Two distinct strands of conservative Canadian economic nationalism—associated with the ideas of John Rae and Isaac Buchanan—helped to inform the country's protectionist National Policy of 1879. These strands of nationalism were much less influenced by Listian ideas than was economic nationalist thought in many other countries at this time. This study of their content, intellectual sources and influence contributes empirically and analytically to debates in Canadian political economy and international political economy, while also advancing historical scholarship. The arguments also have some potential contemporary relevance in an age when protectionist economic nationalism is rising in the US and elsewhere.

On compte actuellement un grand nombre de modèles politico-économiques ayant pour objectif de prédire l'issue des élections au Congrès américain ou le sort des candidats à la présidence des États-Unis. Bien qu'un certain nombre de modèles aient vu le jour pour la France, l'Allemagne et le Royaume-Uni au cours des dernières années, le Canada, à l'instar de la majorité des démocraties, n'a reçu jusqu’à maintenant que bien peu d'attention. Cet article vise par conséquent à développer un modèle ancré dans une théorie du vote capable de prédire suffisamment à l'avance la part des voix récoltées par le parti sortant lors des scrutins fédéraux canadiens. Le Canada étant un système multipartite, différents modèles de régressions apparemment indépendantes sont également proposés afin de déterminer s'il est possible de prédire simultanément les scores de plusieurs formations politiques.

The article seeks to understand what is specifically modern about populists, why we have difficulty in agreeing on who and what they are, and—importantly—how we can address the formidable challenge they present to contemporary democratic politics. It does so by detailing the classical conception of the demagogue and by showing how modernity, in its liberal and counter-liberal aspects, sought to solve conclusively the problem of the demagogue. It argues that modern populists face significant obstacles to their ambitions in the form of modern constitutionalism, yet are also armed with new weapons, including new concepts or “ideologies” for manipulation (such as “the people,” nation, race and class) and new rhetorical techniques (such as propaganda that exploits modern technology and mass media).

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.

Recent research using the Big Five model of personality traits has highlighted the importance of personality traits to explaining diverse political behaviours and attitudes. The trait labelled openness to experience has also been found to positively affect political knowledge. This investigation seeks to distinguish two different components of openness: the aesthetic and the intellectual facets. An analysis of the 2015 Canadian Election Study (CES), the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES) and the 2013 ANES Recontact Study was conducted to explore this question. Openness had no significant impact on political knowledge when a measure that more precisely targets intellectualism, as represented by need for cognition, was included. However, open individuals did exhibit higher levels of interest in politics. Finally, openness to experience and need for cognition fostered political knowledge with frequency of political discussion and exposure to disagreement in the CES respondents (Canadians) but not in the ANES respondents (Americans).

In the 2014 reference, the Supreme Court sought to discover the Senate's “essential nature” in order to determine what reforms parliament could legislate unilaterally. Making use of a classification model found in comparative and historical studies, the Court concluded that the Senate was a “complementary legislative body of sober second thought.” This article re-examines the Court's narrow definition of the Senate's perceived role and presents evidence that its essential characteristics are direct continuations of various pre-Confederation design principles. Limiting a description of its architecture to a single model that eclipses all other roles the Senate may play shifts the debate on Senate reform, which in the recent past has laid emphasis on resolving the conflict among the models embedded in the upper chamber's essential characteristics. The article concludes by reviewing previous constitutional initiatives that aimed at bringing those models more in tune with modern Canada and by making suggestions about how reform proposals could better succeed.

What drives individuals toward a career in politics? Prior research on political ambition has often focused on socio-demographic variables while generally ignoring the importance of individual personality differences. Yet personality consistently predicts political knowledge, interest and participation, suggesting that individual differences may matter in addition to resources and the social environment. To this end, we assess the impact of both the HEXACO and Dark Triad models of personality in predicting nascent political ambition (that is, the initial desire to run for elected office) while controlling for well-established socio-demographic variables (for example, gender, income). Overall, we find considerable support for the predictive power of personality, especially the traits of honesty-humility, extraversion and narcissism. These results have important implications for understanding the kinds of people who are interested in a political career.

