Chapter 2: Organizing the Data -- Brief overview of the provincial and territorial collection, challenges and limitations

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Brief overview of the provincial and territorial collection, challenges and limitations
   Some provinces have fairly complete 20th century sets. British Columbia has been the most methodical and consistent in the production of commission reports on public education. There are a set of four placed to 1925, 1945, 1960 and 1988. In British Columbia’s 1988 Sullivan Report, Sullivan verifies this set of four as the main set of 20th century public education policy defining British Columbia. There would be no fifth British Columbia royal report completing the 20th century after 1988 as the Sullivan Report was very thorough. The Sullivan Report is one of the earliest public education policy documents to respond to the 1980s recession and it is just outside of the technological frame that other documents begin to reflect. Following on this, the Sullivan report
 document is not electronic and does not seem to be scanned, although regardless, of course, I have reproduced it and made it available on my website. British Columbia would perhaps be the most consistent province in Canada when it comes to public education policy production through the vehicle of Royal Commissions that are created by a provincial legislature.
   Following closely on British Columbia is a province such as Alberta that has a complete set of commission reports without the early 20th century stability indicated in British Columbia. Alberta's main set of documents are aligned with the years 1959, 1966, 1971 and 1993. Included are two depression and drought era documents. The 1993 document is not specifically an education document, but includes comment on education policy. It is not available on the internet and I transcribed the main portions of it. It certainly has not been found satisfactory as a public education policy report by University of Alberta's educational policy studies department and much cynicism in the department appears to be due to lack of guidance from government in public education possibly going back to the Worth Report in 1971. The last Alberta public education royal commission was 1959. The province produced policy again in 2004.
   Saskatchewan does not appear to have a history of producing royal commission reports on public education policy since the sole commission product of 1918, its first commission report headed by an American. I did include a 1961 report commissioned by Tommy Douglas. Saskatchewan requires the identification of a series of reports that would in total tell us something about the public education policy history there. 
   The Northwest Territories documents are accounted for on my website, the latest 20^th century document produced in 1994. The Northwest Territories documents pin to the years 1972, 1982 and 1994, and there are key federal documents that explain the development of policy in the Northwest Territories up to 1982, with the Gillies Report of 1972 being somewhat of a loose wheel. I was not aware of this document until it appeared on Goulson's list and did not include it in my Master’s thesis entitled “Education Policy in the Northwest Territories, an analysis of the decentralization years.” Other key historical documents for the Northwest Territories are the Carrother's Report, 1966, The Drury Report, 1975 and the Berger Report, 1977.
    The Yukon set covers 1960, 1972 and 1987. This is not necessarily all that is available. The 1987 document is perhaps one of the most specific First Nations documents produced as policy within the domain of Canadian public education policy. The 1960 document is a highly demanded document on the website. It cites residential schools of the Yukon and it would seem this evidence has been useful to the Residential Indian Schools Resolution committee at work in 2008. I found it to be a document that provided an important information foundation to Yukon education policy, where understanding the history of Yukon policy before I found it and transcribed it, drew a cerebral blank of significant proportions. How would education "experts" in many universities in Canada respond to a question regarding the framing of Yukon public education policy? With the same cerebral blank I would imagine. Yukon public education policy has seemed a particularly elusive landscape in an overview of Canadian public education policy knowledge.
   Ontario's main 20th century public education policy documents begin in 1950 with the Hope Commission directing much of its work to tracing the history shaping the early policy of the 20th century and the mid to late 19th, not just for Ontario, but for other provinces in Canada, as Ryerson's influence was felt everywhere in English Canada through the Council of Public Instruction. Other key Ontario documents occurred in 1968, 1987 and 1994. The 1994 document “For the Love of Learning” is online and there is a link to it on my website. It may be the earliest public education document to be made available online. The Ontario collection could not be said to be satisfactory at this time, but it does provide a satisfactory grouping for the purposes of analysis for theory.
    Some provinces are not complete at this time. Manitoba and Quebec have a huge number of education reports that are electronic, and these I have to sort through. Manitoba's mid-20th century document was produced in 1959 and Quebec's was the Parent Report finished in 1966 or 1967 according to some references. It seems at this time, that with some careful sorting, a group of Quebec documents beginning with the Estates General of 1995 would, when sorted out and brought together, create a comparable report with the Parent Report in terms of time and breadth of treatment. This set I am still working on.
    The upper-end documents 20th century documents for the Maritimes are yet to be resolved. 

    If the state of affairs in consolidating the Canadian public education policy documents of the 20th century should appear insurmountable particularly as one considers the huge number of electronic documents now available, I would counter that even at this point so very much more is apparent. As a consequence of the documentation undertaken by Cary F. Goulson, the historical public education policy landscape is taking shape. We are much further ahead than we were, and a picture against which we can compare the documents produced after the recession in the mid 1980s and the technological change, is emerging.