Publications

A combined study (Léger survey of Quebec population as a whole & ACS survey of religious minority groups) merged and weighted by Léger, this enquiry provides a window into the interplay between public discourse, popular perceptions and experienced impacts around law 21 in Quebec.

This special issue comprises essays and interviews featuring a range of voices, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, reflecting on how the past — often contested — continues to shape our present and future. Reconciliation is a topic at the heart of contemporary debates about Canada’s history, during a time when scholarly and popular narratives of this country’s past are being challenged and rewritten. Canada’s landscape of historical commemoration is similarly in the throes of controversy, with statues being toppled and landmarks being renamed. All the while, how we educate young Canadians about the country’s past remains a hotly contested issue.

Entitled Multiculturalism @ 50 and the Promise of a Just Society, this special edition of Canadian Issues, explores the roots, characteristics and structural fault lines of Canadian multiculturalism and outlines the reframing required if the policy hopes to live up to its initial promise of delivering a just society. In his introduction, guest editor and eminent political philosopher Will Kymlicka reflects on the insights of contributing authors some of whom trace multiculturalism’s failings back to its very foundations, but who also offer glimpses” of why and how multiculturalism might aspire to rebirth and offer a “better future”.

It was in 1946 that Jackie Robinson played his extraordinary summer of baseball with the Triple A Montreal Royals affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was the year prior to his 1947 breakthrough as America’s first ever Black player in Major League Baseball. Robinson’s achievement is a seminal event in the history of the sport that was described as America’s favourite pastime. But breaking baseball’s colour barrier was also a transformational event in the advancement of the civil rights movement in the United States. A decade before Rosa Parks went down in history for her heroic 1955 refusal to give up her seat and move to the back of a Montgomery city bus, Robinson refused to give up his seat and move to the back of a US Army bus when ordered to do so. Twentieth-century civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. described Jackie Robinson as an important contributor to his extraordinary achievements.