Highlights from the months of June and July.

Awards:

• Johannes Remy’s Brothers or Enemies was awarded the Ivan Franko International Prize of 2018.
• French Écocritique by Stephanie Posthumus is on the shortlist for the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize.

Conferences:

• Daniel Quinlan represented UTP at the Law and Society Association’s annual conference in Toronto.
• Anne Brackenbury and Jodi Lewchuk presented our sociology list at the World Congress of Sociology in Toronto.

Media Highlights:

• A launch for Steven High's One Job Town took place in Sturgeon Falls on June 9.
• The North Bay Nugget ran an excerpt from High’s book.
• Northern Ontario Business interviewed High about his research for One Job Town.
• The Saskatoon Express ran a cover story on how Valerie Korinek’s research for Prairie Fairies was inspired by a message from a colleague on a post-it note.
• Global TV News Saskatoon ran a profile of Korinek and Prairie Fairies.
• Toronto’s Albany Club hosted a launch for From Wall Street To Bay Street by Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin.
• The Globe and Mail interviewed Rick Nason about his book It's Not Complicated.
• The Globe and Mail interviewed Luciara Nardon about Working in a Multicultural World.
• Prairie Fairies by Valerie J. Korinek landed on Chronicle of Higher Education's Weekly Book List for the week of July 6.
• Gentrifier by John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill was featured in a piece on the tone deaf marketing of gentrifying neighbourhoods in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
• Christopher Alcantara talked about his latest book A Quiet Evolution with Western News.
• "Miscarriages of Justice In Canada is a darkly compelling book not because it is sensational, but because it is so matter of fact," writes Holly Doan, in a review for Blacklocks Reporter.

New Releases:

• Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600 by Heather Bamford.
• Queering Urban Justice: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto edited by Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware, with Río Rodríguez.
• Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England by Brandon W. Hawk.
• New Brunswick before the Equal Opportunity Program: History through a Social Work Lens by Laurel Lewey, Louis J. Richard, and Linda M. Turner.
• Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel by Marilia Librandi.
• Erasmus and His Books by Egbertus Van Gulik | Translated by J.C. Grayson and edited by James K. McConica and Johannes Trapman.
• Regulating Professions: The Emergence of Professional Self-Regulation in Four Canadian Provinces by Tracey L. Adams.
• Geometry of the Passions: Fear, Hope, Happiness: Philosophy and Political Use by Remo Bodei | Translated by Gianpiero W. Doebler.
• Aristotle's Science of Matter and Motion by Christopher Byrne.
• Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation by Christopher Holman.
• Iberianism and Crisis: Spain and Portugal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Robert Patrick Newcomb.

by Donna E. Wood

My June 18 blog post provided a brief overview of my recently released book Federalism in Action: the Devolution of Canada’s Public Employment Service 1995-2015. It also commented on the first two questions addressed in the book:

1. What governance choices did each province make in taking on the federal programming?

2. How do the devolved public employment services (PES) compare to federal delivery?

This blog posting deals with the last two questions:

3. How is the Government of Canada managing its role post-devolution?

4. How does Canada’s PES work together as a whole? What challenges remain?

To assess the third question, I needed to reflect on the federal role in a post-devolution world. In my view, there are four important dimensions. Ottawa still controls the money (most of it coming from the Employment Insurance or EI account) and sets the legislative, policy and accountability framework under which the provincial and territorial PES programming operates. There are ‘pan-Canadian’ programs to be managed. Determining how PES programming is coordinated across the country, securing stakeholder input, and ensuring that comparative research is available to improve the programs on offer requires federal leadership. Finally, not all employment services were devolved: Ottawa deliberately kept direct responsibility for key target groups: Aboriginal persons, youth and persons with disabilities.

The Government of Canada’s performance in all of these areas between 1995 and 2015 was weak. The federal-provincial and federal-Aboriginal accountability arrangements were inadequate, confusing, controlling, and non-transparent. Given that 87 per cent of PES programming is now devolved, there is no good reason for the federal government to still be involved in the direct management of programs for youth and persons with disabilities. Pan-Canadian programming declined significantly during the Harper Conservative years after 2006 when spending was reduced and all the research institutions and coordinating bodies put in place by the Liberals were defunded.