Studies of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) focus largely on its policy-making role and its interpretation of the Charter of Rights. However, less studied are the Court's decisions in earlier periods, especially in comparison to the Charter years and in cases beyond civil rights and liberties. This study fills a gap in the scholarship by analyzing the universe of decisions from 1945 to 2005 in criminal, tax and tort cases. Utilizing Baum's (1988, 1989) method to examine policy change, I explore policy trends on the Supreme Court. The findings suggest that, for the most part, the SCC has remained a stable, consistent body over the course of its modern history. It appears that most of the variation in judicial output across time is due to issue change with some shifts due to personnel and membership change.

Cet article vise à identifier et analyser les idées qui ont accompagné l’émergence et la victoire de Donald Trump. Nous nous intéressons tout particulièrement au paléoconservatisme, un courant idéologique jusque-là méconnu, qui a néanmoins su articuler les frustrations et aspirations d'une partie importante de l’électorat américain. Critique des élites économiques et politiques associées aux deux grands partis, le paléoconservatisme prône un nationalisme identitaire qui menace de bouleverser l’équilibre déjà fragile entre les variantes libertarienne et socialement conservatrice qui dominent au Parti républicain depuis quelques décennies.

It is well established that political parties play a key role as gatekeepers to elected office. This article explores the local determinants of a diverse candidate pool. In particular, we seek to uncover the district- or riding-specific party factors that are related to women's participation in the parties’ candidate nomination stages. That is, why do some nomination races in a party have no women contestants, while others have many? Using data from an original survey of party constituency association presidents, as well as extensive nomination data from Elections Canada, we demonstrate that a number of local factors are related to the presence of women contesting a party's nomination. Local party associations with a woman serving as president, as well as associations that hold earlier and longer nominations, are significantly more likely to see a woman enter the contest. The results are important since they call attention to what parties do at the grassroots level, as well as highlight practical solutions for parties seeking to have more diversity in their candidate pool.

Which leadership qualities are most likely to be emphasized in news reports about leadership competitions, and are they attributed differently to women and men candidates? To answer this question, we conducted content and discourse analyses of 2,463 articles published by the Globe and Mail newspaper on 10 women and 17 men seeking the leadership of Canadian political parties since 1975. Our results show that women candidates were subjected to more negative and gendered assessments of their communication skills, intellectual substance and political experience than were men candidates. We also found little evidence that gendered media discourses about political leadership have changed over time, especially in the case of women in the strongest position to become the country's first national party leader or prime minister.

Studies of parliamentary systems contend that backbench legislators are increasingly marginalized, with power being centralized in the executive. However, such research typically focuses on national legislatures, ignoring subnational jurisdictions. We extend this literature by exploring the process of “executive creep” in Canada's provinces; namely the tendency of executives to erode legislative independence by appointing backbenchers to quasi-executive positions or cabinet committees. We examine executive creep in all provinces since 1968, finding a clear trend towards the increased incorporation of backbenchers into the work of the executive. Moreover, these changes serve to strengthen the power of first ministers relative to their cabinets.

We explore influences on the number of candidates, and female candidates in particular, who contest mayoral elections in Canada. We draw on an original cross-national data set of election results from mayoral elections in Canada's 100 largest cities between 2006 and 2017. An average of 4.96 candidates contested mayoral elections in this period, and 16 per cent of all candidates were women. Density and mayoral prestige were related to higher numbers of candidates; in contrast, incumbent candidates and the availability of other elected positions were related to lower numbers. Notably, the presence of a female incumbent was related to higher numbers of women running for the position of mayor; in contrast, higher mayoral salaries were associated with an increase in the number of male but not female candidates. This analysis enhances our understanding of the factors underlying contested local elections, as well as the factors that appear to facilitate women contesting local elections.

Canada has taken part in six wars since 1945, all of which have been conducted under US leadership. Despite such military interventionism, there have been no systematic comparative analyses of Canada's decisions to take part in US-led wars. The objective of this article is to develop and test a theoretical framework about why Canada goes to war. More specifically, it seeks to account for variations in Canada's provision of combat forces to multinational interventions led by the United States. It assesses leading theoretical explanations by examining five post–Cold War cases: the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya; the war against ISIS; and the refusal to take part in the invasion of Iraq. The article concludes that Canada's willingness to go to war is shaped primarily by a desire to maintain transatlantic alliance unity and enhance Canada's alliance credibility. Threats to national security, the legitimacy of the intervention, government ideology and public opinion are not found to consistently or meaningfully shape Canadian decisions to take part in US-led wars.

