What determines how Members of Parliament (MPs) and their staff frame their communications with all constituents in their electoral district? Prior research has suggested that constituency operations are one of the last bastions of freedom that MPs have from the full grasp of party discipline in Canada. If this remains true, MP communications with their constituents should reflect the MPs’ background or the constituency context and not their political partisanship. We collected a sample of published newsletters (“householders”) that Canadian MPs’ offices sent to all households in their electoral districts during the COVID-19 pandemic. We supplement our analysis with original insights about householders from a selection of MPs and their staff. Our results suggest that in a system of strict party discipline, the most important predictor of what MPs include in their constituent communications is indeed partisanship. The results inform our understanding of democratic representation, centralized co-ordination and political communication, and the pervasiveness of partisan messaging in Canada.

Despite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

Since 2015, the Canadian Senate has undergone a series of reforms designed to make it more independent, ideologically diverse, and active in the legislative process. We use loyalty scores and vote scaling algorithms to situate the voting behaviour of senators, focusing primarily on the 41st and 42nd Parliaments (2011–2019), the period just before and after the changes, respectively. We find that the reforms have led to a loosening of party discipline across all parties and caucuses but that independent senators appointed under the reformed process are the most likely supporters of the government's agenda. We also find that the Senate has become more willing to use its formal powers.

During the 2015 Maclean’s election debate, Stephen Harper commented, “we have more private member’s legislation that has gone through Parliament under this government than multiple governments before us.” This statement is borne out by empirical evidence: more private member’s bills (PMBs) have become law during Harper’s time in government, compared with most previous parliaments. However, PMBs are subject to less analysis than government bills and do not receive legal scrutiny by the Department of Justice, potentially implicating the protection of rights. Moreover, while one might assume that PMBs concern innocuous local and/or specialized interests, many Harper era PMBs effect substantive legal change to national issues like criminal justice policy. This paper examines the law and order trend in PMBs and addresses the following: why would the PMO under Stephen Harper, noted for its centralized control over all aspects of public policy, permit backbench MPs a role in criminal justice policy, through PMBs?