An Investigation into the Failure to Implement a Universal School Lunch Program during WWII and Postwar Reconstruction in Canada: The Case of Ontario

The purpose of this research is to investigate the various social, political and economic factors that contributed to Canada’s failure to implement a universal school lunch program during the 1940s. Although Canada developed several other social welfare programs in the post-war period, it remains one of the only industrialized nations that does not provide hot meals to children in elementary or secondary schools. Data from the province of Ontario, a major site of postwar reconstruction and policy-making, has been taken up to inform the broader national discourse on school lunches from the 1940s. National, Ontario provincial and City of Toronto archival records were collected and analyzed according to common themes, in order to identify key barriers that constrained government support of a hot meal program. Archival records were identified using key words, and were limited to materials created between 1930-1952. Analysis suggests that sufficient need for a hot meal program had not been established during the 1940s. Despite misleading nutrition messages, rates of malnutrition and nutrient-related disease were at an all-time low, and many Ontario school boards did not appear to have the necessary infrastructure required to supply all pupils with hot meals. The Canadian government had already employed significant resources to improve existing social security programs by coupling them with health education. This strategy reflected a shift in understanding malnutrition as a knowledge-based problem, as opposed to income-based. This understanding was further reinforced through the moralized dissemination of nutrition information, which placed blame on women for improperly raising their children. Ultimately, the strong uptake of nutrition as a public health issue in Ontario may have limited prospective responses to solutions already utilized in the public health domain, and directed favour away from a universal school lunch program for Canada.

WARMING AND CHRONIC HIGH NUTRIENT MANIPULATIONS YIELD DIFFERING LEGACY EFECTS ON THE SOIL MICROBIAL COMMUNITY AND NUTRIENT POOLS IN THE LOW ARCTIC

Climate warming is predicted to increase summer air temperatures in the Arctic, warming soils and enhancing microbial decomposition of soil organic matter. Given the size of the soil carbon stores in the Arctic, even a fraction of its release as CO2 to the atmosphere could result in a positive feedback to climate warming. Fertilizers have been used in the past to quickly increase soil solution nutrients pools to mimic predicted concentrations under climate warming. However, because it may have inadvertent affects on the soil microbial community, fertilizer-induced patterns in microbial decomposition may be unrealistic. This study aimed to better understand the proposed mechanism of enhanced microbial decomposition under nutrient addition and warming treatments to discern whether warming alone is enough to stimulate enhanced microbial decomposition, or if nutrients in excess (i.e. chronic high nutrient additions) are necessary to yield such a response. I investigated the impacts of 10 years of greenhouse summer warming, chronic low nutrient factorial addition (5 g N and 1g P m-2 year-1, respectively), and chronic high nutrient factorial addition (10 g N and 5g P m-2 year-1, respectively) treatments on a mesic birch hummock tundra ecosystem near Daring Lake, NWT, Canada. Soil microbial nutrient pools, soil solution nutrient pools, and microbial community structure were measured in the upper organic, lower organic, and uppermost mineral soil depth intervals of all treatment plots in Spring 2014. Interestingly, the low nutrient additions did not yield any significant trends, yet the warming treatment increased soil bacterial richness suggesting a legacy effect of warming from the previous summers. Enhanced microbial nutrient uptake occurred only in the high nutrient addition treatments, and did not significantly alter soil carbon at least within the ten year period of this experiment. Together, these results and the absence of significant impacts of the low nutrient and greenhouse warming treatments suggests that nutrient and carbon cycling in these low arctic soils may be resilient against climate warming, at least over the initial decades.

WAKING (TO) THINKING BEING: A STUDY OF EDUCATION, METAPHYSICS, MIND, AND LANGUAGE

This dissertation articulates the basic aims and achievements of education. It recognizes language as central to thinking, and philosophy and education as belonging profoundly to one another. The first step is to show that although philosophy can no longer claim to dictate the foundations of knowledge or of disciplines of inquiry, it still offers an exceptionally general level of self-understanding. Education is equally general and faces a similar crisis of self-identity, of coming to terms with reality. Language is the medium of thought and the repository of historical mind; so a child’s acquisition of language is her acquisition of rational freedom. This marks a metaphysical change: no longer merely an animal, she comes to exercise her powers of rationality, transcending her environment by seeking and expressing reasons for thinking and doing. She can think about herself in relation to the universe, hence philosophize and educate others in turn. The discussion then turns to the historical nature of language. The thinking already embedded in language always anticipates further questioning. Etymology serves as a model for philosophical understanding, and demonstrates how philosophy can continue to yield insights that are fundamental, but not foundational, to human life. The etymologies of some basic educational concepts disclose education as a leading out and into the midst of Being. The philosophical approach developed in previous chapters applies to the very idea of an educational aim. Discussion concerning the substantiality of educational ideals results in an impasse: one side recommends an open-­ended understanding of education’s aims; the other insists on a definitive account. However, educational ideals exhibit a conceptual duality: the fundamental achievements of education, such as rational freedom, are real; but how we should understand them remains an open question. The penultimate chapter investigates philosophical thinking as the fulfillment of rational freedom, whose creative insights can profoundly transform our everyday activities. That this transformative self-understanding is without end suggests the basic aims of education are unheimlich. The dissertation concludes with speculative reflection on the shape and nature of language, and with the suggestion that through education reality awakens to itself.

Hall conditions for edge-weighted bipartite graphs

A weighted variant of Hall's condition for the existence of matchings is shown to be equivalent to the existence of a matching in a lexicographic product. This is used to introduce characterizations of those bipartite graphs whose edges may be replicated so as to yield semiregular multigraphs or, equivalently, semiregular edge-weightings. Such bipartite graphs will be called semiregularizable. Some infinite families of semiregularizable trees are described and all semiregularizable trees on at most 11 vertices are listed. Matrix analogues of some of the results are mentioned and are shown to imply some of the known characterizations of regularizable graphs.