This week, I talk with Michael North, author of author of Making Common Sense: On the Construction of the Obvious from Antiquity to AI. We talk about what counts as ‘common’ sense, its relation to the 5 senses, and how that understanding shaped perceptions of common sense. We then get into a discussion about the modern understanding of common sense, the difference between that and reason, and how algorithms and AI are shaping our understanding of what counts as ‘common’ sense.

Historical Headline of the Week

Jo Marchant, “The American Revolution’s Overlooked Influence? Physics. How ‘Common Sense’ Spelled Out Astronomical Expectations for a New Nation,” Smithsonian Magazine, Summer 2026.

Sean Graham is a cultural historian, an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, and a contributing editor with Activehistory.ca

In the weeks after a sudden February announcement that twelve provincial museums were slated to close in Nova Scotia, murmurs began to circulate that some of these sites might be rescued. The controversial decision to remove these rural sites from the Nova Scotia Museum followed significant budget cuts to several provincial departments including the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage, resulting in slashed programs and protests across the province.

The provincial government backpedaled cuts to disability and senior supports, as well as Indigenous and African Nova Scotian programs in the following weeks. In mid-April, some historical societies began to announce that their museum had been “saved.” While the decision to cut these sites from the Nova Scotia Museum was upheld, six of the twelve were offered alternative funding through the Community Museums Association Program (CMAP). 

In a statement from the Queens County Historical Society made on Facebook, the directors indicated that they had “received a significant and encouraging offer from the Nova Scotia Museum to help secure the future of [Perkins House].” They announced that the museum’s future was saved through “an approved annual grant—funding that will play a vital role in ensuring its continued operation and preservation.” [1] Several historical societies, ours included, made similar statements.

The response to these announcements and reporting about this new funding stream implied that protests and outcry against the decision to close these museums had been heard. We let out a collective sigh of relief, despite feeling a little flustered by the short notice. Unfortunately, this sentiment was premature. These museums are open for the season, but they are not saved. 

The lack of transparency that marked the decision to close these sites has followed into the recent offers to help save them.

We have learned in recent weeks that the $50,000 operating grant was extended to the Barrington Woolen Mill, Cossit House, McCulloch House, North Hills Museum, and Ross-Thomson House and Store Museum. Although this grant represents a significant budget cut to the annual funding that the Shelburne Historical Society had received to operate the Ross-Thomson as part of the Nova Scotia Museum, we were quick to accept it. This funding reduction forced us to lay off one of our two seasonal staff members for the museum but we were determined to make it work.

We attempted to confirm details about the CMAP funding to better inform our decision and accepted it under the impression that this funding would be available annually. However, the communications we have received have been guarded and made no promises of permanence. And now we know why. 

In a statement given in April, David Ritcey the Minister of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage explained for the first time that the CMAP funding we have been promised is being considered “bridge funding” to help these museums transition to community sites.[2] Department staff have now been explicit that the province’s long term goal is to remove these sites from the provincial inventory. The $50,000 grant we were offered this year may be offered again, or it may be pulled just as quickly as it was scraped together.  In the case that we are asked to take over the building in the future—which now appears likely—this grant will be wholly insufficient. The security Ross-Thomson had as a Nova Scotia Museum site has not been replaced and we will be on tenterhooks waiting to hear if the museum was saved only to be closed next year. 

Despite the confusing doublespeak that has marked this entire process, the situation appears to remain largely the same as it was in February when we found out, because it had been announced to the public, that our site would be closed. Stop-gap funding that will allow us to operate the building this year will not secure the museum’s future, nor will it pave a smooth road towards a handoff of the building and its maintenance to our historical society. 

The long-term future at Ross-Thomson is foggy as ever, but the short-term plans for this season are settled. The museum is open to the public alongside the rest of the complex from Tuesday-Saturday each week, 9-4. On June 20th, we’re bringing back the Garden Party in the Ross-Thomson yard that used to be a staple event for our historical society. And this fall, during the Giant Pumpkin Festival and Regatta on October 10, we’re launching our very own Tiny Turnip Festival (a festival within a festival) commemorating the giant turnip that was shown off at Merchant’s Coffee House in Shelburne in 1786.

We appreciate the continued support we have received in the aftermath of the announcement that Ross-Thomson was to be closed. We are thrilled that our community and visitors to our town will have the opportunity to visit the museum this year. But we remain concerned that the provincial government continues to signal its intent to shunt its commitment to this building to a small, volunteer-led association, as if the expense is better borne by local shoulders while our tax dollars are diverted to Halifax. 

Cady Berardi is the Curator of the Shelburne County Museum.

Erin Isaac is a PhD candidate at Western University with special interests in lived experience in early Shelburne. Erin relocated to Shelburne in 2023 to participate in the Ross-Thomson Renewal project. 

[1] Statement of the Queens County Historical Society, Facebook, 17 April 2026, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02MG66v3JKYJ8iAKdNGt8bmEXemFuzj46iCyu1Q32UwzxfgXDgVjhxeJ8jKKhLRX99l&id=100057061076326

[2] Michael Gorman, “Money saved from closing 12 museums will help half of them remain open,” CBC, 23 April 2026, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/dave-ritcey-musuems-9.7175269

In December 2025, ActiveHistory.ca published our first piece on Private Hasan Amat, a soldier of the 1st Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, killed at the Battle of Hill 70 on August 20, 1917. To our knowledge, he is the first identified Muslim soldier killed in action serving with the CEF. He is also one of twenty-two known Muslim soldiers to have served in Canadian uniform during the First World War.

This article is about how we found him. It is also about what we did with that knowledge after the file was closed.

How the Search Started

In 2024, before we had ever opened an LAC personnel file, we were doing background reading for an academic article on Canadian and South Asian service in the First World War. In one of the secondary sources, a passing footnote mentioned a Muslim soldier killed at Hill 70 in 1917. The footnote did not name him and there was no reference. We bookmarked it and moved on.

In November 2024, a junior cadet at our corps, 337 Queen’s York Rangers in North York, told Daniyal that he wished he could see more people who looked like himself in Canadian remembrance. That sentence stayed with us. We had a corps standing parade the following week, and the gap between the cadet’s question and what we could answer felt larger than it should have.

We went back to the footnote. We wanted to find out who he was. What followed was about ten months of searching. Most of the work happened in two places: Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) database. Both are open access, but neither is straightforward.

Figure 1. From the attestation papers of Pte. Hasan Amat, attested at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 14 January 1916. The handwritten entry alongside “Mohamedan” under religious denominations is the field that made him visible in the LAC personnel database. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

 The Attestation Paper

Every CEF soldier’s file at LAC begins with an attestation paper. It records name, age, birthplace, occupation, next of kin, and religion. For most soldiers it is the most informative single document that survives.

The first problem is the names. Colonial-era clerks recorded non-anglophone names phonetically. French, South Asian, Eastern European, and other names were transcribed inconsistently between documents. The LAC database requires near-exact matches, so a researcher who tries only the obvious spelling often finds nothing. The footnote we had been working from gave us a partial spelling that returned no result. We tried several variants, but nothing came up.

The fix was to search by unit. Once we knew the soldier had been killed at Hill 70, we cross-referenced the 1st Battalion nominal roll against deaths from August 1917 and filtered by birthplace. One soldier was listed as born in Singapore and enlisted at Halifax in January 1916. We opened his file. The first line of his attestation paper read “Hasan Amat.” Under religion: “Mohamedan.”

Religion as a Filter

“Mohamedan” is an outdated term, but it is consistent across CEF records, and the LAC database treats it as a searchable field. This is not a small detail. In CEF files, Christian denominations were standardized while minority faiths were inconsistently recorded or sometimes omitted completely. The explicit entry in Amat’s file is what made him visible inside an archival system that often obscures the very identities it should preserve.

Once we knew the field was searchable, we cross-referenced it with the LAC personnel database. The query returned a manageable list of CEF soldiers recorded as Mohamedan, Sikh, Hindu, and other minority faiths. Most of them survived the war. Amat was the only one currently confirmed killed in action.

The Personnel File

The personnel file is where biography emerges. The attestation paper is a snapshot. The rest of the file is the story.

Amat’s file shows his path was not direct. He was born in Singapore and employed as a seaman before the war. He enlisted in Halifax in January 1916 and was medically discharged from his first unit, the Royal Canadian Regiment, and re-enlisted within weeks. He trained in England. He fell ill more than once. While the medical entries are brief, the dates accumulate. He was eventually transferred to the 1st Battalion, a veteran formation that had been in France since early 1915.

The document that gave us pause was his military will. CEF soldiers signed wills before deployment. Amat’s is dated August 17, 1916, while he was serving with the 4th Overseas Pioneer Battalion. He left everything to a John R. McLellan of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia but we do not know who McLellan was. Amat lived another year. He was killed at Hill 70 on August 20, 1917.

