This project examines the framing of the Syrian refugee crisis in Canadian print media from January 1, 2012, to December 31, 2016, in eight English-language major dailies. Using automated coding to uncover central themes in the coverage, this analysis explores the changes in news frames over the course of the conflict and the concomitant federal election in Canada, as well as across regional and national news sources. The results indicate that the conflict frame dominates the coverage of Syrian refugees in the pre-election period but shifts markedly following the release of the iconic Alan Kurdi photo toward a more humanizing depiction of refugee families and their resettlement. This analysis speaks to the importance of news media in reflecting and reproducing depictions of refugees among the Canadian public, highlighting the value of examining changes in the portrayals of refugees over time and across news outlets.

Commentators and critics often invoke the metaphor “Charter proofing” to emphasize how much the Charter and judicial review have influenced legislation. This metaphor implies that proposed legislation is evaluated carefully for its consistency with Charter rulings as a condition of passage because decision makers believe legislation should respect judicial interpretations of constitutional norms and/or because they engage in risk-averse behaviour out of self-interest to minimize the likelihood that legislation could subsequently be challenged and declared unconstitutional. However, it is not clear that the federal government is as worried about having legislation declared invalid as many assume. If this is so, federal government responses to the Charter raise an interesting puzzle. The government has both the resources and the institutional capacity to anticipate judicial concerns and integrate judicial norms into legislation to minimize the likelihood of having legislation declared unconstitutional. So why does it not act in a more risk-averse manner at the outset, in order to protect legislation from the possibility of judicial invalidation? This address offers a five-part explanation to this puzzle that emphasizes the significance of political strategizing about risk.

Applying the regime politics approach to the study of judicial behaviour, which regards the Supreme Court as largely operating to preserve the policy agenda of the existing lawmaking majority, this paper evaluates the Court's behaviour during the Conservative government's tenure. There is evidence to support the basic core of the regime politics thesis. The Court rarely invalidates laws passed by the sitting government. Nonetheless, the Court's behaviour during the Conservative government's tenure was distinctive. Incorporating a measure of issue salience—the relative importance of the policies affected—into the analysis demonstrates the Court's impact on the Conservatives' policy agenda stands in sharp contrast to previous governments. It is the only government of the Charter period to have policies in its election platforms blocked by judicial review and the only government in Canadian history to effectively lose all of the constitutional reference cases it posed to the Court.

What is a colony? In this article, I reconsider the meaning of colony in light of the existence of domestic colonies in Canada around the turn of the twentieth century. The two case studies examined are farm colonies for the mentally disabled and ill in Ontario and British Columbia and utopian colonies for Doukhobors in Saskatchewan. I show how both kinds of colonies are characterized by the same three principles found in Lockean settler colonialism: segregation, agrarian labour on uncultivated soil and improvement/cultivation of people and land. Defining “colony” in this way is theoretically interesting as it is different from the definition found in most dictionaries and post-colonial scholarship. There is also an inherent contradiction within domestic colonies as they both support state power over indigenous peoples, Doukhobors and the mentally ill and disabled but also challenge the principles of domination, individualism, private property and sovereignty upon which the Canadian settler state was founded.

The effects of Canadian mining companies on local communities abroad is an increasingly contentious topic as activists and academics, citing case studies, have drawn attention to alleged problems. Despite the policy relevance of this issue, there have been no generalizable analyses of whether mining companies headquartered in Canada behave differently from mining firms headquartered in other countries. This paper conducts the first rigorous statistical analysis of the effect of country of origin, or more specifically, “being Canadian,” on the occurrence of known social conflicts in Latin America. We use an original database of 634 mining properties in five Latin American countries, which allows us to differentiate between a country-of-origin effect and other probable determinants of social conflict in communities near mining properties. We find that Canadian mining firms perform slightly better than other foreign firms, but worse than locally owned firms.

The article examines the impact of visible minorities on support for the Charter of Values and the ban of religious symbols for civil servants among Francophone Quebecers. Building on group conflict theory and contact theory, we expect that the proportion of visible minorities in a region will have a positive effect on support for the Charter of values and the ban of religious symbols among sovereignists while to have a negative effect among federalists. Our results show that the presence of visible minorities decreases support for the ban of religious symbols, except among those who are very supportive of Quebec sovereignty.

