Parallel to the widening gap between high and low income status in Canada has been the increasing number of individuals and families accessing community food banks. In the 1990's, food security reached the national agenda for action, yet no study had described the nutrition and sociodemographic characteristics of a random sample of food bank provision recipients, specifically their nutrient intake throughout the month or at the end of the month when food and money are thought to be most limited. Preliminary studies, at two sites identified the contents of food bank provisions and the clientele to be surveyed. Thereafter, 490 food bank users were randomly selected from a stratified random sample of 57 Montreal area food banks. A dietitian-administered sociodemographic questionnaire and 24-hour dietary recall were completed upon client enrolment at the food banks; following this, three further in-person 24-h recall interviews were conducted, week-by-week over the month. Sixty-two people did not complete all interviews. The 428 people completing four interviews were primarily healthy, well-educated adults (overall mean age 41.5 +/- 12.6 years; men 41.4 +/- 12.2 and women 41.4 +/- 13.0 years) who perceived the food banks as a necessary community service. The frail elderly and single parents with large families did not use food banks. Mean energy intake was similar to the general Quebec population (10.2 and 7.9 MJ for men and women, respectively) and macronutrient intake was stable throughout the month. With the exception of calcium, mean nutrient intakes met recommended levels and were not influenced by income-week nor by energy intake variability. Intakes of several nutrients were related to frequency of food bank use, household size, smoking, education and country of birth. When intakes expressed as food group servings were compared to the number of servings recommended in Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Eating, no age or sex group met the Milk Products group minimu

This thesis examines the ways in which a group of male youths from Montreal interpret the world and construct their identities through the lens of hip-hop. The theoretical framework draws mainly from discussions of youth subcultural theory as articulated by the Center for Cultural Studies in Birmingham, as well as current research on hip-hop culture and youth identities. Using narrative inquiry as a methodological framework, this study highlights how the participants' perceive their neighbourhoods through gangster rap culture, and construct their identities according to these perceptions. This study also reveals how the participants' create original rap lyrics as a self-reflexive tool, and how listening to rap music shapes their linguistic expression.

The relationship of musicmaking to the city is a complicated one as it often takes very specific and complex spatial and social forms. The example of Montreal can be used to illustrate some of the ways in which these forms manifest themselves. By considering the way in which two particular cultural spaces, namely scene and bohemia, emerge in relation to musical activity, this project analyzes the nature of musicmaking and its role in shaping a unique experience of the city. It frames a case study of Montreal musicmaking to explore the ways in which scenes and bohemias are connected to city life. It also considers the way in which a particular image of the city manifests itself through musicmaking. The collective representation of Montreal as a bohemia by anglophone musicmakers works with and through a number of social divisions and cultural distinctions. It is argued that the nature of place-images and mythology in musicmaking is such that they have a profound effect on the sociomusical experience of the city. Montreal is privileged by many anglophone musicmakers as an ideal city in which to be culturally active, as the city's weak economic state is perceived to foster the conditions best suited to a flourishing bohemia. This project examines the relationship of musicmakers to Montreal, using a variety of research methods and theories. Cognitive mapping, diaristic accounts and interviews are utilized to better apprehend how a chosen image of Montreal affects musical practice. The socioeconomic history of Montreal in the latter half of the twentieth century is used to frame an analysis of the emergence of an independent music scene in the city. By exploring a number of relevant factors, this project documents the ways in which musicmaking is structured in relation to the economic, political and social dimensions of Montreal.

This study is an inquiry into cultural conflict experienced by adolescents of Vietnamese origin in Montreal. It examines the nature of the conflicts as they are experienced by the adolescents themselves, as they are perceived by the parents, and by the teachers, counsellors and principals at the secondary schools they attended. The study also examines the course of the conflicts and the kinds of solutions used to resolve them. Separate semi-structured interviews were conducted with six adolescents, five parents and seven school personnel in two public schools attended by the students. Analysis of the interviews showed that students, parents and school personnel tended to define the problems in different ways and to have very different perceptions of their causes. In those families in which the problems of cultural conflict manifested themselves most severely, parents and children tended to use behaviours leading to a deterioration of relations between them and employed a very limited range of alternatives for conflict resolution.

