Talking To The Neighbours

As a leading country in global refugee resettlement, Canada operates a unique program that allows private groups and individuals to sponsor refugees. This innovative approach has received growing international attention, but there remains a need for a more expansive understanding of the sponsorship framework and its potential implications within Canada and across the world. Strangers to Neighbours explains the origins and development of refugee sponsorship, paying particular attention to the unintended consequences and ethical dilemmas it produces for refugee policy. The contributors to this collection draw upon law, social science, and philosophy to bring a more robust and objective perspective on Canada's historical experience with sponsorship into wider conversations about the refugee crisis and resettlement. Together, they present recent cases that exemplify how the model has been applied and how it functions, while also analyzing the challenges that emerge in host-sponsor relations. This volume further examines how sponsorship has been implemented differently in countries such as the United States and Australia. The first dedicated study of refugee sponsorship policy, Strangers to Neighbours assembles leading scholars from a range of disciplines to consider whether Canada's system is indeed a sustainable model for the world.

Timeless reflections on local life, farming, literature, the churchs year, the seasons, that transcend boundaries of place and time.

Rain Woodrow is an entrepreneur, both at heart and by profession. She’s not afraid to do whatever it takes to make her company a success. It’s a work ethic that is about to come in handy at home too. One night, she and her boyfriend, Cullen Dangsi, notice something remarkable happen. At a gathering of their neighbours, each stands up and pledges to work towards their highest aspirations and goals. There is power in numbers, they realise, and soon the neighbours are working together for both individual and community objectives. This cooperative spirit does not go unnoticed by the media, and soon the spotlight of public attention shines brightly on Sunlit Avenue. But that attention comes at a cost. It draws focus to those who aren’t quite as dedicated to the communal projects, as well as those who are jealous of what others are achieving. Why can’t everyone be supportive of this initiative to make each other’s lives better? Rain and Cullen work to solve the mystery, so that they can achieve their dreams, with or without the naysayers. The neighbours have a decision to make: do they allow themselves to be pulled down by toxic people—or do they work even harder to accomplish their goals with renewed ambition?

Neighbours – we all have them and everyone has a story to tell about them. Have you ever had a disagreement with a neighbour? Have your neighbours woken you up shouting, slamming doors or revving a car at an anti-social hour? If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions then this book is for you!

Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood – the set of people near and surrounding the family – through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour’s farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families’ daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, and their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation. Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life.