Increasingly, jurisdictions are adopting “apology legislation” that allow medical professionals to apologize to patients and family members when an adverse event occurs while disallowing the introduction of the apology in a liability case as evidence of fault or liability. While apology legislation itself is fairly straightforward, its potential meaning and impact is much more complex. This paper conceptualizes apology legislation from an accountability and ethics of care perspective. These two concepts—accountability and care—are distinct but interrelated concepts and this dual theoretical approach offers a rich analysis on the potential impact(s) of apology legislation. We argue that apology legislation is a mechanism added to the existing accountability regime that can offer important opportunities to express and practise care. As an accountability mechanism, apology legislation creates space for an accountability relationship to emerge between medical professionals and their patients. Apology legislation also addresses long-standing gaps in how we as a society think about health care and respond to patients and families in ways that challenge the dominant “consumer of services” role. It is in this sense that apology legislation has the potential to destabilize traditional notions of social citizenship. Last, we argue that empirical research is urgently needed to know to what degree apologies contribute to accountability and the transformation of health care.

The concept of participation is a cornerstone of development and democracy discourses, but studies on participatory development rarely examine the political regimes those policies are embedded in. Yet, in authoritarian contexts, participation is ambiguous, potentially threatening—as it can be connected to democratic ideals—and it also can be used as a resource, a tool for domination. Through an analysis of participatory development projects implemented in Sudan, I explore how power relations are renegotiated at the local level. Relying on data collected during fieldwork in Khartoum and the state of North Kordofan, where the projects are located, I highlight the disconnect between the discourse surrounding the participatory devices, which establishes an horizontal relationship between citizens and the local government, and the actual practices that strengthen the latter's power. In doing so, the article challenges a linear, top-down conception of authoritarian power and reveals the tensions that exist between institutional levels.

This paper critiques the deployment of the term “identity politics” in Canadian political science. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of research articles in leading English language academic journals in the Canadian social sciences, we examine whose politics are labelled identity politics and what intellectual work transpires through this label. Identity politics tends to be applied to scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, but with a lack of analytical rigour, indicating a degree of conceptual looseness. Moreover, the designation identity politics is not neutral; it is often mobilized as a rhetorical device to distance authors from scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, and to inscribe a materialist/culturalist divide in claims-making. We argue that the effect of this demarcation of identity from politics is to control the boundaries of political discourse, limiting who and what gains entry into the political. This serves to reassert an exclusionary conception of Canadian identity.

Previous research has argued that while economic voting is quite consistently found to be an important mechanism in the rest of Canada, it is rather weak in Quebec. Guérin and Nadeau (1998) have demonstrated that whether or not citizens in Quebec vote economically depends on the party system. Following their lead, we expect that the presence of a dominant regionalist party in Quebec after 1993 (the Bloc Québécois) inhibited Quebeckers from voting economically. However, our results do not offer evidence for this hypothesis. Furthermore, we find only weak evidence of economic voting being moderated by voters’ attitudes towards Quebec independence. Our study hence suggests that the impact of economic accountability in Canada is not hindered by a strong regional party or by the salience of the issue of Quebec independence. The economic vote, it seems, is more stable and general than it is regularly argued to be.

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.

“Indigenous resurgence” centres on three contentions: (1) that colonialism is an active structure of domination premised, at base, on Indigenous elimination; (2) that the prevailing normative-discursive environment continues to reflect this imperative; and (3) that Indigenous peoples must therefore turn away from this hostile environment and pursue independent programmes of social and cultural rejuvenation. The principal movement advocated under the resurgence paradigm thus appears as one of disengagement with the settler order. I also argue, however, that there is an important secondary drive within the movement that presses in the opposite direction. It figures further engagement both as a longer term goal (in the form of renewed dialogue on decolonization) and as an immediate imperative (in order to expose and remove obstacles to reciprocal dialogue). I aim, here, to excavate this secondary drive and consider what it connotes in terms of settler engagement.

Much of the literature on unconditional basic income considers reciprocity to be necessary for its success. From a normative standpoint, receiving without giving is unjust. From a technical standpoint, the absence of mechanisms that promote reciprocation invites free riding which threatens to erode the economic structure upon which the system of distribution depends. As a solution, it has been proposed that communities adopt social norms that encourage basic income recipients to contribute to the productive capacity of society by engaging in volunteer work. This article interrogates whether this alternative to conditionality is consistent with the rationale for implementing unconditional basic income and finds the instillation of stronger norms to be unnecessary for the project's success.

