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I recently listened to a recording of Lady Chatterly’s lover. Very enjoyable. Besides having many hot and spicy moments, with various people quivering in various places, there are subtle critiques of modernism’s effects on human sexuality and labour. Have we gone too far in elevating pleasures of the mind above pleasures of the body? Is this downplaying and degrading of the quality of the physical paralleled in the degraded quality of work of the modern industrial and post-industrial eras? Are we doomed to be unsatisfied in everything physical, engulfed in a fog of ideas, technology, efficiency, and stress?  I think Lawrence’s answer is clear; the toiling miners, the efficiency- and technology-obsessed mine owner, the bitter spouses are all victims of the drudgery and narrowness of the modern era.

The socialist ‘utopian goal’ is built around realizing our potential to be full human beings. What separates this ideal from its liberal roots is not only socialism’s commitment to extending this principle to all members of society, but also its insistence that the flowering of human capacities isn’t a liberation of the individual from the social, but is only achievable through the social. Ideals are always linked to some notion of justice and freedom. Notions of justice revolve around the egalitarianism of certain outcomes (like distribution of income or wealth) or the legitimacy of a process for reaching goals even if the ultimate results are unequal (equal access to opportunities). Notions of freedom generally divide into freedom from an external arbitrary authority (the state) or the freedom to participate in setting the broad parameters that frame the context of our lives (as in current liberal democracies). The socialist ideal does not exclude these other moral spaces, but locates them on the specific terrain of capacities: capitalism is unjust and undemocratic not because of this or that imperfection in relation to equality or freedom, but because at its core it involves the control by some of the use and development of the potential of others, and because the competition it fosters frustrates humanity’s capacity for liberation through the social.¹

1. ”Transcending Pessimism”, Socialist Register 2000 [↩]

Rudy Wiebe. Big Bear. Extraordinary Canadians Series. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008. pp. 208.

Rudy Wiebe’s Big Bear is the author’s contribution to John Ralston Saul’s “Extraordinary Canadians” series. Out of the fifteen biographies in the series, Big Bear is the only First Nation’s person to be profiled. This is particularly notable given that Saul’s recent book A Fair Country specifically argues for the importance of Indigenous knowledge in shaping Canada’s unique historical consciousness.

In the 200 pages of Big Bear, Wiebe tells the story of Big Bear (Mistahimaskwa), from the carefree days of his childhood until his death in 1888 following imprisonment. The first chapter opens with the striking sentence, “This story happened more than a century ago, but it is still going on” (1). With this, Wiebe immediately signals to the reader that he is challenging individualistic interpretations of history, interpretations which are colonizing insofar as they undermine indigenous interpretations of history in which the individual cannot be removed from the collective. Wiebe is thus asserting that the story of Big Bear is the story both of one man and of a whole people, of an individual and of a collective.

The majority of the book covers the time when Big Bear was the chief of his band, including the development of his political and spiritual leadership, his thoughtfulness in resisting making a treaty too rashly, his various interactions with colonial authorities, and the gross misunderstandings and misinterpretations of him by the white media. Wiebe constructs a complicated and profound character, a man with great physical and spiritual strength, derived on the one hand from having overcome smallpox as a child, and on the other from having been visited by the Great Parent of Bear during his adolescent spiritual quest.

What is most immediately striking about Wiebe’s telling of Big Bear’s life is his blending of two types of history. On the one hand, Wiebe clearly draws upon typical Western facts-and-dates history. But on the other, in his writing style and in his approach to what counts as important and what counts as valid, he is clearly drawing upon an Indigenous storytelling tradition. The latter of these two, I think, is what makes the book more interesting, and what raises the more interesting questions.

Wiebe, throughout the book, attaches great significance to Chief’s Son’s Hand, which is the main spiritual object in Big Bear’s life. It is a bundle of sacred objects, including a large bear paw, which was revealed to him by the Great Parent of Bear during his vision quest. The significance that Wiebe describes Chief’s Son’s Hand as having is spiritual in nature, but is also historical—Wiebe makes it clear that Chief’s Son’s Hand is an object of great historical importance not just because it belonged to Big Bear, who is an important historical figure, but because of its great spiritual significance in its own right. Wiebe does not trivialize or denigrate this importance. Nor does he qualify his description of the importance of Chief’s Son’s Hand:

[Great Parent of Bear] instructed [Big Bear] how to make the core of his sacred bundle. All his life, this sacred object was to be his sign that his prayer had been answered, that, under the Creator, the most powerful Spirit known to his People had come, and would come again, to help him whenever he prayed for guidance and strength, especially in war. (13)

Though Wiebe is a writer of historical fiction, his description of the powers of the sacred object is meant to be an accurate description, not fiction.

