In This Issue:

Upcoming Events

• Panel: “Constructing Canadian Identity from Abroad”

Program News

• Happy Diwali from Canadian Studies!

• Board chair David Stewart publishes new memoir about life as a “professional Canadian”
• Program director Irene Bloemraad compares US and Canada’s immigration policies on “Close-up on Canada”

UPCOMING EVENTS

Panel: “Constructing Canadian Identity from Abroad”

Wednesday, November 9 | 2:30 pm PT | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Celebrate 40 years of Canadian Studies at Berkeley with a lively discussion on how Canadian expatriates think about their home country, and contribute to Canada’s perception of itself. The conversation will feature contributors to the recently-published book The Construction of Canadian Identity from Abroad, a collection of essays that explores the topic from both a theoretical and personal perspective.

The panel will be moderated by the volume’s editor, Christopher Kirkey, director of the Center for the Study of Canada and Institute on Québec Studies at the SUNY Plattsburgh. Panelists will include Berkeley Canadian Studies Program director Irene Bloemraad; Richard Nimijean, Undergraduate Supervisor of Canadian Studies at Carleton University; Julie Burelle, an expert on Indigenous, Quebec, and performance studies at UC San Diego. Also joining the panel will be Berkeley Canadian Studies Advisory Board chair David Stewart, who recently published his own memoir (see below).

Please note that this event takes place later than our normal Colloquium time.

PROGRAM NEWS

Happy Diwali from Canadian Studies! 

Canadian Studies wishes a joyful Diwali to our friends in the South Asian community! Today, many Canadians will join the millions of people around the world celebrating Diwali, also known as the “Festival of Lights”. As noted by Prime Minister Trudeau in his holiday greeting, this five-day festival symbolizes the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. It is a time for members of Canada’s South Asian community to celebrate their shared culture.

Diwali is one of the most important and popular festivals on the Indian subcontinent. Its popularity transcends religious lines, and it is celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and some Buddhists. As a result, observances vary by region. However, popular practices involve participants decorating their homes with oil lamps and colorful circular patterns called rangolis, made of flowers, colored sand, or powdered pigments. Celebrations also include parties, group meals, and firework displays.

Canada is home to one of the largest South Asian diaspora communities in the world; almost 6% of Canadians report South Asian ancestry, with particular concentrations in Toronto and Vancouver. So on behalf of Canadian Studies, happy Diwali!

Image: Diwali vector created by Freepik – www.freepik.com

Board Chair David Stewart Publishes New Memoir About Life as a “Professional Canadian”

Canadian Studies congratulates our board chair, David Stewart, on the release last month of his first book: True North, Down South: Tales of a Professional Canadian in America. Using a Canadian émigré lens, this collection of personal essays entertains and educates readers about immigrant and national identity, cultural misunderstandings, and belonging in the modern world.

David is a well-known figure in the Bay Area’s Canadian community, and is involved in many local community organizations. In addition to chairing the external advisory board for Canadian Studies at Berkeley, he is the former chair and an active board member of the Digital Moose Lounge, a social organization for Canadian expats in the Bay Area. David has lived in numerous cities across Canada and the United States, where he immigrated in 1996.

David began working on a book project in 2018 to reflect on his cross-border life. After much writing and editing during the COVID-19 lockdown, the final book was released on September 20 of this year. Erika Wah from the Digital Moose Lounge interviewed David on his writing process and inspirations in a blog post, “How Do We Expats Show our Canadianness?”

The final product of David’s work is a book about identity and finding belonging in a community. As a child from an Anglo-Quebecker family, Stewart’s Canadian identity was contested by Quebec separatists, then again in his adult life as an immigrant to the United States. Along the way, he found himself homesick in the U.S. and opening an immigration law clinic in North Carolina before he was thrust unexpectedly into a role as a “professional Canadian.”

In engaging and compelling prose, True North, Down South tells twenty-eight insightful and sometimes humorous personal stories of growing up in Canada and carving out an adult life in the United States. Stewart details spending his childhood in an asbestos mining town in 1970s Quebec, coming of age in Montreal, establishing roots in the United States, and promoting Canadian-American relations in Silicon Valley. Charming and approachable, this collection leaves readers with a deeper awareness of what it feels like to be an outsider, a homesick immigrant, and a bridge-builder for two nations more culturally distinct than they appear.

Image of David Stewart provided by the author.

Program Director Irene Bloemraad Compares US and Canada’s Immigration Policies on “Close-up on Canada”

Canadian Studies Program director Irene Bloemraad, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and migration studies expert, was recently a special guest on the podcast Close- up on Canada. The show, hosted by Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, brings on leading experts and policy makers for an in-depth look at the ideas and issues shaping Canada today.

The current season of the podcast places Canada’s immigration policy in a global context. Professor Bloemraad was interviewed for episode “How similar are Canada and the US when it comes to immigration policy?” In a 22-minute conversation with Professor Béland, she discusses how the policies of the two countries differ, where they overlap, and what they can learn from each other. She also explores how politics and public opinion influences these policies, and whether Canada might experience the same political forces on immigration as its southern neighbor.

