Contrairement à l'industrie automobile hâtivement dominée par les intérêts américains, les entreprises canadiennes de véhicules d'incendie existent toujours. L'existence de ces manufacturiers canadiens contredit l'interprétation de l'historiographie souvent adoptée qu'au Canada, nous avons perdu notre industrie et notre technologie aux mains des filiales étrangères. Comment alors expliquer cette différence entre les deux secteurs de fabrication? Nous argumenterons que l'industrie canadienne des véhicules d'incendie a survécu principalement à cause de son caractère de production spécialisée qui lui fut prodigué par sa constante recherche à répondre aux besoins particuliers de sa clientèle, réels ou tels que perçus. Ces besoins étaient justifiés et corroborés par la responsabilité civique rattachée à ce service municipal car une majorité de cette clientèle était constituée de municipalités urbaines et rurales. Dans le cadre de cette étude, nous traiterons principalement des trois compagnies manufacturières qui dominaient le marché canadien dans ce secteur de 1945 à 1965: American LaFrance Fire Engine and Foamite Ltd, Bickle/King Seagrave et Camions Pierre Thibault/Pierre Thibault Canada Ltée.

In the complex process of constructing, regulating and negotiating gender identities, the language of dress communicates messages of power and control. During the Victorian period, acceptable dress for middle-class women included wearing a long dress, corset, crinoline, petticoat, and heeled shoes. This was not a constant or fixed dress code however, and through various campaigns, attempts were made to reform women's dress. A study on change in dress, in particular, dress reform, reveals how boundaries of acceptable dress were constantly negotiated by various groups who employed clothing as a means to regulate gender, race and class. Yet, what were dress reform discourses? Who articulated them? What does dress reform reveal about gender and power relations in the nineteenth century? In this dissertation, I explore the process of problematizing dress in Victorian Canada through an analysis of discourses articulated by members of the medical community; reformers and WCTU women active in moral reform and social purity campaigns; as well as commercial retailers. Overall, this dissertation strives to enhance our understanding of the ways in which the dress reform campaign reveals attitudes towards women's bodies, behaviour and their roles in society. This dissertation argues that in Victorian Canada, it was the medical community who assumed the principle role in educating the public on healthy dress. The medical discussion on clothing covered many topics, but centered on three main themes: the need to maintain warm body temperatures through dress; the effects of tight clothing on organs; and the 'unnaturalness' of fashionable dress. The professionalization of Gynaecology and Obstetrics resulted in more physicians trained as experts on women's bodies, and by extension, on all matters related to women's lifestyle and behaviour. Thus, discourses on women's dress often constructed and reinforced a paradigm in which "fashion" was construed as a danger to women's bodies. Hence, medical discourses on women's dress went beyond placing clothing within a localized disease etiology, and addressed broader issues related to Victorian women's lifestyle, marriage and motherhood.

As historian Marianne Ainley maintains in the introduction to Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women in Science, the way in which science is practised and institutionalized has an impact upon the careers of men and women. The purpose of this thesis then is to determine the type of science, and the ways of practising it, employed within the Canadian federal Department of Agriculture. What conscious and subconscious factors influenced the scientific and methodological choices of the leaders of the Department? How did this, in turn, influence the opportunities of women to become involved in science in the years 1884 to 1921? The thesis argues that the professionalization and bureaucratization of science in the Department of Agriculture created distinct opportunities for such involvement, but it also confined them to specific jobs deemed appropriate for their sex. Because the science that was first undertaken in the Department beginning in 1884 emerged from the natural history tradition, women first contributed as unpaid "amateur" observers, collectors, and correspondents. As science professionalized and bureaucratized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the contributions of unpaid "amateurs" were no longer desired or needed. At this juncture, women were employed as paid assistants and members of the support staff As civil servants, women entered an organization that was undergoing a process of reform and bureaucratizing. As a result, women were subjected to hierarchical and lateral segregation. Women's employment in science in the federal Department of Agriculture followed this pattern. Employed to undertake technical work in seed analysis and scientific work in botany, chemistry, and librarianship in the Department, women were confined to 'women's work' in science. They performed tasks which were undervalued, underpaid, and offered little or no opportunity for advancement, and were, therefore, rejected by men. Over the almost forty year period covered in this thesis, in both peace and war, the work of women followed this pattern. Satisfying the demands generated by the professionalization and bureaucratization of science as well as the reform and bureaucratization of the federal civil service, women were a pivotal part of the scientific workforce of the Canadian federal Department of Agriculture from 1884 to 1921.