Figure 2. Military will of Pte. Hasan Amat, 4th Overseas Pioneer Battalion, C.E.F., signed 17 August 1916. He bequeathed his real and personal estate to John R. McLellan of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

That sequence is not in any database. It comes from reading the file in order, page by page, and noting the dates as they appear. The personnel file is often skipped after the attestation paper, which is a common pitfall. It is often the only document that turns a name and rank into a person.

 The War Diary & The CWGC Record

Every CEF unit kept a war diary, digitized through LAC. The 1st Battalion’s diary for August 1917 covers Hill 70 in operational detail. It does not name Amat. War diaries rarely name individual soldiers below the rank of officer. What the diary gives is crucial context. For Amat, the August 20 entry describes the battalion holding captured ground against German counterattacks at heavy cost. The distance between “killed at Hill 70” on the casualty list and what that meant on the ground runs through the war diary.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission database is free and fully searchable. Every Commonwealth soldier killed in both World Wars has an entry. For Amat, the CWGC record confirmed that his body was never recovered. His name is engraved on the Vimy Memorial among Canada’s missing, without reference to birthplace or religion. In death, at least, he is commemorated as a Canadian soldier among Canadians.

However, the uniformity of the inscription honours every soldier equally. It also obscures what made each one specific. The CWGC record tells you he died. It does not tell you how he lived. For that, you must go back to LAC.

What Followed

The research was complete. What remained was the question of how to share it. The December 2025 Active History piece was the first public output. From there the project moved outward in directions we did not initially plan for.

The cadet corps where the project began has formally adopted the lesson. The commanding officer of 337 Queen’s York Rangers, Capt. James Kelly, CD, confirmed in writing that “Leadership Under Fire: Lessons from Hill 70,” the leadership module we wrote around Amat’s transfer and the August 20 action, will be on the 2026–2027 training calendar. The lesson teaches small-unit decision-making at section and platoon level using a Canadian Muslim soldier as the worked example. It runs annually.

In Canadian secondary schools, the same archival material has been adapted into an Ontario-curriculum-aligned module. The first pilot was delivered cold by a Grade 10 history teacher at Stephen Lewis Secondary School in the Peel District School Board in February 2026, without us in the room. Crescent School followed in April. The Toronto District School Board is reviewing the materials for use in Islamic Heritage Month programming.

Beyond the cadet corps and the classroom, a commemorative poster carrying Amat’s portrait and a short biographical summary is on permanent display at the Islamic Forum of Canada, a North York Mosque with approximately a thousand weekly congregants, and at Crescent School in Toronto. In December 2025, we gave a forty-minute talk to a few hundred senior students at the Right to Play Community Centre near Lahore, Pakistan. Six Pakistani national television networks covered the event. Project content reached a broad public audience online between November 2025 and May 2026, with paid promotion supported in part by a Veterans Affairs Canada Commemorative Partnership Program grant.

Other commemorative outputs are in train with Legion Magazine, Veterans Affairs Canada, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the Vimy Foundation.

A bench and plaque in Amat’s name have been commissioned by the Hill 70 Memorial Foundation for the memorial site at Loos-en-Gohelle, France. The installation is fully funded through private donations we raised. To our knowledge, it will be the first dedicated permanent commemorative memorial to a Canadian Muslim soldier of the First World War. A site survey is scheduled for June 2026 ahead of the 109th anniversary of the battle in August.

Recovering a soldier like Amat adds to Canadian wartime history without changing it. The story is the same. There is now more of it to tell. What began with a footnote and a junior cadet’s question now has a permanent memorial in France and a place on the 337 Queen’s York Rangers training calendar.

Why This Matters Beyond Amat

The method we used is not specific to one soldier. Attestation papers, CWGC records, personnel files, and war diaries exist for every CEF soldier who served. Most of these records are free and online. The barrier is knowing what to look for and working through how a colonial military bureaucracy recorded the people it documented.

Our reading of CEF records suggests there are other minority soldiers whose service has been recorded but not surfaced. Some are recoverable. Others may not be. The work is incremental and slow. What we have tried to show with Amat is that even one file, read carefully, is enough to put a name back into the historical record and, with the right partners, into stone.

We are two cadets from North York. We started with a footnote and a public archive. So can anyone.

Daniyal Elahi, a Warrant Officer, and Harris Elahi, a Sergeant, are cadets with the Royal Canadian Army Cadets at 337 Queen’s York Rangers in Toronto. They founded Our Shared Sacrifice in September 2025 to recover underrepresented soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The Hill 70 Memorial Foundation has adopted their research and commissioned a memorial bench and plaque in Pte. Amat’s name at Loos-en-Gohelle, France. In 2026 they received the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Young Heritage Leaders.

This is the seventh post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE

It is fundamentally about change; constant, rapid change. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke described the Great Acceleration, in part, as “what is certainly the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere.”¹ The Great Acceleration appears to mark a true rupture, and if McNeill and Engelke’s predictions are right, a moment which does not last.² What value then does centring this potentially ephemeral, exponentially unstable, and measurably unprecedented period bring to the development of a framework for Canadian environmental history? It provides perspective. The concept, applied as part of a frame for historical thinking, establishes a kind of exceptionalism of the present that leads to questions around how current conditions came about, what triggered the acceleration, and whether the future might look more like the past than the present. Equally exceptional is the level of personal access to technological resources enjoyed by those living in the Digital Age. Individuals, as well as institutions, rely daily on abundant and available technologies of measurement and administration that permeate our relationships with the physical world. Meteorological forecasts, regulations, maps, and statistical products (including those measuring the acceleration itself) exist as facts in our lives, making it easy to forget that they are interpretive tools.

In this context, a historical framework centred on the Great Acceleration must be grounded in a firm understanding of how systems, tools, and structures for knowing the environment have developed with reference to the acceleration. What is novel and what is a continuity with the past? Have developments in these systems come in response to the acceleration; are they made conscious of accelerating circumstances? Where can causal links be made to the acceleration and what is coincidental? As a point of departure for these inquiries in the environmental history of Canada, scholars might look to the Canada Lands Survey System as both a resource of pertinent information and a key, relevant subject for these historical questions.

As a repository of historical survey plans and surveyor’s notes, the Canada Lands Survey Records and other Canada Lands datasets represent a valuable and constantly evolving inventory (as of 2010 expanding by 2,000 new documents each year) of records capturing how a variety of lands have been viewed within the lens of rights-bearing parcels and the experiences of those completing the work on the ground.³ Moreover, barriers to accessing the information are minimal. The Canada Lands Survey System’s interface and services provide direct and easy access targeting a variety of current day needs for the community of Canada Lands Surveyors. This active role in the ongoing surveying of Canada Lands means that inquiring historians can easily and freely access detailed sources generated by historical and current surveying activities.

“Banff Cemetery Townsite” Plan Number 22145 CLSR AB was surveryed by C. M. Walker in 1913. It can be found in the Canada Land Survey Records here and provides one example of the kind of detailed sources available. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.”

As a historical subject, the Canada Lands Survey System is addressed only thinly by existing literature. It was established in 1951 as an update to the preceding Dominion Lands Survey System (governed by the Dominion Lands Surveys Act which became inoperative when the Dominion Lands Act was replaced with the Territorial Lands Act the year prior).⁴ It is tempting to view the alignment between this date with the beginning of the acceleration as merely coincidental. One of the most comprehensive sources addressing the system, a handbook for the Canada Lands produced by Natural Resources Canada itself in 2010 called Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands provides little to challenge that conclusion, merely reporting the advent of the Canada Lands Surveys Act in 1951 with little further discussion of the reasons or inciting circumstances which triggered the change.⁵ Likewise, George Prudham, then Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys, described the Canada Lands Surveys Act as “entirely technical in nature” when he introduced the new act to the House of Commons.⁶ In fact, language indicating the mundane nature of this change abounds when it was first introduced and again when subsequent amendments were considered in later years.⁷ In the same discussions, however, the House Members demonstrate a keen awareness of being within a moment of distinct change. Minister Prudham’s statements when discussing the bill in the House of Commons recognized the need for update in light of changed conditions and reorganizations of government occurring at that time.⁸ The change of name from ‘Dominion’ to ‘Canada’ sparked heated debates that engaged members’ sense of this time and the legislation being passed within it as a historical point of transition for Canada, particularly detaching from Britain towards a more independent stance.⁹

None of this detracts from a clear sense at the time that this legislation was fundamentally a continuity with the previous surveying legislation and system for federal Crown lands. However, these points do appear to obscure the fact that this legislation and the post-1951 system presented real changes. Following the transfer of western federal Crown lands to provincial control in the 1930s, surveying of remaining Canada Lands had to contend with the participation of new provincial surveying partners and potential boundary disputes.¹⁰ Additionally, in the years following the passage of the Canada Lands Surveys Act, discussions around amendments to the legislation indicate an understanding that the federal surveying administration was leading the standards for high quality survey work, including influencing expectations for the growing community of provincial surveyors.¹¹ Changes continued in subsequent decades in the face of the expansion of offshore resource development, the diversification of surveying contexts and technologies (including increased emphasis on marine, air, and satellite tools), and divesting roles to new territorial and non-government regulatory partners.¹²