The Forum of Labour Market Ministers ─ the intergovernmental body responsible for pan-Canadian coordination ─ rarely met at the Ministers’ level until it was revitalized by the provinces and territories in 2013 following the Harper Conservatives unilateral decision to replace the Labour Market Agreements with the Canada Job Fund.  With the demise of the Canadian Labour Force Development Board in 1998, the only formal way stakeholder’s views were heard was when Ottawa decided to hold a consultation or seek input.

On the fourth question, Canada’s public employment service in 2015 did not work well together as a whole, as it was highly fragmented and complex. With 52 bilateral federal-provincial-territorial labour market transfer agreements, 85 federal-Aboriginal agreements, as well as direct federal youth, disability and pan-Canadian programming, it was very hard for Canadians to figure out who did what and who was responsible for what.

These problems can be rectified without diminishing the positive value of devolution. In my paper Strengthening Canada’s Public Employment Service Post-Devolution, released by the Caledon Institute for Social Policy in September 2016, I outlined the challenges facing Canada’s public employment service and suggested the following changes:

• Develop a pan-Canadian multilateral labour market framework agreement
• Consolidate the four agreements into one agreement
• Devolve responsibility for federal youth and disability programming
• Re-affirm the federal stewardship and coordination roles
• Restore the National Aboriginal Labour Market Management Board
• Develop a National Labour Market Partner’s Council
• Include comparative research in the mandate of the Labour Market Information Council

Since the completion of the book manuscript in 2017, federal-provincial-territorial governments have made progress on many of these suggestions. They have agreed that the four labour market transfer agreements will be consolidated into two: a Labour Market Development Agreement or LMDA (focusing primarily on those with an Employment Insurance attachment) and a Workforce Development Agreement or WDA (covering everyone else). This should significantly reduce complexity, especially with respect to accountability. These new bilateral agreements started to roll out in May 2018, with Ontario and British Columbia first off the mark.

After a very long gestation period the Labour Market Information Council under the Forum of Labour Market Ministers was finally launched in May 2018. Its scope was clarified as focusing strictly on labour market information, not research. Pan-Canadian research will be undertaken by a new federal entity yet to be established, the Future Skills Centre. Stakeholder input will be secured through a Future Skills Council. This all seems to be good news but only time will tell.

However, the Government of Canada has demonstrated no intent to devolve youth or disability employment programming. Given its confirmation of the ‘distinctions’ based approach to Aboriginal employment services, there will be no pan-Aboriginal labour market management board. As a result, some complexity and fragmentation in Canada’s PES will remain.

In 2018 we celebrate 100 years of Canada’s public employment service.  Devolution to the provinces, territories, and Aboriginal organizations started more than 20 years ago. Phase one under the Chrétien/Martin Liberals involved the initial offer in 1995 and the acceptance of federal staff, assets, contracts and programming responsibilities by eight provinces and territories. It also involved the establishment of Aboriginal labour market entities and pan-Canadian institutions.

Phase two under the Harper Conservatives moved the other five jurisdictions to similar devolved arrangements and increased funding for non EI clients. However, the Conservatives reduced federal involvement in pan-Canadian initiatives and unilaterally changed the federal-provincial transfer agreement rules.

We are now into devolution Phase three under the Trudeau Liberals. Hopefully my book Federalism in Action: the Devolution of Canada’s Public Employment Service 1995-2015 will shed light on what has transpired in the past in order to facilitate future policy learning. There is no shortage of work that needs to be done in this often neglected but essential area of public policy.

The Devolution of Canada’s Public Employment Service 1995-2015: Part 1

Guest post by R. Peter Broughton, author of Northern Star: J.S. Plaskett

As a retired high-school math teacher, I fall into no particular camp. I’m not a scientist, an astronomer, or a historian. But perhaps, with no particular axe to grind and at my advanced age, I am oddly suited to bring some new viewpoints to bear on writing a historical biography of an astronomer.

