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In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued a landmark ruling in First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada v. Canada finding that the government of Canada was racially and ethnically discriminating against First Nations children and their families in its funding and delivery of child welfare services to them. This ruling did not result from an isolated legal case; it was the result of litigation that was part of a broader social campaign with active supporters from all over the world. The litigation was driven by, and supported, a dynamic movement for sovereignty for First Nations Peoples around child welfare. This article examines the Caring Society case through the lens of movement lawyering—using the law to bring about transformative social change. Section 2 examines movement lawyering as an approach to lawyering. Movement lawyering involves a range of practices, advocacy and mobilizing that seek to dismantle architectures of subordination. Section 3 provides an overview of the Caring Society litigation and the social campaign within which the case was litigated. The I am a Witness campaign, a dynamic education and grassroots social campaign that engaged Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and sought to make the litigation accessible to the public, is examined in detail. Section 4 analyses Caring Society as a study of movement lawyering. It examines how three elements of movement lawyering; integrated advocacy; accountability to social movements; and willingness to address the root causes of structural oppression were at play in the litigation and related campaigns. In conclusion, the authors contend that Caring Society and the I am a Witness campaign constitute a successful example of movement lawyering as they properly recognize litigation, and the role of lawyers, as one piece of the mosaic of efforts needed to advance transformative social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of global 1968 protest movements in Canadian politics. Topics include the impact of social movements on Canadian historiography, the role of indigenous history and historiography within Canadian history, and political responses to 1960s protest movements in Canada in relation to austerity and neoliberalism.

Social work has engaged with and led the revolutionary social movements of the past century. Yet today, as activism by and for racial others unfolds across the United States and Canada, our discipline remains largely silent. This article considers new ways for social workers to conceptualize social work activism, challenge the existing erasures within the profession, and construct innovative strategies to locate social work within the critical social movements of our time. Recognizing the continuity of histories of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, the author argues that social workers must engage with racialized communities' resistance through their legacy of exclusion and displacement. The author demonstrates the significance of an evolving politics of race and social justice for social work practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Canadian government announced its decision to close six federal prison farms. Although the programme only impacted about 300 prisoners, the decision sparked the creation of a social movement dedicated to fighting to keep the farms operational, and the closures became a sizeable news story in Canada. We argue that actors on both sides of the farm closure issue used it as fuel for staging and capitalizing on a political penal drama. Our findings suggest conservatives do not have a monopoly over using penal dramas to achieve political and social aims and that penal dramas can be extremely productive--well beyond debates over prisoners and prisons. Thus, penal dramas help us capture the nuanced orientation of a particular penal field, which cannot be understood apart from its cast of interested actors or the national, state/provincial or local contexts in which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to the gender and federalism debate, this article explores how characteristics and historical legacies of the Canadian and U.S. federations shape women’s activism. Following discussion of three positions gender scholars and activists hold regarding federalism, their shared view that federalism is gendered is explored. Reversing the causal arrow to compare how organized women circumvent or change obstructive federal arrangements, the text uses abortion rights campaigning to illustrate. It shows that the weaker pan-Canadian women’s movement succeeded in effecting constitutional and judicial change because of a favorable division of powers and preoccupation with Quebec. But a negative historical legacy and division of powers, counter-movements and partisan polarization limited the stronger U.S. movement to circumvention strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many social movement researchers question the usefulness of political opportunity as a concept. However, others argue that it can be refined by disaggregating different opportunities for actors and outcomes to understand the underlying mechanisms that influence each. This research extends this analysis by asking "political opportunity for whom?" Looking at Canadian Aboriginal mobilization, it assesses how different opportunities influence a broad range of movement actors and organizations. Using data from a 50-year period it assesses how contemporaneous, lagged and change regression modeling of opportunities affect results. The article finds that structural opportunities around resources robustly influence a wide range of mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]