“….overcoming the many barriers and interest groups opposed to universal medicare was a hard-won political war waged over many years, particularly with respect to medical associations who fought tooth and nail against the prospect of a public health care system and various politicians who were ideologically in favour of maintaining a significant role for private health insurance. The melange of laws that exist across the provinces, and the Canada Health Act itself, are thus a product of the particular history and context of medicare, including political accommodations necessary to bring doctors into the public plan (for example, they are not public employees but independent contractors mostly paid on a fee-for-service basis with still relatively little governmental control over their clinical decision-making).”
“[…] critical criminology [has] a shared commitment towards understanding how class, race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of difference shape (a) catastrophic imaginaries that construct threats to security and (b) actual instances of victimization that result in the exclusion of those deemed to be vectors of risk and/or culpability. This shared commitment to critically engage with issues related to insecurity and exclusion produces alternative ways of seeing “crime” and “security” matters appropriated by the state, and opens the horizons to other ways of responding to them premised on equality and inclusion.” (Introduction, p. 2)
Halifax’s Pier 21 is a place of beginnings. Between 1928 and 1971, almost one million immigrants entered Canada at the site. This includes those who arrived when immigration was restricted during the Great Depression, those who arrived as refugees or displaced persons after the Second World War, and those who arrived in the later years of relative economic prosperity in Canada. These people began new chapters in their lives at Pier 21. As a key ocean transportation hub with good connections inland by rail, Pier 21 also served as a place of departure and return for the vast majority of Canadians serving overseas during the Second World War.
How can we talk about Leonard Cohen’s oeuvre today? How can, may or must we approach the relationship between the person and the work? With the media now all-pervasive, the distinction between public and private person has become blurred to say the least: chance encounters are shared on social media; unpublished family photos regularly appear online; there is no keeping up with the biographies; etc. This ubiquity inevitably colours every interpretation of the oeuvre and, who knows, may even have contributed to the creative process and the mise en scène of the innumerable speakers.