Harold Innis is arguably the most influential social scientist Canada has ever produced. Nearly fifty years after his death in 1952, his writings on Canadian economic history and history of communication technologies are still highly regarded, still widely cited and still viewed as providing an exceptionally powerful framework for interpreting the histories of societies past and present. The problem, however, is that scholars remain uncertain as to the identity of Innis' framework due to his opaque writing style. There is also a sense in the literature that Innis' work on staples is conceptually linked with later studies tracing the impact of communication technology on the rise and fall of empires in the Near East and Europe. But without a clear conception of his framework, the relationship is difficult to assess. Some scholars have questioned whether Innis' work even has an underlying coherence. The purpose of this study is to suggest Innis' work should be construed as a sustained exploration of the nature of economic and social change. His purpose was to resuscitate the dynamic worldview he associated primarily with the writings of Adam Smith and biological disciplines such as ecology and embryology. To interpret Innis, this study uses the most contemporary expression of ecological change, namely that provided by the science of complexity. Through a reading of Innis' writings on staples, Political Economy in the Modern State, and his two major communication studies, this study suggests Innis' description of change contained several persistent features. The first is he studied systems comprised of multiple agents who by virtue of their interaction displayed emergent properties that persist over time. The North Atlantic trading network was one example. Innis also emphasised that his systems were governed by a variable that maintained a proper balance between freedom and constraint. Without it, self-organisation could not occur. In his early work, the variable was transportation. In the later studies, it was the quantity of circulating information. Finally, Innis pointed to systems governed by formal and final cause. They interacted with their surrounding environment to preserve their formal integrity, and regulate the activities of their constituent parts.

This thesis attempts a comparative analysis of the ideological networks that run through and shape each of the three French translations of Lord Durham's Report. It endeavours to explain how the different ideological currents which contributed to the development of social discourse in Quebec since the uprisings of the Patriotes in 1837-38 and the publication of Lord Durham's Report in 1839, become inscribed in the 150 years or so of the history of Lord Durham's Report in translation. The first chapter sets out the socio-political context proper to Lord Durham's Report as source text, to each of its translations, and to the long intermediary period between the first and second translations. This type of contextualization allows, among other things, for an understanding of both the presence and the absence of Lord Durham's Report as an object of social discourse at certain given moments in the political history of Quebec and Canada. The second chapter presents the actual comparative analysis of the principal ideologems that underlie the discursive formations at work in the socio-political discourse of French Canada or Quebec. In concrete terms, our analysis approaches these ideologems by means of synchronic variations of utterances (of which are considered strictly the modifications of an ideological type). Finally, the third chapter examines the antagonistic relation between the French and the English as it presents itself in the composition of the different translations of Lord Durham's Report. The diachronic invariant that can be singled out tends toward an ideological presupposition that we choose to call "conquetisme" and which has, contrary to the ideologems studied in the second chapter, the Conquest as a specific object of discourse. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The subject for this thesis was the Mohawk Crisis at Oka, Quebec during the summer of 1990. The theoretical framework underlining the study was Antonio Gramsci's concept of a crisis of hegemony or legitimation crisis as applied by Stuart Hall et al. (1978). Within this theoretical framework the media are viewed as an ideological mechanism perpetuating the existing hegemonic relationship. The research undertook to apply this social theory to the Mohawk Crisis and examine the ideological discourse in the media coverage of the Crisis. Press reports taken from the Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette were analyzed using quantitative content analysis and a qualitative exploratory technique. The following two general theses were examined: firstly, that ideological discourse would be apparent in media coverage of the 1990 Mohawk Crisis and, secondly, that the media supported an official 'law and order' campaign during the Mohawk Crisis. Further, two more specific hypotheses were tested in individual chapters which present the results of the quantitative content analysis. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

L'objectif de cette recherche est de cerner les forces nationalistes en presence lors de la Convention d'orientation nationale acadienne (CONA) de 1979. Ce grand rassemblement, dont le but etait d'amener les Acadiens a reflechir sur le degre de pouvoir souhaite dans un eventuel projet politique, constitue un modele symbolique des divers discours nationalistes traversant l'Acadie du Nouveau-Brunswick a ce moment. Elle represente d'ailleurs un evenement privilegie d'analyse de l'indecision identitaire qui caracterise les groupes nationalitaires, dans la mesure ou plusieurs discours et projets politiques ont ete defendus. En effet, un tres grand nombre de participants a la CONA ont choisi une option autonomiste (province ou pays acadien) comme leur choix d'un eventuel projet collectif. Inversement, les representants des partis politiques traditionnels, ainsi que le journal acadien l'Evangeline, ont maintenu vivement que l'epanouissement de la communaute acadienne pouvait se faire a l'interieur des structures actuelles de la province. Consequemment, l'orientation politique mise de l'avant par les participants a la CONA ne s'est jamais concretisee. Cette recherche tente d'expliquer ce phenomene en etudiant les rapports de force entre les acteurs entourant la CONA. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

