Canadian courts and governments increasingly invoke principles of mutual consent and nation-to-nation negotiation as central to the goal of addressing colonial injustices in a democratic society. However, Canada continues to interpret its obligations according to the Crown's fiduciary obligation to merely consult and accommodate Aboriginal peoples on infringement of their rights. In this article, I argue that there are conceptual resources available within existing Canadian law and politics for reconstructing a democratic consensual resolution to the problem of Indigenous exclusion and dispossession. I demonstrate that meeting the basic threshold of mutual consent would first require Canadian institutions to abjure the imperious temptation to impose parochial standards of free, prior and informed consent. Second, the Crown would refuse to ensnare Indigenous communities in unconscionable bargains, agreements that they would not otherwise view as reasonable, fair or equitable. And finally, Canada would accept rights of jurisdiction over land rooted in vital relations of health and well-being, as well as a corollary right of refusal or veto over decisions deemed by affected parties to be unwanted.

A leader from Quebec boosts the fortunes of the Liberal party in that province. This, in turn, has helped make Quebec the veto player in twentieth-century Canadian elections and the Liberals the “natural” governing party. Although Quebec is no longer as critical as before, a leader from the province still makes a big difference. Full impact from the pattern requires more than one election to unfold. Patterns outside Quebec are similar, if fainter: the Liberal party is not punished for choosing a Quebecker and may even be helped. The early success of the pattern moved the Liberals to alternate between Quebec and non-Quebec leaders, such that the party is now led by a Quebecker more often than not. Maintaining alternation has never been easy and is only getting harder.

L'enjeu politique de la fixation du salaire minimum a été relativement peu étudié en science politique. Dans cet article, nous examinons le rôle des partis politiques de gauche sur la fixation du salaire minimum. Comme prédit par la théorie des ressources du pouvoir, les partis de gauche devraient encourager l'augmentation du salaire minimum. Nous postulons toutefois que cet effet diffère selon le niveau de corporatisme. Plus particulièrement, nous pensons que l'effet des partis politiques de gauche devrait être plus faible sous des niveaux de corporatisme élevés puisque les partenaires sociaux sont davantage consultés et que les gouvernements ont tendance à leur déléguer la régulation des salaires. Nos résultats confirment ces hypothèses. Ils indiquent que le salaire minimum tend à augmenter lorsque les gouvernements sont davantage à gauche idéologiquement et que cette relation est plus forte lorsque le degré de corporatisme est faible.

How has English-speaking Canadian political science conceived of the relationship between Quebec and Canada? Why has an issue that has been considered central for more than three decades become less attractive, if not marginal, within the discipline? The aim is to examine, from this example, the overlapping relationship between science and politics. The intent is also to show that Canadian political science has examined the Quebec/Canada relationship from four different angles: 1) its interest in Quebec politics was part of the urgency of the moment, based on a crisis that challenged the foundations of the political system; 2) it questioned the legitimacy of the sources of the dispute, namely the compatibility between the new expressions of Quebec nationalism with the presumed principles on which the Canadian political community had been founded; 3) Quebec nationalism also encouraged a reflection on the existence (or not) of “English Canada” as a sociological and political reality; 4) the combination of the first three factors caused the prescriptions for getting out of, or resolving, the crisis to evolve over time, to the point of rendering research on this issue obsolete.

Cet article vise à brosser un portrait de l’évolution des politiques et des relations commerciales canado-américaines en replaçant au cœur de l'analyse la variable du « nationalisme économique ». Il s'appuie sur l'approche « nationaliste » en économie politique internationale, qui permet de comprendre tant le protectionnisme que la libéralisation et surtout, le passage de l'un à l'autre ou la combinaison des deux. Le nationalisme économique constitue une tendance lourde des relations commerciales canado-américaines, qui auront été caractérisées depuis 1867 et au-delà par une tension continuelle entre protectionnisme et libéralisation.

Proponents of restrictions on the wearing of religious symbols in public institutions in Quebec have often framed their support in the language of liberalism, with references to “gender equality”, “state neutrality” and “freedom of conscience”. However, efforts to account for support for restrictions on minority religious symbols rarely mention liberalism. In this article, we test the hypothesis that holding liberal values might have different attitudinal consequences in Quebec and the rest of Canada. Our findings demonstrate that holding liberal values is associated with support for restrictions on the wearing of minority religious symbols in Quebec, but it is associated with opposition to such restrictions in the rest of Canada. Moreover, this difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada in the relationship between liberal values and support for restrictions on minority religious symbols can explain Quebecers' greater support for restrictions.

