“History should make you feel weird.” So proclaims a widely touted slogan of history nerds. While there is much in the world foisting weirdness upon us today, too rarely do we intentionally seek the off-beat. History students should. “Weird,” though it has come to mean uncanny or bizarre, has its roots in the idea of the turning of events. The Old English wyrd meant the principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined. In a word, fate. It may have come from older words meaning “to turn” or “to wind” thus referencing the Roman Parcae and their northern counterparts, the Norns: the three women, who spun, measured, and irrevocably cut life’s thread. Shakespeare’s “Weyard Sisters” retain this association in their scrying of Macbeth’s destiny. These are fitting associations for the study of the past. For is not history’s chief concern understanding how the threads of past events are woven into the ever growing, shifting, impossibly complex tapestry from which springs our present predicament?

But history should make you feel weird for less etymological reasons. The more recent meaning of “weird,” aligning it with the bizarre, is a good starting point for inquiry. Cultural historian Robert Darnton was on to this when he followed the trail of his own ignorance. He (understandably) didn’t get what was so funny to eighteenth-century Frenchmen about murdering and mutilating cats. “Our own inability to get [a] joke is an indication of the distance that separates us,” he observed, “the perception of distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation.” I tell my first-year history students: If you feel weird because you don’t “get it,” you’re in the right place to start learning.

Recently, I found myself feeling weird in a small room shaped like an uppercase E. Boxed in by looming rows of bounded journals, at the end of my worktable a young former Duke of Edinburgh was framed and mounted, his orca sleek hair dissolving into the black shadows surrounding him. Next to her husband’s portrait, an even younger Queen Elizabeth II, gowned and crowned, alighted from a royal Rolls-Royce at the doors of Lincoln’s Inn on December 9^th, 1957. I was in the heart of Empire. To my left, on another rectangular wooden table, an old-fashioned ice axe with a smooth wooden shaft rested casually as if its owner would soon return for it. I later learned it belonged to Andrew (Sandy) Irvine, a young mountaineer who was lost on Chomolungma (Everest) with George Mallory in 1924. He wasn’t coming back for it.

I was in the library of the Alpine Club of London. The Alpine Club, first of its name, founded 100 years before Elizabeth arrived at the Lincoln Inn. Before me sat a large, royal blue binder with a black spine and black corner lapels. “Original letters” its cover stated, “Farrar, Freshfield, Adams, Reilly, Whymper.” These were storied names in the history of mountaineering. Indeed, so many stories have been pinned to these names that recently scholars and mountain history enthusiasts have rightly demanded other stories about other people. Toward the back of the volume, after pages of dizzying swirls and swooping curlicues the Victorian script gave way to a neatly printed letter:

LETTERS BY THE REV. CHARLES HUDSON AND EDWARD WHYMPER RELATING TO THE MATTERHORN DISASTER OF 1865

The Matterhorn Disaster. The triumph and failure that is said to have shuttered the “Golden Age” of Alpine Mountaineering in July 1865. Edward Whymper (1840-1911), Rev. Charles Hudson (1828-65), Lord Francis Douglas (1847-65), Douglas Hadow (1846-65), Michel Croz (1830-65), and the father (1820-1888) and son (1843-1923) guides both named Peter Taugwalder, had summitted the technically challenging mountain, but only three survived. The others plummeted to their deaths after the young Hadow lost his footing and dragged Hudson, Douglas, and Croz off the mountainside. All would have perished had the rope not snapped, sparing Whymper and the Taugwalders a mutilating 4000-metre fall.

“Disaster Strikes just after the first Ascent of the Matterhorn,” (1865) drawn by Gustave Dore. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

The neatly written letter before me was penned by Frank Smythe (1900-49), a mountaineer of no little renown in his own time, which explained that two letters were given to him by the “late Rev. Pat McCormick (son of Canon G. McCormick), Rector of St. Martins in the Field, London.” The first Victorian letter was written by Charles Hudson to (then) Rev. G. McCormick. Hudson was a man of Muscular Christianity who had served as an army chaplain in the Crimean War. He had dashed off the letter at 5 a.m. on July 13, 1865 from the Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt immediately before the doomed party departed for their climb. It is a typical, last-minute missive, nowadays shot off as a text message. “My dear McC, We and Whymper are just off to try the Cervin [Matterhorn]. You can hear about our movements from the Landlord of the Monte Rosa Hotel. Follow us if you like.” He expected they would spend a night on the mountain and return the following morning; a second night was possible but unlikely. Like most of us who enter into the mountains or step into the street in the morning, he did not consider that an eternity of nights was possible. He was thinking, instead, of a mutual friend. “Please keep an eye to Campbell as long as you are with him, and take him to the Riffel in case you go there. We expect to be back tomorrow.”

