Recent years have witnessed an increased attention toward legislative decision-making in urban Canada. Various studies have been undertaken which attempt to analyze the fundamental patterns of city council voting in different Canadian centres. Although influenced theoretically by discussions in the American legislative voting literature, they have frequently detected trends at variance with findings in the United States. Nevertheless, the direction of such Canadian studies has tended to be less focussed, with hypotheses and theoretical approaches frequently being rejected. This particular work was undertaken in an attempt to break out of a predictable mould which has tended to feature replications of similar research modes across the range of cities. The goal here is to redress the lack of theoretical initiative and to develop new explanations for the dynamic that underlies the municipal decision-making process.

Several recent reports seek to evaluate the impact of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Canadian democracy by documenting his government's efforts to curtail established democratic processes and mechanisms for public debate. However, this article uses examples of the Harper government's changes to legislative and parliamentary norms to demonstrate that this government's efforts to curtail multi-directional public debate were importantly accompanied by efforts to amplify unidirectional communication of the government's partisan messages. The paper finds that this corresponding emphasis on communication exemplified a “photo-op” approach to democracy, which highlights points of compatibility between the seemingly contradictory authoritarian-populist “publicity state” and neoliberal democratic ideals. This research demonstrates the necessity of attention to government communication in analysis of the Harper government's impact on the Canadian public sphere. It also illustrates the pragmatic rather than doctrinaire nature of New Right politics in Canada and the affinity between neoliberal and authoritarian-populist approaches to governance.

Police, as agents of the state, affect its legitimacy by their acts and the way they carry them out. They enjoy considerable powers and autonomy, in comparison with most public employees. Oddly, public administration studies almost ignore them. During the 1990s, the Sûreté du Québec experienced a number of problems of control and responsibility, not because of corruption but because of excess zeal, irresponsibility and sometimes incompetence. Several inquiries and studies, culminating with the massive Poitras Commission report of 1998, revealed a variety of problems, but many points in common. These studies show that while the SQ has known familiar problems rooted in police culture and the power of the police union, a whole range of measures could be pursued by the Department of Public Security and by the SQ to make it more open, more effective and more responsible. Several reforms now taking place could change the orgnizational culture of the Sûreté.

Traditionally, Canadian commentary on the Judicial Committee has focused on the effect or impact of the imperial tribunal's decisions on the nature of Canadian federalism. Numerous studies have examined the issue of whether or not the Judicial Committee strengthened the powers of provincial governments at the expense of the federal government by misinterpreting the Constitution Act, 1867 and by ignoring the intentions of the fathers of Confederation who sought to create a strong centralized government. The Canadian preoccupation with the merits of this debate has led one distinguished political scientist, David E. Smith, to suggest that “perhaps too much” has been written about the Judicial Committee. The literature examining the relationship between the Judicial Committee and Canada has not, however, addressed the significance of the imperial context in which the tribunal's decisions were written. The Judicial Committee was not only the final appellate body for Canada but was also responsible for hearing disputes from other parts of the Empire. Decisions written for one Dominion or colony could have profound legal and political effects on another.

Studies of public contentious action in response to mineral resource extraction have rarely employed quantitative methods. In a highly disaggregated statistical analysis we examine local protest dynamics in Bolivia and argue for a political conditioning of the so-called resource curse. We find that mineral gas resources spark disputes over both extraction and rent redistribution at the local level, and that this relationship is especially pronounced where the population has highly heterogenous political values and interests. In contrast, where the population is relatively united in their political views, significantly fewer protests occur.

Dans cet article, les injustices en matière de responsabilités de care entre les partenaires hétérosexuel.les sont problématisées comme des irresponsabilités relationnelles. D'abord, l'apport des théories du care à l'appréhension des asymétries de pouvoir liées au déséquilibre dans le travail de soin est discuté. Ensuite, les manifestations de ce déséquilibre sont illustrées dans les arrangements intimes établis par les couples. Ces conséquences injustes sont, par la suite, conceptualisées comme des « irresponsabilités relationnelles ». Enfin, une conception de la coresponsabilité relationnelle est proposée dans une perspective de plus de justice et de démocratie entre les personnes, dans le privé comme le public.

Rainer Knopff's scholarship on Canadian constitutionalism has offered some of the most trenchant criticism of the exercise of judicial review under the Charter, yet his theory has largely been misunderstood (as has that of his frequent co-author F. L. Morton). This article exposes two prominent critiques of Knopff's constitutional writings as straw man arguments and provides a republican account of his constitutional theory. The first straw man argument is that Knopff supports a majoritarian or populist conception of direct democracy. This claim is belied by Knopff's embrace of representative democracy and institutions structured to encourage reflexive deliberation. The second straw man argument is that Knopff is a moral rights skeptic. Knopff's rights skepticism is a legal skepticism about the determinacy of many rights that is merely a function of his inclusive legal positivism. The article concludes by reflecting on the republican lessons that Knopff's constitutional scholarship continues to offer, including how holding legislatures responsible for settling reasonable disagreements about legally indeterminate Charter rights might help counteract the twin threats of populism and juristocracy.

