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Titles in The Basics series typically deal with social, economic, or political issues relevant to present-day Canada. Succinct and inexpensive, these books provide a concise overview of contemporary issues and are ideal for the general reader or for use as supplementary texts in university and college courses. As of spring 2008, our collection of Basics titles has grown to more than thirty.
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A Place to Call Home
Long Term Care in Canada
Edited by Pat Armstrong, Madeline Boscoe, Barbara Clow, Karen Grant, Margaret Haworth-Brockman, Beth Jackson, Ann Pederson, Morgan Seeley, Jane Springer
Long-term residential care operates in the shadows; too often viewed as a necessary evil best left invisible. This book is takes a different approach. It is about daring to dream about developing alternative forms of long-term, residential care based on an understanding of what exists today and of what is possible in the future. Taking into account the fact that the overwhelming majority of residents and providers are women, the book makes gender a central concern in planning for care that treats… (more information)
Aboriginal Fishing Rights
Laws, Courts, Politics
Parnesh Sharma
This book examines the nature of aboriginal fishing rights before and after the Sparrow decision from a perspective of whether disadvantaged groups are able to use the law to advance their causes of social progress and equality. It includes interviews with the key players in the fishing industry: the Musqueam Indian Band, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the commercial industry. It concludes that aboriginal fishing rights remain subject to arbitrary control and examines why and how… (more information)
African Nova Scotian – Mi’kmaw Relations
Paula C. Madden
The Indigenous people of Nova Scotia, the Mi’kmaq, have been dispossessed of their lands and, since the early 1820s, confined to reserves. African Nova Scotians have also been dispossessed of lands originally granted to them by white colonial governments and settled in communities with names like Africville, Preston or Birchtown. Yet “the story of Africville, and other stories of dispossession,” argues author Paula C. Madden, “cannot be told and understood outside the context… (more information)
Aski Awasis/Children of the Earth
First Peoples Speaking on Adoption
Edited by Jeannine Carrière
The adoption of Aboriginal children into non-Aboriginal families has a long and contentious history in Canada. Life stories told by First Nations people reveal that the adoption experience has been far from positive for these communities and has, in fact, been an integral aspect of colonization. In an effort to decolonize adoption practices, the Yellowhead Tribal Services Agency (YTSA) in Alberta has integrated customary First Peoples’ adoption practices with provincial adoption laws and regulations… (more information)
Banking on Deception
The Discourse of the Fiscal Crisis
Thom Workman
Through the discourse of the fiscal crisis the proponents of the neo-liberal agenda deceive Canadians by presenting this agenda as the only rational alternative. Workman discusses the success of this appeal to common sense, analyzing how it resonates positively within the Canadian cultural context. (more information)
Between Hope and Despair
Women Learning Politics
Donna M. Chovanec
This book is an empirical account of political learning in social movements based on a study of a women’s movement in Arica, Chile. In the first part of the book the author tells the story of how the women of Arica organized to oppose the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This gripping narrative, told through the women’s own words and experiences, paints a graphic picture of their courage and determination. The second part focuses on the political learning and educational processes… (more information)
Canada’s National Child Benefit
Phoenix or Fizzle?
