Jill L. Grant, Leifka Vissers and James Haney
pp. 3–14
Record
Abstract
In 1912 Nova Scotia was the second province in Canada to adopt a town planning act. Just three years later, the province substantially revised its act under the guidance of Thomas Adams, town planning advisor for the Commission of Conservation. The article examines the context within which Nova Scotia adopted and then overhauled its early planning legislation. While Canadian planning history generally credits Adams with rewriting the legislation, the article documents the mechanisms through which key local actors drove provincial policy. Changes to provincial legislation in Nova Scotia in 1915 reflected the confluence of national interests, international town planning expertise, and local reform agendas.
Jack I. Little
pp. 15–27
Record
Abstract
Although it was largely ignored in the late eighteenth century, Quebec City figured prominently on the North American circuit of British travel writers in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, when the obligatory description of the view from and of Cape Diamond served as a metaphor for imperial expansion. From this perspective, Quebec was not only the site where Wolfe had won his great battle against the French in 1759, it was also a military stronghold and gateway to an empire that stretched to the Pacific Ocean. The story told by American travel narratives and tourist guidebooks was rather different. They tended to see Quebec as unprogressive and of interest primarily because of its antiquity—an image that local tourism promoters turned to the city’s advantage as its population growth stalled in the later nineteenth century. With the arrival of the railways and the growing reliance on tourism as an industry, Quebec City’s image reverted to an early stage of the historical progress narrative, becoming frozen in a mythical past as a picturesque fragment of medieval Europe.
J. William Brennan
pp. 29–44
Record
Abstract
Little has been written about Depression-era municipal politics in Canada. This article considers Regina’s experience by examining the turbulent career of its most successful populist politician, Cornelius Rink. He was twice elected mayor (in 1933 and 1934) on the strength of his appeal among Regina’s immigrant and working-class voters. Then in 1935, in the aftermath of the On-to-Ottawa Trekkers’ sojourn in the city and a riot there on 1 July, social democrats and trade unionists with an attractive platform and a more effective organization managed to unseat Rink with the votes of many of those same immigrant and working-class Reginans. Cornelius Rink was Regina’s first populist mayor, but as it turned out he would be its only one.
