No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Negotiating Public Space on Canada's Parliament Hill: Security, Protests, Parliamentary Privilege, and Public Access
Abstract
This interdisciplinary essay shows how Canadian scholarship could benefit from a greater understanding of public space on Parliament Hill and the people who organize and use the Parliamentary precinct. It argues that the values and stories Canadians create about the Hill influence key institutional actors who in turn shape events and interactions that unfold every day around the precinct. While space on the Hill is heavily regulated, the precinct acts as a public space because many of the individuals charged with its management perceive and organize it like one, and because Canadians committed to saving abandoned cats, visiting the Peace Tower, or demonstrating for social change use it like one. Nevertheless, interventions by parliamentarians as well as multi-billion-dollar renovations necessitated by the precinct's crumbling physical infrastructure threaten to reconfigure debates permanently about who can access the Hill.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
In 1969, the reform of the Criminal Code legalized contraception, abortion, and homosexual acts between consenting adults. Yet the conditions under which legal abortion was now permissible were so restrictive that the new abortion law provoked widespread discontent. One women’s liberation group, the fledging Vancouver Women’s Caucus (VWC), outlined a plan to travel to Ottawa between February and May 1970 in an Abortion Caravan to protest the new law. The caravan’s central feature was a van bearing a coffin filled with coat hangers to represent the deaths of women from botched abortions. Declassified RCMP files reveal that the Mounties were spying on the VWC and tracking the Abortion Caravan on its journey from Vancouver to Ottawa. An analysis of these files shows that the VWC, like other women’s liberation groups, was targeted for surveillance because the RCMP was extremely concerned about women’s liberation groups’ real and putative connections to left-wing organizations. Indeed, the RCMP’s approach to women’s liberation groups was a crucial component of the climate of fear of subversion so prevalent during the Cold War. However, the files also reveal that RCMP surveillance of the VWC proved to be a major challenge because of the complex gendered nature of the force’s surveillance of women’s liberation groups. Ultimately, the files point to the importance of studying the ways in which state security interests intersect with variables such as gender, class, race, and sexual orientation.
The building stones used in the Ottawa Parliament Buildings were mined from numerous quarries in Canada, United States, and several European nations. They were cut, placed and carved according to exacting procedures using the most up-to-date technology of the time. Construction of the rebuilt Centre Block, the focus of this article, was a protracted affair, interrupted by the demands of the 1914-1918 Great War. Exterior stone of the Parliament Buildings has endured the ravages of weather, fire, seismic shaking and pollution. Recently, great effort and expense have been devoted to the restoration of the masonry elements of all of the buildings to ensure the continued viability of this National Historic Site. The role of the geologist, critical in the initial evaluation and selection of the building stone, was largely ignored until recently. Building restoration of late has also restored the role of the geologist, with the requirement to understand the complex reactions of the building stone to the environment and its neighbouring masonry elements, and in the quest to find suitable replacement stone.
Labour Day became a statutory holiday in Canada in 1894, but labour days and craftsmen's parades had been summer events in several Canadian cities and towns for a number of years. Its creation as an official holiday responded to two demands: one for public recognition of organized labour and its important role, and another for release from the pressures of work in capitalist industry. It was up to unions, however, to produce the parades and shape the day's events, and this task could prove to be too much for local workers' movements with limited resources. The tension between celebration and leisure eventually undermined the original grand ideals, as wage-earners and their families began to spend Labour Day pursuing private pleasures rather than participating in a display of cultural solidarity.
This article considers the relationship between the increasingly humanized spaces of early Canada and the patches of settlement that, at Confederation, were assembled into a country. It suggests that Harold Innis correctly identified some of the essential spaces of early Canada as, in his American way, did Frederick Jackson Turner. Both, however, offer limited perspectives: Innis because his analysis ill fit the areas of agricultural settlement where most people lived, Turner because of the imprecisions of his analysis and also because, in early Canada, the bounded nature of agricultural settlement severely constricted the westward expansion on which his analysis turned. But Innis was right about staple trades in non-agricultural areas, and Turner was right that areas of recent agricultural settlement were loci of particularly rapid cultural change. Both analyses can be filled in, and that, particularly with regard to Turner, this article attempts to do. In so doing, it considers the extent to which the early rural societies in Canada, the loci of most lives, can be considered to have been ideologically liberal. It also considers the particular patterns of secondary migration in and beyond bounded settlements, and their relationship to the construction and maintenance of social and cultural difference. Overall, the article suggests that the receptacles within which countries develop are important, that the Canadian and American receptacles were strikingly different, and that the spaces of early Canadian life have their continuing legacies in an ongoing engagement with sparsely settled land and with very different ways of being.