This article explores the role of the numbered treaties relative to the continuity of the settler colonial project in Canada. Although the treaties are often invoked to characterize the federal government's commitment toward strengthening or renewing its relationship with Indigenous peoples at a symbolic level, there remains a disjuncture between the “nation-to-nation” depictions of treaties and the complex political relationships that Indigenous peoples have called for since their signing. This article explores the inconsistent ways in which treaties have been taken up within Canadian legal and political institutions, arguing that the incoherency surrounding treaties promulgates the notion that treaties are being implemented while simultaneously obscuring, distorting and minimizing the rights of Indigenous peoples in practice. It demonstrates that the failure to engage with treaties as the locus of Indigenous peoples’ distinct political relationship with the Canadian state functions to continually produce conditions of colonization and dispossession through the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction as affirmed in treaties.

Intergovernmental agreements between municipal and Indigenous governments are rapidly expanding in number and importance in Canada and the United States, yet they remain underexamined in the literature. This article considers how to measure the success of these agreements. It takes as a case study the port divestiture agreement between the City of Cornwall (Ontario, Canada), and a neighbouring Indigenous government, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. While the agreement represents a partial success and partial failure by conventional public policy and public administration metrics, these evaluations are different when measured against the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) principle of “one-mindedness.” Findings, which were generated using anthropological and qualitative political science methods, suggest that the use of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous frameworks are required to produce accurate and comprehensive evaluations of these agreements and the outcomes that are produced by them.

Do consumer and producer considerations influence support for future trade agreements and, if so, how? Prior research has pitted self-interest-based explanations of trade preferences against perception-based explanations, finding limited empirical support for the self-interest hypothesis. Instead of treating perceptions and self-interest as competing explanations, we construct a theoretical model with perceptions of trade as a mediating factor linking self-interest and support for prospective free trade agreements (FTAs). Using new survey data collected by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, we examine how two distinct forms of self-interest (consumer and producer considerations) can indirectly shape attitudes toward the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We find that the impact of respondents' income level (proxying producer considerations) and their recognition of the price-lowering effect of international trade (proxying consumer considerations) on support for the TPP are largely mediated by perceptions of trade. Together the findings suggest a middle ground between the two sides of the self-interest debate.

In view of the robust link often inferred between autonomous journalism and the strength of a society's democratic institutions, and against the background of current challenges to journalists’ traditional roles as purveyors of timely and independent information, we interviewed 352 Canadian journalists about their social and political roles and the influences on their news choices. Comparison of their responses against an international data set (N = 27,567) suggests that Canadian journalists place greater value on detached monitorial roles and claim relatively greater autonomy from commercial and other influences on their work. Further, in comparing these findings to an influential panel study from 1996 to 2003, we conclude that the Canadian journalists’ “credo,” focused on neutral reporting and oriented more to perceived public interest than to business or audience interests, remains surprisingly intact despite contemporary pressures on news forms and business models. This professed neutrality is mitigated by a desire to promote diversity and tolerance.

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.

Within the broader literature on political representation, studies exploring Indigenous forms of representation are rather limited. Where they exist, they tend to explore how Western models of political representation include Indigenous peoples, conflating Indigenous groups with ethnic minorities. This article asks whether and how Indigenous political representation might be distinguished from the representation of ethnic minorities. Our argument is that Indigenous groups’ identities tend to be based on different claims and relationships to the state than ethnic groups, which leads to political mobilization seeking a means to respond to the colonial nation-state project. We develop a theoretical framework that identifies three principles that ought to inform an effective and legitimate model of Indigenous political representation: recognition, protection and decolonization. We then apply this theoretical framework to assess the extent to which existing models of Indigenous representation in Bolivia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway correspond with these three principles.

Le présent article propose une analyse des transformations récentes de la laïcité française, observées à partir d’un changement dans la hiérarchisation des différentes normes laïques. Après un retour sur le dispositif juridique et historique de la laïcité et sur son interprétation comme « libéralisme ambigu » (Jean-Pierre Machelon), nous mettons en lumière le rapport particulier qu’elle entretient avec l’islam. Une deuxième partie est consacrée à la période 2002-2012 et particulièrement à l’action politique de l’ancien ministre de l’Intérieur puis Président de la République Nicolas Sarkozy. Nous reconstruisons trois étapes de transformation : de la « nouvelle laïcité » à la « laïcité falsifiée » en passant par la laïcité dite « positive ».

