The recreational use and mere possession of marijuana is considered a criminal offense under current Canadian legislation. This thesis argues that the criminalization of recreational marijuana use in Canada is not justified because the "criminal" punishment exceeds the seriousness of the crime. Furthermore, excessive criminalization results in an unwarranted infringement of the autonomy and moral right of citizens to recreational marijuana use. Chapter 1 identifies the contemporary science and medical research surrounding cannabis, especially the psychological and physiological risks of marijuana use and the medicinal benefits of marijuana use. Chapter 2 presents a socio-cultural perspective on marijuana use. We look at how Canadians' views have changed toward marijuana, as well as the social ramifications of two major Governmental reports: The Le Dain Commission Final Report of 1974 and the Senate Special Committee Report on Cannabis of 2002. The socio-cultural context of marijuana in Canadian society is illustrated and compared with other licit and illicit drugs and the stigma associated with a criminal marijuana conviction is illuminated. We move from the social to legal arena in Chapter 3 and outline Canadian laws regulating marijuana offenses from past to present. We show how politics has affected marijuana policy in Canada and how increased penalties to marijuana offenders are irrational and out of step with socio-cultural attitudes toward cannabis use. Chapter 4 marks the beginning of our philosophical, non-consequentialist moral rights argument. The philosophical framework of Douglas Husak is appropriated in order to introduce ethical arguments that challenge the criminalization of marijuana based on the harm it poses to the individual user and to others in society. The principle of autonomy is analyzed as a basis for challenging state interference on paternalistic grounds in the state's efforts to prevent harm to users. The "harm principle" is also put to the test in identifying the plausible harms caused to others. Chapter 5 differentiates our philosophical position from that of Douglas Husak by providing arguments for why marijuana ought to be separated from other "harder" drugs under a moral rights approach. We recommend a more liberalized marijuana policy (although not as liberal as Husaks!) in light of a decriminalized system in Canada, and suggest why such a system could continue to uphold the moral rights of citizens to recreational marijuana use. In order for the moral rights of marijuana users to be upheld, marijuana use and possession ought to be decriminalized, and penalized by no more than a $100 civil fine, accompanied by community service, rehabilitation and job training programs at the discretion of the judiciary. Under a policy of decriminalization, the risk of receiving a conditional discharge, criminal record, and imprisonment is diminished and the vast number of recreational marijuana users will not be hindered from further contributing to Canadian society.

Cette thèse est la rencontre des résultats d'une enquête portant sur l'intégration des jeunes à la société québécoise et l'approche fonctionnaliste des divers acteurs sociaux facilitant cette intégration. Au cours de la dernière année, nous avons travaille des données quantitatives recueillies auprès de 200 jeunes de Montréal-Nord ainsi que différentes théories sociologiques afin de déterminer comment les jeunes réussissaient à s'intégrer à la société québécoise. Nous cherchions d'une part, à savoir quels types d'institutions venaient en aide aux jeunes lors de leurs processus d'intégration. Est-ce des institutions traditionnelles telles que la famille, ou au contraire, des institutions modernes telles que l'école et les groupes de pairs? Nous cherchions d'abord à déterminer quel était le rôle exact de la famille, ainsi que le rôle de l'éducation et des groupes de pairs dans l'intégration des jeunes. Bien que les valeurs défendues par la famille entrent souvent en conflit avec les valeurs promues par la sous-culture de la jeunesse, nos recherches ont démontré que de telles rivalités étaient nécessaires à l'intégration et à la formation de l'identité du jeune. Ainsi, la famille et les groupes de pairs ne sont pas des institutions rivales, mais bien complémentaires et fondamentales pour la socialisation du jeune. Cette question a été posée à 3 groupes de jeunes, à savoir les immigrants, les immigrants de deuxième génération et les québécois de souche. Nos résultats nous ont démontré qu'il n'y avait pas de différence dans le processus d'intégration de nos trois groupes. Ainsi, il serait faux d'affirmer que les jeunes immigrants ont plus de difficulté à s'adapter et s'intégrer à la société québécoise que leur camarade de classe québécois.