Any person writing about Indigenous peoples in Canada, and elsewhere, must be scrutinized with reference to the relationship of their work to the struggle for decolonization. Dawn Martin-Hill (2008) reminds us that, “a lot of past research has reduced Indigenous people to objects and dehumanized them to the point that they cannot recognize themselves. Today, part of Indigenous resistance is to speak and represent self, with no ‘expert’ Eurocentric analysis and authority”.¹ With this in mind, it is important to ask ‘Who is Rudy Wiebe?’ And, ‘Who benefits from his writing?’

Weibe, born in 1934, is a white male Canadian of Mennonite descent who grew up in Saskatchewan, not far from the area where Big Bear was born. He has completed formal training in theology and has been a successful fiction writer, winning a Governor General’s prize for his 1973 book The Temptations of Big Bear. Wiebe is also the co-author of Stolen Life: The Journey of Cree Woman, which traces the life of the book’s co-author, Yvonne Johnson, who is Big Bear’s granddaughter, and who served 17 years in prison for murder. In short, Wiebe is a non-Indigenous writer who is sympathetic to the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous peoples in Canada. He is also a writer with wide appeal, and who is in a position of being able to represent Indigenous peoples to a broad, mostly non-Indigenous, audience. As well, in his previous books he has worked closely with Indigenous communities, and seems to have made more than a token effort to understand historical narratives based on Indigenous knowledge.

That Wiebe is a non-Indigenous person writing in a style that attempts to make Indigenous versions of history more acceptable to a mainstream audience puts him in a delicate position. He treads the line between cultural appropriation and cultural solidarity. But, to suggest that no non-Indigenous person can or should write about indigenous subjects also seems problematic—it suggests that there is a line in the sand that cannot or should not be crossed. Wiebe’s work plays a role in encouraging contact with and understanding of Indigenous understandings of history. He embraces the complexity of the characters but also the complexity of history itself, including the complexity of combining Indigenous and Western historical methods. Wiebe is attempting to transcend the modernist dichotomy of fact versus fiction; he rejects this dichotomy because he knows that it does not exist in the intellectual tradition of the Cree, and thus it is not relevant to a telling of Big Bear’s story.

1. Dawn Martin-Hill. The Lubicon Lake Nation: Indigenous Knowledge and Power, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 47. [↩]

Citizens and Nation by Gerald Friesen is an attempt to conceptualize the Canadian nation at the end of the twentieth century in such a way as to weave together the different strands of our collective past into a unifying national story. Friesen sees a place, Canada, whose present situation as a modern, industrialized, urban nation seems so far from the experiences of indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans, and from the experiences of early settlers. And he worries about the later twentieth century intellectual trends of post-modernism, post-structuralism, which threaten to “de-mean” (eliminate the value of) or dilute any common historical myths that we have of Canada (as a northern nation, as a British-French-Aboriginal nation, as a multicultural nation, etc.). In order to overcome this quagmire Friesen attempts to meld together the idea of modes of communication and economic production as determinants of identity with enquiries into the relationships between cultural history and perceptions of time and space. I argue that in undertaking such a broad and nationalistic project, Friesen glosses over many of the schisms that have existed and do exist within Canadian society. More troubling though for Friesen’s project than this political critique is the argument that it is precisely these internal conflicts and complexities that make Canada interesting and which make a unique Canadian identity possible.

