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Graduate Theses & Dissertations
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- Workplace Bullying in Ontario Healthcare Settings
- This thesis builds on scholarship that highlights how expected gender roles serve to both normalize and obscure forms of violence and hostility in health care workplaces. An analysis of 25 labour arbitrations involving cases of bullying reveals how gender relations is a factor in these grievances and relevant policies in Ontario health care facilities. Reinforced by underlying expectations around women as nurturing and men as aggressive, responses to bullying are found to reflect and reproduce embedded gendered power inequalities in labour. While bullying in the workplace is often treated in policy discussions as an individual and identity-neutral phenomenon, this research provides evidence to the contrary. As a consequence, we must interrogate existing legislation and policies, asking how we can develop approaches that account for, respond to, and mitigate the causes of bullying rooted in unequal power relations, including gendered ones. Author Keywords: gender, health care, labour arbitration, policy, workplace bullying, workplace harassment
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- Reconceptualizing Immigration in Canada
- This thesis challenges the contemporary framework of immigration in Canada. Despite Canada’s effort to promote cultural diversity and multicultural citizenship, immigration policy in the last decade has moved towards a model of cultural assimilation. The recent Bill—Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act—devalues non-European cultures and hinders the successful integration for new immigrants. The problem of contemporary immigration in Canada lies in the narrow and exclusive understanding of immigration. That is, the current immigration framework is rooted in Eurocentrism, which draws exclusively from the economic and cultural values of the West. The Eurocentric understanding of migration not only hinders the successful integration for new immigrants, but it also hinders economic growth and weakens the social cohesion of Canada. For this reason, this thesis offers an alternative framework for understanding immigration. I focus on Chinese migration in Canada and take an interdisciplinary and a conceptual approach in order to present an inclusive understanding of Chinese migration. In particular, I apply the idea of "connected histories" to the context of immigration, and I demonstrate that immigration is a complex and interconnected phenomenon which cannot be reduced to the narratives of economics and ‘Canadian values.’ Instead, immigration should be understood as a process of transnational interactions because it not only allows us to understand benefits that transnational interactions would bring to immigrants, their country of origin and Canada, but it also recognizes different values and the agency of immigrants. Author Keywords: Bill C-24, Chinese Canadians, Eurocentrism, Immigration, Multicultrualism, Transnational
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- Tłı̨chǫ, Co-management and the Bathurst Caribou Herd, 2009-2011
- Since time immemorial caribou have been and remain central to Tłı̨chǫ life and culture. As early as the late 19th century, Canada began to implement wildlife management policies in the NWT in response to concern over the health and future of caribou populations. However, the 2005 Tłı̨chǫ Land Claims and Self-Government Agreement (Tłı̨chǫ Agreement) signed by the Tłı̨chǫ, the Government of the Northwest Territories and the Canadian Government outlines that Tłı̨chǫ will have a say in wildlife management on Tłı̨chǫ Lands. Co-management is the power-sharing model used in an effort to ensure that the Tłı̨chǫ voice is heard in these decisions. My thesis centres on the 2009-2011 co-management process and the resulting final management decisions regarding monitoring and management actions to promote the stabilization and recovery of the Bathurst Caribou herd. I focus my analysis on the Tłı̨chǫ perspective as expressed during this co-management process. I conclude that while Tłı̨chǫ perspectives were presented in the hearings and related processes, they were not well represented in the final management actions. This omission speaks to the wider issue of how aboriginal people are treated and understood in Canada. Author Keywords: Canada, Caribou, Co-management, Northwest Territories, Tłı̨chǫ
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- Rights, Resources, and Resistance
- The development of pan-Indigenous political organizations in northeastern Alberta in the context of oil and gas development during the 1970s created disparate effects on Indigenous communities in the region. Resistance to assimilation policies led the Indian Association of Alberta to transform itself into a unified voice that represented Aboriginal and treaty rights in the late 1960s; however, the organization lost legitimacy following the divergence of goals between influential Indigenous leaders, Harold Cardinal and Joseph Dion. Tripartite agreements began to unfold between the federal and provincial governments, the oil and gas industry, and individual local leadership; environmental degradation spread throughout the landscape. Some communities benefitted financially whereas other communities, like Lubicon Lake Nation, received little compensation and felt the full force of industrial contamination of their traditional territories. Without the support of pan-Indigenous political organizations, Lubicon Lake developed an individual response that was successful in gaining international attention to their conditions. Author Keywords: 1970s, Indigenous politics, Lubicon Lake Nation, northern Alberta, political economy, tar sands
