Over the past two decades there has been a shift in Canadian education policy from a focus on education as a public good to education as a commodity, with policy language increasingly infused with the strategies of business. Branded 'Education au/in Canada', complementary immigration and education policies accommodate seamless entry, renewal, employment opportunities and finally citizenship for the best and the brightest of students abroad. Using a theoretical lens of neo-liberalism and post-colonialism, this article analyses the close intersectionality between immigration and education policy in Canada, illustrates how Canada actively recruits and maintains international students for its nation-building, and discusses the impact on the Canadian welfare state.

Canada was one of the civilizing outposts that formed part of the British plan of imperial hegemony. This liberal democratic white settler society is the context where the new female-dominated social work profession developed. Using various historical archives of the mission statements and practice of early Canadian social work, I critically examine how first-wave feminisms, hegemonic imperial discourses, and settler colonial structures of governance worked as formative factors in the birth of Canadian social work and illustrate this with the life of an early Toronto social worker, Joan Arnoldi (D.O.B. 1882).

No abstract

In a global knowledge economy, western nations compete for the best knowledge workers, while positioning English language and western education as superior. Drawing from critical theories of globalization, we argue that the international education field has become a site to maintain a neo-imperial agenda concealed by a neoliberal rhetoric of progress and economic expediency. Using Canada as a case study, we critically examine the global tactics of power and governance strategies in international education policy, as they influence and shape education and immigration policy within Canada. We illustrate how the OECD positions itself for global dominance in education and (re)produces the international education field using tactics such as rescaling, the policy cycle and ‘self-responsibilizing’ students. This process creates and maintains a global market for knowledge producers and expands the soft power of western nations.

Using the theoretical framework of epistemic injustice articulated by philosopher Miranda Fricker as an analytic tool, we analyze recent victories of Indigenous feminist activism in gathering the stories of Indigenous women, challenging dominant meta-narratives and rewriting the herstory of Canada. We use the epistemic concept of the hermeneutic gap to consider the implications of this resistance in conjunction with the increased visibility of the intersectional positionality of Indigenous women. To illustrate our analysis, we focus on two case studies. Firstly, an individual perspective through the life journey of a feminist Anishinaabe Activist, Bridgett Perrier. Secondly, we conduct a systemic analysis of the recent Report on the National Inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). We close with a discussion on how critical it is for social workers—especially non-Indigenous social workers—to relearn and document the meaning of the MMIWG issues. This includes recognizing Indigenous resistance, activism, and the newly formulated hermeneutic understandings that are emerging. Then, the final task is to apply these concepts to their practice and heed the calls to action which the report calls for.