Friesen differentiates four “epochs of time-space dimensions” (224) which correlate to four dominant communications systems, which in turn, in the spirit of Innis, relate to different economic modes of production. Each of these epochs is meant to create its own type of culture, and each epoch corresponds roughly to a broad time period in the history of northern North America. What then are these four epochs? They are the oral-traditional, the textual-settler, the print-capitalist, and the screen-capitalist. Friesen believes that it is possible to synthesize these historical epochs in order to gain a better understanding of current day “Canadian public consciousness” (224). The key to this project for him is to look at the lives and experiences of ‘common people’ living during these periods. To this end, he chooses several individuals and families to serve as archetypes for different periods. For the oral-traditional society Friesen uses the documentary film Summer of the Loucheux: Portrait of a Northern Indian Family to explore the lives of the Andre family, a Gwich’in family living along the Mackenzie River in the 1980s. For the textual-settler society he relies upon the memoirs of Elizabeth Goudie, who along with her husband, a trapper, spends most of her life in the remote areas of Labrador in the early to mid 1900s, before eventually relocating into town. The print-capitalist society is shown through the memoires of Phyllis Knight, a German-Canadian immigrant who came to Canada in the late 1920s, and along with her husband struggled along in numerous low-paying wage-earning jobs. Finally, Friesen introduces Frank and Roseanne, two mid- to late-twentieth century middle-class workers, Rosie as a teacher and Frank as a mid-level employee of Imperial Oil.

In attempting to save the “citizen’s historical reflection” from the “utter instability, even unknowability, of individuals and communities,” (218) proposed by post-modernists and post-structuralists, Friesen ignores important aspects of the history of Canada and of the people who have and do live here. Specifically, I want to challenge Friesen’s portrayals of Indigenous peoples, ‘common people’ and citizens, and the State.

Friesen’s project in the first two chapters, on oral-traditional societies, is to explain how “there remains today an element in Canadian life that is Aboriginal in character” (13), despite the textual and capitalist nature of today’s society. Friesen wonders how the continuity of Indigenous culture has been maintained, and his answer is that it has been maintained through a “political determination to survive,” (47) rather than through some inherently durable quality to Indigenous cultures or worldviews. More specifically the survival of Indigenous cultures is due to their determination to communicate their political struggle to each new generation. Friesen attributes this determination to a “ sheer stubborn immovability” (47) on the part of Indigenous peoples. It seems slightly offensive to say that ‘stubbornness’ is the reason that Indigenous cultures and languages have survived through centuries of aggressive colonialist and assimilationist tactics by the French, British, and Canadian governments.

Any writing on Indigenous people in Canada should be a part of a decolonizing project. Though Friesen is clearly sympathetic to and even supportive of the Indigenous struggles for, as Haudenoshaunee scholar Taiaiake Alfred would say, peace, power, and righteousness, his approach to Indigenous history undermines what, I assume, are his good intentions. Friesen’s approach to history is not an Indigenous approach, but rather is the approach of a Western-trained academic. This becomes problematic when he tries to slot the history of Indigenous peoples in northern North America into his four-epoch theory. Though he may accurately describe an Indigenous approach to history as one that “associate[s] empirical fact with myths as inseparable parts of a single sphere and discuss[es] human and animal or plant life as elements that exist on the same plane as the dream world,” (220) Friesen nonetheless does not himself feel obliged to approach Indigenous history through this sort of Indigenous view. Thus he risks being another White outsider writing about Indigenous people from a distance, a position which places him distinctly in line with the colonial historiography of Natives in Canada.

Friesen is aware of his position when he says that his account of the survival and influence on Canadian identity of Indigenous culture is a “European-Canadian explanation.” (54) Instead of engaging with Indigenous communities and ways of being, he writes that “it is not easy to penetrate the actual workings of the aboriginal political community” (47). It is certainly easier to take his approach, which is that watching a “short, quiet film offers enough to construct a history of Aboriginal people in northern North America” (17). Winona Wheeler describes this problem well:

Conventional oral history interview methods do not meet [for example] Cree standards. Clearly there is a direct correlation between the depth and quality of knowledge a student acquires and the level of reciprocal trust and respect cultivated between the teacher and student. This is why the practice of racing into Indian country with tape recorder in hand and taking data meets with little success. This is also why historians who read interview summaries in distant offices are deaf to significant events from Indigenous perspectives. (Wheeler 201)

To get, or rather to be given, the kind of information required to tell a history that is meant to be part of a decolonizing project requires investing significant time into fostering a relationship between student and teacher (and for a university academic it also requires having the humility to become a student). And even worse for Friesen, “because Indian oral tradition blends the material, spiritual, and philosophical together into one historical entity, it would be a clear violation of the culture from which it is derived if well-meaning scholars were to try to demythologize it, in order to give it greater validity in the Western sense of historiography” (Harvey Knight qtd. in Winona Wheeler 202). Friesen acknowledges this blending, and yet in his own historiographical work does not partake of it.