As far as astronomy goes, some of my professors, including the renowned Helen Hogg, actually knew Plaskett. The equipment he used as well as the techniques and methods that were familiar to him were still current. But it was only after a course in the history of mathematics that I took as part of a master’s degree a few years later that I began to see the unity of the humanities and the sciences. I began to feel that, by reading extensively, I could learn what interested me. Encouraged by Professor Kenneth O. May, I thought that eventually I might make my own contributions to knowledge.

Fortunately for me there was a means to do so. I had joined the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada as an undergraduate and over subsequent years held virtually every office in the Society, giving me a broader understanding of the great variety of attitudes, backgrounds, and challenges faced by this subset of Canadians. Though I found that the RASC Journal and monthly lectures by experts provided a means of keeping in touch with some of the recent developments in astronomy, I realized that it would be through the history of the subject that I would try to make my mark. Boldly I thought there were few significant developments in Canadian astronomy before the twentieth century, so it would not be a preposterous goal to attain familiarity with the entire history of astronomy in Canada. Of course science really knows no boundaries, so I was inevitably drawn to explore some topics on a broader scale.

Writing for the RASC Journal had its rewards. I was able to address topics that interested me and in the process found at least a few encouraging readers and sympathetic friends. This experience gave me the confidence to write for other journals as diverse as Annals of Science and Journal of Geophysical Research, and eventually to write two books, Looking Up: A History of the RASC and Northern Star: J.S. Plaskett.

My hope is that this biography of John Stanley Plaskett will appeal to a very wide audience. The astronomical community is already familiar with Plaskett as one of a fairly small group of astronomers to make major contributions to the science in the first half of the twentieth century. For such readers, this book will flesh out Plaskett’s personality and provide pertinent illustrations of how he managed to become so highly-regarded at home and abroad. Amateur astronomers, who often like to read (on cloudy nights) about the accomplishments of a former generation, will appreciate Plaskett’s rise from humble roots to international acclaim. He achieved fame for himself and his country by learning on the job, and without ever taking a formal course in astronomy. But I really hope this book will reach beyond those aficionados of astronomy to a broader audience.

I do think the Canadian public thirsts for stories of national heroes. For decades, professional historians have largely derided such figures as elitist, preferring to focus on down-trodden minorities or those whose experience or impact has been localized. So says one of the few notable exceptions, Jack Granatstein in Who Killed Canadian History? Moreover, he writes, these historians in academe often write in a turgid style admired only by their colleagues. Fortunately, there have been counter examples. One shining example is Michael Bliss’s biography of Sir Frederick Banting, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1984 with a second edition in 1992.

Though Plaskett cannot be credited with saving countless lives as did his contemporary, Banting, he did, along with Banting and a handful of others, put Canada on the international radar as a country making serious advances in scientific knowledge. Before the First World War, Canada was a backwater in the arts as well. It took pioneers like Lucy Maud Montgomery and the Group of Seven to bring awareness to the world that important advances were occurring in the vast land north of the 49th parallel.

Finally, and in my opinion, most importantly, I hope that this book will break down some barriers. I would be delighted if humanists realized that they can learn the ways of science from the biography of an astronomer. Scientists may appreciate the value of history when they see how personal, political, and economic forces shape their working lives. Perhaps professional historians may see the value in writing for a broad audience, and writers of creative non-fiction may understand that there is no need to embroider the facts.

I should not kid myself. Five years after Bliss’s second edition of Banting: a Biography came out, an Angus Reid poll found that only 11 percent of Canadians between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four knew that Banting had won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of insulin. If that’s the best that an outstanding writer and historian could achieve, I will be amazed and delighted if 11 percent of Canadians of any age come to recognize the name of John Stanley Plaskett as Canada’s founding astronomer.

R. Peter Broughton was president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 1992 to 1994. His service and extensive writing on the history of astronomy led the International Astronomical Union to name a minor planet in his honour.