Following Hudson’s letter was one written in Edward Whymper’s thin, sloping hand, scribbled less than seventy-two hours later. Within that brief window, rendered insignificant by the space between two pages in a binder, everything had changed. Two letters, written by expeditionary comrades to the same person, from the same place, within days of one another, were separated by little time and space. Yet the fates of these two men had inserted an unbreachable gulf between them. In this letter, Whymper pleaded with McCormick to join him in the search for Hudson’s body. He was to follow a party of guides who had already gone up and he “wished particularly to have an Englishman” with him. Was this because in this moment of crisis and psychological vertigo he craved the comfort of his mother tongue? The familiarity of elongated vowels and clipped consonants? It seems that the Alps he and his countrymen had so emphatically declared their playground suddenly felt hostile and alien to him.

Whymper was haunted by the Matterhorn. Already a black sheep in Victorian English mountaineering circles, he took to drink, earning his living from his family’s engraving business and later writing guidebooks. Mountaineering writers often quote Charles Dickens’ opinion on the Matterhorn disaster; mountaineering, he declared, “becomes ghastly when it implies contempt for and waste of human life—a gift too holy to be played with like a toy, under false pretenses, by bragging vanity.” Whymper was tarred with “bragging vanity.” Historians portray a haughty showboater, more bluster than talent, and saddled him with the legacy of colonial mountaineering in places like the Rockies where he allied himself with the empire-loving Canadian Alpine Club and Canadian Pacific Railway. Together, they promoted Indigenous Homelands as the next peak-bagging playground for foreign and settler mountaineers. I am one such historian. Writing critical histories of him and his ilk, I never particularly liked his character.

Yet, here in the archives, reading his letter to McCormack, Whymper was stripped of his arrogance and later deeds. He was a young man who had encountered violent death, was shaken by it, and sought consolation. I thought of my own experience losing a university friend in B.C.’s coastal mountains.

The next letter thrust me into the future. On April 27, 1911, his seventy-first, and final, birthday, Whymper wrote a letter Sir W. Davidson, an acquaintance at the Alpine Club. Whymper was looking to offer gifts, rather than to receive them. He beseeched Davidson to present a portrait to the Alpine Club of his friend the Chamonix guide, Michel Croz, who had fallen alongside Hudson in 1865. Whymper hoped to commemorate Croz, whom he considered the best of guides. He related a story from the descent from the Grand Cormier, when the Herculean Croz had lifted Whymper’s 160 lbs by the collar. It was perhaps not surprising that Whymper, having been ostracized by the club for most of his life was not offering the portrait himself. He was an outsider, an old man, trying to honour a friend long dead. “Tears do not often come out of my eyes,” he closed, “but when I think of the miserable end of this grand Guide, they come out.”

The final letter was dated 20^th June 1912 and addressed C.H.R. Wollaston, Alpine Club: “Dear sir, I am much obliged by your letter of the 19^th instant, and for enclosing Mr Sidney Spencer’s letter, which I return herewith, as requested. I was already thinking of asking Mssrs Spooner & Co., whom my brother knew, to make me an offer for the negatives. Your faithfully, MMWhymper.” The voice I had been listening to, and beginning to feel an understanding of, was abruptly gone. Snuffed out as quickly as had been Charles Hudson’s. I felt weird.

With an uncertain glance at Irvine’s ice axe, I left the archives and entered the streets of Hackney. A narrow, curving lane brought me to an iron-fenced park, shaded by enormous sycamores. Beneath the trees, on a lawn littered with peeled bark, people picnicked, laid on their backs, yakked at their cell phones. Two men in hoisted-up tennis socks rose, kissed gleefully, and exited the park hand-in-hand. Everyone here was the hero of their own infinitely rich, entangled story. I struggled to reconcile this with the extreme reduction of life encountered in the archives. An absurdly improbable napkin littered at my feet looked up at me. “No human is an island,” it observed. Indeed.

Napkin wisdom (2025). Photo by author.

Taking a cue from my own pedagogical playbook, when I asked myself what I can learn from this weirdness, I realized I was being presented one of history’s great gifts. As a self-identified feminist, Indigenous-ally, and promoter of anti-colonial history, I am well-positioned to dislike Edward Whymper. Yet, in the span of a few pages, the condensed extraction of forty-six years, I was offered a jarringly different perspective. A more existential vantage, from which I observed that history is ultimately about death and life. The historian asks the dead about how they lived. Rarely do we think about our profession in such macabre terms. Perhaps we should. The pages in the blue binder at the Alpine Club preserved Whymper’s immediate reaction to violent death. They also preserved traces of his own. In doing so, they reminded me that history has the potential to reveal to us what Nick Cave has called our shared predicament of an imperilled life. To be alive is to be in danger of death. If you let them, the archives will force you to confront this. They may even invite you to extend a radical compassion that recognizes this shared condition across chasms of time, geography, culture, gender, and political and spiritual persuasions. This compassion does not deflate politics (I still think Whymper was a bit of a dick for his imperialism) but it is a valuable skill: the capacity to feel for someone radically different from one’s self. This skill won’t be emblazoned on student resumés and it’s not going to sell history departments to universities working under increasingly dire financial prospects. But it is important for life, perhaps especially so in an age of polarization and cognitive automatization.