Edited by Douglas Durst
The National Child Benefit announced in the 1997 federal Budget promised 850 million dollars to move children out of the welfare rolls and the trap of poverty. This book attempts to outline the key concepts of this new program and set the stage for discussion of its potential impact. The writers do not agree. This book does not present a unified argument either supporting or critiquing the program but raises a series of important issues and concerns regarding the programs effectiveness in addressing… (more information)
Crimes, Laws and Communities
John McMullan, David C. Perrier, Stephen Smith, Peter D. Swan
In this book, McMullan and his colleagues have provided much needed information and analysis on “unconventional” crimes by researching fire for profit, illegal fishing and business crime in Atlantic Canada. The three essays fill an information gap left by scant media reports, conflicting government statistics and, in the case of crimes of capital, wilfully concealed information. (more information)
Criminalizing Race, Criminalizing Poverty
Welfare Fraud Enforcement in Canada
Wendy Chan, Kiran Mirchandani
The criminalization and penalization of poverty through increased surveillance and control of welfare recipients in recent years has led many poverty advocates to claim that “a war against the poor” is currently in progress. The authors argue that people of colour are most often the casualties in the governments’ desire to roll back the welfare state. Relying on myths and stereotypes about racial difference, the enforcement and policing of welfare fraud policies constructs people… (more information)
Cultivating Utopia
Organic Farmers in a Conventional Landscape
Kregg Hetherington
This study begins with the questions “what draws people to become organic farmers?” and “why do so many leave farming in short order?” Organic farmers speak of a “wake-up call” or a moment, usually several years after buying and moving onto a farm, in which they question what they are doing and why. By most reports, most organic farmers then quit the field, or at least quit trying to farm commercially. The book examines what causes this wake-up call. One central… (more information)
Deadly Fever
Racism, Disease and a Media Panic
Charles T. Adeyanju
In February 2001, a woman from the Congo was admitted to a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, with a serious illness of unknown origin. Very quickly, the rumour spread that she was carrying the deadly Ebola virus. Even though it was equally quickly determined that she did not carry the virus, the rumour spread like wildfire throughout the Canadian media. Through a content analysis of four major Canadian newspapers and interviews with journalists, medical practitioners and members of the Black community… (more information)
Divorce and Disengagement
Patterns of Fatherhood Within and Beyond Marriage
Edward Kruk
This book’s purpose is to better portray divorced fatherhood and to provide family practitioners and policy-makers with an empirically-based understanding of the impact of divorce on non-custodial fathers, and of fathers’ disengagement from their children after divorce. (more information)
Elusive Justice
Beyond the Marshall Inquiry
Edited by Joy Mannette
“The Marshall Commission Report does not deserve accolades. While it acknowledges errors, negligence and mismanagement, it did not make the connections necessary to begin the process of developing a dialogue about a justice system that Aboriginal people can respect, or which respects Aboriginal people.” - M.E. Turpel, Dalhousie Law School (more information)
Feminist Frameworks
Building Theory on Violence Against Women
Lisa Price
This text offers a wide-ranging review of feminist understandings of violence against women. It is founded on a bedrock of radical feminism, which offers the most comprehensive analysis of the nature and meanings of men’s violence against women and children. The book examines feminist analyses in a number of broad areas, including debates around the definition and origins of male violence, critiques of sex and sexuality, the intersection of racism and sexism in some forms of sexualized violence… (more information)
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Effect
Developing a Community Response
Edited by Glen Schmidt, Jeanette Turpin
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Effects (FAS/E) are particularly serious problems in many northern communities. Canadian material on this subject is lacking and services are poorly developed. Part of the reason has to do with the relatively recent recognition of FAS/E. However there is also the problem of hinterland location and resulting marginalization of populations in Northern parts of the country. The intent of this book is to provide an informative, practical and critical resource that will be… (more information)
Fight Back
Work Place Justice for Immigrants
Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, Steve Jordan, Eric Shragge, Martha Stiegman
Displacement of people, migration, immigration and the demand for labour are connected to the fundamental restructuring of capitalism and to the reduction of working class power through legislation to free the market from “state interference.” The consequence is that a large number of immigrant and temporary foreign workers face relentless competition and little in the way of protection in the labour market. Globally and in Canada, immigrant workers are not passive in the face of these… (more information)
Gender and Collaboration
Communication Styles in the Engineering Classroom
Sandra Ingram, Anne Parker
As more women enter male-dominated faculties such as engineering, there is a growing need to understand the set of social processes that impact upon them and the continuing need for curriculum reform. This understanding is crucially important for engineering students because of the increasing demand put on them to work in team-based environments in which they will need the collaborative skills of shared interaction, decision-making and responsibility. (more information)
Get That Freak
Homophobia and Transphobia in High Schools
Brian Burtch, Rebecca Haskell