Guest post by Hanni Woodbury, author of A Reference Grammar of the Onondaga Language

Onondaga is one of many extremely endangered Native American languages that survive now mainly because of the dedicated efforts by younger men and women who have memories of learning their ancestors' languages informally from their parents, grandparents, or elders in the community, and who, as English began to become the primary language spoken in their community, have dedicated themselves to keeping their language alive by developing extensive language programs for their communities.

Why should we document an endangered language? There are many reasons, but here are the main ones:
• because a language in many ways is a store of its speakers' knowledge;
• because a language helps to express the cultural system of its speakers;
• because speakers can use their language to express their identities;
• and, finally, because teachers and students in language programs – in the absence, increasingly, of the older speakers – must depend on the secondhand record that thorough documentation provides to keep their language alive.

The data used to document a language should, wherever possible, be a corpus of natural and spontaneous speech that is created by fluent speakers of the language. Because at this time, all speakers of Onondaga are also fluent speakers of English, it is especially important to use textual materials – stories, conversations, performances of speeches, etc. – for the purpose of documentation and to minimize the use of elicited data for fear that there might be interference from speakers' familiarity with English. The goal is to describe the language from data that represent the flow of language uninterrupted by suggestions from English.

The Iroquoian family of languages divides into two branches, a northern and a southern one. The six surviving northern languages are Onondaga, Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. The single language representing the southern branch is Cherokee. Today's two dialects of Onondaga exist in two locations: at Six Nations of the Grand River First Nations Reserve, near Brantford Ontario, Canada and at Onondaga Nation, which is located just south of Syracuse, NY, in the United States.

I have been involved in the task of documenting the Onondaga language ever since the early 1970s. Writing the reference grammar has been the final step in this effort. Earlier work consists of a dictionary (also published by the University of Toronto Press), and numerous published and unpublished texts with their translations.

Linguists have various methods of creating a record that will help to describe a language fully. The classic method is the one I have used: it involves a great deal of fieldwork with as many speakers of the language as possible, recording and transcribing the field sessions, asking speakers to tell stories, speeches, and recording conversations among speakers, in addition to gathering detailed information that zeros in on those aspects that are especially distinctive of the language. Beyond fieldwork, it involves scouring libraries for all sorts of published and archived materials. Eventually these records are analyzed linguistically and organized in three major ways, as a group of texts with translations, as a dictionary and as a grammar.

Numerous special features distinguish the Iroquoian languages from languages that are more familiar to speakers of English, and they impact the process of documentation. Perhaps the most noticeable feature is that the Iroquoian verb is astonishingly expandable with optional prefixes and suffixes that can be added singly or in combination to the verb root, affixes that are ordered in relation to one another. For example, the simple Onondaga verb héhsaks, given as 1 below, consists of three essential elements (morphemes) that are the minimal requirements of every well formed Onondaga verb: a pronominal prefix that references the agent (the performer of the action) and – if present – the patient (the under-goer of the action), an element that names the action itself (a verb root), and a final element that marks whether the activity is static or whether it changes through time (an inflectional element marking aspect). [Note that in the examples below morphemes are separated by hyphens]. As can be seen, this minimal verb form translates into an English sentence 'he is looking for it,' a sentence with a subject and an object:

1. héhsaks
h-ehsak-s
he>it-look.for-aspect
he is looking for it

The second and third examples illustrate two of a multitude of possible ways to expanded this verb by adding prefixes and/or suffixes. In example 2 a noun root -nahd- 'comb' is inserted. It specifies the nature of the object referenced in the pronominal prefix that the agent of the verb is searching for:

2. hanahdíhsaks
ha-nahd-ihsak-s
he>it-comb-look.for-aspect
he's looking for a comb

The verb with an inserted noun root shows a special feature of the Iroquoian languages, a robust process called noun incorporation.

