Labelling resettlement programs as voluntary suggests that they cause little contention and are devoid of coercion. But is this representation accurate? Drawing on unpublished government documents and media reports, we provide a detailed case study of the Community Relocation Policy (CRP) of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) from 2009 to the present. We show that CRP has been fraught with contention due to the nature of the voting process and the slow and uncertain nature of the community-oriented consultative process. This article highlights the ways in which coercion has emerged from within the very communities considering resettlement, in addition to any coercion that might come from government officials.

Canada has not escaped trends in most liberal democracies with the rapid growth of agencies created by government to deliver public goods, often justified on elements of their mandate—service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, among others—benefiting from an arm's-length relationship to the government of the day. Yet Canadian studies of this phenomenon remain mostly absent from the robust comparative literature theorizing and documenting the emergence of widespread “agencification” and its relationship to performance. This article draws on the Government of Canada's Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) microdata from 2017 to test key hypotheses advanced by proponents of agencification, specifically that agencies are more innovative, autonomous and efficient public organizations. We discover that those working in agencies generally report less climate of innovation and less work autonomy than those working in departments, though some types of agencies—namely regulatory and parliamentary ones—defy these trends.

Do voters use information about and preferences over who will form government in their vote choices? Voters might have preferences over both which party wins the most seats and what type of government that party can form, which they can use to inform their vote choice. To answer this question, we examine the influence of preferences over government types and compare them to trends in party support in the 2019 Canadian federal election. Using rolling, daily cross-sectional survey evidence from the Canadian Election Study, we find that preferences over government type are strongly related to vote choice and that this relationship depends on the perceived viability of the preferred party. We also find that this relationship differs outside and within Quebec: outside Quebec, only the Liberal Party suffers among voters preferring minority governments, while within Quebec, the Liberal Party, New Democratic Party and Conservative Party all struggle to hold on to voters who prefer minority governments.

This article reports on institutional ethnographic research into how texts and talk were mobilized in social relations leading to the Government of Saskatchewan's enactment of the Trespass to Property Amendment Act, 2019. The act, proclaimed January 1, 2022, requires First Nations people to get advance permission from rural landowners before exercising their Indigenous and treaty rights to hunt and fish on land deemed private property. Findings (1) connect the 2018 acquittal of Gerald Stanley for the 2016 killing of Colten Boushie to political developments that paved the way for the new legislation and (2) trace how the advance permission requirement at the heart of the new legislation tramples on Indigenous and treaty rights, making it even more difficult for First Nations people to access their traditional territories for purposes such as hunting and fishing.

Scholarly opinions on the linkages between foreign military interventions and human rights promotions or violations are highly divided across the board. While many scholars see military interventions as effective means to save and promote human lives and rights from the clutches of repressive regimes, others reject such interventions as harmful to domestic reconciliations and rights promotions. The Arab Spring has renewed the debates between the liberal enthusiasts who staunchly supported NATO's military intervention to free up the Libyans from the Gaddafi regime and the critics who saw creeping dangers in this new intervention, ostensibly inspired by the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This paper investigates the issue of Arab Spring-led foreign direct and indirect military interventions in Libya, Bahrain and Syria and critically examines the consequences of interventions for improvements or decline in Arab human rights conditions. Its findings support the position of the anti-intervention scholars that foreign military interventions produce deleterious effects on human rights in the target states.

Still Counting: Women in Politics Across Canada, Linda Trimble and Jane Arscott, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003. pp. xvi, 210

Numbers matter. This is Trimble and Arscott's fundamental message. The ratio of women in elected and appointed political posts to their proportion in the population at large is a measure of fairness in political representation that has obvious implications for women's impact on political processes and policy outcomes. Although Canadian in perspective, the authors draw international comparisons where appropriate and find Canada rather lacking. Perennial under-representation, despite marked improvements over the past three decades, is an evident problem and an issue worthy of investigation.

Les changements climatiques occupent une place centrale en gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement. Vu l'envergure des défis à résoudre, la plus récente Conférence des Parties (CdP) de la Convention-cadre des Nations Unies sur les changements climatiques (CCNUCC), la CdP-27, faisait face à de grandes attentes. Ce court article offre un bilan critique de la CdP-27. L'article présente une synthèse des résultats de cette CdP en étudiant quatre volets principaux, soit l'atténuation des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES), l'augmentation du financement climatique, l'adaptation aux changements climatiques et les pertes et préjudices. Il dresse ainsi un portait des résultats de la CdP-27 au regard des attentes qui avaient été établies au préalable par les parties prenantes. L'article se conclut par une analyse prospective des principaux enjeux à suivre d'ici la CdP-28 et au-delà. Il permet ainsi de faire le point sur les plus récents développements, d’éclairer les avancées à venir et de contribuer aux discussions sur la gouvernance mondiale du climat.

