As a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a contested aspect of his theory. Mill advocated democracy and expert bureaucracy and, although researchers see tension between these systems, I argue that Mill saw them as compatible. Consequently, Mill's theory might be more consistent and complete than many believe, and the public administration debate should perhaps no longer be seen in terms of an opposition between expertise and democracy.

This article has two objectives. The first is to highlight a turn towards multilateral collaboration in the immigration sector and the resulting focus on pan-Canadian policy objectives and initiatives. This account is set against the current literature, which argues a bilateral approach to intergovernmental relations in the sector has resulted in asymmetrical policies and programs. The second objective is to demonstrate the value of explicitly focusing on the nature of intergovernmental relations as unilateral, bilateral or multilateral. Applying this lens, the article draws out the drivers and complexity of the turn towards multilateral collaboration in the immigration sector, arguing it is motivated by an increased provincial engagement in economic immigration and also by the federal government's desire to reassert its own role in response.

The literature on activism characterizes the recent transformations of activism as part of a process towards the “personalization of politics”. For structural or cultural reasons, committed citizens appear to be developing a new relationship to politics, seeking personal satisfaction in their engagement. We propose an alternative interpretation, and characterize this transformation as “do-it-yourself” (DIY) politics. Based on the protests against shale gas development in Quebec, we show that the DIY politics is the “logical” (in the sense of rational) result of citizens developing the means to compensate for the lack of institutional opportunities in the context of developments that potentially threaten their lives and livelihoods. Hence, rather than a quest for personal fulfillment, DIY politics must be understood as a more prosaic and contingent reaction to a specific situation, an individual and collective response to a situation experienced and perceived as problematic. In the conflict surrounding shale gas development in Quebec, which serves as our case study, we show that 1) the initial impulse to mobilize may be accurately interpreted as moving from the “territory of the self” (“territoire du moi”) to the “territory of the us” (“territoire du nous”), and that 2) it is the double failure of institutional representation that underpins civic engagement: the failure of institutional representation and the lack of representation by collective actors already in place.

In 2006, the Canadian government introduced a new component to its process of selecting Supreme Court justices, a review committee composed of members of Parliament. Tasked with interviewing justices prior to their appointment to the bench, the committee met four times, interviewing only five of the eight judicial candidates appointed to the bench before the Conservative government announced the committee's termination in 2014. This study offers the first comprehensive analysis of the performance of this ad hoc judicial review committee. Using an original dataset, we find that MPs asked little by way of probing questions, such as those related to policy or a candidate's previous jurisprudence. However, we do find some evidence that the hearing process was used to further the political aims of the participating political parties.

Many provinces have enacted substantial reforms of their social assistance regime in the 1990s. However, we know surprisingly little about the ideas that underlie welfare reform in Canada. In particular, few empirical studies have directly examined the ideas of policy actors. This article presents a retrospective case study of a major policy initiative, namely Saskatchewan's Building Independence (BI), and examines its alignment with three paradigms of social assistance. Data come primarily from interviews with policy actors. This study concludes that the policy ideas informing BI align closely with the activation paradigm but also share some similarities with the entitlement and workfare paradigms. The significance of this finding is then discussed in light of three issues: 1) Aboriginal people, 2) the perspective of social assistance clients, and 3) “Third Way” ideology. This article concludes with a research agenda on ideas and policy change.

Satisfaction with the workings of democracy seems to have declined in Canada, as it has in other established democracies. Political scandals are one frequently invoked explanation for that shift. But there is substantial scholarly disagreement about whether political scandals undermine democratic satisfaction. This paper uses evidence from a conveniently timed round of the CES (Canadian Election Study) from 2004, as well as the CES panel from 2004 and 2006, to explore this relationship more definitively than is usually possible. The results indicate that the scandal eroded satisfaction with the way democracy works but did not undermine support for democracy more generally.

Each year through the practices of Canada's universities, vast numbers of nonhuman animals are caught, bought or bred, narrowly confined, manipulated and killed. These university−animal relations are governed by a state-based regime, the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC). Through the lens of critical public philosophy, I clarify the power that has constituted this governance regime and now sustains it, examining the regime's justifying claims, its practices that authorize universities and scholars as legally compliant and the related effects of its power. The resulting critical redescription reveals fundamental problems with the political legitimacy of CCAC governance and thus with the university−animal relations that it sanctions.

Usually, the state of urban research in Canadian political science leads to pessimistic evaluations. This pessimism is belied by one emerging area of study: research on Canadian municipal public policies and immigration, which has flourished over the last 20 years. This article tracks the evolution of this research. First, I retrace how municipal policies for immigrants have been studied, and show how comparison is a central component of this literature. Second, I analyze the dynamics of agenda setting, as well as variables for decision making and implementation. Third, I make three propositions for future research, which are i) to examine the reciprocal relationship between attitudes towards immigration and local public policies and politics; ii) to study local public policy as constructions rather than responses and iii) to revisit the use of national models of integration for cities. In conclusion, I underline the positive outcomes of “bringing cities back in” to Canadian political science, not only to better understand political regulation and Canadian federalism, but also to have a more complete view of the immigrant integration policies.