And so I share these letters with my students. And I present them with the pitiless flattening of the archives. And I let them sit with the weirdness. And I hope it will help them begin to find a way to learn.

Dani Inkpen is a settler historian of science and environment who specializes in histories of mountain places. She has written on the history of glaciology, the history of mountaineering, ice humanities, and J.R.R. Tolkien and science, and co-authored efforts to understand mountain systems from multiple knowledge perspectives.

When did the Great Acceleration start? Saskatchewan might hold the answer. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, the settler population exploded, and these newcomers broke 20 million acres of prairie grassland into wheat farms. The transformation released vast quantities of CO2 held in the soil and was inseparable from the genocidal dislocation of Indigenous people from their land.¹ Saskatchewan’s agricultural transformation coincided with settlement on the Great Plains in the United States, the pampas in Argentina, the cocoa boom in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), the sugar boom in Fiji and the Philippines, and rubber booms in Brazil, Ceylon and the Congo Free State. This global “golden age” of resource-led development transformed ecosystems across the globe and contributed to the early stages of anthropogenic climate change.² It all took place decades before the conventional 1950 start of the Great Acceleration.³

Figure 1. The Great Acceleration dashboard. Twenty-four global trends — twelve socio-economic, twelve Earth System — plotted from 1750 to 2010, with the post-1950 take-off that gives the Great Acceleration its name (Steffen et al. 2015). Image: via Courtney White, “What Is Earth For?,” The Grass Canoe/Resilience.org, August 19, 2019.

Will Steffen used simple data visualizations to make a compelling case the Great Acceleration started in the mid-20th century.⁴ A large number of socio-economic and earth systems trends appeared to reach an inflection point in the decade after the end of the Second World War. There were regional examples of rapid change in the preceding centuries, such as the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, but the mid-twentieth century saw this acceleration spread to the rest of the globe.

The problem with this method is that we can create very similar charts with a different x axis that suggest the Great Acceleration was well underway by the end of World War 2.⁵ Global population grew slowly for millennia, then jumped from 1 billion in 1800 to almost 2.5 billion in 1950 (Our World in Data). This process continues in the decades that followed, but it is hard to say the inflection point comes in 1950 instead of 1850. It is also hard not to link most of the other changes in Steffen’s charts to the accelerating population growth that dates back centuries. We can also look at CO2 emissions, and built up areas the x axes to range from 1750 to 1950 and find clear inflection points around 1850; agricultural area and population follow a similar trend through this period and temperate forest in England and the United States reach their low points and start to rebound before 1950. We could continue to collect datasets and find a dramatic increase in intercontinental shipping or global kilometers of railway tracks to create a dashboard that starts to resemble Steffen’s but identifies 1850 as the inflection point.

Figure 2. Six global indicators of human activity, 1750–1950. CO? emissions (land use in green, fossil + cement in grey); CO? from coal; agricultural land; built-up area; population; and forest cover for the United States, China, and England. Every panel inflects well before the Great Acceleration’s conventional 1950 start (Steffen et al. 2015); the shaded band marks 1850–1950, the “inflection century.” Through 1900, land-use change supplied roughly two-thirds of all human CO? emissions. Data: Global Carbon Budget v15 (Friedlingstein et al. 2025) and HYDE 3.5 (Klein Goldewijk et al. 2017), via Our World in Data; pre-1850 land-use CO? is the author’s HYDE-calibrated extension; US forest cover from Williams (1989) and USDA Forest Service (2014), China from He, Yang & Wang (2024), England from Our World in Data after Rackham (1986).

Defenders of the mid-century date have a real point: 1950 is when human influence on earth systems became measurableacross a wide range of indicators. But that is a claim about legibility, not the start of the Great Acceleration, and the dashboard is a little guilty of choosing the data that fit it. Steffen’s earth-systems panel charts the loss of tropical forest, a curve that necessarily looks like a twentieth-century phenomenon, because as we saw above, 1900 the temperate forests of Europe and eastern North America were already near their low point. Picking tropical forest doesn’t tell us when deforestation accelerated; it tells us which forests were still standing once the dataset begins. Run the same panel on temperate forest clearance or the decline of prairies ecosystems and the curve peaks earlier. The indicators on the dashboard are the ones still in motion after the war; the violent transformations that came before are simply not plotted.

We can focus on global warming to flesh out the issues with marking 1950 as the start of the Great Acceleration. G.S. Callendar had already recorded the early signs of global warming by 1938. Using long-running weather station records, he found world temperatures had risen about 0.005°C per year over the preceding half-century, and he attributed much of the rise to fossil-fuel carbon dioxide.⁶ Modern reconstructions confirm his estimate of roughly 0.3°C of warming was remarkably accurate.⁷ Anthropogenic climate change was underway well before 1950, even though it took until the 1980s for scientists to confidently distinguish the warming from natural climatic variation.