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- Dissent Denied
- In June 2010, the Group of Twenty (G20) met in Toronto, Ontario. The summit drew large-scale protests that culminated in mass arrests and extensive civil rights violations. Given these outcomes, this thesis examines the security spectacle of the summit to assess the evolving state of public order policing and social movement protest in Canadian law and politics. Connecting the securitization of the summit to the politics of neoliberalism, I argue these overlapping forces helped foment the criminalization of political dissent during the 2010 Toronto G20. Author Keywords: mega-events, neoliberalism, public order policing, securitization, security, social movements
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- Imagining a National Research Centre
- The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) convened in 2008 and focused on the impact of the residential school on Indigenous people in Canada. It was intended to initiate healing in Indigenous communities while contributing to new understandings between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. In 2015, the TRC's mandate must be completed, and its final task is creating a National Research Centre (NRC) at the University of Manitoba that will hold all of the documentation generated and collected throughout the TRC's tenure. In this thesis I examine many of the challenges the NRC faces, such as lack of funding, institutional oversight, and the enormity of balancing the needs of Indigenous survivors and their communities against building an accessible archive. At a broader level, questions remain about how successful the TRC has been in achieving reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, and how the NRC can work to fulfill this goal. Author Keywords: archives, Canada, Indigenous, museums, residential schools, truth and reconciliation
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- Class Struggle, The Communist Party, and the Popular Front in Canada, 1935-1939
- This thesis is an attempt to provide a critical history of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) during the Popular Front era, roughly November 1935 to September 1939. This study contains a detailed examination of the various stages of the Popular Front in Canada (the united front, the height of the Popular Front, and the Democratic front), with special attention paid to the CPC’s activities in: the youth movement, the labour movement, the unemployed movement, the peace movement, and the anti-fascist movement. From this I conclude that the implementation of the Popular Front, the transformation of the CPC from a revolutionary party to a bourgeois party, was not a smooth process, but instead was punctuated and resisted by elements within the CPC in what can be considered a process of class struggle internal to the CPC itself. Author Keywords: Canada, communism, Great Depression, labour, Popular Front, socialism
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- Growth and Revitalization in Peterborough ON
- The Places to Grow Act (2005) and the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (2006) are two pieces of legislature passed by the Government of Ontario to help govern and limit urban sprawl in major cities across Ontario through to 2041. These policies are framed around the development and maintenance of large-scale cities. While there are some provisions within these policies for mid-sized cities that are part of the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH), there are few resources, case studies, and models for successful revitalization, and intensification in mid-sized cities. The goal of this thesis is to answer questions related to planning and development in Peterborough, Ontario and to assess its progress as it relates to Places to Grow (2005) and the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (2006) guidelines. Through the use of library research, policy document analysis, interviews with key stakeholders, and GIS analysis, I identify both strategies and challenges related to development and growth in Peterborough, ON. I conclude that the policies are proving to be initially favorable in their results, however it is not without significant challenge to Planners and stakeholders in Peterborough, ON. Finally, I suggest further research take place in order to further assess the effectiveness of these policies in other mid-sized cities in Ontario, as well as to measure the success of the policies closer towards the 2041 deadline. Author Keywords: GIS, Peterborough, planning, policy, revitalization, Smart Growth
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- Struggling for a New Left