In 2015, the Canadian House of Commons passed a new code of conduct governing non-criminal sexual harassment between members of Parliament becoming the first of its kind in any Westminster system in the world. Using a feminist institutional and violence-against-women-in-politics approach, we assess how the code challenges, legitimizes and upholds traditionally gendered norms and institutionalized sexism within Canada's parliamentary system including parliamentary privilege, party cohesion and party discipline. Despite its novelty, we argue this code fails to enact positive gender-friendly institutional change and may do more harm than good in its efforts to curb sexual harassment.

La doctrine Gérin-Lajoie, qui fonde l'action internationale du Québec depuis les années 1960, s'exprime conventionnellement comme le prolongement externe des compétences internes du Québec. Comment alors expliquer que les élus québécois prennent régulièrement position sur certains conflits internationaux, qui relèvent pourtant clairement de la compétence du gouvernement fédéral ? Cet article offre un premier éclairage sur les motivations des élus québécois à se positionner sur des enjeux militaires ainsi qu'aux dynamiques qui les entourent. Trois hypothèses sont avancées et confrontées tour à tour à l'ensemble des prises de position des élus québécois depuis le 11 septembre 2001 en matière d'intervention militaire. Premièrement, la paradiplomatie québécoise pourrait être marquée par un nationalisme identitaire, agissant comme outil d'affirmation et de différenciation nationales par-delà les compétences provinciales. Deuxièmement, plutôt que de représenter une tendance à connotation identitaire, l'affirmation québécoise sur des enjeux de compétence fédérale pourrait être la manifestation d'une protodiplomatie. Troisièmement, les élus québécois pourraient s'aventurer sur le terrain de la sécurité internationale en raison de calculs électoraux. En somme, l'article cherche à évaluer si l'affirmation québécoise en matière de sécurité internationale est le fruit de motivations identitaires, souverainistes ou électorales.

This paper studies the prevalence of ballot order effects in two different types of Canadian elections which differ greatly by the strength of party cues they provide to voters. Provincial elections are best described as a typical competition between well established and institutionalized parties, hence providing voters with strong party cues. Alternatively, municipal politics provide voters with much weaker party cues. We use electoral results from recent provincial and municipal elections in Québec and find ballot order effects in municipal elections but not in provincial ones. Although ballot order effects may also be the product of alphabetic preference bias, we argue that in any case these are cognitive biases that are ultimately the product of insufficient cues that voters need in order to cast well-informed votes. The paper, therefore, sheds some light on an understudied type of election in political science.

Existing literature assumes a link between voting and individuals’ political socialization, but no study has explored how political upbringing affects the most important attitudinal predictor of turnout: the duty to vote. Following previous research about the formation of attitudes related to the electoral process and social norms, this study focuses on the socialization agencies and dynamics that might first instill the belief during childhood that voting is a duty. The study also intends to contribute to political socialization theory by adopting a longitudinal perspective, by building upon developmental psychology theory and by simultaneously considering the two main childhood socialization agencies: family and school. A series of multivariate models confirms the role of family's socioeconomic status, parental engagement with children's education and non-authoritarian parenting styles, a positive effect that appears stronger than the effects on duty observed for Catholic schools and schools with democratic governance.

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.

Empirical data from exploratory research on ethical risks in a municipal environment were coded thematically. An ethical risk diagnosis was performed in a municipality confronting a major integrity crisis. A data collection strategy composed of semi-directed interviews with strategic actors and focus groups of operational actors spanned the period from November 2015 to March 2016.

This research follows a feedback-about-experience model (Wybo and Wassenhove, 2009). Thus, through collective reflection, this study's aim is to create a pool of practical recommendations to enable greater understanding of ethical risks and to target risk mitigation strategies for said risks.

As for our analyses, we intersected our results along two axes: a risks’ analysis from three indicators (risky behaviours, risk factors and mitigation strategies), and a stakeholders’ transactions analysis. To underline the cross-cutting nature of the data and their contextual links to specific transactions, our results are presented in a consolidated manner. In the discussion section, strategies for mitigating ethical risks are emphasized in order to highlight an important discrepancy between our results and conventional suggestions about public service ethics set forth by institutional experts.

Canadian immigration policies went through numerous changes under the Conservative party leadership of Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015. This article provides an empirical account of immigration policy change during this era and suggests that of state-centred venue shopping can effectively account for the Harper's immigration record. In particular, it documents the ways in which immigration policies have expanded into international and regional venues, opened new venues to non-state actors, further decentralized into subnational venues and reinvested into traditional administrative and executive venues for policy making. The analysis suggests that the redeployment of the state into new and expanding venues aims to demonstrate state capacity and legitimacy as a nodal actor in immigration policy.