Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Postwar Canada (Brenda and David McLean Canadian Studies). This item is unavailable.Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Postwar Canada (Brenda and David McLean Canadian Studies)

“Why don’t they just move?” This reductive question is asked whenever reports surface of the all-too-common lack of social services and economic opportunities in Canada’s rural and urban communities. But why are certain people and places vulnerable? And who is responsible for a remedy?

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Canadian government relocated people, often against their will, in order to improve their lives. Moved by the State offers a completely new interpretation of this undertaking, seeing it as part of a larger project of development and focusing on the bureaucrats and academics who designed, implemented, and monitored the relocations rather than on those who were uprooted.

In this finely crafted history, Tina Loo explores the contradiction between intention and consequence as diverse communities across Canada were resettled. In the process, she reveals the optimistic belief underpinning postwar relocations: the power of the interventionist state to do good.

Tina Loo is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia. Her previous book is States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. A recipient of Clio and Sir John A. Macdonald prizes from the Canadian Historical Association, as well as the Canada Prize from the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, she is also a member of the Royal Society of Canada.