This article examines the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on social movement politics in Canada using the case of the gay liberation movement. Drawing on the comparative social movement literature, the article situates equality seeking as a strategy and meaning game that legitimates new political identities and that is aimed at mobilizing a movement's constituency. The article demonstrates that equality seeking was a strategy and a meaning frame that was deployed in the lesbian and gay rights movement (exemplified by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s) prior to the entrenchment of the Charter. Thus, it concludes that some claims about the Charter's impact on social movement organizing have been exaggerated.

The majority of Canada's women premiers were selected to that office while their parties held government. This is uncommon, both in the comparative literature and among premiers who are men. What explains this gendered selection pattern to Canada's provincial premiers’ offices? This paper explores the most common explanation found in the comparative literature for women's emergence as leaders of electorally competitive parties and as chief political executives: women are more likely to be selected when that party is in crisis or decline. Using the population of women provincial premiers in Canada as case studies, evidence suggests three of eight women premiers were selected to lead parties in government that were in crisis or decline; a fourth was selected to lead a small, left-leaning party as predicted by the literature. However, for half of the women premiers, evidence of their party's decline is partial or inconclusive. As a result of this exploration, more research is required to draw generalizations about the gendered opportunity structures that shape how women enter (and exit) the premier's office in Canada.

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 introduces a new dictionary for the automated analysis of the tone of French media. We named it the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSDFr) in reference to the English lexicon developed by Young and Soroka (2012), the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD), from which the LSDFr was built. We compare the LSDFr to the only other French sentiment lexicon, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). First, we detail the construction of the dictionary. We then test the internal validity of the LSDFr comparing it with a corpus of manually coded texts. Finally, we test the external validity of LSDFr by measuring how the media tone, calculated using our dictionary, predicts voting intentions in the last four Quebec elections. Our goal is to enable other researchers to conduct media analyses with a comparable corpus of texts in French.

We report on findings from alternative ways of assessing the meaning given to “left” and “right” by respondents in the 1984 National Election Study. Approximately 40 per cent of the sample supplied definitions of the concepts; in comparison, about 60 per cent stated their feelings toward left-wingers and right-wingers and described their political orientations using a seven-point left/right rating scale. Left signified socialism or communism for about one-half of those who supplied definitions, and dislike for left-wingers seemed to be associated with these conceptions of left. Right, which was much more highly regarded than left, signified conservatism for one-quarter of those who defined the term. We also factor analyzed respondents' self-ratings on the left/right scale along with their answers to 15 attitude statements. Left was weakly associated with support for labour's use of the strike weapon. In a criterion group of respondents who had completed university and who had ventured definitions of left and right, self-ratings correlated with factors tapping attitudes toward the military and toward economic disparity and social welfare. As expected, respondents' ratings of themselves on the left/right scale were more similar to their ratings of their preferred parties than to their ratings of other parties. The relationship between self-ratings and ratings of preferred parties generally varied directly with the strength of party identification. We conclude with some observations about the political utility of political labels such as left and right.

Abstract. The Americanization of the Holocaust has encouraged some notable activists, purportedly acting on behalf of indigenous peoples, to present European colonization as a “holocaust,” repackaging colonial history in starkly black-and-white terms. I pay particular attention to discussions in America and Canada over the genocidal implications of indigenous residential schooling. There is a twin danger involved. At one level the Holocaust is subjected to a process of trivialization. At another level, framing history through the Holocaust decontextualizes group histories by re-reading past victimization through a distinctive and different series of events. While comparing historical atrocities can be academically fruitful, activists will do better to highlight the traumatic effects of atrocities on individuals and families, noting their intergenerational legacies. This may be a better way of representing history, and of building bridges between diverse groups.

Résumé. L'américanisation de l'holocauste a encouragé d'éminents activistes, prétendant agir au nom des autochtones, à présenter la colonisation européenne comme un “holocauste”, reformulant ainsi l'histoire coloniale en termes crûment arrêtés. Je porte une attention toute particulière aux discussions menées au Canada et aux États-Unis concernant les implications génocides de la scolarité des autochtones en internat. Deux dangers se présentent. D'une part l'holocauste est exposé à un processus de banalisation. D'autre part, formuler l'histoire par l'holocauste isole de leur contexte les histoires des groupes en relisant les persécutions passées sous le jour d'une série d'événements distinctive et différente. Bien qu'il soit intellectuellement utile de comparer les atrocités historiques, les activistes feront mieux de souligner les effets traumatisants des atrocités sur les individus et les familles et le triste héritage laissé aux générations suivantes. C'est peut-être une meilleure façon de représenter l'histoire et de faire des rapprochements entre des groupes divers.