South Africa's notorious apartheid policy has become an easily identifiable analogy for countries where indigenous populations have been dispossessed of their land and their traditional social structures destroyed. The question "Is this apartheid?" challenges the historical validity of parallels drawn between Canada's native policies and apartheid. The "civilizing" missions of European intruders on the shores of what were to become Canada and South Africa followed distinctive paths in their relationship with indigenous populations. While slavery and wars of conquest paved the way for racial conflict in Southern Africa, mutual cooperation epitomized aboriginal relations in colonial Canada. While reserves in Canada were designed to prepare indigenous people for assimilation into the dominant society, South African reserves became reservoirs of cheap African labour under the National Party's apartheid government which came to power in 1948. The years 1960-1982 marked a critical period in the history of both Canada and South Africa. First Nations communities renewed assertions of aboriginal land rights and self-government. Unlike native Canadians, who asserted their aboriginal and treaty rights within the democratic and constitutional structures of Canada, African resistance repudiated the legitimacy of the apartheid government and fought for the fundamental right of all South Africans to democracy and for an integrated, non-racial state. Three core characteristics of apartheid (the lack of labour rights, the lack of democratic rights and the lack of freedom of association) provide the criteria in addressing the question "Is this apartheid?" The conclusions are clear: while Canada's First Nations have been seriously disadvantaged by paternalism, assimilationist policies and injustice, they have not experienced apartheid. Government policies and aboriginal problems are not addressed by equating Canada with apartheid South Africa. They are Canadian problems with Canadian solutions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

During the term of Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil as governor of New France (1703-1725), diplomacy involving the French and the Amerindian nations to the west of Montreal was conducted in accordance with diplomatic protocols of Amerindian origin. Diplomatic relations between the Amerindians and the French were predicated on the basis of a fictive kinship relationship, wherein the French governor assumed the Amerindian title Onontio and the role of a "father" to his Amerindian "children." The forum for formal intercultural encounters was the council, an Amerindian institution that consisted of a structured dialogue between two parties, punctuated by the exchange of validating gifts. The diplomatic culture of the French made few inroads into the intercultural diplomacy of the period. Neither the Amerindian nor the French diplomats of the period acted as comprehensive cultural mediators during diplomatic encounters. Vaudreuil's corps of diplomatic agents was largely made up of military officers, seconded by interpreters. All of these agents were ethnic Frenchmen, although many interpreters benefited from intermarriage with synethnic and Amerindian women. Few agents cultivated long-term ties with Amerindian groups, or mastered Amerindian languages; those that did were to be found in the lower ranks of colonial society. In general, French agents were primarily interested in exploiting diplomatic ties with Amerindians in order to advance both French interests and their personal careers. French diplomatic agents adopted and learned to manipulate selected Amerindian diplomatic protocols in order to fulfill these goals. Although the French made extensive cultural adaptations in the realm of diplomacy, their motives were pragmatic, and their acculturation limited. The value and meaning with which they invested these alien diplomatic institutions were different form those the Amerindians accorded to the same forms. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Between 33,000 and 55,000 British North Americans (BNAs) fought in the American Civil War. Historians though, have largely overlooked or misinterpreted the BNAs' contribution. Most historical accounts portray BNAs as mercenaries, bounty jumpers, or as the victims of press gangs. Many works imply that most BNAs were kidnapped, or drugged and hauled while unconscious across the border to "volunteer." We are also told that BNAs expended enormous amounts of energy attempting to secure their discharges, and of necessity, had to be placed under guard to prevent their desertion. Nowhere, however, are we informed about average BNAs. Most were neither victims nor abusers of the American recruitment system. Unfortunately, their large and significant contributions to the Union's war effort are all but lost, as historians have tried to capture the more exciting and extraordinary side of BNA recruitment. Such an unbalanced portrayal of BNAs characterizes them as inferior soldiers, and that is a disservice to both BNAs, and to the units in which they served. Much of the misunderstanding surrounding BNAs stems from the lack of a common definition for BNA, and through a failure by researchers to appreciate the significance of the changing nature of the Civil War soldiers' enlistment motivations. My study, on the other hand, concentrates on average BNAs and, in the process, tries to come to grips with their true reasons for enlisting. In the end, the payoff is a more balanced depiction of BNA troops; and the discovery that BNAs were not a homogeneous group of men. There were two basic types: those who resided in the United States before their enlistment, and those who crossed the frontier from the British provinces to volunteer. Both types were willing recruits, but otherwise they showed unique characteristics and enrollment behaviour. American resident BNAs enlisted in patterns much like their American neighbours and friends, while British North American resident BNAs were, in the main, driven by the enlistment bounty. The distinction is important if a better understanding of BNAs is to be achieved.