What does it mean to be free? How have Canadians tried to answer this question? Where does Canada's political culture stand today? These are the themes of this dissertation, and at its heart we will find the abundance of G.W.F. Hegel's political philosophy. The road to answering these questions begins with recognizing that there is a distinctive tradition of Canadian political philosophy which offers an original formulation of the question of freedom, community, and history. The tradition is Canadian Idealism, and its members share central elements of a common vision that is strongly informed by Hegel's thought. This dissertation identifies this tradition and its central tenets, traces the influences and makes a general critical assessment of its political prescriptions. The case is made through an analysis of the importance of Hegel's philosophy to the works of three leading Canadian thinkers: C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987), George Parkin Grant (1918-1988), and Charles Taylor (1931-). These three political philosophers are excellent representatives of the continuance of the Hegelian tradition since the 1950s. They have had an enormous influence on Canadian scholarship and they each embody very different strains of the theoretical approach, thus giving us a good sample of the various forms that a Canadian idealist can adopt. Hegel's philosophy has served as the foundation for their arguments regarding multiculturalism, nationalism, human agency, and the crisis in values of the modern age. While many people have argued for and against the culturalist and nationalist politics of Grant and Taylor or the form of socialism articulated by Macpherson, the significance of their Hegelianism has been underemphasized, and in the cases of Grant and Macpherson it has been almost universally unrecognized. I see them not as isolated political philosophers who share an interest in Hegel, but rather as members of a scarcely acknowledged Canadian intellectual tradition that has been recorded by a few intellectual historians, but virtually ignored in the literature on Canadian political thought. Not only does this dissertation refine our understanding of these three prominent Canadian thinkers and their conceptions of freedom and community, but it also outlines the main tenets of an intellectual tradition that has played a major role in defining Canada's political culture.

This thesis examines how high school Canadian history textbooks authorized for use in Ontario from 1945 to the present have represented knowledge about race, racism, and opposition to racism in relation to the nation and national identity. Through a Foucault-informed critical discourse analysis, the thesis documents how racism permeates the taken-for-granted structures of schooling, how the imagined community of Canada is reproduced, and how ideas about the nation, race, racism, and opposition to racism are put into cultural circulation as normalized regimes of truth. My findings can be summarized briefly as follows: (1) Canadian history textbooks continue to circulate the 18th century idea that humanity is divided into sets of biological or naturally occurring races, in spite of it having been recognized for some time that races are social constructions, not facts of nature; (2) Racism has consistently been reduced to irrational, abnormal, extreme, and individualized problems of psychological or moral deficit and represented as either foreign to Canada, isolated incidents within Canada, or part of a distant past and with consequences solely for the racially subjugated; and (3) Opposition to racism has been represented in these textbooks as a state-driven enterprise stressing tolerance of the Other and privileging the idea that racism can be eradicated or stopped wherever it is seen to start. I argue, moreover, that the circulation of this knowledge about race, racism, and opposition to racism helps to prop up particular nationalist mythologies, most notably the myth of Canada as a uniquely tolerant and pluralistic nation-state which has effectively resolved the problem of racism. The effect is to depict Canada as a 'better place to live,' a model for other nations to emulate, and a place with a moral responsibility to uplift apparently inferior places in the world. I conclude by discussing how the institutionalized arrogance necessary to represent Canada as a space of vanquished racism or as a place of antiracist achievement perpetuates mythologies of white settler benevolence as it at once obscures the banal racisms upon which the modern nation-state is built and re-built.

To better understand the relationship to Otherness, postcolonial translation theorists have examined cultures that are far away in space or time. This dissertation takes an alternative approach by examining a contemporary, nearby Other, that is Native People who have been dominated over in a system that has "translated" them. This study analyzes a set of institutional representations of Canada's First Peoples. Its goal is to shed light on how these representations create a frame of reference that impacts public discourse about these people. Particular attention is paid to movements of consolidation , displacement, or subversion exercised within these frameworks. The review starts by recalling the historical conditions governing the first representations of Native People. It continues by analyzing the representations produced among the spheres of greatest influence: the legal, educational, museological, and linguistic institutions. How do the earliest colonial representations continue to filter through in present-day legal texts? How to educate tomorrow's decision makers about historical and current Native realities? How do museums construct the population's views of these realities? What is the status of Native languages against that of the two "official" languages of colonization? What support do Native languages receive, to allow them to assume their role in education and the development of Native identities, or for defining what is modern? These are the questions that each chapter explores and answers. The creation of the Dominion of Canada put the last touch to the definition of "Indians" as persons. Henceforth, power relations between First Peoples and colonizing forces became asymmetrical, and Canadian institutions got considerable powers of influence, not only over representations of the Native Other, but also over the production and reproduction of these representations. It is important that the subject, who reads and interprets Otherness through the symbolic representations that impact his/her frame of reference, be conscious of the predominance, in public discourse, of representations projected by institutions. This dissertation has attempted to uncover the competing power relations that are at work in representing Native People, while focusing on the position of people who represent, and on the position of those who are represented. This has led us to foreground areas of possible intervention favouring the recognition of Native people in Canada.