This photograph is excerpted from a series of “Scenes of the final monument and crew” enclosed within the Surveyor’s Report on the survey of a portion of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan Boundary in the Winter of 1961/1962. This report can be found recorded as a field book within the Canada Lands Survey Records as “Monuments #72 to the 60th Parallel,” Plan Number FB30427 SK, found here. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

Scholars have recognized for some time that the act of surveying – gridding lands to produce places – is a mechanism through which power is expressed.¹³ This mechanism of power has been a key tool in driving processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including industrial development, colonization, and urbanization, which have contributed to the Great Acceleration.¹⁴ The surveying of Canada did not end with the transition to new legislation in 1951. In fact, for its part in the overall spectrum of surveying bodies and processes in Canada, the Canada Lands Survey System’s creation focused federal government surveying efforts into some of the areas at the forefront of environmental considerations and complexities in the age of the Great Acceleration: the arctic environment of Canada’s northern Territories, First Nations’ lands, National Parks, and the marine environments of Canada’s coastal waters.¹⁵ The surveying of these places in the era of the Great Acceleration is routine, regulated, and technical, but it is not clear that it should be considered mundane. Surveying remains an important technology of administration that is utilized to engage with land and environment (with considerations increasingly moving beyond pure economic development and settlement to encompass broader land management and conservation objectives in varying contexts).¹⁶ The administrators of the Canada Lands Survey System appear to recognize their own importance in the ongoing making of place in Canada with Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands acknowledging the ongoing frenetic pace of their survey work and expressing an understanding of the importance of surveying on Canada Lands as a mechanism for establishing rights in the interests of supporting economic viability and community well-being.¹⁷ There is a need for more systematic scholarly study of the developments in this system from 1951 to present; a period that is relatively obscure in the historical narrative in part, seemingly, due to an erroneous sense that developments in this period were mundane or unimpactful.¹⁸ These investigations would seek to reveal insightful lessons about how a core administrative institution has responded to the evolving conditions of the Great Acceleration, including the evolving needs and challenges present in administering and making knowable a variety of land contexts often at the forefront of present-day environmental issues.

Andrew Burke is a federal public servant and an early career historian who completed a Master of Arts in History at the University of Ottawa in 2023. The constellation of interests which inspired my thesis “In the Middle of Ontario’s Normal Education: The Staff of State Sponsored Social Activism, 1847-1860” encompasses optimism about historical research in the Digital Age, curiosity about the role of spatial thinking in our experiences of society and self, and fascination with the intermediary and the connective – with histories of the middle. I am abidingly captivated by the relationships between people, institutions, and the physical world. These interests have most recently led me to ask questions about the structure of historical communities, the roles played by interpersonal and institutional networks in defining that structure, and the mechanisms of power that might exist within the seemingly mundane.

The views expressed in this work are my own and are based on analysis of scholarly sources and publicly available information. This work does not utilize any information obtained as a consequence of my employment with, has not been endorsed by, and does not represent the views of the Government of Canada.

Notes

1. John Robert McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 2016), 4.

2. McNeill and Engelke, The Great Acceleration, 4–5, 41.

3. Dr. Brian Ballantyne, “Context,” in Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands, ed. Dr. Brian Ballantyne (Natural Resources Canada, 2010), 3, 5–6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4095/288961.

4. Steve Rogers, “History of the Surveyor General Branch,” in Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands, ed. Dr. Brian Ballantyne (Natural Resources Canada, 2010), 24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4095/288961; Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 21st Parliament, 4th Session. 25 June 1951 (George Prudham) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1653358/; see Beelen, K., Thijm, T. A., Cochrane, C., Halvemaan, K., Hirst, G., Kimmins, M., Lijbrink, S., Marx, M., Naderi, N., Rheault, L., Polyanovsky, R., and Whyte, T. (2017). “Digitization of the Canadian Parliamentary Debates.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 849–864. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423916001165 for further information on the LiPaD database.

5. Rogers, “History of the Surveyor General Branch,” in Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands, 24.

6. Canada. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 21st Parliament, 4th Session. 25 June 1951 (George Prudham) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1653358/.

7. Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 21st Parliament, 4th Session. 5 June 1951 (Alphonse Fournier) “Business of the House,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1645900/ identified the bill as one of several “non-contentious matters”; Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 22nd Parliament, 3^rd Session. 11 June 1956 (George Clyde Nowlan) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1857509/ described an amending bill as something that “simply deals with the licensing of land surveyors under the act in question. It is therefore somewhat technical in its nature and is not one which requires any protracted debate”; Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 27th Parliament, 1st Session. 6 December 1966 (Jean-Luc Pepin) “Canada Land Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/2454947 describes amendments as “a housekeeping type of bill” in response to questions and debate;  Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 30th Parliament, 2nd Session. 6 December 1976 (William Hillary (Bill) Clarke) “Government Expenditures Restraint Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/3062874/ referred to amendments to the Canada Land Surveys Act in the prior session as a housekeeping bill among others in a legislative program presented as lacking a firm direction.

8. Canada. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 21st Parliament, 4th Session. 25 June 1951 (George Prudham) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1653358/; Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 21st Parliament, 5th Session. 8 November 1951 (George Prudham) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661242/.

9. Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 21st Parliament, 5th Session. 8 November 1951 (Edmund Davie Fulton) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661245; Ibid., (Alfred Johnson Brooks) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661250; Ibid., (Donald MacInnis) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retreived from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661258 & https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661260; Ibid., (Louis Stephen St-Laurent) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retreived from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661272/; Ibid., (Major James William Coldwell) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retreived from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661278 & https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661280; Ibid., (George Prudham) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retreived from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661281.

10. Canada. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 21st Parliament, 5th Session. 8 November 1951 (George Prudham) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1661281/, https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1663462/ & https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1842313/ .

11. Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 22nd Parliament, 3rd Session. 26 April 1956 (George Prudham) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1842315/ & https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/1842329/.

12. Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 30th Parliament, 2nd Session. 14 June 1977 (Maurice Dupras) “Canada Lands Surveys Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/3102514; Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Edited Hansard. 36th Parliament, 1st Session. 6 May 1998 (Dave Chatters) “Canada Lands Surveyors Act,” Retrieved from LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project website: https://www.lipad.ca/full/permalink/4087209

13. Kate Brown, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place,” The American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001): 19, 22–23, https://doi.org/10.2307/2652223.

14. Brown, “Gridded Lives,” 27, 30–33.

15. Ballantyne, “Context,” in Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands, 3–4.

16. Ibid., 7–8.

17. Ballantyne, “Context,” in Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands, 1, 7–8; Gord Olsson, “First Nations Reserves,” in Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands, ed. Dr. Brian Ballantyne (Natural Resources Canada, 2010), 46-47. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4095/288961 outlines that 13,500 survey monuments were being established and 5,000km of boundaries were being surveyed yearly (presumably, as of the time of publication in 2010).

18. Surveys, Parcels and Tenure on Canada Lands provides an overview of current surveying realities across a variety of Canada Lands contexts. Its discussions focus on the current state of the system while referencing, where relevant, preceding developments of novel legislation, regulations, jurisprudence, surveying standards, and the establishment of new jurisdictional entities at different times and in different places across this period. Focused historical studies might look to chart more systematically and comprehensively the step-by-step development of the Canada Lands administration in the face of the Great Acceleration. In doing so, they would have the opportunity to examine the evolving relationships between individual communities and the environment, as well as the rapidly evolving national context to which the Canada Lands Survey System was responding

This week I talk with John Fraser, author of The Governors General: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office. We talk about John’s experiences meeting all the Canadian-born Governors General, how personality shapes the office, and the role’s political limits. We also discuss the people who held the office, how they managed the position’s responsibilities, and what purpose the monarch’s representative in Canada has in the 21st century.

Historical Headline of the Week

John Fraser, “Julie Payette’s disastrous reign as Governor General: ‘Act of perpetual petulance,‘” National Post, April 2, 2026.

Sean Graham is a cultural historian, an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, and a contributing editor with Activehistory.ca

This is the third and final post in the Canada Post and Canadian Culture series.

Canada Post and its employees have had an undeniable impact on the culture of this country, both via the artistry and symbolism on stamps, and also as an essential facilitator of communication across a vast and diverse nation. From my perspective as a labour and political historian, however, Canada Post and other federal government jobsites have often been a laboratory wherein governments have experimented with ways to restrict the right to strike and bargain collectively, even though those rights are now[i] protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At times, examples set by the federal government to suppress workers’ rights have been followed by employers in the private sector and in other government jurisdictions.

