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Copyright of Canadian Foreign Policy Journal (CFPJ) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research brief presents results from a scan of peer-reviewed and grey literature published from March 2020 to the end of August 2021 looking at the impacts of COVID-19 on food security in Canada. The purpose of this literature scan is to look at how the national food-security landscape has shifted due to the pandemic and to analyze what these changes mean for civil society--led food movements working on the ground to enhance food systems sustainability and equity. This brief presents key findings from the literature scan focusing on food-security policy, programming, and funding; food security for individuals, households, and vulnerable populations; and food systems. We then draw on our collective experiences as food scholars and activists to discuss the implications of these findings for food movement organizing. Here, we focus on networks, policy advocacy, and local food systems as key considerations for food movements in a changing foodsecurity landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements are at the forefront of fighting for another world as conceptualised through Arundhati Roy's portal. COVID-19 and state measures imposed to contend with it have severely impacted not only the activism of movements, but also their capacity to learn. Translocal social movement learning offers one way in which such learning can continue. This article shares reflections from participants involved in a translocal learning engagement between movement members and activist-scholars from Ghana, South Africa and Canada. It provides an important example of the kind of non-hierarchal social movement learning that can happen at a distance, when movements share, learn and support one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electoral success of populist movements in recent years has encouraged parties and politicians to incorporate populist themes increasingly into their discourse. While Canada has not been immune to these trends, populism has enjoyed relatively little electoral success in modern Canadian politics. A new People's Party fielded candidates in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections but failed to win any seats in Parliament. Some populist themes such as nativism or authoritarianism have not rewarded their proponents in Canadian elections. Another dimension, distrust of elites, politicians and the media, is more present in Canadian public opinion today, and was a part of past populist movements such as Social Credit or Reform. In this paper, we examine the structure and correlates of populist attitudes held by Canadians, utilizing data from the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies. In conclusion, we consider the potential for a populist political party or leader to enjoy electoral success in the Canada of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers issues related to Indigenous spirituality in the public sphere. More specifically it examines ways Indigenous people have actively engaged in the electronic public sphere to communicate spiritual teachings and to fulfill kinship responsibilities by utilizing their spiritual gifts to benefit their human and non-human relatives, including the environment, through social action. The author takes the Idle No More movement (INM) as an example of a grass-roots social justice movement that effectively used Facebook as a public platform to create awareness and to mobilize social action. However the spiritual foundation of such social action is often lost in the message. And all social action, including the INM movement, has to be understood in spiritual terms. In this article, the author examines the representations of Indigenous spirituality expressed in the electronic public sphere with a focus on the cultural values underlying the Idle No More Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sex worker activists in Canada identify the criminalisation of various aspects of prostitution as a major source of oppression. In an effort to improve rights and safety, two groups of sex workers brought constitutional litigation to their respective provincial courts to strike prostitution-related laws from the Criminal Code of Canada. These actions counter what might be expected based on the extant literature on the sex worker rights movement, and despite successful litigation, conditions have become more punitive. The court process brought to light many achievements and ongoing obstacles facing sex workers in Canada. Drawing on original research with activists in multiple Canadian cities, this paper examines litigation from a social movement perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries around the world have adopted neoliberal or austerity policies. Among states that fund organizations, this may have a detrimental effect on civil society. Looking at the Canadian context, this article examines whether subnational governments, provinces, step in during times of national budget cuts and changing political environments to fund organizations. We do this by analyzing the effect of critical events, regime changes, and the founding of key organizations on state funding in the province of Nova Scotia between 1960 and 2014. We do this to examine how the interaction of national and subnational political context shapes subnational funding of organizations. We find that critical events appear to be linked to increases in provincial funding, however, do not appear to be linked to cuts in funding. Regime changes and founding of key organizations have less clear-cut relationships with provincial funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of British Journal of Canadian Studies is the property of Liverpool University Press / Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Across Canada, the Raging Grannies are renowned for appearing, invited or not, in spaces not typically open to older women, with outrageous ‘Granny’ costumes and satirical songs. A movement of predominantly non-Indigenous, settler women, the Raging Grannies regularly work in diverse activist coalitions in pursuit of social and environmental justice; many are seeking to ally themselves with contemporary Indigenous movements. However, while analyses have so far focused on their highly visible and iconic activist strategies, their solidarity-building efforts remain under-examined. Based on focus groups, interviews, and participant observation carried out in 2014–2015, this paper probeswhyandhowRaging Grannies are building alliances with Indigenous movements in Canada. What emerges is an important tension. While many view their irreverent and theatrical strategies as quintessential to their ‘Granny Activism,’ such tactics were unanimously deemed inappropriate for engaging with Indigenous movements. Underpinned by reflections on their own settler histories, feelings of outrage at ongoing and state-sanctioned colonial practices, fears of inadvertently reproducing colonial relations, and a sense of interconnected futures with Canada’s First Peoples, they sought different, less-visible ways of practicing their solidarities. Many chose to attend rallies dressed in their everyday clothes, provide resources to Indigenous-led protests, invite Indigenous activists to speak at their gatherings, and work through their churches to redress past harm. Their solidarity efforts incorporated small acts, often pivoting around individual members’ personal connections. This article thus depicts the Raging Grannies as more diverse in their practices than typically recognized. It also addresses an important gap in scholarship on older women’s roles in solidarity movements. Finally, it extends existing scholarship on solidarity-building, suggesting that how solidarity is understood cannot be disconnected from how it is practiced, and thus demonstrating how solidarity can be relational, performative, and contingent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Copyright of International Journal of Canadian Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the Global North, there has been increasing analysis of the ways that alternative food initiatives (AFIs) are developing viable, place-based solutions that challenge the corporate-led industrial food system; however, there has been