In example 3 a suffix -h-, a so-called dislocative, marks the fact that the actor is on his way to perform the action expressed by the verb:

3. hehsákheʔ
h-ehsak-h-eʔ
he>it-look.for-dislocative-aspect
he's on his way to look for a comb

Other prefixes and suffixes can be added to a verb root to mark directionality of the action (whether the action takes place towards the speaker or away from the speaker); the speaker's certainty as to the reliability of his assertion (it's what he heard someone say, it's what he saw with his own eyes, etc.); whether or not the statement should be understood in the negative; whether the action is to be repetitive or not; whether the statement should be taken as a command; whether the meaning of the word entails a change of state or involves two people or objects; whether the action coincides temporally with another action; whether the action is on the self (reflexive); whether one of the parties to the action is benefitted by the action; and many more. All of this and more can be signaled within the boundaries of a single word.

Another feature of the Iroquoian languages is their free word order. Unlike the affixes that expand verbs and nouns which must occur in rigid order in relation to one another, the words in an Onondaga sentence can be moved around fairly freely, depending on what it is the speaker wishes to emphasize. As a comparison, think English: the dog bites the man vs. the man bites the dog – English being a language in which word order changes the meaning of sentences. In Onondaga, who bites whom is made clear by the pronominal prefix within the verb, and the differences in the two cited sentences signal that the first option is a sentence about a dog, and the second is a sentence about a man; but in each it is the dog that bites the man. These features have a direct impact on how information is organized between dictionary and grammar.

Another distinctively Iroquoian feature is the system of pronominal prefixes that form a part of every verb – recall that they keep straight who is the agent carrying out the action of the verb and who the patient in every sentence. English has sixteen pronouns, Onondaga has fifty-eight! The details of the system are two complex to describe here, but the pronominal include three series, one to reference agents, one to reference patients, and one to reference agent and patient pairs (for verbs with two animate participants, e.g., he's thinking about her). The distribution is in part the result of verbal semantics and in part grammatical. In each of the series pronominal prefixes distinguish person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd as well as inclusion, i.e., whether or not the addressee is included in the reference), number (singular, dual, plural), and gender of animate entities (one masculine gender and two (!) feminine genders).

An English dictionary and grammar divide up fairly neatly into two functions. The dictionary lists the store of words and is heavy with meanings, and the grammar describes the rules that combine sounds into words and words into phrases and sentences. An Iroquoian dictionary as can be seen from the descriptions above, is heavy on grammar, i.e., information that deals with the construction of words – recall those multiply expandable verbs – in addition to word meanings.

The many years of studying the Onondaga language in depth have been rich with the pleasure of gaining insights and making discoveries. My hope is that this book will convey to the reader the excitement, surprises, and joys that lie ahead with the study of a language as full of intricacies and puzzles as is Onondaga.

Hanni Woodbury, Ph.D., is an independent scholar who has been researching the Onondaga language since 1971.

Guest post by Carin Holroyd

Governments around the world are obsessed with the challenge of combining two essential public policy objectives: addressing global climate change and building wealth and national prosperity. The industrial growth of the past half century has caused widespread, perhaps irreparable, damage to the global ecology, ushering in an era of uncertainty and climate paranoia. But no societies have yet indicated that they are prepared to accept a sharp reduction in their standard of living in order to slow, if not reverse, the pace of environmental degradation.

In this situation, it is not surprising that the pursuit of green growth—economic expansion focused on the production and distribution of climate-saving technologies, products and services—has become an international priority. In the ideal formulation, new industries and businesses, employing thousands of people, would emerge in the environmental technology and new energy sectors with the products contributing far more to the amelioration of climate change than they would consume in energy and other resources. This is obviously attractive to national and regional governments, which seek highly skilled, highly paid work in viable, internationally engaged businesses while also providing leadership on addressing the challenges of global climate change.

In Green Japan. I explore Japan's efforts to match its climate change commitments, which were transformed by the triple disasters in March 2011 and the near collapse of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, with its desire for continued economic prosperity and employment opportunities for its citizens. Like most countries, Japan does not have an official "green growth" strategy; rather the country has made formidable investments in a variety of current and future technologies while using an array of public policy instruments to promote environmentally-sound energy and resource use within the country.