Friesen frequently writes of both ‘common people’ and citizens in ways that I believe are problematic. He says that ‘common people’ are those who “feel that they are responding to events around them rather than initiating the changes” (6). This, I think, makes Friesen’s ‘common people’ different from the type of people portrayed, for example, by Zinn in A People’s History of America, or by Morton in A People’s History of England. The subjects of these ‘people’s histories’ are people who work to make changes around them but whose changes the elites of society actively try to prevent, and whose historical significance elites try to suppress.

Friesen does portray ‘common people’ as contributing to political actions, like the “thunder gusts” in the 1800s when many people struggled hard for democratic representation and responsible government, and like the political protests that Phyllis Knight participated in in the 1930s. But he portrays political actions like these, when he writes about them at all, as “comforting” (219) or even worse he construes them as intentionally contributing the building of the nation when in fact they were meant to challenge the nation as an entity controlled by elites. Put another way, political protests, like the 1838 rebellions, like the On-To-Ottawa trek, like the FTAA protests, were not shows of solidarity with the elite in the mutual project of constructing the nation. They were demands that the state, as the medium of class power, be given over by the elite in order to better serve the collective good—and not that ‘the nation’, as the locus of Canadian identity, be given over. This leads me to wonder then what, or who, Friesen means by ‘citizens’, for it is certainly true that Indigenous peoples in political struggle, radicals, labour organizers, interned Japanese, and others did not always identify with the Canadian State.

Citizenship is increasingly used as an implement of power by the Canadian state in order to differentiate those it deems (economically and politically) desirable from those it deems undesirable. Recent works by Himani Bannerji, Nandita Sharma, and others have exploded the myth of Canadian multiculturalism and have explained how citizenship policy in Canada has been used to widen class, gender, and racial divides. On a different angle, work by Engin Isin and Greg Neilsen and others has challenged the notion of citizenship as something that is bestowed by states. Rather, Isin puts forth the notion of ‘acts of citizenship’ through which “regardless of status or substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due” (Isin 2). In this way citizenship becomes something that is enacted, and that is taken, and that works in defiance of the ability of the State to privilege certain people over others. Friesen’s book, though admittedly written before the major works by these authors, does not conceive of citizenship in this way, despite claiming to “assert the creativity of every citizen, not just the powerful few” (228).

Friesen’s telling of Canadian history also glosses over the, often negative, role that the Canadian state has played, thereby supporting the status quo image of the Canadian state as benign. He makes little or no mention of the residential school system, the interning of Japanese, the exploitation of Chinese labourers to build railways, the deaths of hundreds of workers in unsafe worksites, the deportation of (often racially targeted) radicals and progressives, the unnecessary imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970, etc. If we want to be able to be proud of Canada as a nation, or as a collective then we must be able to come to terms with these events in our history in order that we might become justifiably proud. But in order to do this we must first halt the destructive actions that the Canadian state continues to support. Why is our military still killing people in Afghanistan under a mission that is not run by the UN? Why is Canada allowed to be the home base for the majority of global mining companies that wreak havoc around the world? Why does our government support the government of Israeli and punish those who do not? Why does the state hold out against signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples? And what of recent immigrants, who despite having higher levels of education find themselves working lower paying and more precarious jobs than those who were born here. Friesen claims that his book is “about today’s world. It is a history of the present” (4). He claims in his conclusion that the book is “political because it contributes to a community discussion about politics and the responsibilities of citizenship” (217). I ask, if Friesen claims that his book is a political one, and is about the day-today lives of common people, why does the book not issue a call to action for political action against the supporters of neoliberal policies that make the lives of ‘common people’, in Canada and in the rest of the world, so much worse?

Friesen positions himself as a champion of importance and impact of common people in shaping Canadian history. I do not disagree with this. But if by ‘common people’ we mean those who are passive with respect to historical forces and who make their contribution by populating the mainstream, these are hardly the people I look to as monumental figures. Those who struggle for change in anonymity, those who demand their rights rather than waiting for them to conferred, those who demand that the government be accountable to the people and not to corporations and the wealthy, these are the people who have held Canada together as a nation by refusing to let it be mediocre and repressive. Friesen “contends that a crucial strength of Canada lies in its common people” (228). I contend that a crucial strength of Canada lies in the politically aware and progressive people who work hard to convince others that they can be more than just common people.

Cited:

Friesen, Gerald. Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Isin, Engin, and Greg Nielsen. Acts of Citizenship. London: Zed Books, 2008.