Figure 3. Global mean surface temperature, 1850–2024, with Callendar’s 1938 measurement marked. By 1938, when Callendar reported roughly 0.3 °C of warming from 147 station records (Callendar 1938), the smoothed series already shows +0.33 °C since the 1850s — an estimate reconfirmed seventy-five years later (Hawkins and Jones 2013). The Great Acceleration’s conventional clock starts twelve years after Callendar’s paper. Data: Berkeley Earth Land + Ocean anomaly relative to 1951–1980 (Rohde and Hausfather 2020); shaded band marks 1850–1950 as in Figure 2.

Until roughly 1950, the largest source of human carbon emissions was not fossil fuel but land-use change: the clearing of forests and the plowing-up of grasslands. Fossil fuels only overtook land conversion as the dominant source around the middle of the twentieth century. So the famous take-off in the CO2 curve at 1950 is not the moment humans began to force the carbon cycle. CO2 emissions are cumulative and all the CO2 released by agriculture and forestry combined with the accelerating combustion of fossil fuels.

Figure 4. Annual global CO? emissions from land-use change, 1750–2024. Land-use emissions roughly tripled across the shaded 1850–1950 band and peaked at 8.7 Gt CO? per year in 1959 — nine years after the Great Acceleration’s conventional clock starts (Steffen et al. 2015). By the time the framework dates “the start,” this flux was not accelerating; it was peaking. Data: Global Carbon Budget v15 bookkeeping reconstruction (Friedlingstein et al. 2025; Hansis, Davis & Pongratz 2015), via Our World in Data; before the dotted line at 1850, the author’s extension from HYDE 3.5 agricultural area (Klein Goldewijk et al. 2017).

The Global Carbon Budget’s reconstruction confirms that land-use change, not fossil fuel, was the major source of global CO2 emissions before the mid-20th century, when fossil fuels became the primary driver. The land-use data do not match the exponential growth curves in Steffen’s charts. Instead we see a doubling of emissions in the century after 1750, roughly a tripling in the century between 1850 and 1950, and a final postwar surge that peaked in 1959 before beginning a long uneven decline.⁸

Figure 5. National shares of global annual land-use CO? emissions, 1850–2024. Fifteen focal countries as fractions of the global flux; the residual is “Rest of world.” Through the shaded 1850–1950 window the United States, Russia, China, and India supply over half the signal; after 1950 the flux flips to the tropical-forest frontier of Brazil, Indonesia, and DR Congo. The prairie/steppe land rush — including the Saskatchewan and Great Plains wheat boom — was the defining land-use carbon signal of its era. Data: Global Carbon Budget v15 by country, via Our World in Data; sources as in Figure 4.

Focusing on Canada, there were two accelerations in CO2 emissions from land use: the Prarie boom circa 1896-1931 and World War 2 through to 1960. The remainder of this post will focus on Canada’s Great Acceleration recorded in the first boom in land-use CO2 emmissions.

Figure 6. Annual Canadian CO? emissions from land-use change, 1850–2024. The shaded band marks 1896–1931, the Saskatchewan wheat-boom window, during which annual emissions doubled from 184 Mt CO? (1900) to 376 Mt (1919). The all-time peak — 470 Mt — falls in 1959, late in the postwar expansion that pushed the wheat economy north into the boreal margins. The abrupt steps at 1899–1900 and 1949–1950 likely reflect discontinuities in the bookkeeping model’s input datasets rather than real one-year events. Data: Global Carbon Budget v15, via Our World in Data; sources as in Figure 4.

John Sandlos has already made the case that Canada experienced a great acceleration in mining starting in the last decades of the 19th century and coinciding with electrification and urbanization.⁹ I want to build on his case and add that Canada was a part of a global land rush that transformed temperate grasslands and tropical rain forests into wheat farms, sheep stations, rubber plantations and cocoa farms in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was not a new process and we can track agricultural colonization across the Holocene. What makes this period different was the speed, scale and global synchronicity of the transformation.

The carbon record traces that synchronicity. The Global Carbon Budget’s reconstruction of land-use emissions shows the American clearances peaking around 1880 (by which point the United States alone was releasing more than a billion and a half tonnes of CO2 a year from land conversion) and then, as that boom subsided, a second wave igniting almost at once around the temperate grasslands of the southern hemisphere and the northern plains. Canada, the Argentine pampas and the Australian rangelands all surge between 1900 and the 1920s; Argentina’s land-use emissions jump roughly eightfold across those decades (data from the same Global Carbon Budget country data behind Figure 5). Saskachewan’s boom was the Canadian component of a global process: same plow, the same handful of decades, on four continents at once.

Figure 7. Saskatchewan, 1880–1950: six indicators of a pre-1950 Great Acceleration. All six series — field crops, wheat, livestock, railways, population, and reserve land surrendered by First Nations — inflect and plateau within the shaded 1896–1931 window. The settler S-curve and the dispossession S-curve are the same curve viewed from two sides. Data: annual agricultural series from the author’s research dataset; census population from HGIS Canada; Historical Canadian Railroads GIS; surrenders from Martin-McGuire (1998).