Bullying in schools has garnered significant attention recently, but despite this, little has been said about the occurrence of homophobic and transphobic bullying in Canadian high schools. Get That Freak fills that gap by exploring the experiences of bullying among youth who identify or are identified as queer. Through interviews with recent high school graduates in British Columbia, Haskell and Burtch share stories of physical, verbal and emotional harassment, and offer important insights into… (more information)
Glass Houses
Saving Feminist Anti-Violence Agencies from Self-Destruction
Rebekkah Adams
The author first experienced a women’s shelter when she and her mother were two of the first residents in Toronto’s Interval House in 1974. Her research is drawn from that experience, her own years of working in shelters and sexual assault centres and the experiences of her fellow workers. Adams witnessed hierarchies that set apart clients and management, where an executive director and managers abused power in the same way she had experienced in the outside’ world of men. Perhaps… (more information)
Hollow Work, Hollow Society
Globalization and the Casual Labour Problem in Canada
Dave Broad
More and more people in Canada and other Western countries are now working at part-time, short-term and other casual jobs. People are now asking: What happened to full-time employment? Why is part-time work being promoted by business people and politicians as a positive thing? Situated historically, the restructuring of global capital and labour markets does not paint such a rosy picture. This book explains the contemporary casualization of work as integral to global economic restructuring. Hence… (more information)
Immigration and the Legalization of Racism
Lisa Jakubowski
”The chameleon-like nature of the law–the duplicitous ways in which the law is written, the equivocal way in which it is stated and, therefore, talked about, the hiding of the truth about the resources which are expended in its implementation, the misleading way in which it casts the discretions it purports to take away and to give–its ideological functioning and its capacity to legitimate the illegitimate, all are put under the microscope in this study. It is a timely piece of… (more information)
Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity
The Politics of Difference and Solidarity
Evelyn Leslie Hamdon
This book is a critical analysis of a Muslim group in Canada that has been working to challenge Islamophobia in their community. An important part of their anti-racist work involves dealing with the internal conflicts and dilemmas created by the differences among the members of the group. The coalition has been successful in developing several educational initiatives, in part, because they have been able to negotiate internal differences in ways that do not fragment the group. Through discussions… (more information)
Issumatuq
Learning from the Traditional Healing Wisdom of the Canadian Inuit
Kit Minor
Through the development of a culture-specific design the author shows us how Inuit people, in a working relationship with members of the dominant culture, can continue to define and decide on appropriate helping skills. (more information)
Leaving the Streets
Stories of Canadian Youth
Alexa Carson, Phillip Clement, Katie Crane, Jeff Karabanow
Youth between sixteen and twenty-four are considered the fastest growing segment of the homeless population in Canada. While much has been written about street engagement and street culture, little attention has been paid to how youth move away from the street. Giving prominence to the voices of the street youth themselves, Voices from the Street explores the attempts of street youth to exit street life, examining the motivations and challenges, as well as the supports and barriers that aid and… (more information)
Man’s Will to Hurt
Investigating the Causes, Supports and Varieties of His Violence
Joseph Kuypers
This book identifies how men code their will to hurt to make it moral, and how they ignore the drastic realities of excessive male violence. (more information)
Marketing Place
Cultural Politics, Regionalism and Reading
Ursula A. Kelly
Marketing Place provides a framework for an analysis of the politics of cultural practices and their relationship to the broader social forces which shape our lives. (more information)
Missing Women, Missing News
Covering Crisis in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
David Hugill
Missing Women, Missing News examines newspaper coverage of the arrest and trial of Robert Pickton, the man charged with murdering 26 street-level sex workers from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It demonstrates how news narratives obscured the complex matrix of social and political conditions that made it possible for so many women to simply ‘disappear’ from a densely populated urban neighborhood without provoking an aggressive response by the state. Grounded in a theory of ideology… (more information)
More Perishable than Lettuce or Tomatoes
Labour Law Reform and Toronto’s Newspapers
Edward T. Silva
This book presents an in-depth analysis of the “unbalanced” treatment by the four largest Toronto dailies of the Ontario NDP’s 1992 proposed labour reform law. (more information)
Names, Numbers and Northern Policy
Inuit, Project Surname, and the Politics of Identity
Valerie Alia
Names are the cornerstones of cultures. They identify individuals, represent life, express and embody power. When power is unequal and people are colonized at one level or another, naming is manipulated form the outside. In the Canadian North, the most blatant example of this manipulation is the long history of interference by visitors with the ways to Inuit named themselves and their land. This book is a concise history of government-sponsored interference with Inuit identity. (more information)
News, Truth and Crime
The Westray Disaster and Its Aftermath
John McMullan
The “truth” behind the Westray mine disaster remains a highly contested matter. This book is a study of how the media represented the events surrounding Westray. The absence of investigative reporting in favour of sensational stories about accidents and the pain and suffering of the bereaved obscures the truth. More importantly it presents a false truth so the question, “What happened at Westray?” remains largely unanswered. The answer to the question, “Who is responsible… (more information)
No Going Back
Women as University Students
Patricia Campbell
Allowing women to tell their stories in their own voices, this book reveals their collective experience in all its complexity. (more information)
Ontario Works–Works for Whom?