Because of this Charter recognition, and the negative optics of attempting a total ban on labour rights, governments have implemented various tools to quietly diminish the rights workers do have, especially in cases where workers—via unions like Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)—are actually in a position to achieve victories. Indeed, the victories of unions like CUPW, including maternity leave in 1981, have taught Liberal and Conservative governments alike that they must be careful in explicitly and violently curtailing rights, lest they create martyrs and public sympathy, like when CUPW President Jean-Claude Parrot was jailed in 1979.

Thus, in the postwar era, federal governments have gradually moved away from cracking skulls and locking people up and towards using subtle bureaucratic tools to achieve their objectives more discreetly. During Pierre Trudeau’s time in power, this was achieved under the dubious guise of inflation control, but it continues today with back-to-work legislation, along with the more insidious Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.

While Pierre Trudeau has a reputation for being pro-labour given his years of labour union activity in Quebec in the 1950s, by the time he became prime minister, he had grown convinced that unions had gotten too powerful, and their workers too rich. Thus, four different programs were set up to effectively stop workers from being able to bargain collectively, which in turn limited the value and efficacy of being able to strike. The first was voluntary wage and price controls, via the Prices and Incomes Commission (PIC). The second was a hard cap on all collective agreements via the Anti-Inflation Board (AIB) from 1975 to 1978. The third was a late-1970s attempt to impose bargaining formulas on federal public servants via an average comparability of total compensation (ACTC) scheme. The final effort, undertaken in the early 1980s, was the “Six and Five” anti-inflation program (6&5), which hard-capped federal public-sector wages well below inflation. While I covered each of these programs in detail in a previous Labour/le travail article, the broad point is that each of these programs preserved the “song and dance” of bargaining, but only when workers were weak. When the government (or a private-sector employer covered under some of these schemes[ii]) was well-positioned to win in a round of bargaining by extracting concessions or keeping demands low, the freedom of collective bargaining was celebrated as a sign that workers had rights.

When it came to voluntary controls, they were never on a platform of fairness. Trudeau wanted unions to sign deals with wages below inflation; in turn, big companies would promise not to raise prices beyond inflation. But this handcuffed workers, because collective agreements were legal contracts often lasting many years, while companies “pinky-swearing” to not raise prices was a promise based entirely upon goodwill, revocable at any time. Later plans like the AIB that forced caps on wages also applied to prices in theory, but they proved much harder to control than binding collective agreements, meaning that workers fell behind. Similarly, when it came to the proposed ACTC mechanism, workers would be told the maximum they were allowed to have via a point system, and bargaining would be used to keep them below that line. Workers could negotiate how to allocate the ratio between wages and benefits, but never seek to increase the total amount of compensation they got, no matter how hard they bargained or struck. In this model, benefits such as more vacation time could never be won in isolation: they would have to be offset by accepting lower wages or some other concession.

In all of this, it’s important to re-state how the process of strikes and bargaining kept humming along, but mostly as ceremony in cases where workers had the potential to win. When employers had the upper hand, bargaining maintained its true adversarial and free characteristics.

In the modern era, interventions have mostly been aimed at the right to strike, and enforced less by high-profile arrests and more via fines. Here, the same vision often applies. In cases where workers have gone on strike, the federal government has often quickly intervened to enforce discipline and help the employer, be it a company or themselves. Usually, the way they have constrained workers is via back-to-work legislation, wherein Parliament votes to end a strike. These efforts were used in recent years during the tenure of the Harper Conservative government and the early Justin Trudeau years.

But given that these votes are often contentious, governments of late have used Section 107 of the Labour Code, which effectively allows the Minister of Labour to unilaterally enforce back-to-work provisions without a vote. This was the provision that the Carney Liberals used against the Air Canada flight attendants represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). It has been used no fewer than 8 times since 2024 to stop the free operation of collective bargaining, all without a vote by Members of Parliament. This is why New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Leah Gazan is proposing Bill-247 to end Section 107 abuses of labour rights.

As CUPW said in their statement of support for this bill, the status quo allows the choreography of labour negotiations to play out, but largely in the employers’ favour:

In a free and democratic society, most everyone recognizes at least in theory that workers have rights, and that those rights include the ability to join a union that fights for their benefit using bargaining and even strikes. Thus, we see the game: unions like CUPW and others have all the rights in the world… on paper. But as soon as they exercise those rights to win, the hammer comes down. This is why the legal recognition of labour rights, however important, impactful, and hard-won, aren’t everything. Workers must have the power to win even when in discordance with the law, and only organizing and solidarity can achieve that.

Christo Aivalis, a former Active History Editor, is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, The Breach, Canadian Dimension, Ricochet, Maclean’s, the Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.

[i] To be clear, the Right to Strike, and the Right to Bargain Collectively, were not always recognized as covered under the Charter. They are not explicitly listed, and early decisions in the 1980s excluded them. They only became included in decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s. See Larry Savage & Charles Smith, Unions in Court: Organized Labour and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (UBC Press, 2017).

[ii] The scope and coverage of each program differed. The PIC was largely aimed at getting agreements from companies and unions, both federal and provincial in jurisdiction. The AIB was the broadest, as it applied to every unionized workplace, including private companies under provincial jurisdiction using emergency federal powers. Trudeau also applied this to large employers even when non-union. The 6&5/ACTC systems were only explicitly aimed at federal public workers, but Trudeau coordinated with provinces and the private sector to implement similar schemes.

Daniel R. Meister

Recent stories in the CBC revisit the controversy surrounding the appointment of Mary Simon, the first Indigenous person to be appointed Governor General of Canada. Simon, an Inuit woman, was bilingual, fluent in English and Inuktitut, and committed to becoming more proficient French while in office. Despite her efforts, and the fact that the Governor General is not subject to the Official Languages Act, some 1,300 complaints were filed related to her nomination. No doubt as a result of this controversy, Prime Minister Mark Carney assured Radio-Canada that the next Governor General would “absolutely” be bilingual in English and French. These comments, in turn, were criticized by some, including retired Nunavut politician Jack Anawak, who countered that it was “colonial thinking” to define bilingualism as meaning only English and French.^[1]

How is it that the even the definition of the term “bilingual” remains contested in Canada today? And why is the issue so important that the controversy lasted for the entirety of Mary Simon’s tenure as Governor General? A closer look at the historical context out of which the Official Languages Act emerged reveals that this simmering controversy is not only unsurprising, but that further contestations and debates are likely.

The immediate context out of which official bilingualism emerged was the Quiet Revolution. Beginning around 1960, the Quiet Revolution was marked by the crumbling of Quebec’s conservative political order and an unleashing of modernization, secularization, and nationalism – which in some quarters turned to separatism. The Quiet Revolution’s causes, chronology, and outcomes are heavily debated.^[2] One thing is certain, however: while many factors played into the discontent that many Quebecers felt about their province’s place in the Canadian federation – economic, cultural, linguistic, religious – the federal government’s response was in large part focused on the linguistic elements. Responding to André Laurendeau’s 1962 call for a royal commission on bilingualism, the federal government eventually launched the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which was active from 1963–1969.^[3]

The Commission’s terms of reference tied the definitions of bilingualism and biculturalism to Canada’s two “founding races”: the British and the French. Yet these definitions were contested throughout the Commission’s hearings, by members of the public and even one of the commissioners themselves. Commissioner J.B. Rudnyckyj, a Ukrainian Canadian linguist, first floated the notion of “multiple bilingualism” and “multiple biculturalism” before going on to issue a dissenting opinion that argued for the creation of regional language rights.^[4]

The “other ethnic groups” (the non-English, non-French, predominantly European-descended) were the most vocal in arguing for an expansion of language rights, in part by challenging the Commission’s narrow definition of bilingualism and arguing for the more literal definition of two languages. This was the “western definition,” referring to the multiplicity of bilingualisms in western Canada, or “inofficial bilingualism,” as Rudnyckyj called it.^[5] However, Indigenous peoples also contested this narrow definition. Ethel Brant Monture argued that, even considering all Indigenous languages as one group, Canada was “a tri-lingual country.”^[6]Stella Kinoshameg made a similar point by beginning her presentation to the Commission entirely in Anishinaabemowin, causing the simultaneous English-French translation system to fall silent.^[7]

In the end, despite Rudnyckj’s efforts, and the efforts of Ukrainian Canadian organizations to build a “third force” of ethnic and Indigenous groups to push for linguistic and cultural rights, the Commission stuck with their terms of reference. The federal government hewed closely to the Commission’s recommendations when it came to language. Two years after the first volume of their report, on The Official Languages, was published, the government passed the Official Languages Act (1969) that made Canada’s official languages English and French. And even though the government went beyond—even against—the Commission’s recommendations in abandoning the notion of biculturalism and instead opting for multiculturalism, this too was carefully placed within a “bilingual framework.”

