Calls for more family-friendly assemblies, specifically those able to accommodate representatives who are pregnant, postpartum or have young children, have become urgent in the last decade, as a mini-baby boom in the federal parliament and the provinces has called the inclusivity of legislatures into question. Drawing on interviews with legislative clerks, this article asks two questions: 1) Are Canadian legislatures family-friendly? And 2) what approaches to family-friendly legislatures emerge from policies and discussions within these legislatures? It identifies patterns both in the types of changes that are proposed and those which are actioned, finding that changes have leaned heavily on the least consequential improvements. Many calls for change continue to run up against structural challenges that have been, thus far, ignored. Although legislatures are more family-friendly than in previous decades, this article argues that the future of inclusive parliaments hinges on a broad rethinking of the parliamentary role.

Academics across Canada, an officially bilingual and multicultural country, devote a lot of attention to diversity and representation. This is particularly true for political scientists. In this research note, we focus on the linguistic composition of panels and overall linguistic fragmentation of the most important in-person event for Canadian political science: the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). To do so, we generated a dataset based on the official program of the 2023 annual conference. Our main results are twofold. First, we find an important under-representation of French-speaking events and academic communications (i.e., panels and papers). Second, we computed Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes demonstrating that francophone-dominated panels and co-authored papers with francophone first authors are significantly more linguistically diverse than anglophone panels and papers. Our results highlight important blind spots in Canadian political science and help make sense of the lack of representation of French-language work in Canadian academia.

This research note reports on a new dataset about legislators in four Canadian provinces since the establishment of their colonial assemblies in the eighteenth century. Over 7,000 legislators from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are included, with consolidated information drawn from multiple sources about parliamentarians’ years of birth and death, religion, electoral performance, kinship, and several other biographical indicators. We also illustrate the utility of such data with the help of a few descriptive examples drawn from the four provinces. We believe this consolidated dataset offers several opportunities for future research on representation, legislative activities and party politics.

Public debates structure election cycles, feature in news media, and are privileged as a form of academic exchange. Yet, public debate is poorly understood from the perspective of political theory. While theorists often talk about “public debate,” they usually mean diffuse discussion on a topic in the public sphere. This article considers how literal public debates—multisided, publicly accessible and publicly oriented performances of reason-giving—may be normatively distinct from other forms of rhetoric. Drawing on the “constructivist turn” in the scholarship on representation and the philosophy of Gadamer, I offer a hermeneutical approach for assessing public debates. I argue that public debates do not merely provide a platform for opinions to be broadcast, they also purport to provide a representative spectrum of opinions. In so doing, they help to construct the borders of the public sphere itself. I conclude by considering the significance of protest to public debate.

What determines how Members of Parliament (MPs) and their staff frame their communications with all constituents in their electoral district? Prior research has suggested that constituency operations are one of the last bastions of freedom that MPs have from the full grasp of party discipline in Canada. If this remains true, MP communications with their constituents should reflect the MPs’ background or the constituency context and not their political partisanship. We collected a sample of published newsletters (“householders”) that Canadian MPs’ offices sent to all households in their electoral districts during the COVID-19 pandemic. We supplement our analysis with original insights about householders from a selection of MPs and their staff. Our results suggest that in a system of strict party discipline, the most important predictor of what MPs include in their constituent communications is indeed partisanship. The results inform our understanding of democratic representation, centralized co-ordination and political communication, and the pervasiveness of partisan messaging in Canada.

Despite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

We introduce new data resources to enable spatial and nonspatial research on Canadian elections, electoral history and political geography. These include a comprehensive set of distinct identification codes for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1867 to the present, a complete set of digital boundary files for these electoral districts, historical census data aggregated to federal electoral districts, and tools to connect our district identification codes to federal election results. After describing the construction and content of these new resources, we provide an example of their use in a comparative-historical analysis of district compactness in Canada and the United States. We find that, in contrast to the United States, postwar institutional changes to district boundary-drawing processes had little effect on district compactness in Canada.

