From strikes at Vancouver Island coal fields in the early twentieth century to recent confrontations involving assertions of Indigenous rights, British Columbia has a long history of clashes between protesters and established interests. Protest, Property Rights, and the Law in British Columbia investigates legal responses to those protests stretching back over more than a century.Benjamin Isitt draws on case studies that illuminate both continuity and change in the regulat...

In October 1890, Eugene T. Kingsley’s life changed irrevocably when he was injured in a fall between two rail cars while working as a brakeman on the Northern Pacific Railway. Following the amputation of both his legs, Kingsley became radicalized and joined the Socialist Labor Party in San Francisco. His activism eventually brought him to Vancouver, B.C. where he founded the Socialist Party of Canada. A self-described “uncompromising enemy of class rule and class robbery,” Kingsley wrote p...

Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York,y 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be “one of the most dangerous men in Canada”.Able to Lead traces Kingsley’s political journey from soapbox speaker in San Francisco to prominence in the ...

Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement.Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this original contribution explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a varie...

Militant Minority tells the compelling story of British Columbia workers who sustained a left tradition during the bleakest days of the Cold War. Through their continuing activism on issues from the politics of timber licenses to global questions of war and peace, these workers bridged the transition from an Old to a New Left.In the late 1950s, half of B.C.'s workers belonged to unions, but the promise of postwar collective bargaining spawned disillusionment tied to inflat...

Finally, after over 30 years of hagiographies, comes a book that sets the record straight and tells us the truth about Pierre Elliott Trudeau.In this unprecedented and meticulously researched sweep of the record, Globe and Mail bestselling author Bob Plamondon challenges the conventional wisdom that Trudeau was a great prime minister. With new revelations, fresh insights, and in-depth analysis, Plamondon reveals that the man did not measure up to the myth.While no one dispu...

This magnificent second volume, written with exclusive access to Trudeau’s private papers and letters, completes what the Globe and Mail called “the most illuminating Trudeau portrait yet written” — sweeping us from sixties’ Trudeaumania to his final days when he debated his faith.His life is one of Canada’s most engrossing stories. John English reveals how for Trudeau style was as important as substance, and how the controversial public figure intertwined with the charism...

The oil sands. Global warming. The National Energy Program. Though these seem like modern Canadian subjects, author Mary Janigan reveals them to be a legacy of longstanding regional rivalry. Something of a "Third Solitude" since entering Confederation, the West has long been overshadowed by Canada's other great national debate: but as the conflict over natural resources and their effect on climate change heats up, 150 years of antipathy are coming to a head. Janigan takes readers back to a...

This wide-ranging book shows why Paul Longmore is one of the most respected figures in disability studies today. Understanding disability as a major variety of human experience, he urges us to establish it as a category of social, political, and historical analysis in much the same way that race, gender, and class already have been. The essays here search for the often hidden pattern of systemic prejudice and probe into the institutionalized discrimination that affects the one in five Amer...

“I defy anybody—Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted—to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.”—John Cassidy, The New YorkerAs the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics profes...

As the threat of another Quebec referendum on independence looms, this book becomes important for every Canadian — especially as language remains both a barrier and a bridge in our divided countryCanada’s language policy is the only connection between two largely unilingual societies — English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Quebec. The country’s success in staying together depends on making it work.How well is it working? Graham Fraser, an English-speaking Canadian who ...

Politics was always Brian Mulroney’s real love. As an undergraduate in Nova Scotia he amazed his friends by getting Prime Minister Diefenbaker on the phone, and he rose fast in the Tory ranks in Quebec as a young Montreal lawyer. He tried for the leadership of the party in 1976, losing to Joe Clark, then returned to win a rematch in 1983. The next year, he ran the most successful election campaign in Canadian history, winning 211 seats, and taking office in September 1984.His first...