National Network for Equitable Library Service

Income, education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports; far more than the actions of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers, it is these conditions that make the greatest difference in our health. Drawing on his experiences as a family physician in the inner city of Saskatoon, Mozambique, and rural Saskatchewan, Dr. Ryan Meili uses scholarship and patient stories to explore health determinants and democratic reforms that could create a truly healthy society.

Health activist, scholar, award-winning journalist, and cancer survivor Sharon Batt investigates the relationship between patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry as well as the contentious role of pharma funding. Over the past several decades, a gradual reduction in state funding has pressured patient groups into forming private-sector partnerships. This analysis of Canada’s breast cancer movement from 1990 to 2010 shows that the resulting power imbalance undermined the groups’ ability to put patients’ interests ahead of those of the funders.

With her linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the Great War. This book tells the story of the nearly 2,000 women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to “do their bit” overseas and at home. Well-educated and middle-class but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britain’s nursing deficit.

Advances in agricultural genomics could help address pressing global issues such as world hunger. However, overlapping and inconsistent intellectual property and biosafety regimes – collectively referred to as the “Intellectual Property–Regulatory Complex” – create significant, and often conflicting, barriers to developing and commercializing new agricultural biotechnology. The authors of this collection explore how this Complex impacts innovation in ways that cannot be appreciated when individual regimes are examined in isolation.

We Interrupt This Program tells the story of how Indigenous people are using media tactics or interventions in art, film, television, and journalism to disrupt Canada’s national narratives and rewrite them from Indigenous perspectives. Accounts of strategically chosen moments such as survivor testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission combined with conversations with CBC reporter Duncan McCue and artists such as Kent Monkman bring to life Brady and Kelly’s powerful argument that media tactics can be employed to change Canadian institutions from within.

Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec's massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and their memory of themselves as a people. By investigating the Cree's three hundred years of contact with outsiders, he illuminates the process of cultural negotiation at the foundation of ongoing political and environmental debates.

Municipalities face important water supply challenges. One response has been to render utilities independent from municipal government through alternative service delivery (ASD). For its proponents, ASD provides needed autonomy from municipal government; for its detractors, it is privatization under another name. Using Ontario as a case study, Kathryn Furlong paints a complex picture of both ASD and municipal government.

Although fifty years have passed since Lester Pearson stepped down as prime minister, he still influences debates about Canada’s role in the world. Mike’s World explores the myths surrounding Pearsonianism to explain why he remains such a touchstone for understanding Canadian foreign policy. Leading scholars dig deeply into his diplomatic and political career, especially during the 1960s and his tenure as prime minister.

In 2008, Canada established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that created Canada's notorious residential school system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation. Settlers must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience.

Who Is Bob_34? sheds light on the clandestine world of online child pornography and pedophilia. What exactly do we know about these crimes? Who produces child cyberpornography? Who distributes it? Who consumes it? And is there a link between viewing and abuse? By infiltrating child-porn user groups and comparing their findings to scholarship on the topic, Francis Fortin and Patrice Corriveau address these questions and more, opening a window on a world that is much more complex than media accounts and commissioned reports suggest.