This article critically engages with the Canadian framing of settler colonial/decolonial politics in terms of guilt and innocence. I argue that centring innocence, even as something to be snatched away from settlers, as with the theorization of settler moves to innocence, can corrupt the practice of moral responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that the desire for and expectation of innocence, in the face of structural injustices such as settler colonialism, are illusionary and that complicity is widespread. In contrast, I follow Iris Marion Young's focus on political responsibility, but I argue that public collective actions need not be as centred as she suggests. Given the nature of settler colonialism and of coloniality, I argue for the acknowledgment of the political significance of daily individual acts and for the cultivation of dispositions that disrupt unjust structures, such as a disposition to transgress.

Liberal democracies are expected to provide residents with both negative rights, such as limitations against the abuse of police powers, and some range of positive (social) rights, such as access to social benefits. These rights are commonly deemed to apply equally, without respect to individuals’ ascriptive backgrounds. Existing research, often in the US context and focused on social programs, shows both support for abstract rights and group-specific prejudices. We interrogate whether similar patterns exist in Canada and innovate by directly examining negative and positive rights in the same study. Using a series of novel survey experiments, we demonstrate the degree to which categorical inequalities based on race and legal status affect public support for rights provision in Canada. Both rights are more recognized for citizens relative to out-of-status migrants, and legal status at times interacts with racialized minority status. Rights appear far from universal in the minds of Canadians.

This article investigates how superpower rivalry affects public perceptions of international organization (IO) legitimacy in the hegemon. We argue that the representation of a superpower rival state at an IO in the form of its key decision maker's nationality can dampen the IO's perceived legitimacy within the rival power. We test this argument using a survey experiment in the United States under President Trump, where we manipulate the nationality of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) judge who casts a tie-breaking vote against the United States. Our results show that when the judge is Chinese, there is a strong and robust dampening of Americans’ perceptions of the ICJ's legitimacy, with no comparable effect arising when the judge is from other countries, including Russia. Replication of the experiment in the United States under President Biden offers external validity for our findings, which may have important implications for the future of the liberal international order.

Les instruments auxquels un État peut avoir recours pour atténuer les risques que font peser les inégalités économiques sur la démocratie sont nombreux et peuvent prendre différentes formes. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à mettre en lumière la dimension normative des trois principaux instruments auxquels on a généralement recours pour mitiger l'influence de l'argent dans la compétition électorale, ainsi que le contexte dans lequel ils furent institués, remodelés – et parfois démantelés – au Canada. Ces trois mécanismes sont la limitation des dépenses électorales, le plafonnement des contributions privées et le financement public des partis. Il ne s'agit toutefois pas uniquement de décrire ces instruments, mais de réfléchir aux justifications normatives spécifiques à chacun, et d'en comprendre leur complémentarité. Plus largement, il s'agit d'offrir un cadre pour penser les enjeux de financement électoral en philosophie politique, un sujet trop souvent laissé dans l'ombre par la théorie démocratique.

Calls for more family-friendly assemblies, specifically those able to accommodate representatives who are pregnant, postpartum or have young children, have become urgent in the last decade, as a mini-baby boom in the federal parliament and the provinces has called the inclusivity of legislatures into question. Drawing on interviews with legislative clerks, this article asks two questions: 1) Are Canadian legislatures family-friendly? And 2) what approaches to family-friendly legislatures emerge from policies and discussions within these legislatures? It identifies patterns both in the types of changes that are proposed and those which are actioned, finding that changes have leaned heavily on the least consequential improvements. Many calls for change continue to run up against structural challenges that have been, thus far, ignored. Although legislatures are more family-friendly than in previous decades, this article argues that the future of inclusive parliaments hinges on a broad rethinking of the parliamentary role.

