Rebuilding of the welfare state in post-industrialized societies is no longer organized around the male worker but around the parent-producer figure. This shift in the focus of social policies results in a greater mix between employment policies and policies towards families and children. In Quebec, this change appears as a fundamental one; the core of social public action is redefined by federal and provincial governments. By comparison, in France the fight against unemployment is still dominant.

The 1993 Canadian election campaign clearly mattered; the fortunes of the Conservative and Reform parties underwent a fundamental re-orientation during the campaign. Previous research has indicated that Reform's success in 1993 was related to the activation of people who were opposed to the welfare state, but this represents only one dimension of Reform's appeal. This article examines the effect of issues on Reform support during the campaign and considers the actual process by which issues affect party support. While it is sometimes said that a candidate primed or made important certain issues for voters, it may be that some of what is labeled priming is actually something else. This article makes a conceptual and empirical distinction between campaign learning and priming. If voters do not know where a party stands on an issue, they cannot adequately use it in their overall evaluation. The evidence demonstrates that the increased importance of attitudes toward the welfare state was largely a function of the distribution of new information or learning, while the increased importance of cultural questions represented priming.

Over the past five years transgender children and their parents have emerged as visible actors in public discussions about the rights of transgender people in Canada. In this article, I track the work of emotions in parent advocacy, showing how the enactment of filial (family) ties sheds new light on the gendered relationship between intimacy and political practice. I argue that an affective shift in parenting has opened up space for some cisgender parents to emerge as political actors in trans advocacy work. The affective politics of parent advocacy nonetheless operates through dominant frames of gendered, classed and racialized normativity, limiting both who can become a parent advocate and potentially narrowing the focus of the struggle.

Despite more than a decade of heightened defence spending and active fighting in the War in Afghanistan, the longest combat operation in the history of the Canadian Forces, scholars know precious little about how the socio-demographic characteristics and attitudes of Canadians may influence their views about taking part in overseas combat operations and funding the institution charged with carrying out these dangerous activities. By testing a range of hypotheses, which purport to explain the influence of multiple socio-demographic and attitudinal factors on Canadians' attitudes toward defence spending and the participation of the Canadian Forces in overseas combat operations, against data from the 2004 and 2011 Canadian Election Study, this article ascertains the most important determinants of Canadians' preferences about defence spending and the use of military force by the Government of 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.

Résumé. Sous l'angle du concept de bureaucratie représentative, le présent article compare la gestion des enjeux liés à la participation des différentes communautés linguistiques dans l'administration publique de deux États multilingues : le Canada et la Suisse. À la suite de la mobilisation politique autour du clivage linguistique, des stratégies de promotion du plurilinguisme ont été adoptées dans les deux pays. La stratégie canadienne mise sur l'égalité de traitement des fonctionnaires anglophones et francophones. La Suisse poursuit quant à elle l'objectif de la représentation des différentes communautés linguistiques dans la fonction publique. Ces différences de fond s'expliquent, entre autres, par la nature du régime linguistique en place et par le contexte de démocratie consociationnelle en Suisse. La participation proportionnelle des communautés linguistiques au sein de l'administration fédérale est globalement atteinte dans les deux pays. Cependant, au niveau du fonctionnement interne, une logique de rationalité linguistique exerce une pression sur les groupes minoritaires pour qu'ils adoptent la langue majoritaire.

Abstract. Drawing on the concept of representative bureaucracy, this article examines how two multi-lingual states—Canada and Switzerland—deal with issues related to the participation of different linguistic communities in the federal public service. Following a political mobilisation of the linguistic cleavage, strategies to promote multilingualism in the public service have been adopted in both countries. The Canadian strategy focuses on equal treatment of Anglophones and Francophones in the public service. In Switzerland, adequate representation of the linguistic communities is the primary goal. These differences are explained by the characteristics of the linguistic regimes in each of the two countries, as well as by the peculiarities of consociational democracy in Switzerland. In both countries, the linguistic origins of public administration staff, overall, mirrors the proportions of the linguistic communities in the wider society. Within administrative units, however, linguistic diversity is hampered by the logics of language rationality, where minorities are under pressure to communicate in the language of the majority.

Policy institutes, or think tanks, have become increasingly visible on the political landscape. However, their policy role has varied in different countries. This article seeks to explain why, compared to think tanks in the United States, Canadian institutes have maintained a relatively modest presence in the policy-making community. Although many Canadian think tanks have made concerted efforts to replicate the strategies of their American counterparts, they have had far less success employing them in an effective and meaningful manner. While many American think tanks have both the resources and the opportunities to convey ideas to policy makers, Canadian organizations must overcome institutional, cultural and economic barriers before they can play a decisive role in policy-making circles. This article also makes reference to the experiences of think tanks in some parliamentary systems, notably Great Britain, to demonstrate that although these barriers are formidable and need to be addressed in some detail, they are not insurmountable.

This article investigates the extent to which provincial political parties made use of social media in their strategy, organization and communication in order to achieve their electoral goals during the Quebec 2012 general election. Using data from a series of 19 interviews conducted with online strategists and campaign directors from the five leading parties active in the 2012 election, we identify the strategic objectives these organizations followed when developing their social media campaigns. The strategists' narratives reveal that social media became a central component of electioneering and that parties were carrying out, in various forms, hybrid campaigns that combined traditional and emergent communication technologies and employed both old and new types of organizational principles.

