Image: NSMC

The Nova Scotia Mass Choir contributes to peace by spreading a message of diversity and harmony through song. #Canada150

The Nova Scotia Mass Choir is a multi-cultural community choir based in Halifax. It was formed in 1992 and has performed throughout North America earning many music awards.

It brings black gospel music to new audiences and celebrates the contributions of Nova Scotians with African heritage to the province.

The choir has released three CDs and performs several benefit concerts a year for various charities and in support of racial harmony.

You can view this great little interview with the choir director below and connect with them on facebook here.

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Mel Hurtig contributed to peace by living a life of activism with a passion for Canada. #Canada150

Mel Hurtig (1932 – 2016) opened Edmonton’s first independent bookstore in 1956 and then sold it and started a publishing house. He ran unsuccessfully for the federal Liberal party in Edmonton West in 1972, arguing against free trade, foreign ownership of Canadian assets, and cultural imperialism.

He worked for five years on the three-volume The Canadian Encyclopedia and then published a Junior Encyclopedia of Canada.

Hurtig was co-founder of the Committee for an Independent Canada (CIC) and later established the Council of Canadians.

“From the time that he was in his early 20s, he has been a passionate nationalist and that doesn’t mean he believed we should be inward thinking. It meant he believed in Canada’s sovereignty, and that we were a strong and wonderful nation.”   –Leslie Hurtig, one of Mel Hurtig’s four daughters 

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The War Resisters Support Campaign contributes to peace by providing assistance to people who refuse to go to war because of their deeply-held beliefs. #Canada150

The War Resisters Support Campaign is working to help Americans who came to Canada after refusing to take part in the war against Iraq. The Campaign has been working to secure permanent residency status to these conscientious objectors.

The conviction not to participate in a war may be based on religious beliefs, personal experience of war and its impacts, or moral and ethical considerations.

May 15^th is International Conscientious Objectors’ Day.

“We demonstrated that misguided wars can be ended, if enough people are willing to say “no” and stick to their convictions.”   –Thom Nickels, who refused to fight in the Vietnam War 

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Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada contributes to peace by lobbying for federally-funded, quality childcare for all children in Canada. #Canada150

The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC) believes that all children have a right to a universal, publicly-funded, inclusive, quality, non-profit child care system. To achieve this goal, CCAAC focuses on public education and political action, working with child care and social justice organizations and government representatives.

“Families in Canada desperately need access to early childhood education and child care services that only a comprehensive, federal system can provide.”

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Debra Lefebvre contributes to peace by working to stop the spread of malaria. #Canada150

Debra Lefebvre founded Buy-a-Net Malaria Prevention Group after working as a registered nurse for a charity in a Ugandan health clinic. Discovering the impact of malaria on the population there, she returned to Canada and looked for ways to solve the problem.

Buy-a-Net began fundraising to buy insecticide-treated nets for people to use around their beds to keep malaria-carrying insects from infecting them when they slept. The group also provides malaria medications.

The group approaches malaria-prevention and treatment “one village at a time”, training local people to become health leaders in their communities. It has partnered with Canadian-based Healthy Children Uganda and with local Ugandan organizations. In eight years, the incidence of malaria deaths in Uganda dropped by one-third.

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Museums contribute to peace by educating people on the lessons learned from wars the value of peace. #Canada150

Museums such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, and Pier 21, the Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax, preserve important stories and artifacts from the past and encourage reflection and dialogue.

Opened in 2014, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights promotes respect for everyone and enhances our understanding of the importance of human rights.

The Canadian War Museum first displayed items in 1880, became an official museum in 1952, and moved to its current location in 2005. It is Canada’s museum of military history. It looks at how war affects people and nations.

Between 1928 and 1971, Pier 21 was the welcoming port for a million immigrants, refugees, wartime evacuees, war brides and their children, and returning troops. The museum offers visitors a chance to appreciate the emotions and challenges faced by people entering Canada through this port.

Museums in all parts of the country, large and small, all contribute to a greater understanding of humans and the world.

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Image: ICANW International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Setsuko Thurlow contributes to peace by speaking out against nuclear war. #Canada150

Setsuko Nakamura, now Setsuko Thurlow, was a 13-year-old schoolgirl on August 6, 1945 when a United States airplane dropped a nuclear bomb on her hometown, Hiroshima, Japan. She was buried in rubble, managed to get free, and walked away from the city seeing the injuries, suffering, death, and destruction caused by the bombing. 140,000 people died. She was lucky to be reunited with her family, who also survived.

She eventually moved to the United States to study, married a Canadian, and became a Canadian citizen. Thurlow worked as a social worker with various agencies in Toronto, and then established the Japanese Family Services of Metropolitan Toronto.