Wheeler, Winona. “Reflections on the Social Relations of Indigenous Oral Histories,” in Walking a Tightrope: Indigenous Peoples and Their Representations. David McNabb, Ute Lischke editors. Wilfred Laurier Press, 2005.

From A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey (2007).

“After the implementatino of neoliberal policities in the late 1970s, the share of national [USA] income of the top 1 percent of income earners in the US soared, to reach 15 per cent (very close to its pre-Second World War share) by the end of the century. THe top 0.1 per cent of income earners in the US increased their share of the national income from 2 per cent in 1978 to over 6 per cent by 1999, while the ratio of the median compensation of workers to the salaries of CEOS increased from jus over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by 2000. Almost certainly, with the Bush administration’s tax reforms now taking effect, the concentration of income and wealth in te upper echelons of society is continuing apace because the estate tax (a tax on wealth) is being phased out and taxation on income from investments and capital gains is being diminished, while taxation on wages and salaries is maintained.” (16-17)

I saw Avatar a few days ago and I want to write a few comments about it while it is relatively fresh.

The basic plot of the movie is that in 2150 a mining company from Earth is exploiting the natural resources of a planet called Pandora, which has an indigenous population called the Na’vi. Cameron I think makes more than a token effort to understand and portray the worldview of the Na’vi (i.e. ‘indigenous’ (North American) worldviews in general),  including the significance and meaningfulness of ceremonies, a holistic view of relations with other animals (i.e. the idea of all our relations), etc.  I suppose what I mean is that Cameron seems to have at least tried (and I don’t know if he succeeds) to show how ways of being typically associated with ‘primitiveness’ are actually commensurate with and not inferior to the way of being that has developed out of Western-Europe (capitalism, separation of human and nature, ‘rationality’, ‘modernism’, etc.).

My first criticism is an obvious one, which is to ask why the Na’vi in the end need a white foreigner to lead them to victory. This white man is somehow able, in the space of three months, to absorb all of the Na’vi’s cultural values and knowledge, and to have a special connection with their planet/deity which allows him to call it to their aid where the spiritual leader of the Na’vi failed.

Also suspect I think is the way that Cameron explains the Na’vi’s special connection with their planet and the other lifeforms on it. The Na’vi have can make literal, physical, synaptic connections with other beings via some sort of nerve endings mixed in with their hair. The human scientists discover that not only can this direct synaptic connection be made between the Na’vi and other beings, but in fact a giant network of synapse-like fibres covers the planet, making it essentially a giant brain–in other words the planet it self is literally conscious. As cool as this is, my issue is that Cameron makes the deep mental/spiritual connection between Pandorians empirically verifiable in a way that gives it credence with the human scientists, and also, importantly, with the human audience in the movie theatre. I suppose my concern is that the mental/spiritual connection would be less believable or palatable to ‘movie audiences’ if it weren’t made explicitly empirically verifiable. While I do like things to be empirically verifiable, or at least I find them easier to believe if they are, I don’t believe that empiricism is necessarily the be all and end all. In terms of the Na’vi, I don’t believe that their connection with other Pandorans and Pandora itself would be any less significant or any less ‘real’ if it was not as empirically verifiable as Cameron makes it in the film. And, since the film is a thinly veiled parable for the conquest and misunderstanding (or non-understanding) of Native Americans by Europeans, my concern is that by making the spirituality of the Na’vi so empirically verifiable it undermines any possibility that the film would help viewers to understand Indigenous spirituality. From my limited experience with and understanding of indigenous ’spirituality’, its believers/followers/practitioners believe (or, indeed, know) that their connections to other beings and forces (including causal connections, e.g. influencing weather through ceremonies) are very much ‘real’, just as the Na’vi know this, but, unlike with the Na’vi, their connections cannot be simplified or distilled into a narrow empirical western-scientific explanation of the world and of events.