Only in 2019 did the federal government pass legislation supporting and promoting Indigenous languages in Canada. But as critics pointed out, the Indigenous Languages Act (2019) was “not really a language rights law at all.” It did not confer rights; it did not place an obligation upon the state to implement those rights; and – most notably – it did not grant Indigenous languages the status of official languages.^[8] In short, Indigenous languages remain outside the official languages paradigm established in 1969. The result? “Even my language, Inuktitut, is slowly weakening because official languages are supported to grow and be prosperous languages whereas Indigenous languages are not,” Simon told the CBC. “If we’re going to save Indigenous languages as a country, we have to do more.”^[9]

In a speech given in 2008, Will Kymlicka suggested that “something like ‘multiculturalism within a bilingual framework’ is the only possible basis for Canada to survive as a country. The only way to keep Quebec in the country is to re-affirm duality in the form of official bilingualism. But the only form of duality that can be politically sustained is one that does not come at the expense of ethnic groups, excluding them from public space and state resources. I see no other viable formula for keeping the country together.”^[10]

But even this analysis failed to consider that multiculturalism was really “colonial multiculturalism,” because it “insufficiently recognize[s] the sui generis or inherent rights of Aboriginal peoples which existed before colonization and continue still,” as political scientist David B. MacDonald would later put it.^[11] Indeed, Indigenous peoples are the ones who have born the expense of the political compromise of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework,” the ones who have been consistently excluded by it.

The undying present controversy over a literally bilingual Governor General being insufficiently “officially bilingual” demonstrates the creaky and contradictory foundations of Canada’s framework of official languages and cultures, the weaknesses of which have been insufficiently addressed by subsequent legislation. As long as a gap persists between these two definitions of bilingualism, there will always be room for critique. So, instead of taking the existing framework as unchangeable, perhaps it is time to delve a little more deeply into the possibilities offered by the “something like” to which Kymlicka refers.

Daniel R. Meister is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at St. Thomas University and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick. He researches the history of Canada’s policy of multiculturalism and is a Regular Contributor to Active History.

^[1] Bianca McKeown, “‘Colonial Thinking’: Inuit Criticize Backlash to Gov. Gen. Mary Simon’s Brand of Bilingualism,” CBC News (9 May 2026). See also Benjamin Lopez Steven, “Outgoing Gov. Gen. Says Criticisms Levelled Against Her French Abilities Were Unfair,” CBC News (24 May 2026).

^[2] See for instance Michael D. Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985); Émile-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren, Sortir de la “Grande noirceur”: L’horizon “personnaliste ” de la Révolution tranquille (Septentrion, 2002); Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); and Xavier Gélinas, La droite intellectuelle québécoise et la Révolution tranquille (Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2007).

^[3] On its history, see Eve Haque, Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada(University of Toronto Press, 2012); and Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon, Panser le Canada: Une histoire intellectuelle de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton (Éditions du Boréal, 2018). Gérard Pelletier, Secretary of State from 1968–1972, confessed in his memoirs that he always regretted that title that the Pearson government had given the commission, remarking in part : « Je déplore l’usage du premier [terme, bilinguisme,] parce qu’il est trop général et devait donner naissance à … confusion… » Pelletier, L’aventure du pouvoir, 1968–1975 (Stanké, 1992), 63.

^[4] Haque, Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework, 57, 177–8.

^[5] Haque, Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework, 65 and 102.

^[6] Haque, Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework, 70.

^[7] “Teacher Wants Indian Language Preserved,” North Bay Nugget, 26 March 1964, 5; and Susan Dexter, “Count Us Out on Biculturalism View of Indians,” Toronto Star, 26 March 1964, 8; both in D.R. Meister, “One of the Cultural Minorities”? Indigenous Peoples and the Creation of Official Multiculturalism,” Canadian Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2025): 57–82.

^[8] Kariwakeron Tim Thompson, “Strengthening the Indigenous Languages Act – Bill C-91,” Yellowhead Institute (27 February 2019); and Lorean Sekwan Fontaine, David Leitch, and Andrea Bear Nicholas, “How Canada’s proposed Indigenous Languages Act fails to deliver,” Yellowhead Institute (19 May 2019) (“at all”).

^[9] Steven, “Outgoing Gov. Gen.”

^[10] Will Kymlicka, “The Three Lives of Multiculturalism,” in Revisiting Multiculturalism in Canada: Theories, Policies, and Debates, ed. Shibao Guo and Lloyd Wong (Sense, 2015), 17–35. The piece began as a lecture of the same name delivered to the UBC-Laurier Institution Multiculturalism Lecture Series, University of British Columbia, 15 April 2008, available online at https://thelaurier.ca/lecture-podcasts/.

^[11] David Bruce MacDonald, “Aboriginal Peoples and Multicultural Reform in Canada: Prospects for A New Binational Society,” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 39, no. 1 (2014): 65–86.

This is the sixth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

In The Great Acceleration, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke proposed four paired concepts as avenues into the global transformations they see as defining the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s: energy and population, climate and biological diversity, cities and the economy, and Cold War and environmental culture.¹ I’d like to propose science and knowledge as a pair of concepts with potential to shed light on important dimensions of Canada’s Great Acceleration. What follows are but some preliminary and scattershot thoughts on these matters; I’d welcome discussion and corrections in the comments to this post.

Science as tricky infrastructure

Increased interest in science and technology is a characteristic of Canada’s mid-twentieth century. The questions raised by World War II and, later, the Cold War were taken by some political leaders to demand answers that were at least partly scientific in character.  In this context, we see the operation of what Alex Souchen and Matthew S. Wiseman have identified as Canada’s military-industrial complex.² Science served as a means through which the state consolidated authority and control over both human communities and non-human nature, with some social scientists and natural scientists exercising their expertise in service of what they conceived as the public interest, while others worked in private-sector contexts where profit was a prime motivator. As Blair Stein has proposed, mid-century scientific and technological advances like air travel affected people living in northern North America not just through the new possibilities these afforded but also through how these reshaped prevailing ideas of distance and environment – or, phrased more broadly, of human possibility in this time and place.³

A study of science in Canada’s Great Acceleration can take cues from recent scholarly examination of the relation between science and capitalism at transnational scales. Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, and William Deringer have proposed an analytic focus on the ways that science and capitalism have co-produced each other, arguing that the relation between these two is best understood in evidence-based analyses of particular historical contexts.⁴ From this perspective, we might consider how science and capital came together under the particular conditions prevailing in mid-twentieth century Canada, in the understanding that such studies might intersect in productive ways with efforts to probe interconnections between science and capital in different historical contexts or at different analytic scales, including the global or planetary. Studies of Canada’s Great Acceleration can help to illuminate the intersections between science and capitalism, on the one hand, and colonialism or imperialism, on the other – intersections that Rieppel, Lean, and Deringer identify as particularly in need of study.

Science might be understood as the tricky infrastructure underpinning Canada’s Great Acceleration. By the mid-1960s, a variety of ways of thinking about and with science were coming to the fore in Canada. Some federal leaders viewed science as a tool that had yet to be used to its full potential, looking to the prospect of a Canadian science policy as a way to improve matters.⁵ And science underpinned the amplification of this period’s environmentalist critiques, with activists (including some scientists) marshalling scientific insights in efforts to highlight what they saw as the alarming ecological changes associated with the Great Acceleration. While it facilitated the environmental transformations characteristic of this period, science also served as a lightning rod for anxiety on the part of political leaders and expert decision-makers, and it empowered emerging critiques of the accelerated environmental exploitation characteristic of the mid-twentieth century. 

The history of science is both an established field of study in its own right and an important sub-theme in many works of Canadian environmental history. And historical work engaging with science is supported in a Canadian context by a number of important institutions, including the journal Scientia Canadensis, the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association (CSTHA), and Ingenium, a crown corporation that involves three museums focused on the history of science and technology in Canada.  Expanded engagements with science in mid-twentieth century Canada are needed not only to generate insights on Canada’s Great Acceleration, but also to amplify and enrich important work already underway on the histories of science and technology in a Canadian context.

A qualitative perspective on the Great Acceleration

The history of knowledge, which has recently emerged as an important scholarly field, offers a framework through which to engage Canada’s Great Acceleration without implicitly confirming scientific chauvinism through an exclusive focus on the work of so-called experts. A powerful illustration of the explanatory potential of the history of knowledge in a Canadian context is Elsbeth Heaman’s award-winning work on taxation, which Heaman describes as “a social history of politics grounded on a social history of knowledge.”⁶ Heaman’s approach to studying a period antecedent to the Great Acceleration offers an important methodological example to guide research on what Heaman terms “the construction of objectivities” – or intersubjective consensus – in Canada’s post 1945 period.⁷

Scholars interested in considering Canada’s Great Acceleration from a perspective informed by the history of knowledge can take cues from scholars like John Sandlos, Arn Keeling, Caitlynn Beckett, and Rosanna Nicol, who have grappled with the sharing of information about industrial pollution across generations within the Yellowknives Dene First Nation.⁸ Also useful will be the work of Joy Parr, who proposed an analytical focus on embodied knowledge in her study of Ontario communities coping with radical landscape change.⁹ Scholars might also orient themselves around key principles defining the international field of the history of knowledge, which include a focus on practices through which knowledge is generated, on the avenues through which knowledge is circulated, and on the ways in which disparate knowledges are entangled.