Alors que la lutte contre la corruption est généralement considérée comme une responsabilité de la Justice ou des agences anticorruptions, des recherches montrent que les institutions supérieures de contrôle des finances publiques (ISC) peuvent aussi jouer un rôle essentiel. Cependant, ce rôle n'est pas toujours clairement défini et pourrait diverger selon les contextes. L'objectif de cet article est de mieux cerner le rôle des ISC dans la lutte contre la corruption du point de vue des acteurs directement concernés, soit les membres des ISC. Treize entretiens, réalisés avec des vérificateurs au Québec et des magistrats en France et au Sénégal, démontrent une contribution effective de ces institutions dans le combat contre la corruption, bien qu'elles n'en aient pas le mandat explicite.

This research note reports on a new dataset about legislators in four Canadian provinces since the establishment of their colonial assemblies in the eighteenth century. Over 7,000 legislators from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are included, with consolidated information drawn from multiple sources about parliamentarians’ years of birth and death, religion, electoral performance, kinship, and several other biographical indicators. We also illustrate the utility of such data with the help of a few descriptive examples drawn from the four provinces. We believe this consolidated dataset offers several opportunities for future research on representation, legislative activities and party politics.

In terms of party systems, Canada's system is an outlier. In our present work, we develop Richard Johnston's account of Canada's polarized pluralism in three ways. First, we link the literature on party systems to social identity theory. Second, we make an empirical contribution by directly testing Johnston's claim that intergroup affect plays a central role in shaping the dynamics of the party system. Using Canadian Election Study data from seven elections, we offer strong empirical support for the theory of polarized pluralism. Congruent with existing research, we find that the most important feature summarizing group-based affect in Canadian politics corresponds with the ideological left/right divide, but we also find that feelings toward groups on a second, uncorrelated axis (feelings toward Quebec and minority groups) shape vote choice. Yet our results show that fault lines in the polarized pluralist structure of the Canadian party system are emerging.

Across the globe, women are underrepresented in elected politics. The study's case countries of Australia (ranked 33), Canada (61) and the United States (66) rank poorly for women's political representation. Drawing on role strain and gender-mainstreaming theories and applying large-scale survey experiments, we examine public opinion on non-quota mechanisms to bolster women's political participation. The experimental design manipulates the politician's gender and level of government (federal/local) before asking about non-quota supports to help the politician. We find public support for policies aimed at lessening work–family role strain is higher for a woman politician; these include a pay raise, childcare subsidies and housework allowances. This support is amplified among women who are presented with a woman politician in our experiment, providing evidence of a gender-affinity effect. The study's findings contribute to scholarship on gender equality and point to gender-mainstreaming mechanisms to help mitigate the gender gap in politics.

Cet article propose une réflexion sur les initiatives politiques déployées ces dernières années un peu partout en Occident afin de rendre les forces armées plus « représentatives ». S'il est difficile de contester la légitimité démocratique de ces initiatives, celles-ci risquent néanmoins de porter atteinte à l'autonomie professionnelle des officiers au sein des forces armées, conformément à ce que nous appelons le « compromis huntingtonien », soit le modèle de relations civilo-militaires qui domine encore aujourd'hui en Occident. En effet, en intervenant directement dans les « affaires internes » des forces armées, le pouvoir civil se trouve ainsi à empiéter sur les pouvoirs et le champ des responsabilités professionnelles exercées par les officiers sur les forces armées. Pour pallier ce risque, nous proposons un élargissement du « rôle politique » de l'officier, à l'intérieur même du cadre fixé par le compromis huntingonien. Cela devrait se traduire par deux axes complémentaires d'action pour l'officier aujourd'hui négligés : d'une part, défendre la place singulière des forces armées dans la société et, d'autre part, agir en tant qu'agent de changement culturel au sein des forces armées.

