True Patriot Love

After the repatriation of the first four Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Canadians have lined the overpasses of the Highway of Heroes to show their support, grief, and pride in our fallen champions.

In 1872, the author's great-grandfather George Monro Grant set out with Sandford Fleming to map out the railway line that would link Canada ocean to ocean. Michael Ignatieff recreates his journey, seeing the country through his ancestor's optimistic vision and tracing how that vision filtered through his illustrious family tree. The Grants' engagement with the idea of Canada's place in the world includes his uncle George Grant's classic, Lament for a Nation, and his own more confident view of Canada's potential. Recalling the novelistic flair of The Russian Album, Ignatieff blends history and love of country and tradition into an unforgettable family memoir.

Photographs of artist's works superimposed on facsimile copy of "Illustrated flora of the Canadian Artic Archipelago."

An analysis of pan-Canadian nationalism on a political level, this book does not question whether nationalist approaches to issues such as free trade, foreign investments, or culture are normatively "good" or economically beneficial--matters that have arguably been exhausted in recent years--but instead studies what these approaches are and how they have influenced government action. Specifically, the author considers the interplay between nationalist ideas and organizations, on the one hand, and federal politics on the other.

Joyce Wieland triumphed over what she called “obscene poverty” to achieve international celebrity as a painter, collagist, quiltmaker, and filmmaker, celebrated as Canada’s most important woman artist next to Emily Carr. Her art portrays strikingly Canadian themes of environmental issues, historical passages, and aboriginal rights in buoyant, satirical images. To make her distinctive, highly personal art, Wieland uses toys, paper cut-outs, wood, glass, and pieces of her panties and dresses just as boldly and felicitously as she uses oils, watercolors, and pencils. Some of her most famous works are quilts, such as Reason Over Passion and Confedspread. She made underground films long before Andy Warhol did, producing a total of 16. Joyce Wieland achieved acclaim through unstinting courage, vivacity, and her off-the-wall humor. She was known for tucking away her secrets in her work. Author Iris Nowell has uncovered some of these secrets through primary sources, such as Joyce’s friends and family, and through her own perspective of having known Joyce for many years. This intimate, rollicking, poignant biography uncovers Joyce Wieland’s life as she lived it, intimately and fully—through the 1950s “Dark Ages of Art” in Toronto, for much of the 1960s in New York’s grungy artist’s loft community and the underground film scene, and back to Toronto for the most productive, stunning years of her life.

Migration and the impact that immigrants have on Canada is and always has been central to a robust understanding of Canadian identity. However, despite claims that “the world needs more Canada,” Canadians, their governments, and scholars pay much less attention to the estimated 3 million Canadian expatriates who live elsewhere. The Construction of Canadian Identity from Abroad features Canadian scholars who live and work outside Canada (or have recently returned to Canada) and who write and think deeply about identity construction. What happens when that Canadian is a scholar whose teaching, research and scholarship, professional development, and/or community engagement focuses directly on Canada? How does being abroad affect how we interpret Canada? In short, in what ways does “externality” affect how Canadian expat scholars intellectually approach, construct, and identify with Canada? This engaging volume is ideal for university students, scholars, government officials, and the general public.

Free trade has been a highly contentious issue since the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney negotiated the first deal with the United States in the 1980s. Tracing the roots of Canada's contemporary involvement in North American free trade back to the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada in 1985 - also known as the Macdonald Commission - Gregory J. Inwood offers a critical examination of the commission and how its findings affected Canada's political and economic landscape, including its present-day reverberations. Using original research - including content analysis, interviews, archival information, and surveys of relevant literature - Inwood argues that the Macdonald Commission created an atmosphere and political discourse that made the continentalization of Canada possible by way of free trade agreements with the U.S. and Mexico. Through the use of a suspect research program, and with the aid of a select oligarchy within the Commission and the government bureaucracy, opposition to continentalism from both the majority of the Canadian population and even several commissioners was ignored. Accessible to readers interested in Canadian politics, policy, or economy, Continentalizing Canada offers a thorough examination into the Macdonald Commission and the resulting discourse in the Canadian political economy.