In This Issue:

Upcoming Events

• Book talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945
• Graduate student discussion with Prof. Andrea Geiger

Canadian News

• UC Berkeley center publishes report on Canada’s “Islamophobia industry”

External Events

• “The Diversification of Agroecosystems: Uncovering Indicators and Outcomes”

UPCOMING EVENTS

Book Talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Wednesday, October 19 | 12:30 pm | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Andrea Geiger will discuss her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, the book highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another.

Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings. To see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire, as well as the role it played in shaping wartime policy with regard to citizens and subjects of Japanese ancestry in both Canada and the United States.

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include transpacific and borderlands history, race, migration, and legal history. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington, and is the author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of History.

UC Berkeley students with a research interest in Professor Geiger’s work are welcome to attend a small group discussion with the speaker following her public presentation. For more information, please email canada@berkeley.edu.

CANADIAN NEWS

UC Berkeley Center Publishes Report on Canada’s “Islamophobia Industry”

Muslims make up just under 4% of Canada’s population, and are generally considered well-established in Canadian society. Yet, in recent years, the country has suffered several high-profile, violent attacks targeted at Muslims, and police data shows a steady increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes over the last ten years. What explains this trend in a country that prides itself on diversity and multiculturalism?

A new report from the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley posits answers to that question, and argues that unique among other forms of oppression, anti-Muslim prejudice is fueled by a wealthy and well-connected “Islamophobia industry” that stretches well outside Canada’s borders. Written by Jasmin Zine, a professor of sociology and religion & culture at Wilfrid Laurier University, The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive attempt to map a network of individuals and organization within Canada that promote anti-Islam rhetoric.

At over 200 pages, the report provides a deep dive into the structure and funding of key public figures and organizations active in fomenting fear of Muslims in Canada. These include far-right and White nationalist groups and media, ex-Muslim and Muslim dissident activists, and national security experts and think tanks. They range from the ideologically committed to those who merely utilize anti-Islam rhetoric to achieve their political or social aims.

The report also investigates the rhetorical tactics used in anti-Islam propaganda. Such groups are united in portraying Islam and Muslims as a threat which must be limited wherever possible. They suggest that Islamic religion and its associated cultural practices are incompatible with liberal Canadian values, and sow fear about the threat that Islamic extremists (jihadists and terrorists) pose to Canadian society. These arguments paint Muslims as an un-assimilable demographic threat, whose uncontrolled growth will inevitably lead to the inevitable Islamization of Canada.

The report also connects actors in Canada with a global anti-Muslim network, not just within the United States and Europe but also linked to Asian powers such as India and China. Narratives like those above are shared along these networks, often between ideologically unlikely allies, and frequently along with funding or logistical support.

Ultimately, the report hopes that by identifying these networks, the Muslim community and its allies will be better-able to combat their influence. It also calls on the government of Canada to do more to address anti-Muslim hate speech and challenge the rise of global Islamophobia.

The project was sponsored by the CRG Islamophobia Research and Development Project and the Islamophobia Studies Center, led by Hatem Bazian.

Image: Muslim woman at a Canada Day parade in Toronto, 2018. Source: Bruce Reeve, Wikimedia Commons.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

The Diversification of Agroecosystems: Uncovering Indicators and Outcomes

Monday, October 24 | 12:00 pm | 114 Morgan | Learn more

The Berkeley Food Institute invites you to a lecture and discussion with Dr. Marney Isaac, a sustainable agriculture researcher from the University of Toronto. Around the world, food production systems that rely on intensively managed single crops have tended to disrupt local and global biogeochemical cycles, reduce biodiversity and make farming risky for ecosystems and for people. Simple strategies such as including trees and other sources of biodiversity in the agricultural landscape can curb many of the negative impacts associated with current food production systems. Dr. Isaac will explain how her group assesses agroecosystem function, drawing on her own research from Ontario and Ghana.

Marney Isaac is a professor in the Department of Physical & Environmental Sciences and the Department of Global Development Studies at the University of Toronto. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Agroecosystems & Development and is the Director of the University of Toronto’s Sustainable Food and Farming Futures Cluster. Her research develops novel social-ecological methods to generate contemporary insights into sustainable agroecosystem policy and practice. She leads an interdisciplinary research lab that explores plant-soil interactions, nutrient cycles and ecosystem function in diversified agroecosystems and agroforestry systems, and the social processes that lead to agroecological transitions. Dr. Isaac serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Applied Ecology, Agronomy for Sustainable Development and Biotropica, and she publishes widely in environmental science, agronomy, ecology, and multidisciplinary sustainability science journals.

In This Issue:

Upcoming Events:

• 5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving
• Book talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945
• Graduate student discussion with Prof. Andrea Geiger

Canadian News

• Canada marks second National Day of Truth and Reconciliation
• What Quebec’s election could mean for Canada

LAST CHANCE TO BUY TICKETS!