An Investigation of Workfare in Ontario
Julie Vaillancourt
This book is an institutional ethnographic investigation of the Ontario Works program and the problems that it creates in the lives of people on social assistance. Ontario Works is a work-for-welfare program that was implemented in Ontario in 1996 as part of the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state. The book shows that Ontario Works has not, in reality, been used to help people on assistance and rather has been used as another means of facilitating an attack on them, while providing subsidized… (more information)
Passing Through
End-of-Life Decisions for Lesbians and Gay Men
Jeanette Auger
In June 2001, Nova Scotia became the third province to pass legislation that permits same-sex couples to legally register their relationship in order to benefit from similar legal obligations as common-law heterosexual couples. Yet despite this new legislation’s aim to advance equal rights, end-of-life decisions for gays and lesbians remain difficult. Jeannette Auger examines how closeted relationships and the history of discrimination have led many partners to dismiss making decisions about… (more information)
Politics on the Margins
Restructuring and the Canadian Women’s Movement
Janine Brodie
“Janine Brodie’s thoughtful and insightful analysis of the impact of international restructuring on the women’s movement asks all the right questions. Her challenge to develop new strategies in the face of the destruction of the welfare state should be taken up by feminists everywhere.” - Judy Rebick (more information)
Real Nurses and Others
Racism in Nursing
Tania Das Gupta
“Most nurses of colour experience everyday forms of racism, including being infantilized and marginalized. Most reported being “put down,” insulted or degraded because of race/ethnicity/colour. A significant proportion of nurses, non-white and white, report having witnessed an incident where a nurse was treated differently because of his/her race/ethnicity/colour.” These are only some of the conclusions that author Tania Das Gupta arrived at as a result of her… (more information)
ReDefining Traditions
Gender and Canadian Foreign Policy
Edna Keeble, Heather Smith
This text contributes to the literature on gender and Canadian foreign policy, an area of study that is very much in its infancy. It introduces a (preliminary) theoretical framework as a way of applying feminist insights to Canadian foreign policy (what the authors call the feminist deconstructive method). Further, it shows the value in focusing on ideas and discourses as a starting point in order to engage conventional scholarship. And while not all encompassing, it provides a means by which to… (more information)
Something’s Wrong Somewhere
Globalization, Community and the Moral Economy of the Farm Crisis
Christopher Lind
“Recalling the fascinating history of rural protests in seventeenth to nineteenth century England, (Lind) argues that today’s crisis has as much to do with morals and ethics as with economics.”–Kim Cariou, People’s Voice (more information)
Star Wars in Canadian Sociology
Exploring the Social Construction of Knowledge
David A. Nock
“David Nock looks at the theories of prominant sociologists and presents a thoroughly grounded discussion of how this unique brand of sociology has been socially constructed. It is a pleasant, interesting, and informative reader which makes all these topics look just a little bit different than they did before.”–Rich Ogmundson, University of Victoria (more information)
Stifling Debate
Canadian Newspapers and Nuclear Power
Michael Clow
This study of nuclear coverage in four dailies in Ontario and New Brunswick finds that it is the promoters, not the opponents, of nuclear energy that overwhelmingly dominate news coverage. (more information)
Strategies for the Year 2000
A Women’s Handbook
Barbara Roberts, Deborah Stienstra
How well has Canada measured up to its obligations under the two agreements it signed during the UN Decade of Women? The authors of this book detail the terms of the conventions (the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women by the Year 2000) and have painstakingly chronicled the progress the provincial, territorial, and federal governments have made towards fulfilling their legal obligations in areas… (more information)
Taxing Illusions
Taxation, Democracy and Embedded Political Theory
Phil Hansen
For several years now, the business community, politicians, the media and many academics have been actively pro-moting tax cuts as the key to successful economic development. Governments everywhere, regardless of party label, have responded with policies of tax reduction. But taxation is about more than raising revenue or shaping economic activity. Taxation helps define the nature of a political community and the values of a political culture. Through examining two Saskatchewan tax reports, one… (more information)
The Fourth World