The various subtables of Table i, or some variant of them, must be familiar to every teacher and to every student of Canadian voting behaviour. While most of our history books, and certainly all of our current concerns, focus on cultural differences in Canada, all our voting and party identification data suggest that the primary line of political division is between Roman Catholics and non-Catholics. The leftmost tables in the two rows of Table i indicate that religious differences are approximately three times as strong as ethnic ones, regardless of the index chosen. The percentage difference in Liberal identifiers is 20 across religious categories, but only 6 across the ethnic ones; the phi coefficient is.21 as compared to.06, while Yule's Q is.42 as opposed to.13. Nor is this simply an artifact. The same finding shows up for vote as for party identification, for a linguistic dichotomy as for an ethnicity dichotomy, and for undichotomized as for dichotomized variables. Similarly, the religious dichotomy need not be imposed, but emerges quite freely when similar data are analysed with the aid program. Indeed, one need not depend on using dichotomies at all, though the analysis becomes more complex. In each case, however, the basic generalization holds.

Abstract. Recent work by Szmer, Sarver, and Kaheny (2010) exploring US Supreme Court decision making has suggested that lawyer gender might play a role in influencing judicial voting behaviour. Specifically, while women lawyers were not revealed to have a more difficult time winning cases before the US Supreme Court, the study did suggest they face a tougher challenge in gaining support from the more conservative justices on that bench. Here, we test whether women lawyers face similar challenges before the SCC. Our findings do not reveal any disadvantage for litigation teams with larger proportions of women and, in most instances, such teams have an advantage. Specifically, in our model of civil rights and liberties votes, litigation team gender had no bearing on individual SCC justice decisions. However, in a pooled model of all issues combined and in separate models of criminal and economic votes, SCC justices were more likely to side with litigation teams with larger proportions of women lawyers.

Résumé. Une étude récente de Szmer, Sarver et Kaheny (2010) explore la manière dont la Cour suprême des États-Unis prend ses décisions, suggérant que le sexe des avocats pourrait avoir une influence sur le comportement décisionnel des juges. Plus spécifiquement, bien que les avocates n'aient pas plus de difficulté que leurs collègues masculins à gagner leurs procès à la Cour suprême des États-Unis, l'étude suggère que leur plus grand défi est d'obtenir le soutien des juges plus traditionnels de cette cour. Dans le présent article, nous cherchons à déterminer si les avocates canadiennes font face à un défi semblable à la Cour suprême du Canada. Les résultats de notre étude ne révèlent aucun désavantage pour les équipes d'avocats comprenant plus de femmes et dans la plupart des cas, ces équipes bénéficient même d'un avantage. Plus précisement, dans notre modèle décisionnel en matière de droits et libertés civiles, le sexe des membres des équipes d'avocats n'avait aucune incidence sur les décisions individuelles des juges de la Cour suprême du Canada. Cependant, dans un modèle commun réunissant tous les types de dossiers et dans des modèles séparés pour les décisions sur des dossiers criminels et financiers, les juges de la Cour suprême du Canada étaient plus enclins à prendre parti pour des équipes comportant une plus grande proportion d'avocates.

It has been the custom of economists since the Mercantilists to assume the existence of a capitalistic labour market. It appears that this abstraction was adopted, not from ignorance of labour conditions–Malthus, who sponsored the bleakest model of a labour market, after all possessed exceptional knowledge of contemporary social conditions–but because it simplified the economists' main task, as they conceived it, of expounding how a capitalist economy works. The abstraction had the disadvantage, however, of diverting attention from how a capitalistic labour market might develop. This question, besides its historical and sociological interest, is relevant to the study of labour markets, and of “economic development.” Yet, in Canada, it has received only brief attention. This paper proposes a more detailed view of how our capitalistic labour market arose.