The revelation, via a leaked draft, that the Supreme Court of the United States was going to overturn the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) sparked immediate questions about whether a similar retrenchment of abortion rights could occur in Canada. Key legal, structural, and political cultural factors mitigate the forces of American-style erosion of norms on the Supreme Court of Canada and in our broader politics surrounding abortion rights. Despite this generally optimistic comparative context, complacency about the status of abortion rights in Canada would be unwise. This short Currents article canvasses factors crucial for not only preserving the policy status quo in criminal law (that is, the absence of criminal law abortion regulation in Canada), but also for advancing the scope of abortion rights in the positive sense, as serious barriers to access persist at the provincial level.

En mars 2020, le premier ministre Legault a fait appel aux influenceur.euses et aux célébrités québécoises dans le cadre de la campagne #Propage l'info, pas le virus afin de sensibiliser les jeunes au respect des consignes sanitaires liées à la COVID-19. Cet article offre un éclairage inédit sur les différentes manières dont ces personnes renommées ont répondu à l'appel ainsi que sur les formes de leurs réponses à l'aide d'une analyse de contenu de leur vidéo partagée sur les réseaux sociaux. Le codage des vidéos s'est fait à partir d'une grille d'analyse qualitative de contenu, inspirée de celle de Fields (1988). Il ressort des analyses que différents moyens ont permis d'accentuer le sentiment de proximité entre la célébrité et son public, dans le but d'augmenter l'adhésion au message. L'utilisation du pronom « On », l'emploi de formules narratives et l'intimité qui se dégage des vidéos informatives vont en ce sens.

Although the existence of strategic voting in the United Kingdom and Canada has been well documented, quantifying when a voter will cast a strategic ballot has yet to be done. This article draws on electoral data from five UK and Canadian elections in order to address this gap by identifying a precise “tipping point” for when a non-viable party supporter's probability of voting strategically crosses a 50 per cent threshold. I find the best tipping point measure occurs when a voter rates their favourite viable party greater than 59 out of 100 in the UK and greater than 73 out of 100 in Canada. Both countries also have clear tipping points for the likeability of an individual's highest preferred party and perceptions of that party's distance from contention. Overall, by calculating these tipping points, researchers can better gauge voter behaviour and how, or when, certain factors contribute to strategic voting.

Since 2017, four provincial legislatures have introduced bills invoking the controversial notwithstanding clause. We present an original dataset of news articles from 10 different outlets that discussed the clause while these bills were being debated in Saskatchewan and Ontario. Empirically, although the clause is typically portrayed accurately, we find over one-fifth of articles about the clause did not indicate that it must be included in legislation. Normatively, the clause was twice as likely to be portrayed negatively as it was positively, and the type of portrayal was strongly associated with the ideological orientation of the news outlet. The rate of negative portrayals was similar across the two provinces, which suggests that attitudes toward the clause may endure beyond the policy issue itself or the level of media visibility.

Supervisors shape the PhD student experience and play a critical role in students’ development. To what extent and in what ways are faculty engaged in mentorship? Are faculty mentoring more or differently now than in the past? This study of political science faculty from political science departments offering PhD programs in the English language finds that graduate supervision is changing over time, with mentorship practices becoming both more common and more varied. Supervisors do not appear to be simply replicating their own limited experience of mentorship as a PhD student. Instead, supervisors are becoming more actively and directly involved in their students’ research careers in ways that increase their students’ career opportunities. There is opportunity for institutions, at both the university and department level, to further invest in building the capacity and ability of supervisors to be effective mentors.

This article examines the effect of racial attitudes on the electoral performance of the New Democratic Party (NDP). Since 2017, the NDP has been led by Jagmeet Singh, the first non-white leader of a nationally competitive Canadian political party. Voters’ racial attitudes and the race of party leaders have a significant effect on vote choice in the United States. Less is known about whether similar effects exist in Canadian elections. I show that NDP vote choice polarized on the basis of racial attitudes following Singh's ascension to party leader. Voters with cold feelings toward racial minorities were less likely to vote for the NDP in 2019 and 2021 than in comparable historical elections. In contrast, there is no significant difference between 2019/2021 and prior elections in support for the Liberals and Conservatives among such voters. These results suggest that racial attitudes are salient in Canadian elections and that national parties may face an electoral penalty when selecting non-white party leaders.

Premier of Alberta Danielle Smith's comments comparing the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act to the Indian Act have sparked widespread outrage and condemnation. Premier Smith would later clarify that these remarks were intended to demonstrate that Alberta and First Nations have a “common problem” with Ottawa. In this brief article, we argue that these comments, as well as the act itself, can be analyzed using Jerald Sabin's contested colonialism framework. We then provide a brief critical discussion of what our analysis means for Canadian politics by addressing the possible intentions and harms of the comments.