At this critical time of reckoning with histories and present legacies in Canada, we come together as an emergent collaborative research team to reflect on how education and wider systems in this country have shaped our individual and collective experiences. As we affirm our practice of visiting and sharing histories from embodied perspectives and commitments in order to build relations, we find echoes in the concepts and practices of Métis and Black/African-Caribbean diasporic communities that we are in relation to. The notion of e-race-sures helps us name the gaps that our communities have experienced in the cultural imaginaries and literal making of Canada where racialized notions of belonging have enabled colonization and entitled (largely white) settlement. Beyond remediating these gaps, the notion of reclamations allows us to move past deficiencies and affirm what has always been there. This move facilitates thinking and acting accountably in relations that exceed what is underwritten by a seemingly coherent history and present story of Canada. By sharing our individual stories in places in the text, the authors name how we each come to know e-race-sures and reclamations in our own lives. But in collectivizing our stories and finding common resonances, we insist on the power of coalitional possibilities and on the need to make room for other communities and stories beyond ours.

This case study of Nova Scotia, Canada, inspects the uptake and circulation of provincial government health messaging during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, organized around the motto “stay the blazes home.” Messaging and collective narratives are analyzed by way of Norbert Elias’s “established/outsider” dynamics, especially focusing on his concepts of “group charisma” and “praise and blame gossip.” Economic realities and identity practices helped make this motto recognizable as a proffered collective call to action around themes of self-restraint rather than neoliberal risk calculation. Outsiders in this collective identity formation are understood to bring more than disease to the province but “anomic infection” itself. Furthermore, the mechanisms of reopening the province are also found in a longstanding and related collective ethos toward hospitality. Finally, the problematic post-pandemic dynamics of established group identity formation are examined.

Care and welcome are central facets of Canadian national mythology. In this paper, I analyze expressions of care in news media coverage of the arrival of Syrian refugees to the city of Winnipeg beginning in 2015. Discussions about who is deserving of care, about what kinds of care should be extended, and about the apportioning of care between refugees and Indigenous peoples all demonstrate that in this instance, discourses about care serve to normalize and perpetuate settler colonialism. Delving into these narratives, this paper develops a conceptualization of settler care, a hollow expression of care for others which serves to bolster settler dominance and to maintain the subordinated positions of refugees and Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial order. I identify two sets of narratives within settler care: settler welcome and settler worry. Each takes several different forms, but in every iteration expressions of settler care serve to normalize settler dominance. When the belonging of refugees is juxtaposed with that of Indigenous peoples, neither is afforded dominance or centrality in the settler order, and Indigenous practices of welcome and demands for justice are subordinated to the settler project. In contrast to these expressions of settler care, the final section of the paper examines anti-colonial practices of care and welcome and reflects on the possibilities and challenges of alternative relations of care.

The Toronto Raptors’ 2019 National Basketball Association (NBA) championship win, a first for the franchise and for a Canadian team, “turned hockey country into basketball nation” ( CBC Radio 2020 ). Canadians’ burgeoning embrace of the team and the sport seemed to point to a growing celebration of Blackness within the nation. However, we problematize the 2019 championship win to tell a more expansive story about how sport and national myths conceal truths about race and belonging in Canada. We explore two particular cases—the “We The North” campaign and the media coverage of Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia—to highlight the contradictory ways that the Raptors coverage mobilized symbols of the North and multiculturalism to present the team as quintessentially Canadian and rebrand basketball for Canadian audiences. We further explore how these stark contradictions manifest in the racialized policing of basketball courts in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). These cases demonstrate that the celebrations of the Raptors and basketball not only continued to police racialized bodies, but also ensured that their inclusion was contingent on the maintenance of the status quo.

This article explores how four settler narratives situate themselves differently within the reconciliation discourse in response to the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. In my reading of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Spawning Grounds (2016) and Jennifer Manuel’s The Heaviness of Things That Float (2016) alongside Doretta Lau’s “How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?” (2014) and Amy Fung’s Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being (2019), I show how these narratives express different degrees of critical reflection on the settler colonial state and differ in their acknowledgement of Indigenous resurgence. I adopt David B. MacDonald’s distinction between “liberal reconciliation,” which is based on a “shared vison of a harmonious future,” and “transformative reconciliation,” which “is about fundamentally problematizing the settler state as a colonial creation, a vector of cultural genocide, and one that continues inexorably to suppress Indigenous collective aspirations for self-determination and sovereignty” as a critical framework.