We present the results of a 2014 survey of Canadian parliamentarians, journalists and bloggers in which respondents were asked to rank competing definitions of open government. Overall, respondents preferred to define open government in terms of access to information and sources. However, controlling for age, ideology and language, we also found that respondents in the different positions ranked definitions of open government differently. Journalists are more likely than any other group to define open government in terms of access to information and sources. In contrast, parliamentarians who were members of a governing party were as likely to choose definitions of open government that emphasized public participation as they were to choose definitions that emphasized access to information. Opposition parliamentarians share more similarities with government parliamentarians than with journalists. These results suggest that key actors in the Canadian policy landscape define open government in ways that are consistent with their institutional interests. We suggest that these results reflect ways in which open government operates more like a buzzword, which helps explain the common pattern whereby opposition parties make promises to be more open and, after taking power, operate in less open ways. Moreover, these results raise questions about the extent to which open government can actually operate as an organizing principle.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) from China has recently met with increasing public opposition in many host nations. Why does the public respond less favourably to Chinese FDI than to FDI from other countries? We explore this question by conducting a series of survey experiments in Canada, where the majority of the public holds a negative opinion of Chinese investment. We find that the bias can be attributed to innumeracy about the relative size of China's FDI and misinformation about investment rules that govern FDI projects in Canada. Correcting both misperceptions substantially reduces the bias of respondents against FDI projects from China. These results suggest that corrective information can lead to positive change in public attitudes, a finding that has important policy implications for Canadian leaders hoping to expand the country's business ties with China.

La Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada (CVRC) réitérait en 2015 la volonté des Peuples Autochtones de renouveler leur relation avec l’État canadien. Cet article présente une réflexion théorique sur les possibilités offertes par le fédéralisme afin de renouveler cette relation entre les Autochtones et l’État. L'article confronte les arguments des tenants du fédéralisme comme cadre des relations entre les Autochtones et l’État et ceux des critiques de l’établissement d'un rapport fédéral de nation à nation entre les Peuples Autochtones et le Canada. L'article présente donc une proposition pour le renouvellement de la relation entre les Autochtones et l’État à travers un modèle de fédéralisme basé autour de régions autochtones autonomes.

Decades of research have established the direct influence of partisanship on voter perception of a host of real-world conditions. Even so, numerous factors have been found to moderate this “partisan bias.” We examine one plausible moderator: the volume of perceptually relevant information that is available in the mass media. Both dissonance-theoretic and motivated-reasoning formulations of partisan bias in political perception suggest that the availability of perceptually relevant information may constrain perceptual bias. Yet this proposition has rarely been investigated systematically. This article investigates the moderation of partisan bias by informational conditions, focusing on the impact of economic news on economic perceptions during five Canadian general elections (1993–2006). Although the overall pattern is mixed, evidence suggests that bias reduction in response to information depends on the broader economic and political context.

This study draws on the 2013 General Social Survey to investigate whether social capital is positively associated with the political participation and engagement of 15- to 24-year-old Canadians. It also assesses whether social capital can help overcome the participation gap between youths with different educational qualifications. Trust in family was the only social tie that was positively associated with the turnout of eligible voters in federal and municipal elections. Associational involvements and generalized trust in strangers were more frequently related to informal political activism and an interest in politics. Online social connections were unrelated to any measure of participation and engagement. Some forms of social capital can help address the marginalization of youths from formal and informal politics, but tertiary education is most closely associated with voting.

What impact do local candidates have on elections in single member district plurality electoral systems? We provide new evidence using data from a large election study carried out during the 2015 Canadian federal election. We improve on the measurement of local candidate effects by asking over 20,000 survey respondents to rate the candidates in their constituency directly. We present three estimates. We find that when all voters are considered together, local candidate evaluations are decisive for approximately 4 per cent of voters. Second, these evaluations are decisive for the outcome of 10 per cent of constituency contests. Third, when models are estimated for each constituency, we find significant evaluation effects for 14 per cent of candidates.

Around the world, Indigenous peoples seek increased control of traditional lands. In northern Canada, such control may be afforded by claims-based co-management regimes. Such regimes are a common, and sometimes celebrated, component of treaty federalism. In Norway, Europe's only Indigenous people, the Sami, now participate in a land-management regime: the Finnmark Estate (FeFo). We explore whether FeFo is, in effect, claims-based co-management and whether Sami thus enjoy the sort of guaranteed shared rule envisioned in treaty federalism. We compare FeFo to Canadian co-management in three dimensions: novelty, independence and Indigenous influence. We conclude FeFo is indeed claims-based co-management. But FeFo falls short of the treaty-federal ideal, for reasons possibly including bureaucratic capture, fragile legitimacy, conflicting interpretations of the Sami interest and conflicting views on the merits of shared rule.