In my thesis I plan to study low-skill temporary foreign worker programs (TFWPs) in Canada. There are two generally well-known TFWPs in Canada, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). A third major program, introduced in 2002, is much less studied and understood. It is called the Pilot Project for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training (PPORLLFT). To put these three programs in context, in 2008 there were approximately 10,000 and 35,000 participants in the SAWP and LCP respectively. In 2005 there were less than 5,500 temporary foreign workers working under the PPORLLFT, and just three years later in 2008 this number had risen to over 66,000, an increase of over %1200. Approximately 66% of all the PORLLFT visas are in Alberta, 20% in B.C. and 5% in Ontario, reflecting a concentration in Tar Sands and Olympics related projects. My main research questions will be:

• How is the PPORLLFT, as a very broad and large scale expansion of temporary foreign workers in Canada, undermining labour standards for both permanent and temporary workers?
• What is the political narrative behind expanding TFWPs in Canada (i.e. in parliamentary and committee debates), and how does the temporarity of these programs, especially the PPORLLFT program, relate to the general trend of neoliberalization of the state and citizenship in Canada and golbally?

As of 2008, there were more than 370,000 temporary foreign workers (TFWs) living and working in Canada. This is much more than the 106,000 economic-class Permanent Residents (PRs) in Canada in 2008. Thus, while there are still many refugee and family-class PRs,  in terms of the composition of the group of people who are allowed into Canada based on their ability to work, there are far more temporary foreign workers than there are foreign workers with PR status. Though higher skilled TFWs and participants in the LCP in some cases do have a route to (PR) and Citizenship, this is very unlikely for PPORLLFT participants, and all but impossible for SAWP participants. Thus, the population of people who are working in Canada but who have no route to PR or Citizenship is increasing significantly.

There is already some scholarship on how temporary foreign worker programs in Canada fit into a larger trend of the neoliberalization of the welfare state. For example, Choudry, Hanley, Jordan, Shragge, and Stiegman (2009) combine an analysis of the development of neoliberal immigration policy in Canada with workers’ stories that they have gathered from their work as activists in the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal. The most comprehensive analysis of Canada’s low-skill TFWPs comes from a very recent article by Fudge and MacPhail (2009) who trace the history of these programs and their recent impacts from the perspective of organized labour and labour law. They argue that the lack of enforcement of federal and provincial policies intended to eliminate exploitation of foreign temporary workers creates a pool of unfree labour which has negative consequences for both those workers themselves and for labourers in general in Canada. Fudge and MacPhail appear to draw upon the analysis of Canadian immigration policy presented by Sharma (2006) who discusses the narrative behind the creation of an  ‘unfree’ group of so-called ‘migrant workers.’ Relatedly, on the concept of alternative or non-state created ideas of citizenship, Isin (2008) writes about the idea of social citizenship and how citizenship may be more realized through acts of contestation (e.g. demanding rights), rather than by being granted by a state.

Besides these more analytical and theoretical works, I anticipate that the majority of reading and analysis that I will undertake will be of government documents, including statistics, committee minutes, and pieces of legislation. Deconstructing and synthesizing these materials will lead me to an understanding of the forces and processes involved in the actions and policy making of the government.

Initially I wanted to base any research for my MA project on the “lived experiences” of people being affected by government policies, in order to ensure that my work would not be out of touch with the needs of non-academic communities. However, after discussions with different people, and for a number of reasons which I will not go into here, I am moving away from basing my research and project on community-based interviews. That being said, I still wish to make a contribution to struggles by labour and community organizers for equity and prosperity for both foreign and domestic workers and their families. The PPORLLFT is very understudied at this point, and in conversations that I have had with a few community organizers there appears to be a need to understand the forces behind the program as well as a profile of those being affected by it. A major objective of this project will be to discover who the workers are that are participating in the PPORLLFT (i.e. is there a cohesive profile of this group?) and what employers are driving the increase of low-skill temporary foreign worker permits? Since all employers wishing to participate in the PPORLLFT must apply for a Labour Market Opinion (LMO) from Human Resources And Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), I am hoping that it is possible to acquire information on LMOs in order to create a profile of this labour market.

I have removed what was posted here, the initial work that that I was doing on a paper, and replaced it with a link to the PDF of the final/full version of the paper, called:

“Low-Skill Temporary Foreign Worker Programs in Canada: Challenges to Citizenship”

I just looked in my spam folder for comments. It turns out some of them are fairly hilarious. A selection:

“Benedict, it is a great post thanks for posting it!”

“Michael, a very interesting post thanks for writing it!

“There proektik (completely Russian-speaking) on the domain. Net. All search engines normally eaten, except Yasha. Even his hands already have entered it in webmaster and any success. Perhaps this is due to the fact that domain. Net???

And, my personal favourite:

“How much money should I have saved for a cross country road trip?”