The Tragically Hip are a remarkable, indeed unique, phenomenon in Canadian popular music. Their 2016 final tour, undertaken after lead singer Gordon Downie was diagnosed with brain cancer, spectacularly reinforced longstanding perceptions of a privileged link between the band’s music and Canadian national identity. This article probes this connection, asking why deeply ambiguous and often critical references to Canada sufficed to raise The Hip to an extraordinary status as icons of Canadian nationalism. Drawing from theories of “banal” and “everyday” nationalism, it argues that, while The Hip’s work may legitimately be read as nationalist, Canada’s position as a culturally peripheral nation is the key to explaining the incongruous appropriation of the Hip’s work for nationalist self-celebration. The discourse around The Tragically Hip, then, helps to illuminate some of the ways in which nationalism works in a culturally peripheral context.

The decriminalization of cannabis in Canada has required a host of regulatory changes at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Provinces have operationalized the development of legal markets in very different ways, offering an opportunity to perform comparative analysis of business responses. This article outlines and delineates the various regulatory frameworks that have been employed at the provincial level, discusses how they have impacted the development of the legal cannabis market, and considers how they have resulted in some further regulatory changes. After reviewing coevolution as a conceptual framework, the implementation of legalization of recreational cannabis is discussed, followed by an exploration of different provincial approaches at a general level. The effects of that framework on the first phase of legal market operations are explored, with a focus on issues emanating from regulatory choices through discussions of five regions: British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick; each section exemplifying different priorities in the regulatory choices. Several themes emerge in the discussion. First, provincial approaches to retail licence approval have created severe bottlenecks, affecting consumer access to legal recreational cannabis. Additionally, the regulatory framework for those licences has resulted in a chilling effect on many potential entrepreneurs. Second, a reduction in black market sales has not yet occurred, largely due to the failure of some provinces to adequately provide retail licences and support legal distribution channels, or to operationalize the retail sales network. Third, many provinces struggled with operationalizing wholesale distribution to the retail stores, initially leading to administrative restrictions on store licences. Finally, issues of fairness and equity, effective displacement of the illegal market, government’s role as a market regulator and participant, and other issues that emerge from the critical comparison of the provincial markets are addressed.

Medical marijuana users represent many people with disabilities in Canada. Recent legislative attempts have allowed people with disabilities to access cannabis as medicine, however the landscape is ever changing. The Cannabis Act was recently introduced, legalizing marijuana for all; however, people with disabilities have not been accounted for when it comes to the issue of access to medicine. Those who rely on cannabis as medicine and those who enjoy it recreationally are now part of the same system, for better or worse. The new medical marijuana regime, under the new Cannabis Act, boasts a “two-stream” process, and it claims that it will be maintaining and improving the old medical regime alongside the new recreational regime. The applicable taxes tell a different story. Medical marijuana has always been subject to sales tax despite being effectively prescribed by doctors to manage and treat many disabilities and illnesses. Now, with the enactment of the Cannabis Act, medical marijuana is subject to an excise tax too—colloquially known as the “sin tax.” Recreational and medical marijuana are subject to the same taxation scheme, making any notion of a “two-stream” process nonsensical and blatantly unfair. The purpose of this article is to provide insight into the varying faults concerning the medical marijuana regime in Canada, with specific emphasis on the issue of taxation. In the simplest terms, taxing medical marijuana is taxing medicine and effectively taxing people with disabilities. Broken down into five parts, this article discusses the underlying reasons for the taxes surrounding medical marijuana, provides a case study of the most important tax case for medical marijuana users, scrutinizes the lack of recognition of medical marijuana as a proper prescription, outlines the ways to improve legislation, and, finally, explores a potential Charter challenge that can be effectively brought against this taxation.

A photo essay that shares the author’s 2018 exhibition, All the Flowers, and includes some personal reflections about its staging and aftermath.