Browse "Communities & Sociology"

Migration is a unique experience for a child and Canada receives child migrants from all over the world. Some children come as unaccompanied minors and claim refugee status, some come alone and wait to be reunited with their families, while others are international adoptees by Canadian families.

At times, the surroundings must seem grim. The white walls are devoid of decoration, except for a home-made Valentine addressed to "Maman" on the refrigerator, and twin beds are pushed together in the dining-room to create more space.

IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT and we're cruising slowly along the potholed road that leads to Svay Pak, Phnom Penh's infamous brothel district. It's very dark - there are no street lamps and the only light comes from flickering candles set in small Buddhist shrines on the roadside.

The Children of Peace. A religious sect active in the area of Sharon (known as Hope until the 1860s but from the 1840s mainly as Sharon), south of Lake Simcoe, Ont, from the second to the ninth decade of the 19th century.

Chinese Canadians are one of the largest ethnic groups in the country. In the 2016 census, 1.8 million people reported being of Chinese origin. Despite their importance to the Canadian economy, including the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), many European Canadians were historically hostile to Chinese immigration. A prohibitive head tax restricted Chinese immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1923. From 1923 to 1947, the Chinese were excluded altogether from immigrating to Canada.

Since 1900, Chinese Canadians have settled primarily in urban areas, particularly in Vancouver and Toronto. They have contributed to every aspect of Canadian society, from literature to sports, politics to civil rights, film to music, business to philanthropy, and education to religion.

Force 136 was a branch of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. Its covert missions were based in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, where orders were to support and train local resistance movements to sabotage Japanese supply lines and equipment. While Force 136 recruited mostly Southeast Asians, it also recruited about 150 Chinese Canadians . It was thought that Chinese Canadians would blend in with local populations and speak local languages. Earlier in the war, many of these men had volunteered their services to Canada but were either turned away or recruited and sidelined. Force 136 became an opportunity for Chinese Canadian men to demonstrate their courage and skills and especially their loyalty to Canada.

The Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival or the Lunar New Year, is celebrated in Canada and several other countries. One of the largest celebrations for Canada’s Chinese population (consisting of more than 1.3 million people located mainly in Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal), it is also celebrated by Canadians from Vietnam, Korea and Southeast Asia. Although it is not a statutory holiday in Canada, many Chinese businesses are closed or have reduced hours for the occasion. Since 1 June 2016, this celebration has been recognized as an official holiday in Canada.

Chinook Jargon or Chinook Wawa — wawa meaning "talk" — is a pidgin language that was prevalent in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest in the 1800s and early 1900s. Its small vocabulary and simplified grammar and sound system made it ideal for communication between diverse communities, especially those engaged in trade. The language is based on Lower Chinook, Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), French, ​English, with some contributions from Salishan, and other ​Indigenous languages. It is estimated that approximately 100,000 people could speak Chinook Wawa in 1875, and it was used widely in court testimony, newspaper advertising, missionary activity among Indigenous peoples, and everyday conversation from central British Columbia to northern California.

Christian Science, a religion founded upon the applied principles of "primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing," and practised by members of The First Church of Christ, Scientist.

​Christianity is a major world religion, and the religion of some 80 per cent of Canadians. Believers hold that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in the first century AD, as presented in the Bible and in the Christian tradition, are central to their understanding of who they are and how they should live.

Of all Christmas music Handel's Messiah has been the major work most frequently performed during the Christmas season across Canada.

Christmas is celebrated in various ways in contemporary Canada. In particular, it draws form the French, British and American traditions. Since the beginning of the 20th century, it had become the biggest annual celebration and had begun to take on the form that we recognize today.

Church choir schools. Institutions set up to train young musicians in the literature and performance of church music and to enable them, through the presentation of such music, to worship in a manner at once spiritual and artistic.

In the 17th century, religious silver was brought to the colonies by missionaries, or sent from patrons in France. The Huron of Lorette, Qué, have an important French reliquary presented to the mission in 1679 and a monstrance of 1664 that originally belonged to the Jesuits.

Some historians have noted that the City Beautiful Movement in Canada was hampered by the lack of an integrated philosophy and the absence of an articulate national spokesperson. However, the amateur side of the movement was lively and active on the local scene.

The Civic Holiday is a holiday observed in most provinces and territories on the first Monday of August.

Clan has been used to designate social groups whose members trace descent from either male or female ancestors. For the Indigenous people in Canada, the term has been used most often to designate groups based on unilineal descent. This means that a person belongs to the clan of either parent.

Co-operative marketing organizations began to appear in British North America in the 1840s when British labourers attempted unsuccessfully to start stores similar to those common in Britain. The first stable store, or society, was developed in 1861 in Stellarton, NS.

As the social evils of industrialization and urbanization unfolded in the later 19th century, many Canadians saw the basic problem as an excess of individualism.

Unique to French-speaking Canada, the collège classique (classical college) has over the centuries prepared Québec's social and intellectual elite for higher education. The first classical college was COLLÈGE DES JÉSUITES, established in New France by Jesuit missionaries in 1635.