Comme l'illustrent Bélanger et Nadeau (2009), l'axe identitaire traditionnel au Québec apparait de moins en moins prédominant sur la scène politique québécoise. Cette situation impose l'adoption d'une stratégie différente de la part des divers partis dits souverainistes. Comment se sont articulées ces tentatives de repositionnement au sein du Bloc québécois? Afin d'explorer cette question, nous avons amassé plus de 7500 communiqués de presse diffusés par le parti entre 2002 et 2021. À l'aide de méthodes d'analyse automatisées et une approche de Latent Semantic Scaling développée par Watanabe (2020), nous illustrons et discutons de la prédominance de l'enjeu souverainiste à travers cette période, ainsi que le ton du parti quant à cet enjeu. Les résultats indiquent que les élections et les résultats de celles-ci jouent un rôle crucial dans la stratégie communicationnelle du Bloc québécois à l’égard de la souveraineté. De façon plus générale, nous observons certaines fluctuations importantes de l'attention accordée à cet enjeu et des variations importantes quant au cadrage de cet enjeu autour des élections. Cette note de recherche apporte un éclairage méthodologique nouveau quant aux théories entourant le réalignement politique en cours au Québec et la saillance qu'occupe le clivage de la souveraineté.

Despite his influence on those interested by leisure, Marx's own conception of leisure is rarely discussed. Insofar as it is, he is generally either thought to see leisure as free time or as indistinct from necessary labour in communist society. In this article, I suggest that by reading Capital and the Grundrisse through an Aristotelian lens, we can find a third potential conception of leisure in Marx, which shares three features in common with Aristotle's. Leisure is distinct from free time simpliciter, it is a “state-condition” people are in when they perform ends in themselves, and it is constitutive of the final end. I conclude that adopting a conception of leisure grounded in this Marxian conception could have implications for contemporary debates around free time and the value of leisure goods like arts and culture.

Ending gender-based violence was a central promise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's self-declared feminist government. Executive speeches about gender-based violence provide clues about what types of feminist ideas undergird the 42nd Parliament. Was carceral feminism advanced, by focusing on punishment? Or neoliberalized feminist ideas, by focusing on the market? Or social justice feminist ideas, by focusing on systemic change? Applying the concept of governance feminism and using Bacchi's WPR approach, this article investigates how gender-based violence is problematized in English- and French-language House of Commons debates in the 42nd Parliament by the cabinet. The speeches problematize gender-based violence as preventable and caused by systemic issues, but this transformational discourse is undermined by a focus on strengthening carceral responses and limiting human potential to economic productivity. Feminist ideas about gender-based violence were adopted, relying on carceral and neoliberalized feminist ideas. The Trudeau Liberals’ campaign for change was discursively undermined.

I compare Christopher Lasch's thought to specific features that research in political science attributes to contemporary populism. Lasch openly favoured a historical form of populism but is rarely considered when current forms of populism are discussed. The research literature characterizes populism as superficially tied to democracy while undermining it, as committed to the moral binary of people and elites, and as intellectually “thin” because it does not engage with the complex theories that ground other ideologies. These characters make populism incoherent and inimical to democracy. Lasch manifests all three characters while connecting them to a sustained worldview. Humans’ awareness of death is the core feature that makes them rational, ethical and equal. Attempts to dilute that awareness are inimical to the equality at democracy's basis. Experts and professionals encourage this dilution by promising remedies and progress. Democracy depends on ordinary people who resist elites and their complex phraseologies.

L'existence et la persistance de mouvements nationalistes peuvent avoir plusieurs explications, dont l'une est liée aux générations – à la façon dont elles ont été socialisées à la politique dans des contextes sociétaux distincts, et comment les générations plus âgées sont remplacées par les plus jeunes à travers le temps. Pour mieux comprendre l’évolution du nationalisme au Québec, cette étude s'appuie sur les six dernières Études électorales québécoises (2007–2022) et utilise un modèle âge-période-cohorte pour examiner la relation entre les groupes générationnels et divers indicateurs du nationalisme. Les résultats révèlent effectivement une histoire générationnelle. Les baby-boomers se distinguent particulièrement des autres générations par leur attachement au Québec, leur soutien au projet d'indépendance et leur appui au Parti québécois, tandis que les millénariaux soutiennent davantage Québec solidaire et les membres de la génération X appuient davantage la Coalition avenir Québec. Ainsi, il cohabite actuellement différentes « générations nationalistes » au Québec.

