COVID-19 has made videoconferencing a regular occurrence in the lives of Canadians. Videoconferencing is being used to maintain social ties, run business meetings—and to uphold responsible government. On April 28, 2020, Members of the House of Commons sat virtually using Zoom. The virtual sitting was the first of what will become a stand-in for regular proceedings, allowing the Members to fulfill some of their parliamentary duties while complying with physical distancing (see Malloy, 2020). As the legislative and executive branches look to digital technology to allow the business of government to continue, what about the judicial branch of Canada's government? Courts are an essential service. This is best articulated by the Chief Justice of Nova Scotia: “The fact is, the Courts cannot close. As the third branch of government, an independent judiciary is vital for our Canadian democracy to function. It is never more important than in times of crisis” (Wood, 2020). In this analysis, we seek to understand how courts have responded to COVID-19 and the challenges of physical distancing through the use of digital technologies. This is accomplished through a systematic review of COVID-19 statements and directives issued from all levels of court across Canada. We briefly compare Canada to the United States, a jurisdiction that demonstrates greater openness to technology.

Abstract. In recent years, there has been increasing popular and academic debate about how ethnic and racial diversity affects democratic politics and social cohesion in industrialized liberal democracies. In this introduction, different interdisciplinary theoretical approaches for understanding the role of diversity for intergroup relations and social cohesion are reviewed and four extensions to the current literature are proposed. These include taking advantage of a comparative framework to understand how generalizable the consequences of diversity are. A comparative country approach also helps to reveal which policies might be able to mitigate any potential negative consequences of diversity. Most importantly, we propose that the research in this area should include other aspects of social cohesion beyond measures of generalized trust, such as solidarity, attitudes about the welfare state and redistributive justice, as well as political and social tolerance. Finally, research on the effects of diversity might gain more insights from taking less of a majority-centric approach to include the effects on various minority groups as well.

Résumé. Ces dernières années ont procuré un sol fertile au débat populaire et universitaire autour des effets de la diversité ethnique et raciale sur la politique démocratique et sur la cohésion sociale dans les démocraties libérales industrialisées. Dans cette introduction, nous passons en revue diverses approches théoriques interdisciplinaires permettant de clarifier le rôle de la diversité dans les relations entre les groupes et dans la cohésion sociale et nous proposons quatre ajouts à la littérature courante. Nous suggérons, entre autres, de tirer profit d'un cadre comparatif pour comprendre à quel point les conséquences de la diversité sont généralisables. Une étude comparative des pays aide également à cerner les politiques qui pourraient atténuer les conséquences négatives potentielles de la diversité. Par-dessus tout, nous avançons que la recherche dans ce domaine devrait inclure d'autres aspects de la cohésion sociale à part les mesures de la confiance généralisée, des aspects tels que la solidarité, les attitudes envers l'État-providence et la justice redistributive, ainsi que la tolérance politique et sociale. Finalement, la recherche sur les effets de la diversité pourrait devenir plus instructive en adoptant une approche moins centrée sur la majorité afin d'inclure également les effets sur divers groupes minoritaires.

Abstract. This article examines the influence of ideology in Canadian politics. The core theory is that political opinions are bound together into ideological clusters by underlying influences that affect simultaneously the opinions of individuals about more than one issue. The central hypothesis is that ideological disagreement between the left and the right is asymmetrical, that is, that leftists and rightists bundle in different ways their opinions about issues. The analysis draws on evidence from Benoit and Laver's survey of experts (2006) about the policy positions of political parties, the Comparative Manifesto Research Project (Budge et al., 2001; Klingemann et al., 2006), and Cross and Young's survey of Canadian political party members (2002). The results of the analysis indicate, first, that Canada's left/right ideological divide is wide by cross-national standards, and, second, that leftists and rightists organize their opinions about the world in different ways.