The Canadian party system experienced a period of remarkable transition between 2006 and 2015, with the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Liberals trading places as the main competitor to the Conservatives. While national-level explanations are often used to explain this volatility, William Cross's research has shown that local association revitalization played a central role in the Liberals’ 2015 resurgence. This article examines the relationship between NDP local spending and success between 2006 and 2015. It shows that the NDP was consistently outspent by its opponents overall but that it often had a spending advantage in marginal ridings. As a result, this article finds little evidence that the NDP's local spending disadvantage cost the NDP seats, even though it finds a positive correlation between NDP local spending and NDP vote share.

The Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan promises to help low-income parents, especially women, participate in the economy. But even under this plan, care will be too expensive for many families. Several provinces offer targeted subsidies to reduce fees—unfortunately, these benefits are often hard to access and their popularity with voters is unclear. Using a pre-registered survey experiment (N=821), this research note investigates support for a hypothetical child care supplement to help low-income families. Overall, we find strong support for such an initiative, but little enthusiasm to pay for it through new income taxes. We then manipulate the ease of accessing this benefit. We find little evidence that burdensome child care benefits are more popular than easily accessible benefits. If anything, burdensome benefits reduce support. We then briefly consider how partisanship influences support. We conclude with timely recommendations for government and discuss the need for accessible child care benefits.

In this work we offer results drawn from a dataset of a post-provincial election survey in eight Canadian provinces to assess the impact of party system congruency on partisanship. We postulate that partisanship will be more likely and stronger in provinces that share a similar political party system to the federal level. We extend this preliminary analysis to test the underlying mechanism by examining the impact holding partisan ties at the provincial level has on the likelihood and strength of federal identification, according to party system similarity. Our results show very limited support for the party system congruency factor, raising further questions of its applicability in the Canadian context.

The influence of party connection on the selection of judges has long been an issue in Canada This article considers whether such connections adversely affect the appointment of women judges to federally appointed courts. The answer appears to be yes. Using political donations as a proxy for party connection, the data analyzed here suggest that as the number of appointees with connections to the government rises, the number of women appointees falls. However, for appointments to provincial courts by the government of Ontario, the prevalence of political connections among judicial appointees is less prominent, suggesting that different systems of judicial appointment may help to lessen these effects.

Prime ministers in parliamentary systems confront a challenging agency problem in leading cabinets toward cross-government priorities: ministers tend to prioritize departmental interests and may lack incentives and/or information enabling co-ordinated effort. In Canada, a novel mechanism for both increasing incentives and information provision has been developed in recent decades: the mandate letter. These letters are issued by Canadian prime ministers to their ministers, reinforcing government priorities, each minister's responsibilities, and specific policy expectations. This article examines mandate letters as mechanisms inducing interministerial policy co-ordination, focusing on the 2015–2021 period, under Justin Trudeau, as the first Canadian prime minister to release these letters publicly. Using topic modelling and social network analysis, I find that Trudeau has increasingly sought to strengthen ministerial co-ordination and ministers’ focus on crosscutting policy priorities. This case study contributes to our understanding of intraexecutive co-ordination and the agency problem in cabinet government.

Contact tracing applications have been deployed at a fast pace around the world to stop the spread of COVID-19 and may be key to containing future pandemics. This study aims to explain public opinion toward cell phone contact tracing using a survey experiment. We build upon a theory in evolutionary psychology—disease avoidance—to predict how media coverage of the pandemic affects public support for containment measures. We report three key findings. First, exposure to a news item that shows people ignoring social distancing rules causes an increase in support for cell phone contact tracing. Second, pre-treatment covariates such as anxiety and a belief that other people are not following the rules rank among the strongest predictors of support for COVID-19 apps. And third, while a majority of respondents approve of the reliance on cell phone contact tracing, concerns for rights and freedoms remain a salient preoccupation.

À partir d'une expérience s’étant déroulée au Québec auprès de plus de 200 personnes, cet article évalue dans quelle mesure l'humour peut alimenter les stéréotypes culturels et religieux. Si sur le plan des effets directs, les différences s'avèrent moins importantes, on remarque que le degré de participation religieuse joue un rôle significatif dans l'entretien d'une perception négative à l’égard des immigrants et de la communauté arabo-musulmane. Ce constat souligne la nécessité de considérer des facteurs modérateurs pour mesurer les impacts des diverses manifestations de la communication politique, dont l'humour, sur certaines attitudes liées à la diversité.