National Network for Equitable Library Service

What is family? Citing national security and societal welfare, the Harper government adopted a strict definition of family to limit access to citizenship for certain immigrants.

Migrant workers, though long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Marsden shows that people with precarious migration status face barriers in law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their access to institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards.

Whatever deficits remain in the Canadian project to make justice available to all, class actions have been heralded as a success. They have been employed over the past several decades to overcome barriers to justice for those who would otherwise have no recourse to the courts. First proposing a conceptualization of access to justice that moves beyond mere access to a court procedure, leading expert Jasminka Kalajdzic then methodically assesses survey data and case studies to determine how class action practice fulfills or falls short of its objectives.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission urged a better understanding of Aboriginal law for all Canadians. This book responds to that call, outlining significant legal developments in straightforward, non-technical language. Jim Reynolds provides the historical context needed to understand the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers and explains key topics such as sovereignty, fiduciary duties, the honour of the Crown, Aboriginal rights and title, treaties, the duty to consult, Indigenous laws, and international law.

In 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Canada v. Bedford that key prostitution laws were unconstitutional. Red Light Labour addresses the new legal regime regulating sex work by analyzing how laws and those who uphold them have constructed, controlled, and criminalized sex workers, their clients, and their workspaces. This groundbreaking collection also offers nuanced interpretations of commercial sexual labour from the perspectives of workers, activists, and researchers.

A mugger to a stranger, "Give me your wallet or I will beat you to pulp!" It is a crime. An employer says to a worker: "Adding lung-saving ventilation will reduce my profit. Give me back some of your wages and I will let you keep your lungs!" This is not a crime. Our assumptions about the world condition is to see these situations as legally different from one another. But what if we, the critics of corporate capitalism, instead insisted on taking the spirit of law, rather than its letter, seriously?

Unsettled Expectations is a critical multi-site ethnography that examines conflict over Indigenous land rights in Canada and the United States as a lens through which to understand historical and ongoing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in settler colonies. The goal of the research is to try to understand the lived practices and discourses of people defending and countering indigenous land rights--as a grounded point of departure to examine the limits and possibilities of decolonization.

This volume addresses a wide range of topics related to Aboriginal resource use, ranging from the pre-contact period to the present. The papers were originally presented at a conference held in 1988 at the University of Winnipeg. Co-editor Kerry Abel has written an introduction that outlines the main themes of the book. She points out that it is difficult to know what the enshrinement of Aboriginal rights in the Canadian Constitution means without knowing exactly what constituted the Aboriginal interest in the land past and present.

"From diversity comes strength and wisdom": this was the guiding principle for selecting the articles in this collection. Because there is no single voice, identity, history, or cultural experience that represents the women of the First Nations, a realistic picture will have many facets. Accordingly, the authors in Women of the First Nations include Native and non-Native scholars, feminists, and activists from across Canada. Their work examines various aspects of Aboriginal women's lives from a variety of theoretical and personal perspectives.

Tug of War is the first book of its kind. Written by a sitting family court judge in layman’s language, it demystifies complex family law concepts and procedures, clearly explains how family court works, and gives parents essential alternatives to resolve their own custody battles and keep their kids out of the often damaging court system.