Starting in the last few years of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived in Saskatchewan by railway and began transforming the prairie ecosystem into a blanket of wheat. Charting the kilometers of railway track, acres of field crops, population and livestock all confirm an acceleration in Saskatchewan. The wheat production chart records both the acceleration and then the collapsing yields during the drought years in the 1930s. And every acre broken was a carbon release. Prairie grassland holds most of its carbon underground, in soils built over millennia, and the plow that turned it into wheat fields oxidized that store into the atmosphere. In the Global Carbon Budget’s reconstruction, Canada’s land-use emissions more than doubled between 1890 and 1920, the window when the prairie was broken. Saskatchewan’s transformation was not only a regional ecological event but a contribution to the very global carbon signal Steffen’s dashboard dates to 1950, released decades before the dashboard begins to read it.

This acceleration also depended on clearing the land of its people. Through the 1880s and 1890s, as starvation and disease brought mass death to Plains peoples confined to reserves, the Canadian government responded not with relief but by negotiating large land surrenders. Some 400,000 acres of reserve land were given up in the aftermath of this genocidal Starvation Policy.¹⁰ The prairie was broken for wheat only after it had been emptied of the people who had lived on it.

Saskatchewan and the Canadian prairies were a continuation of a process that started in the United States, making it difficult to pin down a key decade in this earlier stage in the Great Acceleration. The American experience was a little more linear as the booms moved from state to state in the decades after the end of the Civil War. The Canadian and American processes share a peak in the early 1930s before the Dust Bowl forced an end to the constant growth in cropland.

Figure 8. The U.S. Great Plains, 1865–1950: four indicators of a continental Great Acceleration. Cropland, population, railway miles, and livestock across the twelve Great Plains states defined by Cunfer’s On the Great Plains, with the same 1896–1931 band as Figure 7. The Great Plains story runs roughly thirty years ahead of Saskatchewan’s — the steepest growth in every indicator predates the Saskatchewan window — and both regions peak together in the dust-bowl decade. The Saskatchewan wheat boom was a late entrant to a continental land rush whose first wave had already crested on the U.S. plains. Data: county-level agricultural census compilation underlying Cunfer (2005); population from Cao and Richardson (2023); railway miles from Railroads and the Making of Modern America, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

My goal here isn’t to upend the Great Acceleration framework. I’m a fan of Steffen’s work and I find it useful in teaching and thinking about Canadian history. But I do not think global history fits neatly into such a neat periodization. We can leave the battle over golden spikes that do or do not mark the start of the Anthropocene to the geologists. Historians focus on the continuity, the ruptures and how they relate. Mineral extraction and settler colonial transformations of the prairies in Canada were a part of global transformations that accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These processes snowballed into further economic development, industrialization, population growth and mass urbanization in postwar Canada. I’m not sure we need to settle on a definition as long as we contextualize the rapid change in the postwar period with the histories of other periods of rapid change in Canadian history and how they fit into larger global processes.

Jim Clifford is an associate professor of environmental history at the University of Saskatchewan. His research focuses on the long-distance enviornmental consquences of British industrialization and consumption.

The Windsor Star reported an incident on May 28th, 1954—as did papers all over North America—about a Port Colborne, Ontario woman being arrested in Buffalo, New York, for trying to enter the United States “illegally” after being in an accident in the neighbouring American town. It was her second time trying to cross the border, the first time was in Windsor, in 1950, where she was simply turned away. What makes this experience unique was because of what she said to the arresting officers. She declared herself the “Canadian Christine Jorgenson.”[i]

Marie Jeffersons’s story is vastly different than Jorgensen’s. One significant distinction was that Jorgensen was not Intersex. It was reported that Marie was “born with both male and female characteristics” and that her mother had twelve doctors called in to decide on her sex and advised her mother to bring Marie up as a boy.[ii]

Trans and intersex communities should not be seen as the same but instead as communities whose experiences, at times, intersect. Most people with Intersex conditions do not identify as Trans and, as stated in The Intersex Society of North America website, “only a small portion of intersex people experience” issues with their gender identity. Marie’s story is not the typical narrative of the Intersex experience. Her story is one of those rare examples at a time when being Intersex was not seen as its own identity. If the doctors would have decided that she was female, she may not have ever been written about at all.

What makes Marie’s story so valuable is that she participated in shaping her own narrative and worked to spare others from the hardships she endured. Unfortunately, she failed to make quite the effect she wanted to, and her story was lost to history.

Ottawa Citizen. March 22, 1954, page 4.

