DNA and historical evidence indicate many colonial French Canadians were of Sephardic Jewish ancestry

The Spanish Inquisition in 1492 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Spanish Jews and the exile of around 150,000. The Huguenots and Acadians who settled in Colonial French Canada are assumed to be of Christian faith and ancestry. To support this hypothesis, the researcher uses a novel combination of methods drawn from historical records and artifacts, genealogies and DNA testing. In recent years, this combination of methods has led to the discovery that several of the Plymouth Colony settlers, Central Appalachian Colonial settlers, and Roanoke Colony settlers were of Sephardic Jewish origin. Thus, using the new methodology of ancestral DNA tracing, the researcher document that the majority of Huguenot and Acadian colonists in French Canada were of Sephardic Jewish ancestry. They are most likely descended from Sephardic Jews who fled to France from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1300s and early 1500s. The researcher additionally propose that some members of both groups continued to practice Judaism in the new world, thus becoming secret Jews or crypto-Jews. The researcher also finds evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry in both groups.

John Stuart Mill and the liberal idea of Canada

The writer and politician John Stuart Mill played an important role in the two greatest constitutional moments of nineteenth-century Canada: he publicly supported Lord Durham’s 1838 report on Canada and he voted for the British North American Act (1867) that formed the Dominion of Canada. Mill had a part, in his own mind an important part, in Canada’s evolution from colony to self-governing dominion. I argue that his attitude to Canada was broadly consistent across these three decades and was consistent with his principled defence of liberal imperialism. But it was complicated by Mill’s relatively low opinion of the French Canadians who, he thought, lagged behind the rest of Canada in their development. That is why Mill supported Durham’s recommendation that they be assimilated into the English-speaking mainstream. I conclude that French Canada exposed the limits of Mill’s form of liberalism, which gave priority to the ‘civilising’ imperative over cultural diversity. And it remains questionable just how capacious Millian liberalism really is in accommodating cultural diversity.

From Perceived Supervisor Social Power to Employee Commitment: Definition and Scale Development

It has been theoretically proposed that employees’ perceptions of their supervisor social power in the organization entail a potential to influence their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. However, no study has investigated such potential. This lack of research stems from the absence of a common understanding around the meaning of perceived supervisor social power (PSSP) and the absence of any validated measure. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to establish PSSP definition and to validate a five-item scale to measure this construct. Three studies encompassing four independent samples of employees from three different countries and three different languages (i.e., France, cross-sectional [Study 1, Sample 1], Canada, cross-sectional [Study 1, Sample 2: French Canada; Study 2: English Canada], Romania, two-wave data collection [Study 3]) were conducted to assess the validity of PSSP. Results showed that responses to the PSSP scale presented excellent psychometric properties (i.e., factor validity, reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity). Furthermore, the structure of the proposed five-item measure of PSSP was found to be invariant across four samples. Finally, PSSP nomological validity (i.e., integration into a nomological network) was assessed. Study 1 and Study 2 showed that PSSP was positively related to affective organizational commitment. All three studies showed that PSSP acted as a positive moderator of the relation between affective commitment to the supervisor and affective organizational commitment. Together, these studies support the psychometric soundness of the PSSP scale and presented the first evidence of its potential to influence followers. Implications of these findings for future research on supervisor social power are discussed.

Loyalty and Lobbying: French-Canadian Delegates in London, 1763–1840

This article examines the individuals who came to London in order to lobby the imperial authorities in favour of the expansion of French-Canadian rights from the 1763 Treaty of Paris to the 1840 Act of Union and who were delegated by a significant body or institution within French Canada. Early efforts were centred on the expansion of religious rights and the perpetuation of Quebec’s legal and social institutions, including French civil law and the seigneurial system. Religious affairs remained an important facet of French-Canadian lobbying throughout the British regime, though the issue of political reform, which came to the fore in the 1780s, soon came to dominate lobbying efforts. These efforts were predicated on ideas of loyalty, as delegates sought to negotiate a place within the British Empire for French Canada. They lobbied London to allow French Canadians to fully participate in civic life within the framework of British political institutions while also allowing Quebec to retain its particular religious and social institutions. Delegates experienced some success, especially when they enjoyed the support of the colonial authorities at Quebec, but often failed to achieve their goals because they ran counter to British policy or because their English-speaking opponents had greater access to Whitehall.

Constitutional Statesmanship: Lord Durham and the Creation of a New Colonial Paradigm, 1839–1841

No one is fully prescient, Durham included. His Report did not anticipate the degree to which the French Canadians would be unwilling to submerge themselves into a British whole and the role which religion would play in maintaining the distinctive society. But nor did he anticipate the willingness and ability of the two communities to work together to achieve tangible results for the new country, while the underlying racial resentment remained largely intact. Despite eruptions, occasionally violent, fuelled by that resentment, the growth of the country which he envisioned has taken place and the outcome has been beyond what he could have imagined. The full assimilation which he anticipated has not occurred, although French Canada has gradually moved in the direction of urbanization and adoption of commerce at the expense of the traditional farming orientation. The diminution of the Church influence and the increasing adoption of English as the new lingua franca of the world may yet have an impact which cannot be fully estimated. The existence of Quebec within Canada has provided much greater ability and political leverage to maintain the French language than would ever have been possible were Quebec to have existed separately, completely surrounded by the predominantly English-speaking United States and English Canada.

Global health training in Canadian family medicine residency programmes

ObjectiveCanadian family medicine (FM) residency programmes are responding to the growing demand to provide global health (GH) education to their trainees; herein, we describe the various GH activities (GHAs) offered within Canadian FM programmes.DesignA bilingual online survey was sent out to all 17 Canadian FM program directors (PDs) and/or an appointed GH representative.SettingOnline survey via QualtricsParticipantsAll 17 Canadian FM PDs and/or an appointed GH representative.ResultsThe response rate was 100% and represented 3250 first-year and second-year FM residents across English and French Canada. All schools stated that they participate in some form of GHAs. There was variation in the level of organisation, participation and types of GHAs offered. Overall, most GHAs are optional, and there is a large amount of variation in terms of resident participation. Approximately one third of programmes receive dedicated funding for their GHAs, and two thirds wish to increase the scope/variety of GHAs.ConclusionThese results suggest nationwide interest in developing a workforce trained in GH, but show great discrepancies in training, implementation and education.