In this study, I establish that language textbooks are sites of discursive struggle through which nationalist imagined communities are reproduced. I use critical discourse analysis to analyze how these textbooks construct Canadian identities that position students in relation to an imagined community of Canada. I analyze twenty-four textbooks and three Citizenship and Immigration Canada publications used in government-funded language instruction in Ontario. Representations of Canada and Canadianness in the texts examined include and exclude student readers, participate in banal nationalism, and legitimate particular understandings of Canada. The identified textbooks mark nationality through flags, maps, references to nation, and the use of nation as a frame of reference. The textbooks also make claims about how 'Canadians' think and behave. This banal nationalism naturalizes and essentializes imaginings of 'Canada' and 'Canadianness' supporting particular and interested constructions and positive evaluations of 'Canadian' identity. Both government produced publications and identified textbooks legitimate constructions of Canadian identity through repeated positive representations of Canadianness; the marginalising inclusions of 'others'; the subordination of gendered, racialised, and classed social positions to nation; and by maintaining a low level of dialogicality overall.

Globalizing processes of late capitalism shape local cultures in complex and contradictory ways, exacerbating assimilation and alienation in geographically and culturally marginalized communities and, paradoxically, empowering disenfranchised groups by facilitating communication between diasporic populations and providing access to information, images, and commodities. This dissertation explores the ways in which linguistic difference, geographic isolation, and cultural marginalization have contributed to collective consciousness and feelings of distinctiveness in Chéticamp, an Acadian community in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. I examine forms of cultural work—such as genealogical research, community museums, and cooperative associations—as cultural performances in which community members envision and enact their Acadian identities. Performed identities are inauthentic in the sense that they are actively negotiated and subject to ongoing adaptation and transformation; yet they are also authentic in the sense that they are deeply felt and central to understandings of our experiences, our relationships, and our place in the world. Examining Acadian ethnic and linguistic identities through a performance lens thus illuminates possibilities for cultural survival in contexts of uncertainty and change.

No description available.

<p> The purpose of this study was to describe and compare the music programs at Mennonite Collegiate Institute (MCI) founded in 1889 and Steinbach Christian High School (SCHS) which has its origins in Steinbach Bible College founded in 1936. The <i>Kanadier,</i> Mennonites who came to Manitoba in 1874 (e.g., <i>Kleine Gemeinde</i> and Bergthaler), had previously rejected part-singing in Russia. However, they became more open to part-singing after they came to Manitoba. The Bergthaler in Gretna helped establish MCI. The Mennonite Brethren (MB) and Evangelical Mennonite Brethren (EMB) were influential in promoting choral music among the <i> Kleine Gemeinde</i> in Steinbach. Steinbach Bible College became a joint effort of the MB, EMB, and <i>Kleine Gemeinde</i> (now the Evangelical Mennonite Conference or EMC). The <i>Ru&beta;l&auml;nder</i> (or <i> Russlaender</i>) who came to Canada in the 1920s, many of whom were MB, were culturally more progressive than the <i>Kanadier</i> and influenced both MCI and SCHS. The researcher interviewed teachers, administrators, a museum curator, visited archives, and attended a <i>S&auml;ngerfest</i> (or <i>Saengerfest</i>) at MCI and a concert at SCHS. Both schools are known for their choral programs and do similar repertoire. Regarding the religious musical heritages of the two schools, MCI is more deliberate at including German hymns and traditional favorites known as <i>Kernlieder </i> in their programming whereas the emphasis at SCHS is sacred music in general.</p>

In this thesis I demonstrate how the social and physical construction of spaces in Montréal‘s CBD during the Quiet Revolution marginalized working-class, inner-city manufacturing districts. To address this research question, I work across a variety of secondary sources and employ census data and reports to analyze demographic changes as well as other indices that illustrate the impact of local economic restructuring. In order to understand identity formation that is related to yet distinct from the mechanisms of capital, I examine archival documents that trace the urban growth regime’s nationalist-inflected vision of high-modernity that was inscribed onto the city’s landscape. I focus on the appropriation of landscapes in working-class Southwest Montréal. I situate these landscape transformations in a longer history of class formation in which a colonized Francophone bourgeoisie attempted to reverse its socioeconomic circumstances that were partly a consequence of the British conquest.