Canadian political science has changed over the past 50 years; however, these changes have come slowly and lag behind larger societal demographic transformations. While early attention to diversity concentrated on the place of women within the discipline, more recent attention focuses on the presence of Black, Indigenous and other political scientists of colour. Accompanying a diversification of personnel has been a broadening of the substantive focus of our research, as well as an expansion in the epistemological and methodological approaches applied to the study of politics. Yet despite these adaptations, the study of political science in Canada remains siloed and often exclusionary, challenging our ability to train the next generation of scholars to be capable of addressing the issues facing a world that is increasingly complex and diverse.

This article analyzes the effect of procedural rule change on the dynamics of parliamentary speeches in the Canadian House of Commons between 1901 and 2015. During this period, several new rules were introduced to reduce the opportunities for private members to speak during the debates so that the government could get its business done within an acceptable amount of time. Our analysis looks at the impact of these rule changes on the content and orientation of all individual speeches made by members of Parliament. The results indicate that parliamentary rules had an important effect on the topic and duration of debates. Our findings also confirm that procedural changes contributed to a heightening of partisan polarization in the Canadian Parliament over time and disproportionately reduced the influence of government backbenchers in the legislative process.

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.

While much has been written about the politics of retrenchment, in a number of advanced industrial societies social policy expansion does occur today, which raises issues about how to study it in a post-retrenchment era. The present article explores the new politics of social policy expansion in Canada. Drawing on the work of Paul Pierson, we use an integrated framework that highlights the interaction of five factors: the availability of fiscal resources; the emergence of new social risks; the intensity and nature of partisan competition; the policy preferences of the main political parties; and the role of political institutions, especially federalism. Empirically, the article studies the politics of federal social policy expansion during the Harper (2006–2015) and Justin Trudeau (2015–) years, with a focus on three policy areas: child benefits (Universal Child Care Benefit and Canada Child Benefit), pensions (Old Age Security and Canada/Quebec Pension Plan) and Employment Insurance.

Since 2015, the Canadian Senate has undergone a series of reforms designed to make it more independent, ideologically diverse, and active in the legislative process. We use loyalty scores and vote scaling algorithms to situate the voting behaviour of senators, focusing primarily on the 41st and 42nd Parliaments (2011–2019), the period just before and after the changes, respectively. We find that the reforms have led to a loosening of party discipline across all parties and caucuses but that independent senators appointed under the reformed process are the most likely supporters of the government's agenda. We also find that the Senate has become more willing to use its formal powers.

À partir d'une recherche qualitative menée auprès de femmes âgées de 60 ans et plus, l'article propose une modélisation de la citoyenneté « vécue » dans l'avancée en âge. Construites à partir des pratiques de la vie quotidienne, quatre figures de citoyenneté sont proposées. La présentation des figures met en lumière autant la description des pratiques du quotidien que les finalités d'action qui animent l'agir quotidien. Par la suite, l'analyse narrative examine les diverses formes de citoyenneté vécue des participantes dans le vieillissement. Si les citoyennetés tracées rendent compte de différentes pratiques de participation sociale et d'affiliation au collectif, elles témoignent aussi, par ailleurs, des inégalités sociales et de genre qui sont toujours à l’œuvre pour penser les rapports à la citoyenneté vécue des femmes âgées sous des modes polyphoniques.

This article examines the failure of Canadian public policy in addressing racial economic inequality directly. Our analysis contends that Canada's key policy regimes were established in the postwar era, when approximately 96 per cent of Canadians were of European descent. As a result, the frameworks, problem definitions and policy tools inherited from that era were never intended to mitigate racial economic inequality. Moreover, this policy inheritance was deeply shaped by liberal universalism, which rejected racial distinctions in law and policy. These norms were carried forward into the more racially diverse Canada of today, where they have steered attention away from the use of racial categories in policy design. As a result, racial inequality was not a central priority during major policy reforms to core policy regimes in recent decades. In theoretical terms, our analysis contributes to Canadian Political Development through a sustained consideration of the intersecting roles of ideational frameworks, path dependency and policy inertia.

At issue in the SNC-Lavalin scandal was a new tool of corporate criminal law: remediation agreements. Introduced in 2018, remediation agreements allow corporate diversion and create an alternative to the prosecution of corporations suspected of criminal wrongdoing. This article examines why the federal government adopted and chose this particular new tool. Drawing on a wide-ranging documentary record, I argue that this reform was the product of transnational lawmaking and the ongoing influence of Canada's international commitments to prohibit and punish foreign bribery. The article shows how international criticism of Canada's lacklustre anti–foreign bribery enforcement record catalyzed cross-national policy diffusion and learning from other states. This led Canada to adopt corporate diversion, which promised greater enforcement, and also led Canada to adopt a form of the practice with legislative and judicial limits that narrowed the chances of any company—including SNC-Lavalin—of obtaining a remediation agreement.

Populism's electoral success has been linked to socio-economic crises and to inflammatory political discourse. However, little is known of populist attitudes in contexts in which these supply-side factors are not salient. The present article diverges from the conception of populism that sees it as being activated or fuelled by contextual factors and, rather, conceives populism as an ideological attitudinal dimension that can have an impact on vote choice when supply-side factors are not salient. Using the particular context of the 2015 Canadian federal election as a case to test this theory, empirical analyses support this conception of populism by demonstrating that populist attitudes can be relatively prominent and even impact vote choice in a setting in which the traditional supply-side factors to activate or fuel populism are not salient. Ultimately, populism is shown to be an important demand-side attitudinal dimension even when there is little or no fertile ground for it.

En mars 2020, le premier ministre Legault a fait appel aux influenceur.euses et aux célébrités québécoises dans le cadre de la campagne #Propage l'info, pas le virus afin de sensibiliser les jeunes au respect des consignes sanitaires liées à la COVID-19. Cet article offre un éclairage inédit sur les différentes manières dont ces personnes renommées ont répondu à l'appel ainsi que sur les formes de leurs réponses à l'aide d'une analyse de contenu de leur vidéo partagée sur les réseaux sociaux. Le codage des vidéos s'est fait à partir d'une grille d'analyse qualitative de contenu, inspirée de celle de Fields (1988). Il ressort des analyses que différents moyens ont permis d'accentuer le sentiment de proximité entre la célébrité et son public, dans le but d'augmenter l'adhésion au message. L'utilisation du pronom « On », l'emploi de formules narratives et l'intimité qui se dégage des vidéos informatives vont en ce sens.

To enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideological representation in Canadian municipal politics. Combining our municipal ideology estimates with elite survey data from more than 900 Canadian municipal politicians, we find evidence of a strong relationship between mass and elite ideology. This relationship is consistent across differing municipal population sizes and institutional structures. We conclude with additional detail on our publicly available individual and aggregate measures and describe their potential uses for future research on ideology and representation in Canadian politics at all levels.

These two books draw attention to the role of Canada's oil-producing provinces—“petro-provinces” for Angela Carter and “carbon provinces” for Douglas Macdonald—in the politics of energy, environment and climate change, but they do so in very different ways. Carter's volume examines the erosion of environmental protections in the oil-rich provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador, while Macdonald's focuses on the way interest-based conflicts rooted in regional energy political economies have driven federal/provincial dynamics around energy and climate policy. Both books are well written (not always a given in academic publishing), and they should interest anyone concerned with the politics of energy, environment and climate change in Canada.