Résumé. Cet article examine l'influence des idéologies dans l'environnement politique canadien. La théorie centrale stipule que les opinions politiques sur diverses questions sont structurées en groupes idéologiques consolidés par des influences sous-jacentes qui affectent simultanément les opinions des individus. L'hypothèse principale découlant de cette théorie est que la structure du désaccord idéologique entre la gauche et la droite est asymétrique; plus précisément, que les individus situés à la gauche et à la droite du spectre politique canadien organisent de manière différente leurs opinions politiques. L'analyse s'appuie tout d'abord sur les données d'un sondage auprès d'experts politiques réalisé par Benoit et Laver (2006) et portant sur les positions politiques des partis. Elle utilise également les données du Comparative Manifesto Research Project (Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al., 2006) et celles d'un sondage d'opinion de Cross et Young (2002) effectué auprès des membres de partis politiques canadiens. Les résultats de cette étude démontrent, en premier lieu, qu'il existe un clivage important entre la droite et la gauche au Canada même lorsqu'il est observé dans une perspective comparative, et en second lieu, que les individus se situant à la gauche et à la droite du spectre politique ont tendance à organiser de manière différente leurs opinions sur le monde.

Abstract. Many analyses of public opinion regarding global integration, and by implication global governance, are based on the material factors or interests driving individual and collective political preferences. In contrast, we show that values and ideology offer a better explanation of attitudes toward trade liberalization than do economic interests, and that the material self-interest factors that do influence opinion about trade are not relevant for opinion about globalization. We use regression analysis of original Canadian public opinion data to show that individuals of whatever skill or educational level who trust multinational corporations and the market, who like the United States, who support more immigration, who oppose a larger welfare state, and who support Canada taking a more active role in the world are more likely to support globalization. We conclude that Canadians' continued support of free trade agreements but wariness about globalization indicates that the compromise of embedded liberalism, a compelling metaphor about the foundation of twentieth-century international organization, continues to shape their understanding of the world.

Résumé. De nombreuses analyses de l'opinion publique concernant l'intégration mondiale, et logiquement la gouvernance mondiale, reposent sur les facteurs ou les intérêts matériels qui influencent les préférences politiques individuelles ou collectives. Par contraste, nous démontrons que les valeurs et l'idéologie offrent une meilleure explication des attitudes à l'égard de la libéralisation des échanges commerciaux que les intérêts économiques. Nous prouvons également que les facteurs matériels d'intérêt personnel modelant l'opinion des gens à l'égard du commerce n'ont aucun impact sur leur opinion à l'égard de la mondialisation. Nous recourons à l'analyse de régression des données originales sur l'opinion publique canadienne pour démontrer qu'indépendamment de leur niveau d'aptitudes ou d'instruction, les personnes, qui font confiance aux multinationales et au marché, qui aiment les États-Unis, qui soutiennent l'immigration, qui s'opposent à l'élargissement de l'État-providence, et qui encouragent la participation du Canada aux affaires mondiales, sont des partisans plus probables de la mondialisation. Nous concluons que le soutien continu des Canadiens pour les accords de libre-échange ainsi que leurs hésitations à l'égard de la mondialisation prouvent que le compromis du libéralisme tacitement enchâssé, métaphore puissante de la fondation de l'organisation internationale du 20e siècle, continue de façonner leur compréhension du monde.

Abstract. This paper starts from the assumption that historical institutionalism has much to offer in order to address important questions raised in the literature on comparative federalism. Historical institutionalism is a useful approach to enhancing our understanding of both the origins that drive federal system dynamics and the dynamic patterns which federal systems unfold over time. The paper conceptualizes federalism as a multi-layered political order, comprising an institutional and an ideational layer. It then introduces two models of political change, the model of path dependence and the process sequencing model, and asks how each model can contribute to explain the emergence of the federal order in Canada and Germany. I conclude that while the model of path dependence lends itself well to capturing federal system dynamics in Germany, the process sequencing model, in contrast, is better suited to explaining sources and patterns of change in Canada.

