Citizenship lies at
the heart of the liberal state and forms of political modernity.
Defined variously as a relational practice, a set of personal rights
and obligations, or as a cultural idiom unique to particular societies,
citizenship is to a greater or lesser degree always "fluid,
plastic, and internally contested" (Brubaker, 1992, p. 13;
on citizenship see also T. H. Marshall & T. Bottomore, (1992).
Its analysis offers an opening to modern approaches to power and
social control, to forms of modern nations and nationalities; conceptually,
idioms of citizenship are deeply implicated in most debates of public
policy in the liberal state. And, as Contesting Canadian Citizenship
discloses, such has been the case since the beginning of modern
Canadian history.
The various and diverse
chapters contained in Contesting Canadian Citizenship tell
us about how modernist discourses of class, gender, race and discursive
idioms of human pathology have shaped how Canadians have imagined
each other. Such discourse furnished the theory upon which forms
of unequal citizenship have been cast, institutional life has been
ordered, and relations of power and vulnerability have been forged.
For some citizenship promised power and opportunity, full citizenship
within the liberal state; for others liberal discourse on citizenship
led to non-citizenship, shame, subordination, incarceration, even
sterilization.
The readings open with
a nicely tailored introduction to the contemporary debate and varied
usages of citizenship as a practical - and almost always contested
- political and social idiom. Here the Canadian debate is effectively
placed within the context of a broader international literature.
Janine Brodie's contribution to the introduction "Three Stories
of Canadian Citizenship" focuses on three approaches to the
development of citizenship in Canada: the legal, rights based and
governance approaches. Under these headings Brodie moves from an
account of the juridical nature of Canadian citizenship, to a discussion
of the evolution of Canadian citizenship within a critical appraised
account of T.H. Marshall's seminal theorization of citizenship,
to a historical survey of citizenship under the general rubric of
governance.
Beyond the introduction,
Contesting Canadian Citizenship has five sections. "Constituting
the Canadian Citizen" contains essays by Veronica Strong-Boag
on the debate around citizenship central to the Canadian Franchise
Act of 1885. Gender, race, and class are illuminated as central
features of the construction of citizenship within the Canadian
liberal state. Ronald Rubin tackles citizenship in the evolving
cultural politics of Quebec sovereignty, while Claude Denis provides
a thoughtful and provocative account of the Hobson's choice at the
heart of the history of indigenous citizenship in Canada.
Under the heading "Domesticity,
Industry and Nationhood" Sean Purdy relates a fascinating story
of the implication of idioms of citizenship within debates over
housing policy, while Jennifer Stephen considers industrial citizenship
within the context of an account of employment, industrial relations
and the creation of an efficient labour force during the era of
crisis and reconstruction from 1916-1921. Deyse Baillargeon employs
data from interviews with Francophone women in Montreal to provide
a contextually specific glimpse into how women in Quebec, who possessed
only a partial juridical citizenship, nevertheless made an important
contribution to the maintenance of social stability during the Great
Depression. Finally, Shirley Tillotson takes up the question of
citizenship and leisure rights in mid-twentieth century Canada.
In a nicely theorized account of the development of leisure rights
sensitive to the implications of class, gender, race and rurality,
Tillotson makes the argument that the imperatives of a moral economy
of democratic citizenship in which the right to the prerequisites
of health and culture led the liberal state to provide all Canadians
not just the elite with access to leisure in the form of statutory
and paid holidays and recreational programs.
Education has always
been central to the Canadian debate on citizenship. This theme is
treated at length under the heading "Pedagogies of Belonging
and Exclusion". Lorna R. McLean links the literature of class
and masculinity with emerging forms of Canadian citizenship through
an account of the adult education program of Frontier College. Katherine
Arnup provides an illuminating account of the links between modernist
discourses implicating motherhood with the manufacture of citizens.
Here experts in child development — typically, members of the
medical profession — cast a shaft of enlightenment on the benighted
mothers — especially those of non-Anglo-Canadian stock —
of future citizens of the country. Mary Louise Adams relates how
the construction of citizenship was — and remains — implicated
in the definition and policing of sexual identity and an orthodox
sexuality. Bernice Moreau provides an account of the junction of
race and citizenship in Nova Scotia. Here the shameful story of
how Black Nova Scotians struggled to gain educational rights and
civic equality against a state and civil society that denied them
full citizenship is related.
Finally, four chapters
address the theme of "Boundaries of Citizenship". Here,
Robert Adamoski relates the passage of children as wards of the
state to productive citizenship. Adamoski argues that the philanthropic
and child rescue movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century
dealt with their charges within the class, gender and racial expectations
of the time. Working class girls and boys would become solid working
class citizens; only through assimilation could Aboriginal children
enter the ranks of citizenship. Joan Sangster discusses the rescue
of delinquents for the liberal state. In a chapter that considers
developments from 1920-1965, Sangster provides illustrations and
analysis of the changing — and unchanging — strategies
used by the state and social experts to re-create model citizens.
Dorothy E. Chunn deals with race, sex and citizenship through an
examination how the criminal law in British Columbia was employed
normatively to disseminate and sustain dominant conceptions of appropriate
and inappropriate sexual and social relations. Her account illustrates
how law worked to reinforce hierarchical social relations within
the new settler society of British Columbia. Robert Menzies relates
the story of mental hygiene and citizenship in British Columbia
during the formative 1920s, an era in which the long shadow of eugenics
discourse threatened dire consequences for those who for any number
of reasons were deemed unworthy of citizenship. He develops a useful
historical context for his account: relating how developments elsewhere
— from Ontario to Britain, Alberta to California — shaped
the course of the debate in British Columbia, and contributed to
the shaping of social policy for some of Canada's most vulnerable
citizens.
This is a very useful
publication. It brings together a diverse body of literature that
speaks to the complex and evolving ideological core of the Canadian
liberal state: citizenship and prose rendered with a minimum of
jargon. Of course, each reader of this book will find some chapters
more literate, interesting and useful than others. Such is to be
expected in a volume containing seventeen chapters and almost as
many authors.
References
Brubaker, R. (1992).
Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, London:
Harvard University Press.
Marshall, T.H. &
Bottomore, T. (1992). Citizenship and Social Class. London:
Pluto Press.