- This study examines the emergence of the New Left organization, The New Tendency, in Windsor, Ontario during the 1970s. The New Tendency, which developed in a number of Ontario cities, represents one articulation of the Canadian New Left’s turn towards working-class organizing in the early 1970s after the student movement’s dissolution in the late 1960s. Influenced by dissident Marxist theorists associated with the Johnson-Forest Tendency and Italian workerism, The New Tendency sought to create alternative forms of working-class organizing that existed outside of, and often in direct opposition to, both the mainstream labour movement and Old Left organizations such as the Communist Party and the New Democratic Party. After examining the roots of the organization and the important legacies of class struggle in Windsor, the thesis explores how The New Tendency contributed to working-class self activity on the shop-floor of Windsor’s auto factories and in the community more broadly. However, this New Left mobilization was also hampered by inner-group sectarianism and a rapidly changing economic context. Ultimately, the challenges that coincided with The New Tendency’s emergence in the 1970s led to its dissolution. While short-lived, the history of the Windsor branch of The New Tendency helps provide valuable insight into the trajectory of the Canadian New Left and working-class struggle in the 1970s, highlighting experiences that have too often been overlooked in previous scholarship. Furthermore, this study illustrates the transnational development of New Left ideas and organizations by examining The New Tendency’s close connections to comparable groups active in manufacturing cities in Europe and the United States; such international relationships and exchanges were vital to the evolution of autonomist Marxism around the world. Finally, the Windsor New Tendency’s history is an important case study of the New Left’s attempts to reckon with a transitional moment for global capitalism, as the group’s experiences coincided with the Fordist accord’s death throes and the beginning of neoliberalism’s ascendancy. Author Keywords: Autonomist Marxism, Canada, Labour, New Left, Rank-and-file Organizing, Working-Class History
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- Building Individuals, Building the Economy
- This thesis explores the neoliberal governmentality approach to education for Northern economic development that was prevalent from 2006 to 2015, during Stephen Harper’s period as Prime Minister of Canada. Using a grounded theory approach, this thesis identifies three themes – Indigenous integration, education, and employment for labour force/ economic development – to direct an analysis on programs and funding supported by the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, Employment and Social Development Canada, and Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. This examination suggests that Federal programming and funding encouraged neoliberal governmentality approaches to Northern development and education. Specifically, the former Government interest in developing an Indigenous work force to serve labour market needs is brought to light. Author Keywords: Economic Development, Indigenous Education, Labour Force Development, Neoliberalism, Territorial North
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- relationship of policy aims and implementation
- Background: Ontario’s Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC) claims people with mental illnesses/addictions need improved care/overuse emergency departments. MOHLTC expects Coordinated Care Planning (CCP, teams of mental/physical health professionals, social workers and informal caregivers) to improve care and lower emergency department returns/healthcare costs. CCPs are directed by policies, Smith’s “problematics,” or Deleuze’s “expressions,” supposedly reflecting “contents”/“everyday worlds.” Research Question: How do Ontario health/allied professionals come together with a person with mental illness/addictions and informal caregiver(s) to address health needs through a CCP? Method: 1) Analyzed CCP policies; generated questions about creation/implementation. 2) Interviewed eight professionals about interpreting/enacting policies. 3) Connected interview data to policies. Findings: Opportunities for fragmentation exist in gaining consent; determining eligibility; persons in care, informal caregivers and professionals’ participation; person-centeredness; “shame-free” environments; health literacy; records of medications. Conclusion: CCP participants need to minimize fragmentations which takes time, space, money; creates contradictions in lowering costs/improving care. Author Keywords: Addiction, Dual Diagnosis, Health Care Policy, Institutional Ethnography, Integrated Health Care, Mental Illness
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- 'This is where the poetry comes out'
- Since 1984, poetry slams have emerged as a politicized expressive movement of performing the personal and political through poetry competitions. Slams are also discursively spatialized, often represented as “spaces” that are “safe,” “inclusive,” etc. In this thesis, I investigate how, why, and to what effect the Peterborough Poetry Slam produces, consolidates, and challenges such “resistant spaces.” Drawing on interviews and participant observation, I consider how the slam’s reiterative practices facilitate its space-making by encouraging performances that resist, reimagine, and sometimes inadvertently reify dominant societal norms. I argue that this space-making is imperfect yet productive: though not resistant space in any straightforward or static way, the slam continuously produces possibilities to challenge norms and confront power. This thesis contributes to scholarship on performative space and creative resistance movements. In an era when political resistance to power structures is often silenced, this research offers insights of potential significance to other resistant space-makings. Author Keywords: Nogojiwanong Peterborough, performative space, poetry slam, resistance, space-making, spoken word