Résumé. L'article part de la position que l'institutionnalisme historique constitue une source intéressante pour aborder des questions importantes issues de la littérature sur le fédéralisme comparatif. L'institutionnalisme historique est une approche utile pour élargir notre compréhension des dynamiques politiques dans les systèmes fédéraux. Cet article conceptualise le fédéralisme comme un ordre politique à plusieurs niveaux comportant une strate institutionnelle et une strate idéationnelle. Puis, deux modèles de transformation politique sont introduits : le modèle de la dépendance du sentier et un autre qui trace les diverses séquences d'un changement dont la temporalité est décisive pour les résultats. On analyse ensuite la capacité des deux modèles d'expliquer la formation d'un ordre politique fédéral en Allemagne et au Canada. L'article conclut que le modèle de la dépendance du sentier est utile pour cerner les dynamiques du système fédéral allemand tandis que le modèle des séquences temporelles est meilleur pour expliquer les sources et les transformations du fédéralisme canadien.

Constitutionalists and political scientists often claim that federal high courts are neutral and impartial arbiters of federalism disputes. However, analysis of the political impact of nine federal high courts on the division of powers clearly indicates that such courts are best characterized as centralist and nationalist. This is largely the result of the strong institutional factors that link the federal high court to the political institutions of the central government, notably the process by which federal judges are appointed. The political theory of federalism must thus be modified to take into account the centralist function of judicial review.

We study data on the gender of more than 21,000 unique candidates in all Canadian federal elections since 1921, when the first women ran for seats in Parliament. This large data set allows us to compute precise estimates of the difference in the electoral fortunes of men and women candidates. When accounting for party effects and time trends, we find that the difference between the vote shares of men and women is substantively negligible (±0.5 percentage point). This gender gap was larger in the 1920s (±2.5 percentage points), but it is now statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our results have important normative implications: political parties should recruit and promote more women candidates because they remain underrepresented in Canadian politics and because they do not suffer from a substantial electoral penalty.

“The Recent History of Professionalism in Relation to Social Structure and Social Policy” by T. H. Marshall was published by this Journal twenty years ago. It has since become a classic; and may be fittingly celebrated in this anniversary issue. Its classic quality lies in the skill with which Marshall worked enduring themes with current trends and problems into a common web. He defines professions as, in effect and with some other characteristics, those occupations in which caveat emptor cannot be allowed to prevail and which, while they are not pursued for gain, must bring their practitioners income of such a level that they will be respected and such a manner of living that they may pursue the life of the mind. There are certain problems which surround such occupations in all times.

The current changes noted by Marshall are the ever greater dependence of modern society upon professional services, an increase in the variety of such services and in the number of the professions, and the tendency for many practitioners of the older professions and for most or all of some newer professions to work in organizations with an employer, rather than to set up a shop to which clients come, one by one, are served, and pay for the service. He also noted that while the community at large is in all times and places concerned with the manner in which professional services are performed, this is especially so in our times; indeed, the community at large is the client of some new professions and, in increasing measure, of older ones.

This paper reports the results of a content analysis of election–related headlines in Canada's two English–language national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and The National Post, over the course of the 36–day 2000 federal election campaign. We found that the two national newspapers' headlines revealed differences in issue emphasis, leader portrayals and party assessment. Yet both newspapers embraced a game frame for election coverage–by focusing on the horse–race, leader personalities and campaign strategies–to the neglect of campaign issues and ideological distinctions between parties. These findings suggest that media game framing can result in troublesome consequences for constructive citizen engagement in election activities.

Recent decades have been marked by increasingly divided partisan opinion in the US. This study investigates whether a similar trend might be occurring in Canada. It does so by examining redistributive preferences, using Canadian Election Studies data from every election since 1992. Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sorting that is comparable to that in the US. Over time, like-minded citizens have increasingly clustered into parties, with increasingly stark divisions between partisans.

