Canadian History post confederation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Canadian History post confederation - undertake ExampleThe threat of race suicide loomed large in the outlook of hold reformers as it did in all the societal improvement campaigns of the era. It was widely believed that the deplorable health of the working class, most visibly demonstrated in the advanced failure rates in military medical inspections, and the large-scale infiltration of non-British immigrants would jeopardize the future of the Anglo-Saxon race. unitary worrying development noted by reformers was the hesitancy of landlords to rent dwellings to families with children. This reluctance was commonly noted by observers of the urban scene and became particularly serious after the war with the housing shortage. It represented a concrete manifestation of the potential conflict of interest between different sections of capital -- industrialists and landlords -- over questions such as the reproduction of the workforce. As one conservative union bureaucrat in Toronto, J.T. G unn, put it blatantly in 1920, Landlords object to children, with the result that we are drifting into race suicide. Race was a loosely defined term employ extensively by well-disposed commentators to designate the peculiar social attri alonees that allegedly derived from the biology or floriculture of a particular people. In the English-Canadian case, this attitude was largely rooted in a sense of the underlying superiority of British stock and constituted a fundamental element of the social hierarchy. It reflected the ideological legacy of the oppression of French Canada and the Native peoples, the Anglo-chauvinism associated with the international hegemony of the British Empire, and the Eurocentric racism linked to colonialism and slavery. Whether one was an environmentalist who believed that industrious intervention could uplift the social and moral conditions of the indigent and socially misfit or a hereditarian who envisioned that social problems originated in immutable biological traits, there was a common opinion that the Canadian race could be bettered. uncomplete was there disagreement that the physical, mental, and moral state of the race faced grave danger unless prompt bodily process was taken. Early reformers isolated infectious diseases as the main peril because they threatened to overtake the city as a whole. A 1906 editorial in the Toronto Daily News outlined this threat to the respectable classes The Ward constitutes a constant menace to the physical and moral health of the city. It is an open sore from which flow fetid currents which cannot but be corrupting to the whole community. The metaphor of disease was widely used to depict the slum housing conditions of immigrants and the poor. Dr Charles Hodgetts, head of the Public Health and Housing section of the COC, argued that temporary shack towns on the outskirts of cities were quickly becoming the overcrowded permanent homes of a foreign population -- hot beds of parasitic and comm unicable diseases and breeders of vice and inequity. Such fanaticism was extended to working-class British and American immigrants as