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In 1971, following a protracted and tumultuous debate, the Toronto Board of Education formally abolished the use of corporal punishment in its schools – the first Ontario board to do so. Corporal punishment continued to be employed elsewhere in Ontario and throughout Canada well into the 1980s, and the use of physical discipline was prohibited in all Canadian schools only in 2004, following a ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada. Why did educators and legislators defend corporal punishment for so long, and why did the tide turn in the last part of the twentieth century? Concentrating on legal and political dynamics, this article explores the ways in which the Toronto Board of Education grappled with the issue of corporal punishment in the three decades before its abolition. It seeks to situate the story of Toronto's approach to school discipline on the broader social landscape on which the battle over corporal punishment was conducted. It concludes that the particular configuration of the Toronto Board of Education following trustee elections in 1969 strongly affected the shape and outcome of the corporal punishment debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Canadian cities dealt with a growing housing shortage while the federal and provincial governments argued over who would implement the provisions of the 1944 National Housing Act. This was particularly true in Toronto. As Torontonians celebrated the construction of Regent Park, Canada's "Premier Slum Clearance and Public Housing Project," nearly 1,350 Toronto families were housed in dilapidated old army barracks and staff houses. Until Regent Park, the shelters were Toronto's only rent-geared-to-income housing project. This article challenges the assumptions that Toronto's homeless were "shiftless welfare bums" and examines the strategies shelter residents used to survive the often brutal conditions in which they lived and how they hoped to escape them. Finally, it argues that the inability of municipalities to replace emergency shelters with decent affordable housing reveals the long-standing reluctance of Canadian governments to develop social-housing programs to eliminate homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]