From March 19^th to the 23^rd, 1954, there were multiple daily articles in the Toronto Evening Telegram about her, written by various authors including herself. The first article was mostly based on an interview that Ron Kenyon did with Dr. Stewart Wilson, an urologist from Welland, Ontario and Marie’s last of many doctors. Marie is not named in the article, and it even stated that Wilson would “not release her name until he had gained permission to do so.”[iii]  I can only assume the doctor or someone else at the Clinic leaked her story to the press even though Wilson assured the media that the hospital kept the operation under “utmost secrecy.”[iv]

After being hounded by the press, Marie came forward and told her side of the story. She gave details on how alone she felt and how she felt “confused, bewildered, with little help available.”[v] She also stated that the “conventional solutions for conventional people” were no help to her.  Marie stated that sex “is much more than just your reproductive organs. It’s a matter of mind, too […] I don’t think I exactly wanted to be a woman; I think it was more that I was meant to be a woman, and I couldn’t really be anything else, no matter how hard I tried.”[vi]

Marie was born on July 30th, 1929, in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. She explained that her childhood was difficult, and she was very depressed when she was young. Two of her brothers, Donald and William, were also interviewed for the Telegram and described Marie’s school years as cruel. “Every visit to a washroom was an embarrassment to him, and every visit to a public locker room an agony of mortification.”[vii]

During puberty, Marie noticed that her voice did not change, she was not developing facial hair and was beginning to develop breasts. Her mother suggested she go see a doctor. The doctor recommend that she stay a “boy” and she ended up having top surgery. She regretted that decision later in life and so did her future Windsor doctor.

When the Telegram story broke out, the paper interviewed various people, including Marie’s family, neighbours, and people who lived in the same apartment as her parents. Mrs. Freeman Cadwell, who lived above the Jeffersons, stated that she was “positive Marie had been born with all-female characteristics. She could cook and sew with the best of us.”[viii] The conversations were, predictably for the era, steeped in the gender norms of the time. It was reported that since the age of six, she knew she was “different” in many ways. As a child, she liked to stay by herself and not play with the other boys and instead helped her mom clean the house, wash dishes, and bake. She seemed to have strong parental support. Her mother said that “if becoming a woman is going to make Marie happy that’s all I care about.”[ix]

The surprise of the Port Colborne community, who knew her before the story, was not that she was a woman but that she had gender-affirming surgery. Marie reported that she went through eleven operations. She eventually gave permission to the doctors to disclose the information about her operations to the press. Wilson “said the one he did was comparatively minor and involved plastic surgery to remove scars. The other operations were performed in Halifax, Saint John N.B., Toronto, Windsor, and Hamilton.”[x] There were no articles about the Saint John and Hamilton surgeries, but there were details about the Windsor operation. It happened in October 1953. She had five doctors come to her bedside to make it truly clear that, if she decided to go through with the operation, that there would be no way she could become male again. That she would be a woman until she died. She responded, “That was what I wanted.” The operation was done by Dr. Walter L. Percival at Hotel Dieu Hospital. He created a “birth canal” for her by taking skin from her stomach. It was a two-hour operation. Jefferson was in the hospital for over a month recovering. When she was well enough for the first time, she walked along Ouellette Avenue in women’s clothes. She thought everyone was looking at her “but I felt I was doing the right thing.”[xi] After the operation, she was put on hormones. She reflected on her journey, saying, “I think the operation I had done in Windsor, that finally made me a woman.”[xii] When she got out of the hospital, her parents went to see her, and they walked right past her because they didn’t recognize her. Marie’s story was covered all over North America.

Quad-City Times. Davenport, Iowa. March 21, 1954, page 3

Two months after her declaration, articles started to appear again, this time focusing on her getting into a car accident. Many of the articles were misogynistic with captions like “Those Women Drivers.” It was reported in the Buffalo News on May 24th, 1954, that she was charged with driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident. Marie was given a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty.[xiii]

Her story soon went cold, until August 18th, 1954, the Hamilton Spectator reported that she was attacked and robbed by two American tourists in a hotel room. She ended up going to the hospital for cuts and bruises. The article also gave information that she was currently employed as a “domestic.”[xiv] Marie’s father’s obituary had her living in Windsor in 1959.[xv] In her mother’s obituary in 1960, she is not listed.[xvi] After this, I have not found any more information about her. With that her story and her claim to fame was forgotten.

Marie’s extraordinary story happened over seventies years ago and I think we can still find many parallels to what various Queer, Trans and Intersex communities are battling right now.  The simple idea of just wanting to live one’s authentic self, out in public, instead in the shadows of societies judgements is still a struggle many experience today. The statement that Marie made in her final published article was that she knew all to well “how to deal with a shameful secret.” Her advice was “if you’re afraid people are whispering about you in the street, don’t hide your secret deeper and skulk away. Drown the whisper with noise. Shout your secret from the housetops, so even the deafest can hear.”[xvii]

Walter Cassidy has been an educator in Windsor for the past 26 years. He just finished a two-year educational residence with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. He is a local Windsor Queer historian, and activist. He has curated two exhibits in Windsor area; one at the Chimczuk Museum and one at the Amherstburg Freedom Museum. He also contributed to the Love in a Dangerous Time Exhibit, currently at the CMHR, which is the largest queer exhibit in Canadian history. 

