| Introducing Inroads | |
Introducing Inroads #11 | ||
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AS WE COMMENCE THE SECOND DECADE OF INROADS, WE CONTINUE TO EXPLORE the most morally complex problem facing Canadians, namely relations between Indians and the rest of us. Jean Allard is a former Manitoba MLA who has lived with Indian politics for the last four decades. He has written a book that has yet to be published but that has circulated — in samizdat — among many people engaged by these matters. We decided it sufficiently important to get Allard’s ideas into broader circulation that we prevailed upon him to allow us to publish a major excerpt of Big Bear’s Treaty. Gordon Gibson agreed to write a foreword. JOHN RICHARDS contributes an editorial about the Charter of Rights, forced on the provinces by Trudeau, and the Magna Carta, forced on King John by his nobles nearly eight centuries earlier. For his part, Harvey Schachter decided to devote his listserv selection this year to contributions inspired by Mordecai Richler's death last summer. THE MAJOR THEME OF THIS ISSUE is the politics of cities. Andrew Sancton argues that cities are not the same thing as municipalities. To address urban issues adequately, we must understand city governance as being multilayered, involving the federal and provincial governments at least as much as municipalities. Rae Murphy surveys the history of relations between Queen's Park and the nearby Toronto City Hall, especially in the aftermath of the “Common Sense Revolution.” Like Toronto, Montreal underwent a controversial redrawing of boundaries and responsibilities. Henry Milner and Pierre Joncas examine Montreal's experience. John Richards and Nadene Rehnby provide some west coast content with a photo essay on East Vancouver. CONFLICT OVER USE OF LANGUAGE HAS historically been a major fault line in cities, both here and abroad. One theme in Milner and Joncas's article is that the campaign over Montreal's megacity brought to the surface linguistic divisions traditionally submerged in municipal politics. Phil Resnick discusses tensions between majority and minority national communities in Belgium. Charles Castonguay undertakes a thorough exploration of language use and language policy in Canada's capital region since the B&B Commission of the 1960s. John Richards explores the role of language in determining the grim history over the 20th century of Calcutta and Dhaka, the two principal cities in the Ganges delta. Kenneth McRae adds an article on Helsinki's bilingual history over the last century. Three of these articles owe their conception to a September conference of the Institute of European Studies at UBC on language policy, supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and the UBC Canadian Studies Programme. (The honorary Belgian consul in Vancouver owns Daniel, le chocolat belge, and contributed fine chocolates to the event.) WE NEXT PRESENT JEAN ALLARD'S MAJOR manuscript. Tackling the controversial subjects of treaty rights and band accountability, Allard brings a lifetime of expertise to the debate His key proposal is “updated treaty money.” ARTHUR MILNER EXPERIMENTED THIS year with the format for his roundtable. In years past, he has assembled people in the same room and got them talking. This year, he organized a discussion among senior officials from different governments — plus a few others on anti-poverty policy. He supervised and subsequently edited an e-mail exchange among them. A loss of immediacy, true; but a gain in depth and detail. IN OUR INELEGANTLY LABELED “AND MORE” category Reg Whitaker sets off discussion and debate with his thoughtful analysis of malaise in Canadian public life, the “flight from politics” by both left and right. We then briefly visit the West Coast, where in 1999 B.C. for the first time qualified as a “have not” province and received equalization transfers from Ottawa. David Bond attempts to explain the many factors responsible for this relative decline. Finally, Henry Milner reviews Jeffrey Simpson's The Friendly Dictatorship. Despite the book's merits, he finds Simpson gets a key point about electoral reform wrong. John Richards in Vancouver, Arthur Milner in Ottawa, Henry Milner in Montreal, Bob Chodos in Waterloo |
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