Moose Jaw’s Tunnel Vision: Mystery, History, and the Construction of “Canada’s Most Notorious City”

The Tunnels of Moose Jaw is a tourist attraction that presents an award-winning but highly problematic interpretation of Moose Jaw’s early 20th-century history. This article explains how the Tunnels of Moose Jaw constructed a successful and compelling presentation of local legends centered around the claim that “notorious” Chicago-based gangster Al Capone hid out beneath Moose Jaw during Prohibition. With scant evidence to prove this and other claims, the attraction has blurred the lines between “history” and “legend.” Unfortunately, the attraction’s focus on incorrect information has made it difficult for Moose Jaw’s residents and visitors to understand what aspects of the city’s history are truly noteworthy. This article argues that the Tunnels of Moose Jaw and its many local supporters successfully boosted the city’s economy, confidence, and reputation at a crucial turning point in the late 20th century, but did so by presenting the city and its history as something other than what it really is.

“People Drive Automobiles”: Esther Shiner, the Silent Majority, and the Popular Case for the Spadina Expressway, 1971–1987

This article examines pro-expressway politics in Metro Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on Esther Shiner, a North York housewife and later councilor who led a 16-year battle to revive the Spadina Expressway after it was canceled by premier Bill Davis in 1971. Shiner founded an advocacy group, Go Spadina, and became a beacon for what one journalist called the “Spadina revivalists”—groups of (mostly) suburbanites, inside and outside municipal government, who articulated a popular rather than a technical case for building the expressway. I argue that Shiner’s campaign was an early example of the “auto populism” now common in Toronto politics and also one expression of a much broader “silent majority” politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Although Shiner’s campaign was ultimately a failure—the expressway was never completed—her Spadina revivalism should be understood by historians as one early example of a deep and popular impulse in suburban politics.

Les premières maisons shoebox montréalaises de Rosemont et de Villeray

S'appuyant principalement sur les registres fonciers, les plans d'assurance incendie et les rôles des valeurs locatives de la ville de Montréal, cet article prend le relais d'une note de recherche publiée récemment par l'auteur dans cette revue. Le texte présente les maisons de type shoebox construites dans les quartiers Rosemont et Villeray et démontre que celles érigées à l'ouverture de ces quartiers, au début du XXe siècle, étaient principalement le fait de promettants-acquéreurs, c'est-à-dire d'individus qui, ayant obtenu des promesses de vente de la part des sociétés immobilières, ont pu ainsi mettre la main sur des lots à bâtir. Ces promesses de vente qui exigeaient un versement initial de quelques dollars pour accéder à la propriété ont permis notamment à de simples journaliers d'ériger sur leur lot de modestes et fort originales maisons. Par ailleurs, un coup d'œil sur celles construites au tournant des années 1920 dans ces mêmes quartiers démontre l'existence d'une autre catégorie de shoebox qui ne seraient plus l'apanage des plus humbles de la classe ouvrière.

(Re)mapping Akikodjiwan: Spatial Logics of Dispossession in the Settler-Colonial City

This article examines the socio-spatial reproduction of settler-colonial urbanism at a contested site of urban development in Canada’s capital city. Akikodjiwan is an Algonquin sacred site on the Ottawa River (Kichi Sibi) and the location of a large-scale private real estate development project. Using the Access to Information Act, this article demonstrates how the Canadian government—led by the National Capital Commission—orchestrated a land transfer to the developers amid long-standing calls by the Algonquins to have the land returned. This article contributes to understandings of the positioning of the settler city at the center of the spatial logic of coloniality in Canada, as a site of the deployment of socio-spatial strategies of settler-colonial governance and property relations, but also as a site of Indigenous resistance. Transpiring in a purported climate of reconciliation, the remapping of Akikodjiwan demonstrates the ongoing spatial implications and role of place making in settler-colonial city making, where racialized logics and regimes of private property are mobilized in an attempt to dispossess and exclude Indigenous peoples from their lands, alongside the simultaneous transfer of thousands of settlers onto an Algonquin sacred site.