National Network for Equitable Library Service

Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. The contributors to Beyond Testimony and Trauma consider other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on valuable insights gained from their work on long-term oral history projects.

Since the 1990s, there has been an upsurge in renewable electricity co-operatives across Canada as hundreds of community organizations have turned to the sun, wind, and rivers as sources of local power generation. Empowering Electricity offers an illuminating analysis of these co-operatives within the context of larger debates over climate change, renewable electricity policy, sustainable community development, and provincial power-sector ownership.

The Dene, a traditionally nomadic people, have no word for homelessness, a rare condition in the Canadian North prior to the 1990s. Julia Christensen documents the rise of Indigenous homelessness and proposes solutions by interweaving analysis of the region’s unique history with personal narratives of homeless men and women in two cities – Yellowknife and Inuvik. What emerges is a larger story of displacement and intergenerational trauma, hope and renewal.

Community Mental Health in Canada offers a timely, critical overview of the provision of public mental health services in Canada, past, present, and future. This new edition has been substantially revised and expanded and includes a deeper discussion of stigma, the recovery vision, the pharmaceutical industry, and mental health law, in addition to an array of new topics. Recent developments such as the creation of the Mental Health Commission of Canada in 2007 and the release of its national mental health strategy document in 2012 are also discussed.

Elections are not just about who casts ballots – they reflect the citizens, parties, media, and history of an electorate. Fighting for Votes examines how these factors interacted during a recent Ontario election. Drawing on a wealth of sources, the authors ask three questions: How do parties position themselves to appeal to voters? How is information from and about parties transmitted to voters? How do voters respond to the information around them? The result is a sophisticated analysis of how parties influence voters in an era when new media is reshaping the electoral landscape.

The first major comparative analysis of parenthood in politics, Mothers and Others brings together leading scholars of gender and politics to discuss the role of parental status in political life. Examining three main areas of citizen engagement within the political system – parenthood and political careers, parenthood and the media, and parenthood and political behaviour – they argue that being a parent is a gendered identity that influences how, why, and to what extent women (and men) engage with politics.

In 1875, Icelandic immigrants established a colony on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg. The timing and location of New Iceland was not accidental. Across the Prairies, the Canadian government was creating land reserves for Europeans in the hope that the agricultural development of Indigenous lands would support the state’s economic and political ambitions.

The first major reappraisal of Pierre Trudeau’s controversial defence policy, The Price of Alliance uses the 1976 procurement of Leopard tanks for Canada’s troops in Europe to shed light on Canada’s relationship with NATO. After six years of pressure from Canada’s allies, Trudeau was convinced that Canadian tanks in Europe were necessary to support foreign policy objectives, and the tanks symbolized an increased Canadian commitment to NATO.

Standing Up with G̲a’ax̱sta’las tells the remarkable story of Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951), a controversial Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw leader and activist who lived during a period of enormous colonial upheaval. Working collaboratively, Robertson and Cook’s descendants draw on oral histories and textual records to create a nuanced portrait of a high-ranked woman, a cultural mediator, devout Christian, and Aboriginal rights activist who criticized potlatch practices for surprising reasons.

Achieving socio-political cohesion in a community with significant ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity is a challenge in contemporary liberal democracies. Public policies and institutions shaped by the needs of the majority can inadvertently marginalize minority interests. Intercultural Deliberation and the Politics of Minority Rights articulates a type of political deliberation designed to mitigate this problem. Instead of asking what the liberal state can tolerate, R.E.