[i] Christine Jorgensen (1926–1989) was a famous American transgender woman who, two years earlier, was outed after she had gender-affirming surgery in Denmark. Jorgensen’s very publicized transition started conversations in North America about gender identity and helped shape more inclusive ideas about the subject. She even had a successful career as an actress, singer, and recording artist.

[ii] Daily Standard-Freeholder. Tue, Mar 23, 1954, p.9.

[iii] The Hamilton Spectator. Fri, Mar 19, 1954, p. 8.

[iv] The Ottawa Journal. Mar 20, 1954, p.36

[v] The Evening Telegram. Mar 20, 1954, p.3.

[vi] The Evening Telegram. March 23, 1954, p.3.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] The Evening Telegram. Mar 22, 1954, p.3.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] The Calgary Albertan. Mon, Mar 22, 1954, p.2.

[xi] The Evening Telegram. Mar 22, 1954, p.3.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] The Buffalo News. Fri, May 28, 1954, p.6.

[xiv] The Hamilton Spectator. Wed, Aug 18, 1954, p.18.

[xv] The Toronto Star. Tue, Aug 25, 1959, p.32.

[xvi] The Toronto Star. Mon, Sep 19, 1960, p.37.

[xvii] The Evening Telegram. Mar 23, 1954, p.3.

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series

There is a harmful provision of the Indian Act that, until recently, has never been the object of sustained scholarly scrutiny: Section 141. In force from 1927 to 1951, this provision made it an offence for Indigenous peoples to raise funds or retain legal counsel to pursue claims in court without first seeking written permission from the Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs. Because very little is written about the section, it’s often assumed that it was hardly used. However, our research reveals that it was used in targeted ways, and that its history offers a window into the broader logic of the Indian Act as an administrative instrument that aimed to regulate and diminish Indigenous political authority.

A page from Canada’s Indian Act showing Section 141, a provision in force from 1927 to 1951.

Section 141 was enacted at the end of March 1927. This was just prior to a joint committee of the House of Commons and the Senate issuing its final report regarding the Allied Tribes of British Columbia’s call for recognition of Indigenous land title.^[1] The Allied Tribes, who had been seeking to bring their title claims to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,^[2] had their claims rejected, with the added recommendation that the government impose measures to restrict activities that enabled such claims.^[3] Both the joint committee’s report and the enactment of Section 141 demonstrated a desire to stifle Indigenous peoples’ ability to use the Canadian legal system to challenge their dispossession.

Mirroring the joint committee’s language around preventing “mischievous agitation,”^[4] Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs at the time, framed the rationale for the provision in fiduciary and paternalistic terms, presenting it as a measure to protect Indigenous people from exploitation by leaders and lawyers who were taking advantage of them by promising legal rights that would be impossible to claim.

Archival evidence shows that, soon after the law was enacted, a Toronto lawyer named Royce McCuaig wrote to Indian Affairs on behalf of Indigenous clients seeking clarity on the meaning of Section 141.^[5] What counted as “prosecuting”? Did the law apply only to the commencement of court action, or also to preparatory steps? What information did the government require to grant consent? What reasons could be used to deny permission?

To answer McCuaig’s questions, Scott sought advice from Stuart Edwards, the Deputy Minister of Justice. The way Edwards answered came to define the legal life of the provision, giving the law an exceptionally broad scope in three ways:^[6]

First, Edwards defined what it meant “to prosecute” a claim as including any preparatory steps towards a legal claim. This meant that actions, including fundraising and gathering evidence, would require prior written consent from Indian Affairs. This interpretation departed from the conventional understanding of the term as the formal commencement of court proceedings, as a Department of Justice staffer noted in a memo on the subject.^[7]

Second, Edwards stipulated that those seeking permission under Section 141 should provide a full disclosure of the proposed claim. In practice, this meant laying out the legal grounds and supporting documents before the Department would consider consent. This not only placed an onerous burden on legal representatives and anyone seeking to advance a claim, but it also gave Indian Affairs advance notice of potential legal action and the opportunity to prevent it entirely.

Third, Edwards stated that the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs held absolute discretion to grant or deny consent for any permissions, even if the denial was “unreasonable.”^[8] Further, there was no requirement to provide reasoning, nor was there an avenue for appeal under Section 141. In effect, Indian Affairs became the gatekeeper of Indigenous access to the courts without having to justify its decisions in any way.

Letter from Secretary of Indian Affairs to Royce McCuaig, November 8, 1927

In his follow-up letter to McCuaig, Scott justified this exceptional interpretation by presenting the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs as a neutral arbiter who could “intelligently” determine which claims were legitimate.