Our knowledge of the institutional features of local government in Canadian cities is surprisingly fragmentary. The academic literature has long identified dominant tendencies in Canadian local institutions, but systematic empirical data has been missing. In this article, we address this gap in knowledge in two ways. We introduce the Canadian Municipal Attributes Portal (CMAP), a new open-access database that contains information on dozens of institutional features of local government for nearly 100 of the most populous municipalities in Canada. We then propose a new multidimensional index of authority concentration, which is designed to capture variation in the local structure of decision-making authority in a systematic and nuanced manner. We apply this index to a systematic pan-Canadian subsample of 65 CMAP municipalities. The result is a rich portrait of institutional variety, one that both corroborates and substantially extends our current understanding of the shape of municipal institutions in Canadian cities.

Public debates structure election cycles, feature in news media, and are privileged as a form of academic exchange. Yet, public debate is poorly understood from the perspective of political theory. While theorists often talk about “public debate,” they usually mean diffuse discussion on a topic in the public sphere. This article considers how literal public debates—multisided, publicly accessible and publicly oriented performances of reason-giving—may be normatively distinct from other forms of rhetoric. Drawing on the “constructivist turn” in the scholarship on representation and the philosophy of Gadamer, I offer a hermeneutical approach for assessing public debates. I argue that public debates do not merely provide a platform for opinions to be broadcast, they also purport to provide a representative spectrum of opinions. In so doing, they help to construct the borders of the public sphere itself. I conclude by considering the significance of protest to public debate.

In recent decades, Canada and other democracies have experienced a significant rise in migrant settlement. This has sparked much interest among scholars and policy makers in the forces that encourage or impede the political incorporation of newcomers. In this research note, we consider a factor that has received relatively little scrutiny, the impact of immigrants’ attention to native-country politics on willingness to participate in residential-country elections and affiliate with a political party in that country. We examine this through an original survey of Americans in Canada conducted during the 2020 US election cycle. A randomized experiment demonstrates that directing the attention of American emigrants to US campaigns can lower interest in Canadian elections and weaken attachments to a Canadian political party, particularly for those who are less integrated into Canadian society. These findings point to a potential tension between political engagement as an emigrant versus as an immigrant.

The Canadian child welfare system has been characterized as being in crisis for over a decade; the number of children in care (and dying in care) has increased dramatically, straining an overburdened system. Physical or sexual abuse is not the reason most children are removed from their homes; rather, the state deems them lacking the necessities of life, usually because their family is impoverished. Because the majority of children in care are Indigenous, the child welfare system is described as the new version of residential schools. Using the lens of historical institutionalism, this study argues that the current child welfare system reflects colonial and neoliberal assumptions that some parents are incapable of sound decision making by virtue of their race or socio-economic situation. Canada's child welfare system is both a product and contributor to the institutions and policies that reinforce intergenerational poverty, a key determinant of removing children from their families.

Recent political developments in established democracies have renewed attention to the politics of identity. Some commentators have expressed concern that polities are fracturing along increasingly narrow social identity lines, in the process, losing their ability to build solidarity around shared commitments such as redistribution. This article takes stock of the strength of Canadian social identities and their consequences for redistributive preferences. It asks: first, which group memberships form the basis of Canadians’ perceptions of shared identity, and second, do these group memberships shape preferences for redistribution? This study answers these questions using two conjoint experiments that assess respondents’ perceptions of commonality and support for redistributing to hypothetical Canadians who vary on multiple dimensions of identity and need. Findings support that Canadians perceive greater shared identity with some of their groups (their social class) over others (their region or ascriptive identity), but that they overwhelmingly prioritize redistributing toward those who need it over those with whom they share group memberships.