little study of the interrelationships among them. In an effort to better understand the possibilities for food system transformation, this paper builds on existing studies to investigate the increasing collaborations among AFIs occurring through provincial food networks in Canada. I pay particular attention to the attempts to foster and maintain these networks by exploring the history of collaboration since the late 1970s and the development of provincial networking organizations (PNOs) as central to this process. Contrary to assumptions that AFIs act in isolation, I demonstrate that they are part of actual and existing mobilizations through robust social movement networks. Together, these collaborative efforts may be illustrative of a new wave in food activism that is represented by the emergence of a multi-scaled and cross-sectoral ‘food movement’ – a network of networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the work of the Calgary Birth Control Association with a particular focus on their referral service to help Albertan women obtain abortions in Seattle. The fact that Canadian women were travelling to the United States for abortions highlights the shortcomings of the Canadian health-care system and the legal changes in the 1969 omnibus bill. Cross-border travel is also compelling evidence for the argument that reproductive rights are an international issue. More particularly, this study demonstrates the tensions that reproductive-rights activists faced in addressing the needs of individual women vs the long-term objective of changing the laws and improving accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Socialist Studies is the property of Society for Socialist Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Canada, women's rights organizations have successfully mobilized the law to foster gender equality. In doing so, they have been constrained by legal understandings of equality and discrimination, which have shaped their strategies to seek justice. In return, their mobilization, mainly through litigation, has contributed to craft or to alter legal categories (such as "substantive equality," "women," "sexual harassment," etc.), which in turn sustain their identities and their interests. However, claims made in the name of gender equality raise two issues: They tend to overlook the intersection of gender with other grounds of discrimination such as religion or race/ethnicity; and they tend to conflict with multiculturalism, a value enshrined in Canadian law. The recent decision taken by the province of Ontario to ban religious arbitration for family matters offers an illuminating case study of this tension between gender equality and religious rights in the Canadian context. This article analyzes women's rights activists' legal understandings of gender equality and religious/ethnic discrimination to explain how these representations have influenced women's mobilization against religious arbitration in Ontario. Bringing together the insights developed by critical legal studies about intersectionality and the study of legal mobilization, this articles explores through a concrete example the tension between feminism and multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing explanations of the increase in collective action surrounding victims’ rights in early 1980s Canada generally follow the precepts of political process, resource mobilization, and framing approaches in social-movements research by depicting the movement as a corollary of contemporary organizational, political, and cultural conditions. We find that the increase in activism, while certainly influenced by such factors, also required that victim-advocate groups properly manage, display, and frame the strong emotions associated with the victim experience – grief, fear, injustice, and anger – to maintain the internal integrity of the group as well as its external or public legitimacy. Our analysis contributes to social-movements analyses of how understandings of movement dynamics can be deepened by paying attention to how emotions play out in the process of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines government and advocacy group texts on three recent Canadian domestic violence policy moments. Drawing on governance, feminist poststructuralist, and social movement perspectives, it examines men's rights advocates' and feminists' discursive actions and their influence on officials. The research aim is to explore the provisional, intrinsically incomplete, and indeed questionable success, to date, of Canadian anti--domestic violence advocates' strategies and tactics of resisting men's advocates' efforts to delegitimize gendered constructions of domestic violence. At the level of political action, the article contributes to efforts by feminists internationally to safeguard protections and supports for abused women and children in a political context marked by the increasingly prominent influence of men's rights and associated antiprogressive backlash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous peoples in both Canada and the United States have engaged in numerous protests. Nevertheless, although these protests led to an ongoing national social movement in the United States, this has not been the case in Canada. This article draws on the sociological literature of social movements to explain this difference. Both cases have some key factors necessary for the formation of national social movements. These common factors include making purposeful political challenges and using noninstitutional tactics of protest. However, other necessary factors—strong leadership by social movement organizations, well-developed political networks, and the development of a strong national collective identity—are much weaker in Canada than they are in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of ‘emergent ties’ is often used to refer to the role of social networks in activating social movements. Yet pre-existing network ties were usually not a factor in initiating decisions of 50,000 draft-age American youth to migrate to Canada during the American Vietnam War. These youth often learned about the possibility of migrating to Canada through the news media and a widely distributed draft resistance manual. Once in Canada, they often became involved in networks that directed and sustained their movement activity. This suggests that the emergence and persistence of activism may often be distinct. This paper argues that a transformation process that leads to activism is often a life stage specific process, usually in late adolescence or early adulthood, whose explanation requires detailed attention to everyday behavioral activity; while the evolution and persistence of activism is often a life course persistent process that covers a longer period and involves the influence of more generically structured network ties. These patterns are demonstrated in a fuzzy set analysis (FSA) of early and longer term political activism in the lives of Americans who migrated to Toronto during the Vietnam War. We find that for both men and women, helping others was a necessary experience in transforming the resistance involved in this migration into collectively organized anti-war activism, and that a longer term tendency of the women who migrated to Canada to remain more involved than men in social movements is a product of their continuing contacts with the persons involved in their earlier activism. The results of our research underline the importance of distinguishing life stage specific and life course persistent processes in the study of social movements, and more generally that the study of social movements and the life course have much to contribute to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of judicial empowerment on social movement politics and public policy using a case study of the lesbian and gay rights movement in Canada before and after the 1982 constitutional entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The expanded role of courts in the Canadian political system has had substantial effects on public policy in the lesbian and gay rights area over a twenty-year period, putting Canada in the forefront of this area of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Deviance et Societe is the property of Medecine et Hygiene and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)