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Fated to Live in Interesting Times: Canada's Changing Citizenship Regimes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Jane Jenson
Jane Jenson
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal
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Abstract

This article presents a way of thinking about citizenship which incorporates theoretical elements of historical institutionalism and political economy. These provide the tools for identifying patterns of change in visions of the proper form of the triangular relationship among the state, the market and communities. These discourses, as well as the practices which result from it, are labelled the citizenship regime. The history of this concept is analyzed to account for some of the difficulties of contemporary Canada. There is now a double challenge. Increasingly, Quebec and the rest of Canada promote a different balance of responsibility among the state, market and communities. As well, neo-liberal efforts to reduce deficits and redesign government are challenging received ideas of solidarity. The result is that the pan-Canadian and Quebec's citizenship regimes are diverging.

Résumé

Cet article présente un concept, à savoir le régime de citoyenneté créé en combinant des élements de deux traditions qui sont l'économie politique et l'« institutionnalisme historique ». Le régime incarne un discours sur la relation triangulaire entre l'État, le marché et les communautés ainsi que des pratiques qui matérialisent ce discours. L'article présente l'histoire des mutations de régimes de citoyenneté pancanadien et québécois. Il constate que le défi actuel est double. De plus en plus, le Québec et le reste du Canada promeuvent les discours différents sur les responsabilités de chaque composant du triangle. Canada promeut moins la solidarité sociale qui le caractérisé les trois premières décennies de l'après-guerre. Un écart grandissant entre le régime pancanadien et celui de Québec en est le résultat.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 627 - 644
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1997

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References

1 If the notion of citizenship is traced to the classical age, its current meaning is intimately involved in the most current of debates about rights and responsibilities, civil society and civility, equity and equality. For a useful overview of the debates up until the mid-1990s see Kymlicka, Will and Norman, Wayne, “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” in Beiner, Ronald, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995Google Scholar). For a representative sampling of positions on citizenship from Europe, the USA and Canada see that volume as a whole.

2 This characterization evokes the historically close link between citizenship and war-making. One legacy, among many, from the French Revolution was to take the capacity to bear arms for the patrie as the mark of citizenship. This deeply gendered view of citizenship determined that women, and other “different” categories, would have great difficulties acceding to full rights.

3 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 3.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 254.

5 Marshall, T. H., “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Marshall, T. H., Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York: Anchor, 1965Google Scholar).

6 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 256.

7 One detailed examination of this question is found in Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994Google Scholar).

8 This concept is developed in Jenson, Jane and Phillips, Susan, “Regime Shift: New Citizenship Practices in Canada,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 14 (1996), 111–35.Google Scholar

9 The newest versions of historical institutionalism have been described as “theorizing on the reciprocal influence of institutional constraints and political strategies and, more broadly, on the interaction of ideas, interests and institutions” ( Thelen, Kathleen and Steinmo, Sven, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Steinmo, Sven, Thelen, Kathleen and Longstreth, Frank, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 14Google Scholar).

10 For an overview of this approach see Lipietz, Alain, Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis in Global Fordism, trans, by Macey, David (London: Verso, 1987Google Scholar). For its application to the issues discussed here and its modification to accommodate neo-institutionalism, see Jenson, Jane, “All the World's a Stage: Space and Time in Canadian Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy 36 (1991), 43–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 For this argument about the variability of “Fordisms” as well as the specific characteristics of Canada's permeable Fordism, see Jenson, Jane, “‘Different’ but Not ‘Exceptional’: Canada's Permeable Fordism,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26 (1989), 69–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 For a discussion of the regulation approach in these terms see Jenson, Jane, “Paradigms and Political Discourse: Protective Legislation in France and the United States before 1914,” this Journal 22 (1989), 235–58.Google Scholar As Thelen and Steimo say of the historical institutionalist project, “to the extent that we take seriously notions of human agency as crucial to understanding political outcomes, we need to come to terms not just with political behavior as the dependent variable, influenced by those macro-economic structures, but as independent variables as well” (“Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” 10–11).

