Political parties have long been identified as critical players in Canadian democracy. In this address I focus on the activities of parties at the constituency level arguing that this is crucial to fully understanding many important questions in Canadian political science. By way of example, using data relating to the 2015 federal election, I argue that examining the relative vitality of local party associations in the period between election campaigns assists in a fuller understanding of election outcomes and that examining local party nomination dynamics is key to understanding the underrepresentation of women in the candidate pool and ultimately in the House of Commons.

Buildings produce a large proportion of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and municipalities control a number of policy levers that can help to reduce those emissions. This article explains variation among Canadian cities regarding policies adopted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with a particular focus on green building standards. By applying insights from the study of the politics of public policy to urban politics, this article finds that while electoral disincentives prevent most cities from enacting high impact green building policies, the success of some cities can be attributed to the influence of independent municipal environment departments. These departments facilitate policy learning by providing information and resources. The findings suggest that policy makers could improve the effectiveness of local climate change policy by creating municipal environment departments that have organizational capacity—funding, staff, and a cross-cutting mandate—and are insulated from interference from politicians and line departments.

Canada is beginning to slowly embrace an ethic of Indigenous-settler biculturalism. One model of change is afforded by the development of biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where recent Indigenous Māori mobilization has created a unique model in the Western settler world. This article explores what Canada might learn from the Kiwi experience, focusing on the key identity marker Pākehā, an internalized and contingent settler identity, using Indigenous vocabulary and reliant on a relationship with Indigenous peoples. This article gauges Pākehā’s utility in promoting biculturalism, noting both its progressive qualities and problems in its deployment, including continued inequality, political alienation, and structural discrimination. While Canada has no Pākehā analogue, terms such as “settler” are being operationalized to develop a larger agenda for reconciliation along the lines recommended by the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. However, such terms function best when channelled towards achieving positive concrete goals, rather than acting as rhetorical screens for continued inaction.

The articles in this symposium reflect on Richard Simeon's article, “Studying Public Policy,” published forty years ago in this journal. In this introduction, we review these articles’ contribution to three themes in “Studying Public Policy”: first, the goal of the study of public policy should be policy analysis and explanation, not policy prescription; second, the analysis of public policy outcomes requires a holistic and contextually situated analytical framework; and third, building theory requires methods of comparative analysis, not single case studies. We also propose items for a future policy studies agenda.

Drawing on the work of Richard Simeon and using the cases of equalization in Canada and Belgium's social security system, this article shows how nationalist ideas combined with institutional management structures, government formation rules and the configuration of party systems to condition the territorial dynamics around these two programmes. In Canada, resentment against equalization in many provinces, often because it is perceived as accommodating Québécois nationalism, has translated only into moderate pressures on the programme because federal parties have largely stayed away from this divisive issue and federal executive discretion over the programme has meant that provinces cannot force change. In Belgium, pressures on social security have been more intense because the absence of pan-Belgian parties has given greater resonance to Flemish nationalist ideas within the political system.

In his classic 1976 article on the state of policy studies in Canada, Richard Simeon explicitly warned against following the path toward a policy science. Simeon was suspicious of the normative agenda embedded in the policy sciences project and worried that it would submerge politics in a broader set of interdisciplinary concerns. Was Simeon right? The policy sciences have not developed the way their principal proponent, Harold Lasswell, had anticipated or hoped, but neither has the study of public policy developed exactly as Simeon advocated. Both Lasswell and Simeon believed strongly in an empirical orientation and Lasswell, more than Simeon, focused on creating a tool kit of techniques. Schools of public policy have moved beyond both critique and technique to estimate risk, ameliorate error and mobilize knowledge. This new agenda requires students of public policy to acquire and employ practical knowledge steeped in the particular and instructed by policy narratives.

If Richard Simeon's “Studying Public Policy” sought to inspire a theory of policy making, however tentative or crude, its conceptual cornerstone was no doubt the “funnel of causality.” Yet references to the funnel of causality have all but disappeared from the policy literature. This article traces the evolution of the thinking that underlies the funnel of causality with the aim of demonstrating its lasting relevance to policy studies. Being a method for understanding how inputs from various levels of abstraction impact policy outcomes, the interaction and feedback effects implicit in the funnel metaphor have been maintained in subsequent neo-institutionalist work that takes seriously the institutional and sociological environment in which policy making takes place, particularly that which is interested in the origins and operation of policy subsystems, policy communities or networks, and policy regimes.

This article argues that Simeon's insistence on the value of explicit comparison within individual studies of public policy needs to remain central even in historical institutionalist approaches which “take time seriously” and focus on causal mechanisms—a methodological injunction sometimes seen to augur in favour of single-case and single-outcome studies. However, if Simeon's suggested approach is to reflect the major advances that have occurred since he wrote, it will require more fully and more explicitly combining the power of the comparative method with the powerful insights generated by a logic of intertemporal causal mechanisms unfolding over time.

Concerned by the proliferation of idiosyncratic prescriptive case studies in the nascent subfield of policy studies, Richard Simeon, in his seminal 1976 article, asked scholars to produce more comparative policy research that aimed at explaining general events and contributing to theory building. The extent to which Simeon's vision materialized remains debated. With a view to informing this debate, we conducted a systematic content analysis of the articles published in five major generalist public policy journals from 1980 to 2015. The analysis reveals that Canadian policy scholars took a comparative turn, publishing more territorial, sector and time comparisons than in the past. We also found evidence that theoretical knowledge accumulation is more important today for Canadian authors than it was when Simeon wrote his article.