The origins of judicial review in this country have been the subject of debate among legal scholars. This article examines the conflicting accounts provided by W. R. Lederman and B. L. Strayer, and attempts to assess them in the light of the Confederation debate, 1864–1867, and the debate surrounding passage of the Supreme Court Act in 1875. It arrives at these considerations: that the intentions of the founders are of greater significance than has hitherto been suggested; that both the founders themselves and the legislators in 1875 held conflicting expectations on the role of the Supreme Court in constitutional matters; and that this conflict has left its mark on the court. The article concludes that reflection on the origins of judicial review ought to temper the enthusiasm with which many Canadians have greeted the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Multicultural policy is an increasingly salient, and contested, topic in both academic and public debate about how to manage increasing ethnic diversity. In spite of the longstanding commitment to multiculturalism policy in Canada, however, we have only a partial understanding of public attitudes on this issue. Current research tends to look at general attitudes regarding diversity and accommodation–rarely at attitudes towards specific multicultural policies. We seek to (partly) fill this gap. In particular, we focus on how support for multiculturalism policy varies across benefit types (for example, financial and other) and the ethnicity/religiosity of recipient groups. Using a unique survey experiment conducted within the 2011 Canadian Election Study (CES), we examine how ethnic origin (Portuguese vs. Turkish) and religious symbols (absence and presence of the hijab) influence support for funding of ethno-religious group activities and their access to public spaces. We also explore whether citizens’ general attitudes toward cultural diversity moderate this effect. Results provide important information about the state of Canadian public opinion on multiculturalism, and more general evidence about the nature, authenticity and limits of public support for this policy.

Studies interested in Indigenous voting in Canada tend to focus on socio-economic, cultural and political factors that explain their lower levels of electoral participation. While highly relevant given Canada's ongoing reality as a settler-colonial state, these studies are of limited help in making sense of recent increases in electoral engagement in Indigenous communities across the country. Using data from four elections between 2006 and 2015, this study focuses instead on why some Indigenous individuals vote and how they vote. Our analysis suggests that one of many possible reasons for the recent surge in Indigenous turnout has to do with the candidates presenting themselves for elections. Higher voter turnout in Indigenous communities corresponds with a higher proportion of Indigenous candidates. This trend is consistent with the literature on affinity voting. We also find that political parties who present an Indigenous candidate receive more votes in constituencies with a high proportion of Indigenous voters.

The adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has generated considerable interest among legal commentators who question the potential impact of United States civil rights jurisprudence on Charter adjudication. This article offers a preliminary analysis of the impact of US constitutional law generally, and civil rights jurisprudence in particular, on Charter adjudication in the Supreme Court of Canada between 1984 and 1988. Focussing on the Supreme Court's citations of US decisions, the study finds that the frequency of such citations has increased under the Charter. Moreover, the Court's use of these decisions has had a significant substantive impact in defining the nature of constitutional interpretation and the content of the Charter's legal rights.

Despite what would appear to be pressures for policy convergence in Canada due to growing continental integration and market competitiveness, agro-environmental policies in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario have become increasingly divergent over the past decade. Quebec's policies are comprehensive, coercive in approach and intrusive in the production process; those in Ontario, while comprehensive, rely more on industry self-regulation and shy away from intruding significantly into farming practices. Three institutional factors help explain this policy divergence. First, Quebec's main environmental act enabled the Ministry of the Environment to participate in the agro-environmental policy community's “subgovernment,” while the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario remained in the “attentive public.” Second, the agricultural policy network in Ontario took on many attributes of closed bipartite corporatism during the 1990s, thereby enhancing the power potential of Ontario's farmers. Third, path dependence related to policy feedback predisposed Ontario to self-regulatory approaches, but favoured strong statist policies in Quebec. The combination of these institutional differences creates distinct negotiation settings in the two provinces. Consequently, in Ontario, policy discussions tend to focus on wealth generation to the exclusion of distributive justice, while in contrast, Quebec's institutions focus more on distributive issues, perhaps at the expense of aggregate value creation.

Foreign news coverage on Canadian national television was content analyzed in light of Third World criticisms of Western news agencies. Using a sample of CBC and CTV national English-language newscasts in 1980 and 1985, four hypotheses were considered: (1) the geographical distribution of foreign news is highly concentrated, focussing on the West and regions of violence involving Western interests; (2) news from the industrialized West and from the Third World tends to be characterized by different formats and topics; (3) differences between networks are limited; and (4) differences between the two years studied are minor. The results support these hypotheses, with the partial exception of the fourth one, to the detriment of the image of the Third World on Canadian television.

This study will investigate the problematic character of externalization theory, which posits that national leaders sometimes engage in foreign conflict in order to restore domestic cohesion. The first stage is a reassessment of the behavioural literature that, for two decades, has failed to support the theory, despite commonly held expectations to the contrary. Some significant discrepancies between theory and testing are uncovered during the review. These missing elements of externalization subsequently are incorporated in a crisis-oriented model. This model of crisis resolution, based on domestic conflict change as the independent variable and war versus de-escalation as the dependent variable, is tested using International Crisis Behaviour Project data from 1948–1975. The results are encouraging to the theory and suggest the value of further research in the area.

In 1961, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation collaborated with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the New Democratic party. The CLC urged its affiliates to affiliate with the new party; and assumed that widespread affiliation would lead to a more competitive party. Increased electoral support, however, was not forthcoming. This note argues that levels of union support forthe NDP(measured by rates of affiliation) are very low, and thus the transformation of the CCF into the NDP was, in many respects, a non-event. However, the study also argues that members of NDP-affiliated union locals are more likely to identify with the vote for the NDP than are members of unions not affiliated with the party. Thus, the problem forthe NDP is that too few Canadian unions are explicitly advocating NDP support through affiliation.