Perceptions of numbers (numerical estimations of migrant flows) and mental images (beliefs about characteristics and motives of immigrants) have been shown to be important predictors of cross-national immigration attitudes. However, this finding has seldom been verified in Canada. As a result, we know little about how Canadians estimate the amount and type of migrants coming into the country, what drives the generation of these numbers and images, and what the consequences of numerical estimations and mental images of immigration are for public attitudes toward immigration. Using nationally representative cross-sectional survey data from 2019, this article reports that Canadians generally overestimate the number of refugees and asylum-seekers coming into the country but are comparatively less prone to overestimating the overall number of immigrants. Canadians also rely on mental images about the reasons for immigrating to Canada that diverge from the realities of Canada's immigration program. We document how reliance on these numbers and images is driven by the type of media consumed, feelings of threat, and individual-level characteristics of Canadians. In doing so, this article demonstrates that mental images strongly influence Canadians’ attitudes toward immigration; numerical estimates also matter, but less so. Furthermore, perceptions of the number of migrants arriving affect latent preferences toward immigration—such as ethnocentrism, perceptions of “threat,” and border insecurity—while mental images shape both preferences for lowering immigration intake and latent preferences.

The representation of Canada's two main linguistic groups in the teaching of Canadian politics is crucial, but we know little about it. In this article, we analyze the systemic underrepresentation of francophone authors in Canadian political science by examining the research that students are exposed to. Based on data from 351 syllabi across 42 Canadian universities, as well as data from the reading list of the doctoral qualifying field exams in Canadian politics, our findings show that francophone authors are systemically underrepresented (when not totally absent). About 38 per cent of Canadian politics courses include no francophone authors in their reading lists. Our findings suggest that Canadian politics is not an inclusive and comprehensive field. This result entails important implications not only for current professors and students but also for the profession more generally, given that the students who will make up tomorrow's faculties in Canadian universities are shaped by these biases.

Using a new measure of urbanity for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1896 to the present, this article describes the long-term development of the urban-rural divide in Canadian federal elections. We focus on three questions: (1) when the urban-rural divide has existed in Canada, identifying three main periods—the 1920s, the 1960s and 1993–present—in which the urban-rural cleavage has been especially important in federal elections; (2) where the urban-rural divide has existed, finding that in the postwar period the urban-rural cleavage is a pan-Canadian phenomenon; and (3) how well urbanity predicts district-level election outcomes. We argue that the urban-rural divide is important for understanding election outcomes during several periods of Canadian political development, and never more so than in recent decades. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on urban-rural cleavages, Canadian electoral politics and Canadian political development.

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.

This article investigates the representativeness of news coverage when there are nearly as many female candidates as there are male candidates by considering the 2018 Québec Election, in which 47 per cent of candidates were women. We are interested not only in the magnitude of the coverage (that is, the volume of press coverage received by each candidate) but also in its tone (if the press coverage is negative or positive) and whether these parameters fluctuate based on the gender of the candidates. We know that the quality of the news coverage, and more specifically its tone, can affect voting intentions. We also know that journalists routinely portray politics as a masculine activity, but we know very little about the coverage that local female candidates receive in the context of parity in North America. We find that in spite of exceptional circumstances, female candidates received significantly less coverage than men.

This research note reports on a new effort to track candidate diversity in Canadian elections. The dataset covers 4,516 candidates who ran in the 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2019 federal elections and includes novel data on their race, Indigenous background and age, alongside information on gender, occupation, prior electoral experience and electoral outcome. We outline the process for collecting and systematizing these data, which relied on genealogical methods and the principle of triangulation. The data can be used to track diversity among electoral candidates over time or merged with other sources to answer district-level questions about representational diversity, electoral dynamics, vote choice and political communications. The method could also be replicated and applied to other levels of government.

Cabinet committees are important sites of executive politics in Canada. This article examines the extent to which two representational attributes—gender and region—determine influence, as a function of cabinet committee structure. Employing a dataset of ministers under the three most recent prime ministers, I find that female ministers are less likely than male ministers to be influential in terms of connections to other ministers, to belong to the core of most influential ministers and to be represented on the most powerful committees or chairing committees. However, there is evidence of improvement over time. While regional representation is an imperative in cabinet making for Canadian prime ministers, its role in determining ministerial influence within committees is not evident: ministers from less-represented regions are no more likely to be influential than other ministers. This analysis highlights a neglected but central arena for social representation in Canadian government.