Studies of public contentious action in response to mineral resource extraction have rarely employed quantitative methods. In a highly disaggregated statistical analysis we examine local protest dynamics in Bolivia and argue for a political conditioning of the so-called resource curse. We find that mineral gas resources spark disputes over both extraction and rent redistribution at the local level, and that this relationship is especially pronounced where the population has highly heterogenous political values and interests. In contrast, where the population is relatively united in their political views, significantly fewer protests occur.

This article examines candidate emails from the 2016–17 Conservative Party of Canada leadership race to explore how candidates communicated with party supporters on issues of moral traditionalism (for example, abortion and sexuality diversity) and minority religious accommodation. We find that the level of public support for a given policy position shaped how overtly candidates signalled their views, with those supporting moral traditionalism or restrictions on religious minorities tending to express their views covertly and vice versa. Message overtness also changed following the deadline for new members to join the party before the vote. This article marks the first systematic study of how party leadership candidates attempt to solicit support from particular party factions and how candidates’ appeals evolve throughout a campaign. The results also show that the high-profile debate around minority religious accommodation during the leadership race did not displace contestation between candidates over issues such as sexual or reproductive rights.

Alberta is responsible for over a third of Canada's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Reducing the country's emissions requires policies and initiatives that reduce emissions in the province. Yet the study of provincial climate change policy in Canada has largely focused on lower-emitting provinces like British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario. This article argues that Alberta is best understood as a “reluctant actor” on climate change, whose policies are influenced by decisions and pressures from outside its borders. The literature on Canadian-American environmental policy making and international policy transfer are used to explore provincial GHG targets and carbon pricing policies. The article finds that Alberta's 2002 targets and Specified Gas Emitters Regulation were determined by economic competitiveness and leakage concerns, while the adoption of new GHG targets in 2008 and a carbon tax was the result of policy transfer through political bandwagoning and the desire for reputational benefits.

Canada has long claimed the Northwest Passage as its “internal waters,” while the United States and other countries argue it is an “international strait.” The latter “free sea” position originates in Hugo Grotius, often styled the “father of international law.” However, Grotius later qualifies his own position by granting to coastal states the right to regulate maritime traffic. Grotius's works also inspire the English School of International Relations: an “international society” approach that Canada has historically followed in its overall foreign policy. Hence, a twenty-first-century Grotian vision might suggest a compromise amenable to Canada: Canada would grant passage to conforming American vessels, thus facilitating international trade, but Canada would also gain powers of effective jurisdiction, allowing it to secure and conserve the fragile environment. Canada might thus re-envision sovereignty not as a zero-sum contest for status symbols but as the exercise of functional jurisdiction for the common good of international society.

Governments in advanced industrial democracies generally regulate foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows with two types of policy measures: entry barriers and post-establishment restrictions. This article provides an integrated account for the two types of FDI restrictions, which is largely absent in the existing literature. We argue that the government's choice of FDI policies is shaped by a compound effect of the incumbent's ideological orientation and the political influence of unionized labour. Although inward FDI broadly benefits domestic workers, the entrance of multinational corporations (MNCs) adversely impacts the unionized interests of labour by transforming the labour market in ways detrimental to unions’ wage-bargaining leverage. Leftist governments, driven by the preferences of their labour constituency, tend to lift entry barriers to FDI in order to promote capital inflows. At the same time, leftist governments may also need to address unions’ concerns about inbound MNCs by tightening post-establishment restrictions on FDI, which impose constraints on the globalized business and operational model of MNCs. We argue that leftist incumbents generally liberalize entry barriers but tighten post-establishment restrictions when the level of labour unionization is high. We found evidence consistent with our argument from country-level and sector-level analysis of FDI restrictions, using a sample from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s of Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.