By a capitalistic market is meant one in which the actions of workers and employers are governed and linked by impersonal considerations of immediate pecuniary advantage. In this market, the employer is confident that workers will be available whenever he wants them; so he feels free to hire them on a short-term basis, and to dismiss them whenever there is a monetary advantage in doing so. Hence, the employer takes no responsibility for the workers' overhead costs: labour, to the employer, is a variable cost. From a broader viewpoint, the capitalistic labour market represents a pooling of the labour supplies and labour needs of many employers, so that all of them may benefit by economizing on labour reserves. Economy is possible because the labour requirements of employers collectively are less than those of employers individually, to the extent that short-term needs for labour dovetail, and to the extent that a worker can stand as a reserve to many employers. When the demand and supply conditions of labour are dependable enough to permit this pooling, the overhead costs of labour can be transferred from individual employers to the market, that is, to the workers themselves and to the community at large. The essential historical aspect of the capitalistic labour market, then, is the development of the supply and demand conditions that will support it. Two questions are especially critical: How are workers induced to flow into the labour market pool? And how are they prevented from flowing out again?

In the 1980s, Canada went from having one of the lowest levels of female representation in its national legislature to having one of the highest among countries with single-member district electoral systems. The authors examine the common assertion that this increase was largely due to the surprising Progressive Conservative landslide in the 1984 federal election. By simulating plausible alternative election results they find there would have been a substantial increase in the number of women in the parliament, regardless of how the vote split in 1984. The simulations are followed by probit analyses for 1980, 1984 and 1988 which examine what factors affected the probability a major-party candidate would be a woman and what factors affected the probability that a successful candidate would be a woman.

In Canada, voter turnout at the municipal level is lower than in elections at other levels of government. The reasons that might explain this low turnout are still unclear. The research tests 15 hypotheses to explain municipal electoral participation based on the case of the province of Québec (mayoral elections in 2005 and 2009 in all municipalities in the province, n = 949). The results show that four factors explain voter turnout and its variations: the size of the electorate, the presence of elderly voters, the margin of victory, and the number of candidates. These results improve our understanding of the cost of voting at the municipal level and they stress the need for conducting additional monographic investigations on this topic in Canada, especially in larger municipalities where voter turnout is often lower.

This note extends the authors' earlier work on incumbency in Canadian federal and Ontario provincial elections by examining riding by riding results in the 1984 federal and 1985 Ontario provincial elections. In particular, the authors test their earlier hypothesis that incumbency effects are swamped by large shifts in voter preferences. The results indicate that incumbency had a significant impact, and that this impact was not reduced by the large shift in votes in the 1984 federal election. The authors reject the hypothesis that large shifts in party allegiance reduce incumbency effects.

This study measures the effects of macroeconomic conditions upon the popularity of the incumbent party in Canadian federal general elections from 1945 to 1988. In so doing it uses a model similar to the retrospective voting models used in electoral studies in the United States. The results suggest that for the elections from 1945 to 1972, bad economic conditions preceding the election benefited the incumbent party. For the elections from 1974 to 1988, these effects were diminished or reversed. Such results have precedents in separate studies that use Canadian poll data. However, they contradict the general conclusion of American studies that bad conditions hurt the incumbent. This contradiction suggests that the model's assumptions about voting behaviour, which appear to be verified by the American studies, do not apply universally.

Michel Foucault's framework has substantially changed the manner in which we understand power. His analysis substitutes for theoretical representations a study of complex mechanisms of production like strategy, tactic, apparatus, technologies, and so forth. Those terms are not simply figures of speech or analogies. The archaeology of knowledge brings a new perspective of study for social analysis: space. That concept shapes Foucault's approach from L'Histoire de la folie to Souci de soi. From that point of view, it is less important to linger on his notion of power than to inquire about his general theory of productions developped through the archaeological analysis of madness, jail, sexuality or subjectivity. It is in this fashion that Michel Foucault's work will contribute to modify social and human sciences' practices

Since Professor Leontief published his study of American foreign trade factor requirements in 1953, much has been written about the problem. This paper reviews the discussion briefly, and provides some data indicating the factor requirements for Canada's foreign trade.

