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

Canadian History post confederation - Essay ExampleThe threat of race suicide loomed large in the observation post of housing reformers as it did in all the social improvement campaigns of the era. It was widely believed that the deplorable health of the working class, most visibly demonstrated in the game failure rates in military medical inspections, and the large-scale infiltration of non-British immigrants would jeopardize the future of the Anglo-Saxon race. One worrying development noted by reformers was the reluctance 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 coalescence bureaucrat in Toronto, J. T. Gunn, 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 utilise extensively by social commentators to designate the peculiar social attributes that allegedly derived from the biology or culture of a particular people. In the English-Canadian case, this attitude was generally rooted in a sense of the inherent superiority of British stock and constituted a fundamental element of the social hierarchy. It reflected the ideological legacy of the mastery 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 active intervention could uplift the social and moral conditions of the broken and socially misfit or a hereditarian who envisioned that social problems originated in immutable biological traits, the re was a common opinion that the Canadian race could be bettered. neither was there disagreement that the physical, mental, and moral state of the race faced grave danger unless prompt action was taken. Early reformers isolated infectious indispositions as the of import 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 fit the overcrowded permanent homes of a foreign population -- hot beds of parasitic and communicable diseases and breed ers of vice and inequity. Such bigotry was extended to working-class British and American immigrants as