Studies of Canada’s Great Acceleration that are defined by principles in the history of knowledge will locate insightful points of encounter, even conflict, between different genres of knowledge. This perspective might inflect ongoing examination of high modernist state undertakings – an area of strength within Canadian historical scholarship – by further underlining how both these undertakings and the often-fervent opposition to them amounted to material expressions of distinct types of knowledges. This perspective might also position us to recognize anew the importance of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI), also known as the Berger Inquiry after commissioner Thomas Berger, as a signal moment of Canada’s Great Acceleration – an instance where state processes ran up against Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and were obliged, at least for a time, to change course.  A recent NiCHE series on the MVPI included a number of posts that turn on ideas of knowledge, including Crystal Gail Fraser’s piece on her grandmother, Julienne The’dahcha, and Dinjii Zhuh “sovereignty, knowledge, and love for the Land.”

To date, the Great Acceleration has typically been defined in terms of key biophysical or ecological indicators like rates of species extinction or degree of freshwater eutrophication. A focus on knowledge broadens prospects for the qualitative study of the Great Acceleration, an emphasis that might make it even more productive to integrate histories of northern North America with scholarship on the Great Acceleration. Works by historians of Canada have positioned us to appreciate many dimensions of the social and labour history of the mid-twentieth century. Engagements with Canada’s Great Acceleration will benefit from this substantial body of work while more closely coupling histories of consumerism or manufacturing to the attendant environmental costs. At the same time, an important focus in such works will be the transfer of wealth and power away from communities – which included shoppers and workers, of course – and the concentration of these in the hands of the few.

From this perspective, in coming to terms with the Great Acceleration, we could track flows of money as well as rate of species decline or concentration of nutrients, considering whether wealth transfer or profit accumulation might amount to a definitive characteristic of this historical period. We could investigate the history of algae blooms in Lake Winnipeg, for instance, in ways that consider the profit-seeking behavior of multinational corporations that produce agricultural inputs, the decision-making of upstream farmers who apply the inputs that help grow the food and also drive the blooms, the water monitoring activities of both locals and experts, the advocacy efforts by those affected whether directly or indirectly, and any regulatory activities by state agents. We might consider the slow violence of eutrophication in ways that centre not just ecological but also cultural and social causes and effects. Among effects, particular attention is due to disruptions to traditional lifeways and harvesting practices within nearby Indigenous communities, recognizing that mid-twentieth century accelerations are related to ongoing colonial processes. Additionally, we might track shifts to longstanding patterns on the part of some Manitobans of spending summers at the lake, a history that intersects thoroughly with questions of race, gender, and class.¹⁰

A satellite image of Lake Winnipeg. The lake is strikingly green, suggesting extensive eutrophication.
Image credit: NASA, via Wikimedia Commons – public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AlgaeLW.jpg

In Canada as in many other nations around the world, from roughly the 1980s, the public funding of science was rendered increasingly suspect by ascendant neoliberal ideas.¹¹ In the decades since, principles of individualism have become established in many quarters as something like a commonsense – what Elsbeth Heaman might term an objectivity. Over recent decades, historians have participated in efforts to raise alarm about inadequate state support for institutions fundamental to the generation and preservation of knowledge, such as archives and access to information programs. And historians have struggled with the deficiencies that have resulted from state underfunding. In 2026, historians are involved in the latest of these battles. Environmental historians like Tina Loo have been particularly involved in pushback against cuts affecting agencies of particular interest to them, like Parks Canada. What some have called the war on science is clearly a war of attrition.¹² Understanding the Great Acceleration as a particular interval in the history of science and knowledge leaves us better positioned to recognize the distinctive dimensions of the knowledge regime that now prevails, a regime that is in some ways hostile to the needs and concerns of many historians.

Particularly considering the tensions and complications around expertise in a contemporary era characterized by misinformation, disinformation, and generative AI, it is an opportune moment to consider anew the historically- and geographically-specific dimensions of science and expertise in Canada, as well as the roles of all sorts of knowledges and knowledge-holders in driving forward, variously navigating, and raising concerns about the social and ecological changes characterizing Canada’s Great Acceleration.

Shannon Stunden Bower is a Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on the Canadian Prairies, and addresses questions related to water management (with particular concern for the extremes of flood or drought) and government institutions (whether at national, provincial, or local scales).

1.  J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Belknap Press, 2016).

2. Alex Souchen and Matthew S. Wiseman, Silent Partners: The Origins and Influence of Canada’s Military-Industrial Complex (UBC Press, 2024).

3. Blair Stein, “‘One-Day-Wide’ Canada: History, Geography, and Aerial Views at Trans Canada Air Lines, 1945-1955,” Scientia Canadensis 40, no. 1 (2018): 19–43.

4. Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, and William Deringer, “Introduction: Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories,” Osiris vol. 1, no. 33 (2018): 1–24.

5. Science Council of Canada, First Annual Report, 1966-67 (Queen’s Printer, 1967), 1, 22.

6. Elsbeth A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917. (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 15.

7. Heaman, 15.

8. John Sandlos, Arn Keeling, Caitlynn Beckett, and Rosanna Nicol, “There is a Monster Under the Ground: Commemorating the History of Arsenic Contamination at Giant Mine,” Papers in Canadian History and Environment, no. 3 (October 2019): 1–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.25071/10315/36516

9. Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (UBC Press, 2010).

10. Dale Barbour, Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town (University of Manitoba Press, 2011).

11. Janet Atkinson-Grosjean, Public Science, Private Interests: Culture and Commerce in Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence (University of Toronto Press, 2006), 5.

12.  Chris Turner, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada (Greystone Books Ltd, 2013).

This is the fifth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

When environmental historians describe the “Great Acceleration,” they usually point to dramatic post-Second World War transformations in human activity.¹ Carbon emissions surged. Industrial production expanded. Highways, suburbs, pipelines, and hydroelectric megaprojects reshaped landscapes at unprecedented speed and scale. In Canada, the decades after 1950 saw massive infrastructural expansion: hydroelectric development across northern rivers, the growth of extractive industries, and the spread of transportation networks that integrated previously remote regions into national and global markets.

Yet these familiar indicators – energy production, extraction, industrial output – tell only part of the story. As economic and technological systems expanded, states simultaneously developed new forms of governance to manage the social disruptions produced by accelerated capitalism, urbanization, and settler colonial expansion. One of the most significant yet overlooked infrastructures in this process is the prison. Prisons have rarely been considered within environmental histories of the period, limiting how scholars understand the full scope of postwar transformation.

Carceral institutions must be understood as part of this broader process. Prisons are not simply social institutions that confine individuals; they are material landscapes that reorganize land, water, labour, and energy. Across Canada in the postwar decades, the growth of carceral systems reshaped rural environments, altered local economies, and reinforced systems of territorial control which were deeply entangled with wider environmental change. Recognizing prisons as environmental spaces opens a new perspective on Canadian environmental history in the age of the Anthropocene. This essay argues that the Great Acceleration in Canada was driven not only by intensified extraction and production, but also by the expansion of governance infrastructures designed to manage the social and environmental consequences of rapid change.

Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario. Carceral institutions functioned as large-scale infrastructures embedded within regional landscapes during Canada’s postwar expansion. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

The Overlooked Infrastructure of the Great Acceleration

The concept of the Great Acceleration emerged from Earth system science, where researchers identified a cluster of indicators showing dramatic increases in human activity after 1950. Graphs charting population growth, fossil fuel consumption, fertilizer use, and urbanization all reveal the same pattern: a sharp upward curve beginning in the mid-twentieth century, reflecting the rapid intensification of industrial activity and resource use.

Environmental historians have adopted this framework to examine how the postwar decades transformed landscapes. In Canada, scholars have explored the ecological consequences of hydroelectric megaprojects, oil development, industrial forestry, and agricultural intensification, particularly through studies of pollution and environmental injustice.² These processes dramatically altered rivers, forests, and northern territories, with effects that remain central to ongoing debates about environmental change.

But focusing exclusively on extraction and production risks overlooking the governance structures that made this acceleration possible. The expansion of large-scale infrastructures required parallel expansions in administrative and coercive capacity, as states worked to manage labour, regulate populations, and secure territory under conditions of rapid transformation. Carceral institutions formed a critical component of this system, providing a spatial and institutional mechanism through which these forms of governance were enacted.

The Carceral Turn in Postwar Canada

While Canada expanded aspects of its carceral system in the postwar period, imprisonment rates remained comparatively stable, reflecting a broader culture of penal restraint.³ This apparent stability, however, obscures a transformation central to the Great Acceleration: the large-scale material expansion of carceral infrastructure. As the Canadian state responded to postwar industrialization, urbanization, and territorial integration, it invested not only in extractive and productive systems, but also in institutions designed to manage the populations affected by these changes.