Along with the nations created by states, there are ''internal nations'' within states. Several such nations exist within the Canadian state, representing close to one quarter of the population. In recent years, Canadian political scientists have been actively theorizing this multinationalism and showing how it might be accommodated. Yet, the political realm has become highly resistant to such notions. Dualism, the primary historical accommodation of the francophone ''internal nation,'' has been displaced by a state nationalism which, in turn, has entrenched a purely territorial rationale for federalism and has made multiculturalism the only legitimate basis for accommodating cultural diversity. Moreover, the nationalisms of the two predominant ''internal nations,'' Quebec and ''First Nations,'' have been mobilized in direct opposition to each other. In the end, rather than constituting a new form of ''post-modern state'' which transcends nationalism, Canada is in fact caught in the contradiction between the nationalism of the Canadian state and the nationalisms of its ''internal nations.''

Résumé. De mars 2006 à décembre 2007, le Québec a été secoué par un débat sociétal sur la question de la gestion de la diversité culturelle. Cette «crise» aurait été alimentée par un tsunami médiatique traitant de divers cas d'accommodements juridiques ou d'ajustements administratifs accordés dans les services publics à des citoyens québécois issus de l'immigration dans la grande région de Montréal (Giasson et coll., 2008). Par le biais d'une couverture étendue, les médias ont attiré l'attention de la population sur ces pratiques d'accommodement. L'article présente les données exploratoires d'une analyse de contenu de la couverture faite par onze journaux québécois du climat de l'opinion des Québécois en matière de diversité et d'immigration pendant la phase intensive de développement du débat. L'étude montre que dans leur analyse des sondages d'opinion et dans la présentation générale des tendances de l'opinion publique sur les accommodements raisonnables, les journaux ont mis l'accent sur l'évaluation du malaise des répondants envers l'immigration et la diversité religieuse plutôt que sur l'ouverture de la population québécoise envers la diversité et sur l'apport social de l'immigration, renforçant ainsi davantage l'impression populaire qu'une crise sociale majeure se déroulait et qu'il existait un fossé entre les Québécois «de souche», les Québécois issus de l'immigration et les autres Canadiens.

Abstract. From March 2006 to December 2007, the province of Quebec experienced a contentious public debate on diversity. The “crisis” was fueled by a “media tsunami” during which news outlets actively reported on numerous cases of reasonable accommodation practices or administrative agreements in public services granted in the Greater Montreal region to citizens of immigrant background (Giasson et al., 2008). Through this extensive coverage, the media brought these instances of accommodation to the public's attention. The research studies the press coverage that 11 daily newspapers dedicated to the state of public opinion in Quebec during the active and intense development phase of the “crisis”. The study shows that in their analysis of polls and their general framing of the mood of public opinion towards reasonable accommodation, newspapers focused mostly on the malaise in the population toward immigration and religious diversity rather than on its openness to diversity and to the positive social outcomes of immigration. In doing so, the media further anchored the popular impression that a serious social crisis was ongoing and that a wide gap in tolerance existed between Francophone Quebeckers, Quebeckers of recent immigrant background and other Canadians.

Governments often operate under considerable pressure to respond effectively to the emergence of increasingly complex policy dilemmas. This article first explains some key difficulties in bringing forth comprehensive policy interventions. Despite the ubiquity of social and political constraints to policy innovation, many failures can be attributed to public bureaucracies that are not designed to deal with complex problems, and which all too quickly exceed their policy-making capacities. This study then analyzes why comprehensive policy-making does sometimes occur, and links its occurrence to bureaucratic design factors, arguing that extending organizational capacity for innovation involves more than generous budgets and expertise. The article draws upon, and develops further, Mintzberg's ideas on administrative adhocracy to show how administrative units can be organized to enable bureaucracies to transcend professional compartmentalization and routine; and how structures can be designed for comprehensive policy innovation. The study focuses on Canadian federal bureaucracy, and it is supported by three case studies of recent policy experiments: energy, environment and AIDS.