This paper explores how local government structure affects policy co-ordination. It compares the delivery of economic development services in two Ontario cities. In London, a specialized agency is the lead, but lacks full functional control, while in Hamilton policy control is consolidated in a single municipal department. The findings support the hypothesis of those who argue in favour of general-purpose governments, as the municipal hierarchy in Hamilton was instrumental in achieving policy co-ordination. Proponents of specialization argue that it limits the need for co-ordination between governments but, as the London case demonstrates, this logic breaks down when there are too many players with too few responsibilities.

In 2012, Canada's federal government announced cuts to refugee health coverage. Evidence suggesting that the cuts represent a social policy failure has since been accumulating, including the 2014 Federal Court ruling ordering their reversal. This explanatory case study uncovers the problem definition process that led policy development by applying coding methods to governmental publications, transcripts of parliamentary proceedings and internal governmental correspondence obtained under the Access to Information Act. The systematic analysis identifies avoidable gaps that occurred and proposes an avenue for strengthening future federal social policy processes so as to avoid negative outcomes such as those that resulted here.

There is no unifying theory to guide the study of partisan political staff. The literature suggests staffers may be variously mechanisms for resolving principal-agent problems, extensions of centralized political control or spoils given as rewards inside the core executive. Annual Public Accounts data, available only since 2007, offer a promising new addition to the debate over federal exempt staffs. This paper presents descriptive and linear regression results on staffing expenditures for five years of federal data in Canada. Using the construct of “revealed preference,” predictors of variance in ministerial spending on staffing may provide new, objective information on their function in Canadian government. Results of this study demonstrate that quantitative methods can be applied to the study of political staff and may be a helpful addition as the field continues to develop, test and refine theory.

Western powers have created a wide range of military networks whose operating modes remain largely unknown to us. While the subfield of International Relations debates the ability of networks to generate convergence, this article addresses this debate with a longitudinal study of one such military network: the Multinational Interoperability Council (MIC). Our analysis reveals that, despite limited resources and influence, members of the MIC produce an identity, norms and capabilities for collective action that are specific to the network. They are able to mobilise them strategically in order to produce soft convergence in the area of military coalition building.

Recent media accounts suggest certain faith-based interest groups are increasingly pressuring provincial governments across Canada to ensure their views on education policy are acted upon. This paper offers a qualitative assessment of the policy influence possessed by faith-based groups active on the education file in Alberta and the factors responsible for this level of influence. Overall, such influence is not directly attributable to the group's size or resources nor can it be explained by the assumption that Alberta is overrun with religious citizens demanding socially conservative policies. Rather, the explanation is found in a more nuanced appreciation of the self-interested electoral calculations made by the long-governing Progressive Conservative party, on the one hand, as well as well as the party's long-running commitment to “school choice” on the other. This sentiment is intimately related to both the province's populist political culture as well as a broader ideological convergence around the principle of “free choice” in general, and the benefits of marketization in particular.

Although ministerial political advisors are prominent and influential actors within the core executive in Canada and elsewhere, information is scarce with respect to their personal and professional backgrounds and career trajectory. This article uses recent survey data and publicly available biographical information to analyse the demographic composition of senior ministerial policy advisors within the Government of Canada. It finds that, while ministerial policy staffers are young and politically committed, they are not so young nor so professionally inexperienced as sometimes thought. Nor are they always personally and tightly bound to their current ministers but often work for different ministers in different departments. This suggests that advisors are agents of the whole government as much as agents of their individual ministers and raises questions about the degree to which they are responsive to the Prime Minister's Office, thereby increasing centralization.

Despite criticism of ongoing protectionism, this study argues that Canada's internal trade regime has evolved significantly since the implementation of the original Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). This includes thirteen formal amendments to the AIT and numerous regional agreements in Western, Central, and Atlantic Canada. Borrowing from the liberal International Political Economy (IPE) literature it argues that existing regional agreements complement and offer a potential framework for broader internal trade reforms at the national level. Of these the New West Partnership Trade Agreement (NWPTA) offers a promising model for Canada's internal market, with revised rules and norms related to negative lists, labour mobility, procurement, and investment and dispute settlement. Ongoing efforts to remove barriers will also be linked to a strengthened Internal Trade Secretariat, confidence-building measures, increased transparency and further reform of technical language.

This paper re-examines the issue of hate propaganda under the Canadian Charter of Rights and the US Bill of Rights. It also reconsiders the significance of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. What the paper attempts to show is that one strand of Locke's famous argument supports First Amendment exceptionalism and Justice Holmes's dissenting opinions in Abrams and Schwimmer, but another strand buttresses the Keegstra and Butler decisions and the Report of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada. In the contemporary context of the debate over free speech and its limits, Lockean toleration has communitarian as well as libertarian dimensions, and the control of hate propaganda in Canada's multicultural and multinational polity becomes more clearly an important part of the liberal tradition.