These institutions were often located in rural or peripheral regions, where large tracts of land were available and government sought to stimulate local economies. Prison complexes were substantial infrastructural projects, requiring extensive construction, utilities, transportation access, and long-term operational support. Facilities such as Kingston Penitentiary and later sites like Collins Bay Institution illustrate how carceral landscapes  became embedded within regional landscapes, shaping land use, labour markets, and patterns of mobility. Kingston Penitentiary, for example, required shoreline modification along Lake Ontario, dedicated water intake and waste systems, and integration into regional transportation networks. Its presence tied the surrounding environment directly to the ongoing operation of a federal carceral institution.

Like other systems of the Great Acceleration, prisons consumed large amounts of land, water, and energy. They required extensive heating systems, water treatment, sewage infrastructure, and continuous electricity to maintain security technologies and controlled environments. Their construction often necessitated new roads, service networks, and connections to regional power grids. In many cases, prisons functioned as anchor institutions within rural economies, reshaping development patterns and employment structures. Yet prisons differ in a crucial respect. They are not only sites of circulation, but of confinement. They are designed to manage flows – of people, resources, and information – by restricting the movement of human bodies. In this sense, they are landscapes of governance as much as landscapes of material transformation. Seen in this way, prisons reveal that the Great Acceleration depended not only on expanding production, but on expanding the state’s capacity to regulate and contain populations within rapidly transforming environments.

Collins Bay Institution, Ontario. Postwar carceral facilities were constructed as large-scale infrastructures embedded within rural landscapes, linking local environments to national systems of governance. Source: P199, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Landscapes of Confinement

Understanding prisons as environmental infrastructure also reveals how they participated in the territorial reorganization that accompanied the Great Acceleration. The rapid expansion of industrial and extractive systems after 1950 required not only access to land and resources, but the restriction of Indigenous presence on that land. In this sense, the Great Acceleration in Canada depended in part on processes of dispossession and forced assimilation that enabled the consolidation of state and economic control. As postwar development extended state authority into rural and northern regions, carceral institutions helped stabilize these spaces within expanding systems of governance.

Carceral expansion intersected with existing patterns of settler colonial governance, which Patrick Wolfe describes as a structure – “not an event” –  organized through a logic of elimination.⁴ Indigenous peoples have been – and remain – dramatically overrepresented within Canadian prisons, comprising over 30 percent of the federal inmate population despite representing a small proportion of the national population.⁵ Within this context, prisons functioned not simply as sites of confinement, but as mechanisms through which the state managed Indigenous mobility, labour, and social life under conditions of accelerated territorial and economic change. Their expansion cannot be separated from the longer history of colonial policies aimed at regulating Indigenous life.

The siting of prisons in rural and remote areas further reshaped relationships between local environments and national governance structures. These institutions linked peripheral landscapes to federal administrative networks while embedding carceral power within specific ecological contexts, binding land, infrastructure, and authority together in material form.

The result is a distinctive form of landscape – what might be called a carceral environment. These spaces are characterized by surveillance technologies, fortified architecture, and tightly controlled ecological conditions. Lawns are meticulously maintained, perimeters cleared, and circulation strictly regulated; even vegetation is managed according to security priorities rather than ecological ones. Such environments represent a particular mode of human interaction with the non-human world, defined by containment, control, and the management of risk. The environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration were thus inseparable from the extension of state control over land and populations, including the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enforcement of assimilative structures necessary to sustain that transformation.

Slow Violence and Environmental Afterlives

Carceral institutions consumed large volumes of water, generated continuous waste streams, and required constant energy inputs to sustain surveillance and controlled environments. These demands extended far beyond prison walls, shaping surrounding ecosystems over time. Recognizing prisons as environmental infrastructures also draws attention to the temporal dimensions of the Great Acceleration. While the concept is often associated with rapid and visible change, its effects also unfold slowly through systems that produce long-term environmental and social consequences. In this sense, the Great Acceleration generated not only environmental transformation, but new forms of governance designed to manage its disruptions. Carceral systems were one such response.

This becomes particularly apparent through what environmental historian Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” harm that unfolds gradually and often invisibly across time, “incremental and accretive”⁶ in its effects. Carceral landscapes embody this kind of durational impact, both through their environmental footprints and through their role in managing populations over extended periods. As industrial expansion, urbanization, and resource extraction intensified after 1950, states faced increasing pressures to regulate mobility, contain social instability, and absorb the inequalities produced by accelerated development. The prison emerged as a key institution through which these pressures were managed. 

The consequences of this system extend beyond the immediate operation of prisons. Resource consumption, waste production, and energy demands reshape surrounding environments, while incarceration produces long-term and intergenerational social effects, particularly within Indigenous and marginalized communities. Carceral systems thus enabled accelerated development by containing the populations most affected by its disruptions and stabilizing the conditions required for continued expansion.

In this sense, prisons operate as sites of environmental afterlife. They absorb the social tensions generated by accelerated economic and political systems, concentrating those tensions within specific places and populations. The landscapes that host them become part of a broader geography of containment through which states manage inequality and maintain territorial order. This geography was essential to the functioning of the Great Acceleration, allowing rapid environmental transformation to proceed while displacing and containing its social and ecological consequences.

The relationship is therefore reciprocal and constitutive. The Great Acceleration produced the need for institutions capable of managing disruption, while the expansion of carceral systems enabled accelerated development by stabilizing the inequalities and displacement it generated. The Great Acceleration, in this sense, was not only a period of rapid growth, but the emergence of enduring systems of environmental and social management that continue to structure Canadian landscapes.

Aerial view of Kingston Penitentiary. The spatial organization of carceral institutions – cleared perimeters, controlled circulation, and environmental management – illustrates how prisons functioned as landscapes of containment within broader processes of post-war development. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Rethinking Canada’s Environmental History

Taken together, this perspective reshapes how we understand the environmental history of the Great Acceleration in Canada.

First, it expands the range of infrastructures that environmental historians consider significant. Ecological change is not shaped solely by dams, pipelines, and mines; institutions designed to manage human populations also play a central role.

Second, it foregrounds the relationship between environmental transformation and systems of governance. Accelerated industrial development required new mechanisms for regulating labour, mobility, and social order, and carceral institutions formed part of this broader architecture of control.

Finally, it highlights how environmental change intersects with inequality and colonial power. The spaces of the Great Acceleration were not neutral. They were structured by political decisions about who would benefit from economic growth and who would bear its costs. Prisons make this dynamic particularly visible, revealing how the management of people and the management of land became intertwined in the postwar decades that reshaped Canada’s environmental trajectory.

The Great Acceleration is often described as a period of unprecedented environmental transformation. Yet this transformation depended not only on technology and industry, but on the institutions that governed change and contained its consequences. Among these, the prison stands as one of the most overlooked infrastructures of the Anthropocene. Recognizing its place within Canada’s environmental history reveals that the landscapes of acceleration were also landscapes of confinement –  spaces where the governance of bodies and the transformation of environments became inseparable.

Alicia Carefoote is a PhD candidate in Canadian Studies at Trent University whose research explores how stories about policing, the environment, and national identity shape Canada’s past and present. Focusing on the Arctic and the history of the RCMP, she works to uncover the gap between popular narratives and archival realities.

1. Will Steffen et. al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no.1 (2015): 2–3.

2. John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, “Toxic Legacies, Slow Violence, and Environmental Injustice at Giant Mine, Northwest Territories,” The Northern Review, no. 42 (2016): 16.

3. Cheryl Webster and Anthony Doob, “Punitive Trends and Stable Imprisonment Rates in Canada,” Crime and Justice, vol. 36 (2007): 297, 331.

4. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–388.

5. Office of the Correctional Investigator, Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator 2021-2022 (Government of Canada, 2022), 96.

6. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series

In May 2024, I attended a meeting of Parks Canada’s Indigenous Cultural Heritage Advisory Council in Sydney, British Columbia. One of our agenda items was the federal government’s commemoration of upcoming historical events, including the passage of the Indian Act in 1876. The hope was that we would tell the federal government how to commemorate these events in an Indigenous way or at least in a manner that reflected the value of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous values. To say the council was not particularly excited was an understatement. Truth be told, the individual who presented the item to the council was equally unenthused. Yet it highlighted something the council kept running into during the entirety of its existence. How are celebration and commemoration related, and what do you do when things like the Indian Act hit a milestone in their history?