An Indigenous Perspective on Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Activism
Grace Ouellette
This book is not about feminism. Rather, feminism is the basis of the discussion, an example of how understanding oppression must consider a number of barriers. Euro-Canadian feminists rarely address the circumstances that are unique to First Nations’ women, instead working with the assumption that all women are a part of a similar struggle. Ouellette attempts to confront these barriers. Throughout interviews with a number of women, she highlights the following four questions. To what extent… (more information)
The Mean Girl Motive
Negotiating Power and Femininity
Nicole E.R. Landry
Prior to the 1980s, girls were completely excluded from research on childhood aggression, presumably because their ‘sugar and spice and everything nice’ made them averse to aggression. Not only were girls missing from research, their voices are frequently absent in current ‘girl aggression’ discourse. Despite this, ‘mean’ girls have received growing attention, especially in psychology. Besides conclusions that boys and girls aggress differently, much work has… (more information)
The Politics of Community Services (second edition)
Immigrant Women, Class and the State
Roxana Ng
“Students like it a lot. It is readable, although it offers a complex argument. It is practical and speaks to experiences that many (students) have had. It offers a model of what an empirical study using social organization of knowledge looks like.”–Marie Campbell, Social Work, University of Victoria (more information)
The Tragedy of Progress
Marxism, Modernity and the Aboriginal Question
David Bedford, Danielle Irving-Stephens
The Left in Canada has had an uneasy relationship with the Aboriginal struggle for justice. There is a natural sympathy and alliance between the working class and its political representatives who are struggling against the exploitation of labour and Aboriginal peoples and nations who are resisting the dispossession of their lands and the loss of their culture. Yet the co-incidence of interests has very rarely led to any support by labour and the Left for Aboriginal resistance. In fact, rather than… (more information)
The University as Text
Women and the University Context
Carol Schick
This book is an excellent analysis of how male-centric approaches and methods dominate university life. “Schick effectively raises stimulating questions that challenge the status quo of university education.” - Britta Santowski, Canadian Book Review Annual (more information)
Toxic Criminology
Environment, Law and the State in Canada
Edited by Susan C. Boyd, Dorothy E. Chunn, Robert Menzies
Critical research, writing and advocacy by legal academics and practitioners, NGOs, indigenous peoples and ecofeminists has existed on a global scale since the 1960s, but not until the 1990s did criminologists begin to examine environmental crime in a more concerted way. This late entrance by criminologist has much to do with who is involved in environmental crime—namely upper strata, mostly “white” men who run corporations and state agancies and the preception of environmental… (more information)
When Justice Is a Game
Unravelling Wrongful Convictions in Canada
MaDonna Maidment
All too often the police do not get the right person. Wrongful convictions are framed as mistakes or failures of the justice system. However, many of the wrongfully convicted are from among the poor and visible minority groups. The law then becomes an ideological mask relieving us of the responsibility of engaging with the real issues that underscore wrongful convictions. MaDonna Maidment illustrates how the desire to get a conviction and paint the police and the courts in a positive light often… (more information)
When the Fish Are Gone
Ecological Collapse and the Social Organization of Fishing in Northwest Newfoundland, 1982-1995
Craig T. Palmer, Peter R. Sinclair
The Gulf Coast fisheries off Northwest Newfoundland provide a graphic example of the social and biological consequences of the failure to create conditions that would allow for fishing on a sustainable basis. This book shows how an ecological crisis has produced a social crisis threatening the viability of fishers, the fish plants where they sold their fish, and the communities in which they live. It is set in the context of the North Atlantic fisheries and of primary resource producing rural areas… (more information)
Women Fishes These Days
Brenda Grzetic
As the fisheries have dramatically changed in Newfoundland and Labrador, so has the work and learning experiences of women fishers. Restructuring, work and learning are not gender neutral. Women Fishes These Days explores women’s lives in the restructured fishery, their workload and work responsibilities, work relations, professionalization and training. It also, through a series of interviews with women fishers, looks at the impact on their identity, their autonomy and, particularly, their… (more information)