5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving

Saturday, October 8 | 5:00 pm

Clark Kerr Campus, UC Berkeley | Buy tickets here

Canadian Studies is pleased to partner with the Digital Moose Lounge for our fifth annual Canadian Thanksgiving dinner! Join us for a special meal celebrating the Bay Area’s Canadian community, as you mingle with your fellow SF Bay Canadians while enjoying entertainment and a delicious turkey dinner.

Tickets may be purchased through the Digital Moose Lounge.

Book Talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Wednesday, October 19 | 12:30 pm | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Andrea Geiger will discuss her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, the book highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another.

Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings. To see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire, as well as the role it played in shaping wartime policy with regard to citizens and subjects of Japanese ancestry in both Canada and the United States.

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include transpacific and borderlands history, race, migration, and legal history. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington, and is the author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of History.

UC Berkeley students with a research interest in Professor Geiger’s work are welcome to attend a small group discussion with the speaker following her public presentation. For more information, please email canada@berkeley.edu.

CANADIAN NEWS

Canada Marks Second National Day of Truth and Reconciliation

On Friday, Canada marked its second National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The holiday commemorates the children who passed through Canada’s residential school system, and honours the survivors and their families. The commemoration originates from “Orange Shirt Day”, an indigenous-led grassroots awareness campaign. It was elevated to a federal statutory holiday last year, following the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites.

Canada’s Indian residential school system operated from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. It aimed to assimilate Indigenous people into European-Canadian society by removing children from their families and severing their connections to their communities and culture. Attendance was compulsory for Indigenous children from 1894 until 1947, and over 150,000 children are believed to have been enrolled between 1831 and the closure of the last school in 1998. Conditions in the schools were often horrific, and children suffered from poor sanitation, malnutrition, and physical and sexual abuse. The number of students who died at the schools remains unclear due to poor record-keeping, with estimates ranging from 3,000-30,000 children.

In a statement published Friday, Prime Minister Trudeau asked Canadians to “come together to reflect on the legacy of residential schools.” He called it the nation’s “shared responsibility” to understand the ongoing impacts of the schools on survivors and their families, and to work to addressing these wrongs. To that end, he noted several programs the Government has implemented, including the appointment of an Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites and introducing new legislation to create a National Council for Reconciliation.

What Quebec’s Election Could Mean for Canada

Quebeckers headed to the polls today to elect the new members of their province’s legislature, the National Assembly. While results have yet to be released, recent polling shows the governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), led by current premier François Legault, cruising to an easy victory. The final projection from 338Canada has the CAQ winning a comfortable 39% of the vote, which translates to 77% of legislative seats.

In an article published in CTV News last month, political scientist Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and frequent Berkeley Canadian Studies collaborator, spoke to some potential national effects of this election. Legault and the CAQ have worked to increase Quebec’s autonomy from the federal government, and the party has opposed many of Trudeau’s policies. While a CAQ victory is all but assured, Béland says the margins are important: a strong victory would “not be good news for Justin Trudeau.”

A particular point of contention between Trudeau and Legault is immigration. Legault has vocally opposed the Liberals’ target of 430,000 immigrants per year, equal to about 1% of Canada’s total population. Liberal policymakers argue that immigration is necessary to sustain the Canadian economy. Last quarter, Canada saw its highest quarterly population growth since 1957, 95% of which was due to international migration.

Legault calls the Liberals’ policies “extreme”, and has promised to limit Quebec’s acceptance of new immigrants to 50,000 people per year. In controversial comments, the premier suggested that increasing levels of non-Francophone immigrants would damage “social cohesion” and threaten Québécois culture. Opponents called his words “divisive” and “hurtful”, and accused the CAQ of weaponizing anti-immigrant sentiment for politics. The CAQ immigration minister recently apologized after being criticized for falsely stating that “80% of immigrants… don’t work, don’t speak French, and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec.”

Other opponents worry about how the CAQ’s push for autonomy extends to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Some high-profile laws sponsored by the current government have been accused of violating the Charter, notably Bill 21, which instituted a ban on the wearing of religious symbols by state employees, and Bill 96, which expanded the scope of French language laws. While these laws are mostly popular in Quebec, they have been harshly criticized from other parts of Canada, as well as by Quebec’s English-speaking and religious minorities. They are nevertheless exempt from review by the Canadian Supreme Court due to the National Assembly invoking Section 33 of the Charter (the Notwithstanding Clause). This clause, unique to Canadian law, allows a province to suspend fundamental rights for a limited period, which can be renewed indefinitely.

In the CTV article, human rights lawyer and McGill professor Pearl Eliadis decried this move as a “unilateral attempt… to change our fundamental Charter and constitutional values.” She warns that if this practice becomes commonplace, the Charter will soon lose its relevance in Canadian law and society. This was the case for several years after the passage of the charter in the 1980s, when the Parti Québécois invoked the clause for every piece of legislation they passed to ensure that no law could be challenged based on Charter rights. A CAQ government will likely continue to employ the Notwithstanding Clause.

Image: François Legault. Source: Lea-Kim Chateauneuf, Wikimedia Commons.