This qualitative inquiry describes the linguistic perspectives of eighteen grade six students at Ecole Duncan, a multiethnic primary school (grades K-6) located in Park Extension, an inner-city neighbourhood of Montreal. Employing standard tools of ethnographic enquiry, such as interviews and participant observation, I examined the childrens' perception of the interplay of language and identity, and rooted the inquiry within the theoretical framework of social constructivist learning. The key element of the lived experiences of these children that surface in the data is that their perceptions and experiences are largely determined by a sense of belonging and opportunities to participate in the life of their communities. I conceptualize students' language learning as a social practice, and identity as being socially constructed, contradictory, and subject to change over time. Rampton's concepts of expertise, affiliation and inheritance are used in the theoretical framework. The major assumption of this study is that social factors influence children's identities, which has a reciprocal effect upon their language learning. This inquiry has implications for policy makers, educators and families.

Despite its growing importance in industrialized nations, the service sector has received relatively little attention from economic geographers in recent debates over the nature and significance of the current processes of change affecting contemporary capitalism. This lack of attention means that we have little detailed knowledge about how the various industries that comprise the service sector are restructuring their operations and how these processes, in turn, influence broader economic change. This thesis goes some way toward redressing this imbalance by studying the evolving structure of two key sectors of the Montreal tourism industry--hotels and travel agencies. / I begin with an overview of past attempts to understand the changing role of the service sector in developed economies. Despite their weaknesses new political economy frameworks are shown to perhaps provide the best starting point for the development of a more 'services informed' approach to understanding current economic change. / In an attempt to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of applying such approaches to the study of services I first review their ability to explain and predict changes currently taking place in the tourism industry as a whole. This is followed by a discussion of the empirical findings of the thesis based on 103 interviews with managers and owners of Montreal hotels and travel agencies. I focus on the following key areas: the evolving competitive environment, changes in corporate organization, the adoption of new technologies and shifts in labour use. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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Urban spaces and their meanings are continually reinvented by daily life and representational practices. Public spaces provide an avenue to analyse the construction and contestation of political and social power in the city. The geography of Montreal's gay men's communities underwent profound changes during the 1980s. The traditional gay areas of the downtown core and the "Red Light" districts have disappeared in favour of a new gay quarter, the Village. This transformation raises questions about the exercise of power in space since the heart of the gay neighbourhood and the downtown area were one in the same. The accumulated symbolism of downtown Montreal was contested and subverted by the growing visibility of sexual minorities. This analysis of urban space reflects a transformation in public discourse that evolved from a tight control of morals, to the confinement of private morality to private spaces, and finally to the constitution of a discourse centered on human rights. A variety of qualitative methods including interviews and documentary sources, such as the community press, have been used to show the political dimension of public space and the manipulation of the symbolic economy allowing the establishment of rights to urban space. / Dominion Square is the spatial focus around which collective and social phenomena have been analysed. The impacts of these phenomena on our collective imaginations have been reconstructed. The transformation of central urban space by modernist architecture and urban functionalism, reconfigured public spaces in the downtown core, along with its definitions, its representations and its control. A mapping of gay geographic imagination shows the importance of sexuality, language, social class, religion and national identities in the development of a sense of belonging in space. It has been shown that gay geographic imagination is necessarily linked to other aspects of identity and diverse manifestations of power. This imagination questioned the privileged representations of hegemonic social values through the practices of daily life, the subversion of the meaning of space and political protest. Police repression showed itself to be only one of the strategies used by the municipal establishment in its censorship practices.

This thesis examines the Lebanese-Syrian Orthodox community of Montreal between 1905-1950 primarily through information found in the marriage registers of the two Orthodox churches. The first purpose of this study is to evaluate the importance of the three pillars of this ethno-religious group's culture--religion, family and hometown. The second purpose is to draw a composite of this immigrant community based on the information provided in the valuable source of an immigrant church's records. This study serves as a beginning for further studies of the Lebanese-Syrian Orthodox community in Montreal, this ethno-religious group's largest and founding community in Canada.