Steve Schwinghamer🇨🇦

Today we're revealing the cuts plans for our immigration system from Budget 2025. TLDR: These aren't efficiency savings they are major services cuts and cost downloads to cities poised to wreck our immigration system. @policyalternatives.ca 1/x

bender from futurama talks to a woman in a kitchen Alt: Bender laughing at Leela, then says "oh wait you're serious let me laugh even harder."

*reading this as a historian*

Nostalgia: narrating the past via sentiment

History: narrating the past via critical analysis

Guess what we have here...

#ReadSeveralBooks

A very handsome mackerel tabby sits beside a brown basket.

#cat in basket update:

Almost?

The national infrastructure project that would really improve quality of life for so many people...

We deserve better trains

If we're about to have another 1970s oil crisis, at least Tesla has already built the Pinto 2.0 for us so we can really embrace the moment.

s/ another luxury street project to be used by a minority of residents /s

CBC just promised a look into why gas prices are going up, coming after the news.

Please allow me to summarize:

It is a day ending in y, so the US or its surrogates have started another pointless war over oil.

The only words I'm interested in hearing from Tony Blair will be delivered from the dock in The Hague.

holy shit

Ok but when has assassinating a politician in a volatile region resulting in military clashes due to existing alliances ever turned out bad

When the rest of you are writing lectures do you also put little heart emojis next to the names of historians you like? Do you have heart lockets that open up with "[Historical Figure], my beloved"? Do you use shrug emojis? Am I normal? I want to be normal.

If only we'd repair our adherence to the Jay Treaty...

In Gulf War 1, Iraq did this in Baghdad as a defensive tactic to blind coalition planes and satellites. When they did it in Kuwait we called it ‘environmental terrorism’ and documented health effects on the troops fighting in it.

When I get a time machine, I'm going back in time to the 1970s and making gas in the US at least twice a expensive, permanently.

Imagine the world...

Good chicken gravy involves a decent amount of stuffing in the drippings.

One of the most difficult things to have register / be respected in colonizing contexts:

This is not for you.

You can learn more, of course, on the museum website:

pier21.ca/research/his...

Lego facade of the office bay between sheds 21 and 22, now the front entrance of the Canadian Museum of Immigration. It must be noted that this structure did not house Canadian immigration operations - but was home to the US immigration team!

Happy Birthday, you big, weird, problematic lump of historical Canadian bureaucratic nonsense.

Closing of an internal memo of July 1926 in which the immigration department discusses the move to shed 21 as temporary.

...only on the understanding that the site was TEMPORARY, but of course immediately after it moved, along came the Great Depression, and instead of getting a better building, they hobbled along in the cargo shed for forty-three years, greeting almost a million new Canadians.

...the designation statement.

The immigration branch was pushed into a less suitable site at the insistence of the railway, which only got interested in doing anything at all at the site when it got the very favourable terms of the Railway Agreement to do so.

The imm branch moved to Pier 21...

... for his statue, and the railway wound up paying 80% of the tab to put up a tourist attraction for British visitors.

Now also the site of our national museum of immigration, it surely does embody certain aspects of immigration in the early twentieth century, but maybe not in the way meant by...

This was a commercial project, built by the railway, over the objections of the immigration branch.

Heck, this project even gave us the Nova Scotian Hotel and the old Cornwallis statue, put in place NOT because anyone in the city cared about him - demonstrably, they did not, as nobody donated...

... the Railway Agreement, 1925.

pier21.ca/research/imm...

Buddy. That ramshackle dump was slapped together with spare steel the railway could cobble up once it became interested enough to do so, likely because of the combination of the massive pork barrel in the South End (the grain elevator, a prize of a 1925 federal by-election), and the signing of...

And THAT makes its function in current public memory a lot of fun. Pier 21 is a designated national historic site in part because it is a "highly specialized building type...[and] its embodiment of the policies, procedures and attitudes of early 20th-century Canadian immigration processes."

There's lots more to say about how the immigration quarters and the larger facility got built - German POW labour, scraping up harbour defences to get free fill, and so on - but the point is that it was a hot and very unintentional mess from an immigration perspective.

Letter from CN building engineer to supt immigration, commenting that "Mr Evans, our field engineer on the work, interviewed the local officers of your Department at Halifax, but did not seem to be able to get very much information as to what should be done, and we therefore decided that it would be best to make up a layout of what seemed necessary and submit it to you for approval."

The responses of the immigration branch were so useless, CN wound up making up the layout themselves!