13 A history of the federal citizenship regime is presented in more detail in Jenson and Phillips, “Regime Shift,” and Boismenu, Géard and Jenson, Jane, “La réforme de la sécurité du revenu pour les sans-emploi et la dislocation du régime de citoyenneté canadien,” Politique et Sociétés 15 (1996), 29–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Appropriate and detailed references to the relevant literature are found in those articles and will not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that we had frequent recourse to Pal, Leslie A., Interests of State: The Politics of Language, Multiculturalism and Feminism in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993Google Scholar). For a somewhat similar presentation of the notion of diverging regimes, see Bourque, Gilles and Duchastel, Jules, “Les identités, la fragmentation de la sociéé canadienne et la constitutionalisation des enjeux politiques,” International Review of Canadian Studies 14 (1996), 80.Google Scholar

14 The Charter obviously contains protection for collective rights, for language communities and Aboriginal peoples. Nonetheless, its primary focus is on individuals, recognizing both rights as well as the need for special protections.

15 Martin, Paul, “Citizenship and the People's World,” in Kaplan, William, ed., Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 73.Google Scholar

16 Ibid.

17 These debates are summarized in Jenson, Jane, “Citizenship and Equity: Variations across Time and in Space,” in Hiebert, Janet, ed., Political Ethics: A Canadian Perspective, Vol. 12 of the Research Studies of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991Google Scholar).

18 MacLennan, Hugh, Two Solitudes (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978Google Scholar), dedication page. Too frequently the meaning of Hugh MacLennan's title is misinterpreted. His quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke is less one about distance than one about closeness. The full citation is: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other.”

19 It would obviously be an error to say that all Quebeckers who made careers, whether political or bureaucratic, in Ottawa shared the liberal vision which came to be associated with Trudeauism. An obvious and currently very visible exception is long-time federal public servant André Burelle, who explicitly repudiates what he sees as the melting-pot approach to Canadian identity and argues for a new pact between Quebec and Canada. See his Le Mai canadien: essai de diagnostic et esquisse d'une thérapie (Montreal: Fides, 1995).

20 Phillips, Susan D., “How Ottawa Blends: Shifting Government Relationships, with Interest Groups,” in How Ottawa Spends 1991–92: The Politics of Fragmentation (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), 184.Google Scholar

21 Quoted in Pal, Interests of State, 109.

22 As McRoberts, Kenneth writes: “In rejecting biculturalism and basing its policy on multiculturalism, the Trudeau government was seeking to rein in Canadian dualism by reducing it to language alone. Rather than two cultures, let alone societies or nations, Canada was composed simply of individuals, of whom some spoke English, others French, and some both languages” (Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity [Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997], xv).Google Scholar

23 Laforest, Guy, Trudeau et la fin d'un rêve canadien (Quebec: Septentrion, 1992), 13.Google Scholar

24 McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada, xvi.

25 The tendency outside Quebec is to forget the extent to which nationalism is hegemonic. Beginning with the Lesage Liberals, and their theme Maîtres chez nous, the idea of using the Quebec state to promote new times in Quebec was also shared by the Union Nationale, whose Daniel Johnson père called for Égalité ou indépendance, and by Robert Bourassa's Liberals, with their theme of souverainété culturelle. It obviously also undergirds the Parti Québécois’ nationalist affirmation and social democracy. See Linteau, Paul-André et al., Histoire du Québec contemporain (Montréal: Boréal, 1989), 678Google Scholar ff.

26 In the early 1960s the vision of Canada as composed of two communities had not been totally banished from the universe of political discourse of federal politics. For example, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism at its creation recognized duality. André Laurendeau, an eloquent and longstanding proponent of the rêve canadien, was named co-chair. Not only was the name of the Commission dualistic, but the mandate called upon the Commissioners “to recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races” ( Innis, Hugh R., ed., Bilingualism and Biculturalism: An Abridged Version of the Royal Commission Report [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973], 184–85Google Scholar). McRoberts, in Misconceiving Canada, details the elimination of this dualist vision.

27 Here I am adopting the position that Quebec's claims are a collectivist version of liberalism, in which fundamental rights are inviolate but certain other individual rights may be limited by the compelling needs of the collectivity. For the development of this position, see Taylor, Charles, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Gutmann, Amy, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994Google Scholar). Philip Resnick also argues that there is a profound streak of liberalism within Quebec society. See Ancelovici, Marcos and Dupuis-Déri, François, eds., L'Archipel identitaire. Receuil d'entretiens sur l'identité culturelle (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 90.Google Scholar

28 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 60.

29 Quoted in Robert Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” in Kaplan, ed., Belonging, 107.

30 Boismenu and Jenson, “La réforme de la sécurité du revenu.”

31 Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” 107.

32 Keith G. Banting, “Who R Us?” paper presented to the Canadian Association of Business Economists, Ottawa, May 2, 1995, 10.

33 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 56.

34 Ibid., 58–59.