In response to the rebellion losses bill controversy of 1849, Upper Canadians mounted a series of political demonstrations and spectacles. Opponents of the bill (and of the governor who gave it royal assent) took to the streets in displays of 'muscular conservatism' where sheer numbers and undertones of violence associated with effigy burnings and rioting gave weight to their opposition. In response, Reform government supporters joined the fray, engaging in emotional and physical outbursts that strayed from the etiquette of deliberative democracy. Government supporters also staged welcome ceremonies - vice-regal displays - when Governor Elgin toured the province to reveal popular support for his actions and the principle of responsible government. The article examines the wide range of performative strategies deployed across the province as Upper Canadians grappled with a divisive issue. It argues that deliberative democracy built a public, but so too did muscular conservatism and monarchical display.
Public space has been unwisely neglected by the student of the modern city. This paper argues that in nineteenth-century Canada it was a significant symbol valued by the whole population, and examines the process of negotiation by which contending interests in Toronto sought to secure their rights to its use and enjoyment. In the ongoing disputation over control and appropriate uses of the street, the most important public space during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the social significance of public space and its geography are clarified.
Since 1958, the Canadian government has used the celebration of 1 July to promote particular models of national identity and to foster national unity. Commemorating the anniversary of Confederation, these Dominion Day and Canada Day (as renamed in 1982) observances changed over the decades to reflect changing government public policy objectives and new conceptions of the nation. From a celebration rooted in military pageantry stressing Canada's British heritage, these events were modified to promote a vision of a multicultural, bilingual country with a strong Aboriginal component. Moreover, Canada Day messages increasingly stressed the themes of individual achievement and respect for diversity. Although politicians played roles in determining the form and content of these events, and public response influenced which components were maintained, bureaucrats working in the Secretary of State department exercised a particularly strong influence on these celebrations, providing institutional continuity and expertise to planning efforts. These celebrations provide a key window into understanding the Canadian government's evolving cultural and national identity policies in the post–Second World War era.
Recent United States Supreme Court decisions concerning protest outside health clinics that provide abortions, coupled with a new wave of “aggressive panhandling” ordinances being adopted by American cities, indicate that Courts and lawmakers are creating a new model of citizenship. This model is marked by a radical individualism and extreme libertarianism based on transformed property relations. Courts are finding that individuals have an innate “right to be left alone” in public space – a strong departure from early jurisprudence which restricted that right to be left alone to private property. These recent decisions and laws suggest the development of a model of citizenship quite at odds with the cosmopolitan, associational citizenship theorized and promoted by many political theorists.
Officers of Parliament were a little noticed feature of Canada's cabinet parliamentary system until the privacy commissioner was forced to resign in June 2003. This article analyses the past, present and future of these institutions, which were created to assist Parliament in holding responsible ministers and the bureaucracy accountable and to protect certain rights of individual Canadians. The fundamental issue is how to balance these offices' independence from both the executive and Parliament with an appropriate measure of accountability for their performance. The article examines five structural features that determine the nature of these interactions and suggests that there needs to be greater clarity in these relationships. The primary relationship in terms of responsibility and accountability of officers of Parliament should be with Parliament. Reforms are recommended to recognize and to reinforce the primacy of that relationship.
Ottawa's Confederation Square was initially planned to be a civic plaza to balance the nearby federal presence of Parliament Hill. A century of federal planning, with the direct involvement of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, repositioned it as a national space in the City Beautiful style. Recent renovations have improved its pedestrian amenity and restored much of the original plan by French urban designer Jacques Gréber. The square contains the National War Memorial and the National Arts Centre, yet is a weak public space due to weak edge definition, animation, and spatial enclosure. The war memorial design was selected in a 1925 international competition won by Britain's Vernon March. The Great War monument was not installed until the 1939 Royal visit, and Mackenzie King intended that the re-planning of the capital would be the World War II memorial. However, the symbolic meaning of the Great War monument gradually expanded to become the place of remembrance for all Canadian war sacrifices. The National War Memorial is more successful as a symbolic object than Confederation Square is as a public space, yet both have evolved into important elements of the Canadian capital's national identity.