The Indian Act has impacted Indigenous peoples in Canada for one hundred and fifty years. While it technically does not apply to Inuit^[1] or Métis, the fact that it applies to the largest Indigenous group in Canada—First Nations—and as a result informs federal and provincial laws and policies regarding them, means that it often has a spillover effect on the other two groups. Nowhere is this better seen than in the Indian Residential School system. Although it included First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children, it tended to focus on First Nations children, and its policy of mandatory attendance was heavily informed by the Indian Act.^[2]

This sort of nuance is fundamental to moving beyond basic understandings of the Act. As the late Murray Sinclair famously stated, “Education got us into this mess, and education will get us out of it.” It is equally important, however, that this education is correct. If the goal is to change the hearts and minds of those with negative views of Indigenous peoples, then any evidence of exaggeration or falsehood can, through the process of confirmation bias, prevent that from happening. A good example is the attempt by Indian residential school deniers to exonerate the entire system by making claims that there are not two hundred and fifteen unmarked graves at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.^[3] The logic appears to be that if “they” were wrong/lied about x, then “they” must have been wrong/lied about y too. It is not a deductive argument, and as inductive arguments go—unless you assume “they” have ulterior motives and/or are trying to deceive you—there is no clear causal relationship between x and y. Still, Indian residential school deniers make that connection because they know that anyone who is already skeptical about the history of Indian residential schools will be predisposed to accept arguments that confirm their biases. As a result, it is important to ensure that when we talk about the Indian Act, we do not exaggerate or make allegations that can be easily disproven by anyone with time and an internet connection.

There are some exaggerations and misinformation about the Indian Act that persist to the present day. In 2019, I pointed out in my review of Bob Joseph’s 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act for the Ormsby Review that it was incorrect to claim that status Indians who joined the military during the Second World War—or the First World War, for that matter—automatically lost their status.[4] I am not saying no status Indians lost their status after serving Canada in the world wars, but rather it was not automatic, and claims to the contrary are extremely easy to disprove.

There are numerous status Indian veterans who served and never lost their status. Indeed, one of the chiefs of the McLeod Lake Indian Band, Andrew Solonas Sr., served for four and a half years in the Second World War, never lost his status, and was later elected by his nation. Second, as Veterans Affairs Canada points out, many Indigenous veterans did not receive benefits after either world war because of their legal status under the Indian Act.^[5] In other words, because they were status Indians after serving. Even here, the exact reason was insidious, as technically they were eligible for many of these benefits, but they had to apply to Indian Affairs for them, which often had a reason to deny an application and/or reduce what was received based on the rationale that, as status Indians, they already received benefits from the Crown.^[6] Indeed, this situation has been stated as one of the reasons why the Michel band enfranchised en masse – the only First Nation to do so. One band member, who served in the Second World War, wanted access to veterans’ benefits like other Canadians, and when he tried to give up his Indian status to accomplish this goal, he was told by the federal government that he had to get the entire nation to give up their status too.^[7] And finally, as Joseph notes on his website—after and contrary to what he said in his book—only some people lost their Indian status because they were away from their reserve for too long without permission from Indian Affairs and/or were told by Indian Affairs that they needed to give up their Indian status to serve.^[8]

 And that brings us back to the Indian Act. If you look at the versions that existed during the world wars, you will not find anything in them that stated that status Indians who served in the armed forces would lose their Indian status. Perhaps far more insidiously, the reasons why people lost or gave up their Indian status did not apply to everyone and were often quite literally personal.

Another exaggeration has to do with the ability of Indigenous peoples to hire lawyers. It is commonly stated that Indigenous peoples or status Indians lost the ability to hire lawyers in 1927 when the federal government enacted one of its many amendments to the Indian Act. As a practical matter, this statement is true, but it is far more complicated than that. The amendment to the Indian Act never actually stated that status Indians could not hire lawyers. Rather, the Indian Act was changed to make it a crime for anyone—regardless of race or ethnicity—to request or receive money from a status Indian to pursue a claim in court for a band or tribe without the written permission of the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs.^[9] So strictly speaking, people could still get or ask for money from a status Indian to pursue claims, they just had to get permission from Indian Affairs first.

To be clear, this technicality was in many ways a cruel farce. One reason the federal government passed the 1927 amendment was that more and more First Nations were pursuing claims against the federal and provincial governments, especially in British Columbia, where the Aboriginal lands question was reaching a false climax—the so-called Great Settlement. But the technicality existed nonetheless.^[10] And while it was removed from the Indian Act in 1951, a similar concept known as Crown immunity resulted in the dismissal of the Calder case in 1973, when the Nisga’a failed to obtain the Attorney General of BC’s permission to sue the Province of British Columbia. This outcome is ironic given that the Calder case, in recognizing Aboriginal title was not created by the Crown, is often seen as a victory for Indigenous peoples, and the reason why the modern comprehensive treaty process started in Canada.

Moreover, it is often overlooked that Indian Affairs took a multistep approach to banning the hiring of lawyers. Before 1927, a 1910 amendment to the Indian Act forbade a band or band member from entering into a contract or agreement using band or federal government funds without the written permission of the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs.^[11] This amendment did not explicitly state the agreement or contract included hiring a lawyer, but it coincided with new sections in the Indian Act regarding the sale and surrender of reserve land by Indian Affairs, as well as a number of declarations and petitions in British Columbia demanding that Aboriginal title be dealt with. And even though historical geographer Cole Harris points out that there are clear indications that the federal government under Wilfred Laurier wanted to make a claim against the province to force the issue, Laurier’s defeat in 1911 precluded the claim. The end result was that status Indians were hindered in their ability to hire lawyers at a time when being able to do so might have helped them.^[12] It did not stop land claims in the province, however, and in this sense, while the first amendment in 1910 might have stemmed from a desire to help Indigenous peoples, the second amendment in 1927 was clearly meant to silence them.^[13]

When I teach my senior-level Indigenous history course, I always bring up the obsolete Bohr model of the atom in which the nucleus is at the center, and electrons orbit in circular energy levels. Although physicists have recognized the Bohr model as flawed for about a century, it is still used today as a teaching tool because it is easy to understand and helps students grasp the basics of atomic structure before being introduced to more complex concepts. In a certain sense, the intricacies of the Indian Act—including Indigenous veterans losing their Indian status and Indigenous peoples not being able to hire lawyers—could be seen in the same light. Today, it is important for us to move beyond these simplifications to discuss the nuance of the Indian Act. The fact that some Indigenous veterans gave up or lost their Indian status because a government official enforced a section of the Indian Act in bad faith is arguably far worse than everyone losing their Indian status. The same is true of hiring a lawyer. And make no mistake, these technicalities have had real-world consequences. And more recently, it has provided fuel to groups like Indian residential school deniers, who attempt to use minor mistakes to disprove larger things.

Dr. Daniel Sims is a member of the Tsay Keh Dene Nation. Currently, he works as an associate professor in the Department of First Nations Studies and an adjunct professor in the School of Education at the University of Northern British Columbia. His current research examines failed economic developments and concept of wilderness in the Finlay-Parsnip watershed.

This series was produced within the project Historicizing Our Times: Histories of Migration and Climate in the Digital Space, which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

[1] Section 4(1) explicitly states that the Indian Act does not apply to Inuit. A version of this section has been part of the act since the 1951 amendment.

[2] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, What We Learned: Principles of Truth and Reconciliation (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), 5, 6, 29, 32, 33, 36-38, 39, 84, 87, 89, passim.

[3] Tom Flanagan, “No Evidence of ‘Mass Graves’ or ‘Genocide’ in Residential Schools,” Fraser Institute, 12 February 2024, https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/no-evidence-of-mass-graves-or-genocide-in-residential-schools 

[4] Daniel Sims, “#514 Consider the Indian Act,” Ormsby Review, 2 April 2019, https://thebcreview.ca/2019/04/02/514-consider-the-indian-act/

[5] Veterans Affairs Canada, “Indigenous Veterans,” Remembrance – People and Stories, 23 April 2026, https://www.veterans.gc.ca/en/remembrance/people-and-stories/indigenous-veterans

[6] Magdalena Paluszkiewicz-Misiaczek, “‘They Should Vanish Into Thin Air… and Give No Trouble:’ Canadian Aboriginal Veterans of World Wars,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 19, no. 2 (2018): 119-123, 125-128, passim.

[7] Colleen Underwood, “Why My Grandfather Dissolved the Michel First Nation and Renounced His Indian Status,” CBC – The Doc Project, 29 May 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/docproject/disbanded-why-my-grandfather-dissolved-our-reserve-1.4643764/why-my-grandfather-dissolved-the-michel-first-nation-and-renounced-his-indian-status-1.4643782

[8] Indigenous Corporate Training Inc., “Indigenous Veterans: Equals on the Battlefields, but Not at Home,” Indigenous Corporate Training Inc., 9 November 2021, https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-veterans

[9] Indian Act, chap. 32, 1927, s.149a.

[10] I do not believe anyone calls it the Great Settlement anymore, but anthropologist Wilson Duff did. See Wilson Duff, The Indian History of British Columbia, vol. 1, The Impact of the White Man (Ministry of Provincial Secretary and Government Services, 1980), 69-70; Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2002), 260.

[11] Indian Act, chap. 28, 1910, s.87; Indian Act, chap. 14, 1911.

[12] Harris,225-228, 378n55.

[13] Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989 (UBC Press, 1990), 111-113, passim.