March 19th 2025,

For Canadian History we had to rewind time a bit back to 1945. There was a conference called to discuss the oncoming peacetime economy because everyone was scared of another depression. The Green Book proposed comprehensive national programs to help during economic downturn. Provinces would get grants from the treasury to make up for any lost revenue of them pulling out of the provincial income tax. Have-not provinces were in favour of this, Tommy Douglas was disappointed due to the per capita basis of the new programs rather than them being fiscally based. Duplessis of Quebec was concerned over autonomy. In the end talks collapse. Throughout the 60s a bunch of legislation was passed, here’s a list of them as thats how they were spoken about in class: old age security and old age assistance (1951), hospital insurance and diagnostic (1957), Canadian Pension Plan (1965), Medicare (1966), Guaranteed income supplement (1966), and Canada Assistance Act (1966). It was emphasized that this was not some great socialist design, but it was a way to try and take the stigma away from relief.

Then he talked about Tommy Douglas, if you know who he is let me know what you think. In 1947 Saskatchewan, the hospital insurance act was passed. It was compulsory and popular but expensive. BC would jump on board under W. A. C Bennett, who championed it at the national level to relive pressure on the province. Liberal Ottawa drags its feet until 1957 because a guy named Frost (Ontario premier) gets on board. Actually 9 out of 10 premiers pushed for national healthcare. A guy named Paul Martin threatened to leave the cabinet if the Liberals did not get behind , so the Hospital insurance and diagnostics services act (or whatever) was passed. This meant costs between the provinces and federal government would be shared 50-50. Hospital care is covered (not for mental health facilities, long-term nursing homes, or tuberculosis sanatoriums) and would be available to all citizens, but there were still regional disparities since there were more doctors in Ontario, BC, and Alberta (income was higher); the dental gaps were even bigger. Private insurance would cover pharmacies, mental health, etc.

In 1961 Diefenbaker stablished the royal commission on health services; in 1962 Saskatchewan pushes through Medicare, but when they did a bunch of doctors went on strike! In 1966 Pearson passes the act, there are disputes over costs but that doesn’t matter because it became law in 1968. Physicians wanted to keep fees and work in their own offices rather than in a medical service unit. I do not know. How to feel about this, my mediate knee jerk reaction was anger, but maybe they had good reasons for being against free healthcare? Maybe I just grew up with nationalized healthcare so I cannot fathom going without it and what the benefits are. Anyway, in 1970 all provinces sign on to cost sharing regarding healthcare. The 1979-80 time period is interesting as Joe Clark, the new PM, appoints Emmett Hall to report on the state of the health system. This was prompted due to fear over universality being in jeopardy because of doctor’s billing and hospital fees. In July 1980 the report was submitted to Trudeau Senior and it found that Canadians wanted universal healthcare to stay and user fees should be phased out as well as extra billing. The minister of health and welfare moves to bing in the Canadian Health Act, where the provinces get full payment as long as they get rid of extra billing, doctors would still work around this anyway. How? I do not know.

French Revolution class started with the new calendar. The main goal was to make time-keeping a public utility and to be as rational as possible. So time was measured the same way the metric system is used, in increments of 10 and 100. So the revolutionary clock was 10 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour. You can imagine that this did not land well with workers. We were then shown a clip from the movie Danton (1983), a Polish movie that was made during the “solidarity movement” era when the USSR was declining. It is very pro-Danton, someone who had a lot of issues according to my professor. Anyway, we were shown this because she was talking about how there were power struggles in the spring of 1794 between Robespierre and Danton.

The Great Terror (June-July 1794) was when Paris prisons were emptied of remaining suspects around the time Robespierre was planing his Festival of the Supreme Being. The verdict for these suspects was either acquittal or death, accused were denied the right to defence. The irony here (as she states) is that the supposed grounds for Terror (foreign and domestic threats) were already under control at this time, so when will the terrors state return to constitutional rule? Anyway, Festivals were used to reinforce the re-making of time and space,such ass with the Supreme being one mentioned. This festival was called Robespierre’s cult of civic virtue, it was to supplant Christianity and inculcate civic virtue. Because the Thermidorian thing is going to be discussed in our next class she told us that Lenin lived in perpetual fear of a Russian version. My thought was, he was right to feel that way considering he was nearly killed! But whatever. Let’s go to my next class.

For political science we focused on protests from Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang. So Hu Jintao was considered a relatively weak general secretary, Deng’s sudden journey sought to renovate the Chinese Political Economy. Zemin privatized state owned enterprises and state owed apartments, encouraging market activities. This had a negative effect on society and the people. Jintao tries to reduce accelerating marketization by introducing the new socialist countryside. This reduced the gap between the rural and urban spheres. The agriculture tax was abolished and healthcare was brought in. 1989 stability saw the outsourcing of surveillance systems; stronger courts and rule of law; growing trust in the courts, independence of court is limited if they challenge the party state. Growing trust meant people use the courts to wage demands, and the court can make decisions against party members (but not Xi Jinping). This also reduced the dictators dilemma.

When talking about the hegemony of the party-state my professor said that Marxists stated capitalism would collapse, but this did not happen so they were embarrassed and tried to figure out why, thus Gramsci came up with hegemony. Now we moved on to rightful resistance and looked at multiple protests. The first was a labour protest of SOE workers. Their grievances were about lost livelihood and desperation because privatization expelled workers and closed factories, meaning no pensions. First there were petitions and then it got disruptive, to the point where managers were kidnapped. Then we talked about Migrant worker protests which were against hukou “apartheid” (I put that in quotations, when hukou is mentioned in class it is legitimately referred to as a form of apartheid). Workers demanded unpaid/delayed wages and overtime alongside rights-based demands and strikes. Economic rights were granted and Chinese authority make arbitration more difficult. Peasants had an anti-tax protest during the reform era and the 90s. More revenue was going to the central government and thus the local governments would tax the peasants. Resistance would lead the abolition of the agriculture tax, which was apparently 2000 years old.

We ended the class with the middle class protests and the maybe emergence of state-society relations. The middle class protests failed to become a true social movement. The protesters consisted of property owners, similar to NIMBYs, and the protesters consisted themselves were value-driven. They had very well written pamphlets which showed off their knowledge and connections, aka Cultural Capital. Environmental protests were placed under his umbrella of “middle class protests”, these focused on green area protection, parks, and gentrification; peasants focused on brown issues like pollution. The state responds by placing responsibility on local governments. The state regulates society by rule by law, now protests are seen as routine (there were waves during Covid but they failed to reach the national level). Are protests shaping a new state-society relationship? Maybe, but it probably wont change the state. Will they face extreme repression from the state? Probably not. He ended the class by telling us to keep balance and be critical of western views on China.