The study explored the sources of political knowledge using data from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. Two dimensions of political knowledge were measured: factual knowledge, in which respondents were asked to name the 10 provincial premiers; and conceptual knowledge, in terms of respondents’ abilities to define and use the concepts of left and right. The authors tested four explanations of people's levels of political knowledge; these dealt with education, political participation, media effects and region, with controls for income, residency in several provinces, age and sex. Education was significantly associated with both forms of knowledge, but especially with conceptual knowledge. Reading about politics in newspapers and magazines was strongly related to the two knowledge variables. The effects of reliance on television for political information, however, were much weaker. There were significant effects for region, with the patterns depending on the type of knowledge. The study concludes with some observations about the role of knowledge in political behaviour.

Proponents of restrictions on the wearing of religious symbols in public institutions in Quebec have often framed their support in the language of liberalism, with references to “gender equality”, “state neutrality” and “freedom of conscience”. However, efforts to account for support for restrictions on minority religious symbols rarely mention liberalism. In this article, we test the hypothesis that holding liberal values might have different attitudinal consequences in Quebec and the rest of Canada. Our findings demonstrate that holding liberal values is associated with support for restrictions on the wearing of minority religious symbols in Quebec, but it is associated with opposition to such restrictions in the rest of Canada. Moreover, this difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada in the relationship between liberal values and support for restrictions on minority religious symbols can explain Quebecers' greater support for restrictions.

Abstract. Electoral engineering determines prospects for centripetal politics in postconflict societies. Lebanon's postwar elections have been contested by interethnic electoral alliances in multi-ethnic electoral districts. Interethnic coalitions, vote pooling and bargaining have structured the results of these elections, as have the electoral laws demarcating the boundaries of electoral districts. Democratization, peace building and ethnic harmony have been the main victims of these cross-ethnic alliances, however. This paper seeks to explain this Lebanese puzzle by examining the institutional determinants of cross-ethnic electoral alliances in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 parliamentary elections.

Résumé. Dans les sociétés post-conflictuelles, l'ingénierie électorale détermine l'éventualité de politiques centripètes. Les élections libanaises d'après-guerre se sont disputées entre des alliances électorales interethniques dans des districts électoraux multiethniques. Les coalitions interethniques, le “ vote pooling ” et le marchandage, de même que les lois électorales qui déterminaient la configuration des circonscriptions électorales, ont structuré les résultats de ces élections. Or, la démocratisation, la construction de la paix et l'harmonie ethnique ont été les victimes principales de ces alliances interethniques. La présente analyse vise à expliquer ce paradoxe libanais en étudiant les déterminants institutionnels des alliances électorales interethniques lors des élections parlementaires de 1992, 1996 et 2000.

The interest of philosophers in the politics of cultural identity was one of the most interesting developments in this field in the 1990s. Their involvement in an area dominated by historians, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists2 has been particularly evident in Canada where scholars such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor have shaped the way many academics understand cultural identity politics. These theorists have favoured a cultural approach to the phenomenon. They have established frameworks for understanding and managing multiethnic states that stress the inherent strength and meaning of culture.

In recent years, many governments have embraced new modes of economic governance that rely on public-private partnerships. These forms of governance effectively devolve authority and responsibility from the state, and instead rely on the policy networks found in civil society.This article argues that despite the general enthusiasm for such decentralized collaboration, there is significant variation in its meaning and practice. Comparing the public-private partnership strategies of two governments in Ontario in the 1990s, the article analyzes the origins and progress of two distinctive governance paradigms, looking for signs of economic innovation.The case studies demonstrate that each of the social democratic and neoliberal paradigms contains its own specific representational logic, organizational design, and policy purpose. The article underscores the analytical importance of linking the study of decentralized policy networks at the meso or local scale to macro-level political and economic factors that condition their operation and effects. It concludes with a discussion of the obstacles to institutional innovation in Ontario, and the conditions that facilitate successful public-private partnerships in economic governance.

This paper describes the digitization and enrichment of the Canadian House of Commons English Debates from 1901 to present. We start by laying out the general framework in which this project took place and then present the structure of the database and provide guidelines to prospective users. The paper concludes with the introduction of www.lipad.ca, an online platform designed as a hub for archiving Canadian political data, with the parliamentary proceedings at the centre of its architecture.