In this way, the Canadian government’s interpretation of Section 141 went beyond normal administrative authority and allowed Indian Affairs the power to block Indigenous legal organizing at its earliest stages. Moreover, because the provision was framed in fiduciary terms, this suppression could be represented as benevolent oversight on behalf of Indigenous peoples.

The effects of this interpretation can be seen in archival files involving individuals who were charged or investigated under Section 141. In the cases we’ve found to date, officials targeted Indigenous leaders who were prominent in their communities and worked to unite different nations to support legal claims, particularly land claims. The department actively characterized such leaders as “agitators,” seeking to discredit organizing efforts as dangerous or disingenuous “adventurers who try to make a living out of their fellows.”^[9]

One interesting feature of the cases we have come across is that formal prosecutions were rare, perhaps because the department feared the draconian provision would not withstand legal scrutiny. In at least one instance, the Secretary of Indian Affairs expressed concern that laying charges under the provision might backfire, warning that a judge “may think that the said section puts an unwarranted restraint upon the Indians.”^[10]  

Letter from Secretary of Indian Affairs to Inspector of Indian Agencies for Manitoba, April 12, 1935

As a result, we’ve found only two cases where charges were laid, and only one in which a conviction was obtained. At the same time, the archival files show that formal prosecution wasn’t necessarily the goal. Indian Affairs relied on Section 141 to activate surveillance, police, intimidation, and intervention even when it was acknowledged that prosecution wasn’t viable.^[11]

Thus, the provision participates in a long history of surveillance, counterintelligence, and oppression of Indigenous movements—particularly land claims—without a strong legal basis. Like the surveillance of the Red Power movement in the 1970s^[12] or the suppression of resource protests in the 2000s,^[13] the primary objective of Section 141 was not to prosecute specific criminal acts, but rather to discourage political organizing outside of settler-imposed frameworks by subjecting community leaders to a regime of surveillance and intimidation, all while avoiding the legal scrutiny of an actual court hearing.

In practice, therefore, the message of Section 141 was clear: trying to address grievances outside of the constrained channels created by the Indian Act would draw the ire of the colonial state.

This history reveals that the Indian Act not only aimed to govern Indigenous peoples through administration. It also sought to control the conditions under which Indigenous communities could seek legal advice and press their own claims with the ultimate aim of chilling and preventing land-based advocacy. In that sense, Section 141 was one expression of a broader settler colonial system, the effects of which did not end with its repeal.

Amy Swiffen is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Monreal, QC.

Keith Cherry is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Law at McGill University, Montreal, QC.

Hannah Wyile is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Global Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS.

Kris Millett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, NS.

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] Hamar Foster, “Letting Go the Bone: The Idea of Indian Title in British Columbia, 1849-1927,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law: British Columbia and the Yukon, ed. Hamar Foster and John McLaren (University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1995), 70n15.

[2] Hamar Foster, “‘We want a strong promise’: The Opposition to Indian Treaties in British Columbia, 1850-1990,” Native Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2009): 127.

[3] Canada, Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons Appointed to Inquire into the Claims

of the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia, Report and Evidence (King’s Printer, 1927), ix.

[4] Canada, Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons Appointed to Inquire into the Claims

of the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia, Report and Evidence (King’s Printer, 1927), ix.

[5] LAC, RG10, volume 6810, file 470-2-3, Letters from JA Royce McCuaig of Toronto regarding the interpretation of Section 149A on September 7 and September 22, 1927.

[6] LAC, RG10, volume 6810, file 0470-2-3 v 8, Letter from Secretary of Indian Affairs to Royce McCuaig, November 8, 1927.

[7] LAC, RG13, volume 2192, file 1927-1501, Memo to Edwards, October 25, 1927.

[8] LAC, RG10, Vol 6810, file 0470-2-3 v 8, Letter from Secretary of Indian Affairs to Royce McCuaig, November 8, 1927.

[9] LAC, RG10, volume 3211, file 527, 787 Secretary of Indian Affairs to Inspector of Indian Agencies for Manitoba A.G. Hamilton, April 12, 1935.

[10] LAC, RG10, volume 3211, file 527, 787 Secretary of Indian Affairs to Inspector of Indian Agencies for Manitoba A.G. Hamilton, April 12, 1935.

[11] For example, in 1943, the Department of Indian Affairs investigated Wendat Leader Jules Sioui for soliciting funds to pay for travel linked to political advocacy. It concluded that his actions did not technically violate Section 141 since they were not related to making a legal claim. Nonetheless, the department still investigated Sioui and attempted to discredit him. See LAC, RG10, volume 3201, File 527,787-4, memo from the Director of Indian Affairs to the Deputy Minister of Justice September 25, 1943

[12] Brett Forester, Ka’nhehsí:io Deer, Marnie Luke & Dave Seglins, “How RCMP spies infiltrated the 1970s Indigenous rights movement,” CBC News (24 March 2026), online https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/rcmp-spies-1970s-indigenous-rights-9.7134112

[13] Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan, Policing indigenous movements: Dissent and the security state (Fernwood Publishing, 2018).

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.