This paper uses conventional input-output methods; one may criticise input-output results in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is to say that the algebraic solution does not represent the total picture. Professor Leontief, in a reply to Professor Granick and others, willingly admitted that the total picture includes resource endowments in each trading country, primary factors of production, shapes of production functions, input-output relations which govern the transformation of resources into goods and services, and consumer preferences for different bundles of production which can be supplied with alternative combinations of factor inputs. But in addition to this general limitation of the approach there are several specific criticisms.

Strikingly innovative developments in brain science during the past two decades, reflecting advances in a dozen different biological disciplines (such as biochemistry, biophysics, endocrinology, neuropsychology, genetics, and human development) have created a new psychobiology that thus far appears to have had only slight impact upon mainstream political science theory and research. This field analysis examines the implications of psychobiology for the study and practice of politics, from the perspective of the founding father of political behaviouralism. The article discusses the psychobiology of mind in terms of human consciousness and memory and then examines the epigenetic and recursive relationships between brain structure and political perception; between brain lateralization and dynamics, and political thinking and decision-making; and between brain development and political equality, with particular regard to sex, age, health, race, and intelligence.

Abstract. The development of federalism in the context of the neoliberal era in the 2000s has partly created the conditions for a more stable co-operation between the federal and Quebec governments, contributing to the trend of separatism being sidelined in Quebec. In the context of neoliberalism, federal–provincial agreements have created conditions for just enough asymmetry in the relationship between the federal government and Quebec, something that Quebec has historically demanded, for separatism to remain off the agenda. What separates this relationship from past ones is a significant change in the context whereby the neoliberal orientation is becoming the common currency for co-operation. If Canadian federalism continues its present course under neoliberalism without any major mishaps, for the first time since the divisive period of the 1990s and early 2000s, federal–Quebec relations likely will be stable without national unity crises of the kind that culminated in the 1980 and 1995 Quebec referenda on sovereignty.

Résumé. Le développement du fédéralisme dans le contexte de l'ère néolibérale dans les années 2000 a en partie créé les conditions pour une coopération plus stable entre les gouvernements fédéral et québécois, contribuant ainsi à la tendance du séparatisme au Québec d'être marginalisés. Dans le contexte du néolibéralisme, des ententes fédérales-provinciales ont créé les conditions pour un peu assez de relation asymétrique entre le gouvernement fédéral et du Québec, quelque chose que le Québec a toujours exigé, au séparatisme de rester hors l'ordre du jour. Ce qui sépare cette relation de celles du passé est un changement significatif dans le contexte dans lequel l'orientation néo-libérale devient la monnaie commune pour la coopération. Si le fédéralisme canadien continue son cours actuel sous le néolibéralisme sans encombre majeur, pour la première fois depuis la période de division des années 1990 et début des années 2000, les relations fédérales-Québec probablement seront stable sans crises unité nationale du genre qui a culminé dans les années 1980 et 1995 référendums sur la souveraineté du Québec.

New techniques of ecological inference are utilized to estimate with confidence intervals francophone support in each federal electoral district in Quebec for the pro-sovereignty side in the 1993 and 1997 Canadian general elections and the 1992 and 1995 referenda. Analyzing the link between demographic and political contextual variables and support for the sovereignty of Quebec suggests that demographic factors, such as the proportion of farmers and government workers, influence francophone voting behaviour more often than political factors such as incumbency. Unlike in many other countries with ethnically based movements, francophone support for sovereignty actually rises as the francophone portion of the population rises. This finding indicates that the contact hypothesis probably applies to the Quebec sovereignty movement.

Recent northern First Nation land claim agreements have created a new category of First Nation citizenship. Although many embrace the category as an essential aspect of First Nation sovereignty, others reject it as a colonial imposition that constrains the possibilities for indigenous politics. There does indeed appear to be a gap between the legal category of First Nation citizenship and northern indigenous peoples’ ideas about political society. For one thing, the latter includes animals, while the former does not. In their recent book, Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka develop a model of animal citizenship. Although not primarily concerned with First Nation citizenship, they do assert the universality of their model, including its compatibility with indigenous ideas about proper human-animal relations. In this article, I assess those claims and show that, to the contrary, their model is in many ways antithetical to the knowledge and practices of northern indigenous peoples.