That Japan would be at the cutting edge of environmental technologies is hardly a surprise. The country adapted well to the ecological excesses of the 1950s and 1960s, bringing in dramatic improvements in air and water quality, some of the world's most aggressive recycling and environmental signaling policies, and investing heavily in futurist energy systems from nuclear fusion to a proposed "lunar ring" that would transmit power from stations on the moon to receiving units on earth. Japan has one of the world's best commuter transit systems, with large percentages of the population using subways, buses and trains on a regular basis. Japan’s interest in energy efficient appliances and forms of transportation began after the oil shocks in the 1970s. The country’s lack of its own sources of energy and its resultant dependence on Middle Eastern oil made Japan painfully aware that it needed to diversify its sources of energy, limit energy use and develop new environmental technologies as much as possible. So, Japan has been pursuing strands of a green growth strategy for decades. It is the public policy lessons from this long term pursuit of green growth that I explore in Green Japan.

Manufacturing standards and consumer awareness campaigns have encouraged and required companies to arrange for full product recycling and major improvements in energy consumption, with the country becoming a world-leader in net positive house construction (homes that produce excess power for the grid) and urban environmental design. Even municipal authorities are active on the green growth file, developing local smart energy grids and encouraging innovations in urban design that they are then marketing internationally through eco-city initiatives.

In many ways, green growth symbolizes Japan’s attempt to reconcile two often competing elements of its national culture. The country’s penchant for industrial and manufacturing innovation is well-known as is its deep cultural affinity for nature, serenity and living in harmony with the natural world, value systems that were on international display during the 2005 Aichi World Fair. The government of Japan has called for active citizen engagement, through such initiatives as the old Team Minus 6% movement which encouraged/required offices to reduce heating and air conditioning usage, and other public displays of commitment to energy conservations. Japan’s development of its new energy and environmental technology sectors has employed a range of public policy initiatives and investments. There are lessons from these public policies that are useful for other governments, like Canada’s, that are interested in pursuing green growth.

But the path forward is difficult. Japan is serious about responding to climate change and has made a concerted effort to cut CO2 emissions. But the nation’s plans took a real hit in 3/11 when it was forced to close, temporarily, its entire nuclear power system. While the Japanese public hopes that the plants will remain shut, the government feels it may have no choice but to reopen many of the nuclear facilities to keep up with consumer and industrial demand. Japan’s forward-looking investments are wildly speculative and, at times, breath-taking, but few countries in the world are looking as seriously and systematically at long-term power supplies that could wean the industrial economy away from fossil fuels.

Japan is one of the world’s leading countries in the field of green growth. They lost an early lead in solar power production to Germany and, more recently, China, but continue to produce new products like energy-saving LED lights, hybrid, electric and hydrogen-fueled cars and trucks, creative large building designs (including the world’s largest wooden skyscraper which they hope will be the foundation for an “urban forest” inside Japan’s cities), and other market-based innovations that will keep Japan’s businesses strong, create international markets for their products and generate sustained national prosperity.

The world has a great deal at stake in the comparative success of the green growth movement in Japan and other countries. If effective and viable models of industrial and employment growth emerge, producing personal and collective prosperity while improving environmental outcomes and preventing further climate change, the global impact could be significant. Failure to combine environmental sustainability and economic growth would lead to an acceleration of climate change with all of the negative and unpredictable consequences of ecological transformation.

However, all countries cannot implement full green growth strategies without sparking a competitive industrial flurry that will increase consumption and the international environmental footprint. Japan, however, being one of the first and best in the field could reap sizeable economic and employment benefits, allowing it to dominate the field of environmental technologies as it has done in such sectors as automobiles and consumer electronics. If anything, Japan’s pursuit of green growth reveals the fundamental conundrum in environmental industrial policy, in which the desire for economic prosperity and opportunity continues to clash against the reality of a planet that is approaching its ecological limits.

Carin Holroyd is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Saskatchewan.