Associated with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Advisory Council, Thurlow continues to write and speak about her experience surviving the nuclear bomb, the subsequent shunning by Japanese society, and the repressing of free speech by the American administration after the war. She is a powerful advocate for a nuclear weapons-free world.

“The truth is, we all live with the daily threat of nuclear weapons. In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes, every second of every day, nuclear weapons, thousands on high alert, are poised for deployment threatening everyone we love and everything we hold dear.”

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Linda Dale contributes to peace by using art to amplify the voices of children affected by war. #Canada150

Linda Dale works with young people living in war zones and post-conflict situations. She uses her exhibit development and artistic skills to help children to tell their stories and participate in peace-building.

She has curated three exhibits relating to children’s experiences of war as refugees, child soldiers, and victims of genocide, and curated four other exhibits on social justice themes. She leads the group Children/Youth as Peacebuilders and has worked in Angola, Bosnia, Burma/Thailand, Cambodia, Colombia, Côte D’Ivoire, Northern Uganda, and Rwanda.

You will find War and Children learning materials at warandchildren.com

You can learn more about Linda and Children/Youth as Peacebuilders at childrenyouthaspeacebuilders.ca

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Gregory Baum contributes to peace by prompting interfaith dialogue to build understanding among all faith communities. #Canada150.

Gregory Baum was born in Berlin, Germany to a mother who was Jewish and a father who was Protestant. He came to Canada as a war refugee in 1940 and was held in several refugee camps run by the military before ending up in an internment camp in Sherbrooke, Quebec at 17.

After the war, Baum became a professor in the fields of sociology, theology, and ethics at the University of Toronto and then at McGill University in Montreal. He promoted dialogue between Christians and Jews, and argued against preachings that foster contempt for others. He challenged Christians to be moved by anyone who suffered social injustice regardless of their religion.

“After Auschwitz the Christian churches no longer wish to convert the Jews. While they may not be sure of the theological grounds that dispense them from this mission, the churches have become aware that asking the Jews to become Christians is a spiritual way of blotting them out of existence and thus only reinforces the effects of the Holocaust.”

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Alice Chown contributed to peace by advocating for women’s rights and pacifism before and during WWI.

‘Personal relations have taught me that there is a life force in every individual urging to order, harmony, beauty.  We may set this wonderful force for righteousness free by granting to all freedom to live out the truths inherent in them. Society makes an institution and thinks it is a permanent dwelling, instead of a tent in which to abide for night before passing to the next stage in its journey.” 

Alice Amelia Chown (1866 -1949) was born in Kingston and educated at Queens University. She was a suffragist, pacifist, socialist and writer.  She was brought up in a strict Methodist family, and remained at home until she was forty attending her mother. Her Mother did insist that Alice receive an education equal to that of her brothers. Amelia studied political science and economics at Queen’s University, and graduated with a BA in 1887.

She was an early proponent of education for women as a device to broaden their intellectual talents, and free them from ghettoization as homemakers. While she believed that the role of women in the home was important, she did not want it to be the sole defining role of any one women’s life.

When she left her family home Chown embarked on a life of activism and travel, leading a very unconventional life for a woman at the time. She was an original and iconoclastic thinker, and became one of the leading social feminists of her day. She was highly critical of the Methodist Church, and the place of women within it. Her article on the training of Methodist deaconesses was scathing it its analysis of the church’s desire to infantilize women in service of men.

In 1912 Chown helped organize support for strikers at Eaton’s department store in Toronto. She picketed alongside the strikers, and was thrown into a paddy wagon alongside them also. She tried to use her position in society to persuade the Toronto papers to discuss the strike, which they were reluctant to do for fear of losing advertising revenue; and to get support for the strike from the Toronto Women’s Suffrage Society. The Society did not want to be damaged by association with an “unpopular” strike. The great majority of the strikers were Jewish, and the Society understood its own social capital as tenuous and its cause as exclusive.

Chown was a committed pacifist during World War I. She thought that pacifists “have glimpsed the coming world ideal.” In 1915 she was a co-founder with Laura Hughes and Elsie Charlton of the Canadian Women’s Peace Party. Chown’s pacifism caused conflict with other Canadian feminist leaders. In 1917 she moved to the United States, where she taught at a trade union college for the next ten years. Later she traveled in Europe and Russia. Chown founded the Women’s League of Nations Association in 1930, dedicated to education in pacifism. She organized teas at which Jews and gentiles could meet. In 1945 she was elected honorary president of Toronto’s United Nations Society.

She is best known for her journal, The Stairway, published in 1921. It includes her essays on settlement and co-operative movements, trade unionism, suffrage, dress reform and sexual freedom, women’s right to higher education, home economics education, urban improvement, universal brotherhood and world peace.

Alice Amelia Chown died in Toronto in 1949.

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