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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines how the government framed its communications during the so-called "Printemps érable" (Maple Spring), a historic student protest movement that took place in Quebec in 2012. Six years after the end of the conflict, and despite the production of a significant volume of analysis and reflections on this social crisis, no empirical work had been dedicated yet to the study of the government’s communication strategy. Following a quantitative content analysis of 424 public interventions from cabinet members, this study raises the argumentative frameworks at the heart of the government’s communication strategy. Drawing on Entman's cascading activation model (2004), the analysis shows how the government tried to define the problems, solutions and protagonists involved in this societal conflict. Our study highlights the government's failure to maintain the framing initiative of the crisis, and the change in communication strategy that resulted.

Disaffection of youth from politics is a well-documented phenomenon in many countries. In this article, we consider whether the social networks of young people have the same influence on political engagement as they have been found to have for older adults. We use a single dataset to test the effects of discussion and disagreement on the political engagement of young people (30 and under) and older adults. We find that social network discussion has a stronger effect on the engagement of young people but that disagreement has no clear differential effect.

Minority nations within multinational States often evolve within a context of great uncertainty when it comes to the protection of their distinctive political and cultural characteristics. While their minority condition in no way limits their existence as nations, it can nevertheless come with a certain feeling of national fragility and even a fear of disappearing. These minority nations, when the State to which they belong refuses to recognize their particularism and to allow them the necessary tools to defend it, can then quickly become fragile nations. In this article, we discuss, define and specify the meaning of the concept of fragile nations, putting the emphasis on its theoretical and normative dimensions.

The determinants of fulfilling campaign promises in Canada over the period 1994–2015 are analyzed in a comparative perspective. All other factors being equal, we find that promises to reduce government spending are more likely to be fulfilled by the Conservatives than by the Liberals. Majority and re-elected governments facing a budget surplus are more likely to fulfill their election promises than minority and newly elected governments facing a budget deficit. Promises are more likely to be fulfilled at the start than at the end of a mandate. We also find a small but noticeable increase in the rate of fulfilling campaign promises over time.

This article analyzes an important discretionary power of the Supreme Court of Canada, the ability to award costs. With the use of an original data set, we explore trends in costs awarding in public interest litigation at the Supreme Court from 1970 to 2012. Our findings suggest that, over time, the Court has tended to favour nongovernment parties over government parties where the former are less likely to pay costs when they lose and more likely to receive costs when they win. In these cases, costs orders were more likely to benefit public interest litigants, such as nongovernmental organizations, than individual litigants and businesses. Together, these findings suggest a sensitivity to access to justice concerns when making costs orders, though some may argue that this sensitivity by the Court does not extend far enough.