This is a comprehensive primary reference to a rich and often neglected storehouse of information on Canada's educational background. As the boundary between full-fledged royal commissions and other official governmental inquiries is not always clear -- and many legislative committee inquiries and special department of education investigations have been as significant in educational development as regular commissions -- Goulson has included all major ministerial-level governmental inquiries in Canadian education between 1787 and 1978. More than 300 inquiries are included, among them general, special interest, judicial, legislative, parliamentary, and other governmental committees. The information provided for each includes the type of commission or committee, its size, chairman, purpose, dates of appointment and reporting, and primary source references, as well as a selection of its major conclusions and/or recommendations. Official governmental records and documents including the Reports themselves, Legislative Journals, House Debates and Hansard, Sessional Papers, Statutes, and Department of Education records were used as the resource base. This volume will be of specific interest to teachers and students of the history of education, and most educators, no matter what their fields, will find it useful.

In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement won many supporters with its promise that social ills such as venereal disease, alcoholism, and so-called feeble-mindedness, along with many other conditions, could be eliminated by selective human breeding and other measures. The provinces of Alberta and British Columbia passed legislation requiring that certain “unfit” individuals undergo reproductive sterilization. Ontario, being home to many leading proponents of eugenics, came close to doing the same. In the Public Good examines three legal processes that were used to advance eugenic ideas in Ontario between 1910 and 1938: legislative bills, provincial royal commissions, and the criminal trial of a young woman accused of distributing birth control information. Taken together, they reveal who in the province supported these ideas, how they were understood in relation to the public good, and how they were debated. Elizabeth Koester shows the ways in which the law was used both to promote and to deflect eugenics, and how the concept of the public good was used by supporters to add power to their cause. With eugenic thinking finding new footholds in the possibilities offered by reproductive technologies, proposals to link welfare entitlement to “voluntary” sterilization, and concerns about immigration, In the Public Good adds depth to our understanding. Its exploration of the historical relationship between eugenics and law in Ontario prepares us to face the implications of “newgenics” today.