The Peace Calendar was the first regular publication of the Canadian Disarmament Information Service (CANDIS), and was the direct predecessor of Peace Magazine.
The Peace Calendar arose out of an urgent need for peace movement information during the dangerous years of the early 1980s, when the US-USSR nuclear arms race reached a menacing intensity. For Canadian peace activists, the nuclear-armed cruise missile — tested over Canadian territory and dependent on Canadian arms manufacturers for components — was a central campaigning issue, but it was just one part of a larger sense of nuclear danger. In Western Europe, the Pershing II missiles were deployed in response to the Soviet Union’s SS-20s, upping the ante in the countries (in particular, the still-divided Germany) which had been the crucible of the Cold War.
The Peace Calendar was published from January 1983 to December 1984. The Canadian peace movement was so active, and the need for news so urgent, that the paper expanded rapidly — from one letter-sized page in January 1983 to 12 tabloid pages in February 1984.
All the 1983 and 1984 issues of The Peace Calendar are now available online. They were scanned from copies of the paper originals, so may still contain the odd typographical error (the 1984 issues, in particular, still need a thorough proofreading). We have retained all articles and “Network News” shorts, but have not included the listings pages or ads (aside from some house ads). To protect people’s privacy, we have blanked out any phone numbers which appeared in the original issues.
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