Concernant le parcours de soin du patient, le centre Françoise Minkowska a mis en place en 2009 un dispositif des Médiation, d’accueil et d’orientation (le MEDIACOR). Il s’agit de clarifier, de qualifier et de traiter dans les meilleurs délais les demandes adressées par les professionnels du soin et du social qui sont confrontés à des représentations culturelles et sociales différentes. La pertinence de ces demandes sera évoquée à parti de la présentation de cas cliniques.

The political underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in Canadian politics is well documented. One political arena that has yet to be examined in this respect, however, is school boards. Using data from a candidate survey conducted during the course of the 2018 Ontario school board elections, as well as demographic data collected on the entire population of school board candidates, we explore the unique characteristics of school board elections. The research note begins by describing the gender and racial composition of candidates and trustees in Canada's most populous province. It then considers the ways in which school board elections may serve as a launchpad to higher office for either of these two traditionally underrepresented groups, as we explore the features of progressive political ambition, recruitment into school board campaigns and the relative electoral success of racialized candidates and women in this local office. While women do very well in school board elections, they are significantly less likely than their male counterparts to have the desire to move up to provincial or federal politics. Meanwhile, racialized candidates contest school board election in significant numbers and report similar levels of progressive ambition relative to their white counterparts, but they fare exceptionally poorly in school board elections.

L’effet oppositionnel entre sens attendu et sens inattendu est ici examiné dans le cadre théorique de la psychosystématique guillaumienne, à travers l’étude des formes verbales de l’anglais. Deux types de situations interlocutives sont abordés. Le premier concerne la relation entre narrateur et lecteur et traite de l’écart opéré entre chronologie d’expérience et chronologie linéaire choisie par le narrateur. Le second met en présence des sujets parlants dans une situation d’énonciation et étudie l’écart entre sens attendu et sens obtenu dans les emplois modaux en discours rapporté. L’étude conclut à la distinction capitale qu’il convient d’opérer entre expérience et représentation. Les phénomènes de discordance narrative et de polyphonie énonciative dépendent ultimement de la manière dont la réalité phénoménale est représentée.

L’évolution du modal should s’est caractérisée par l’émergence progressive d’une interprétation non-déontique en construction hypotaxique. En effet, certaines constructions comportant should, du type It is surprising that he should say that, révèle un conflit sur une valeur construite ; celle-ci n’est alors plus repérée comme «effective» mais comme «fictive», et est considérée comme inattendue. Cette contribution se propose d’analyser le lien entre représentation attendue/inattendue et interaction de marqueurs hypotaxiques. L’examen d’exemples authentiques d’anglais contemporain révèle, en effet, la coexistence de plusieurs formes après la séquence It is + adjectif de valuation : constructions en for … to, propositions introduites par that (ou ∅) comportant should ou une forme assertée ou une base verbale. Il s’agit de montrer les différences de repérages entre ces formes et de rendre compte de l’apparition de l’une plutt que de l’autre en contexte.

Since the 1960s, public consultation has emerged as an important democratic tool, allowing governments to inform, debate, and learn from the general public. Since the 1980s, international trade agreements have wielded significant influence over domestic law making, as an ever more ‘comprehensive’ set of topics is regulated via treaty. In Canada, these two trends have yet to meet. Neither the public nor Parliament is involved in trade policy making, raising concerns about the democratic legitimacy of expansive trade agreements. Through the lens of the recent Canada and European Union (EU) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), this article examines whether trade law’s consultation practices can be aligned with those of other federal government departments. We identify five key values that make consultations successful—diversity, education, commitment, accountability, and transparency—and consider the viability of their inclusion in trade consultations.

Drawing attention to the legal and psychoanalytic genealogy of reparations, this article examines the relationship between reparations and racial difference through an analysis of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s documentary series 8th Fire: Aboriginal People, Canada and the Way Forward. The representational life of reparations in liberal settler colonialism is a repository for addressing the broader landscape of legality—sovereignty, self-determination and anti-colonialism—beyond the confines of international human rights mechanisms. This article considers the following questions: How do forms of testimony animate connections between reparations and racial difference? In what ways do visual and representational practices operate through racial and colonial temporalities central to reparative juridics? What is the relationship between reparations and possibilities for anti-colonialism? I argue that the social, legal, cultural, and representational life of reparations in settler colonialism is structured by racial difference.