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.

À la lumière de récents développements en politique québécoise, le présent article jette un regard critique sur deux éléments controversés entourant la légitimité du référendum sur la souveraineté du Québec de 1995, soit (1) le rejet de bulletins de vote le jour du scrutin et (2) l'effet du rallye pour l'unité canadienne tenu le 27 octobre 1995. Cette analyse mobilise des données historiques agrégées d’Élections Québec ainsi que des données individuelles de sondage collectées par Canadian Facts Limited en octobre 1995 (n = 930). Les résultats ne révèlent aucun prédicteur attitudinal du rejet de bulletins de vote à travers les circonscriptions québécoises. Des analyses suggèrent cependant l'existence d'un impact statistiquement significatif du rassemblement du love-in qui pourrait avoir profité à la cause fédéraliste à quelques jours du vote, particulièrement à l'extérieur de l’île de Montréal. Cette recherche vise à contribuer au débat public sur la transparence des processus démocratiques en contexte référendaire.

Over the last decade, there has been a spate of incidents in Canada and the United States involving Saudi Arabian nationals who, while out on bail for predominantly sexual crimes, were able to abscond from the countries despite having surrendered their passports. Investigation has revealed evidence supporting a reasonable inference that the government of Saudi Arabia has, in fact, assisted its nationals to escape on these occasions. This article makes the case that this kind of conduct amounts not just to unfriendly acts but also to infringements upon the territorial sovereignty of both states and serious breaches of the international law of jurisdiction. It surveys the possible remedies available to both injured states and, in light of the fact that neither state has sought any such remedy, examines possible remedial routes for the victims of the Saudi nationals’ crimes. It remarks upon the utter failure of either Canada or the United States to address these acts, concluding that such wilful neglect both corrodes sovereignty and undermines the will to address sexual crimes.

This article reviews the “gaps” that allow for the creation of the “offshore” in international law and argues that these are instead constituted by constraints on our spatial imaginary of law than by any “real” gaps between state jurisdictions. The modern practices of sovereignty by states and non-state actors are at odds with the implicit geography of international law that assumes a static and fixed concept of territory. By rethinking the relevant legal spaces of international law and the sovereign practices that constitute the supposedly deterritorialized offshore, we can see that the offshore is actually onshore somewhere; we can reterritorialize the supposed deterritorialized competences. This article identifies a desynchronization between state territories and the actual exercise of sovereignty that presents as pseudo deterritorialization. Yet if both the concept of sovereignty and the implicit geography of international law confirm and reinforce one another in international law discourse, international lawyers are blind to the changing “landscape” of sovereignty in international law.

In Canada, the relationship between Indigenous Nations and mining corporations is characterized by asymmetrical power dynamics. To address this situation, several Indigenous Nations who see mining as an opportunity to realize their financial autonomy have developed mechanisms to enhance their capacity to regulate how their traditional territories are exploited. Drawing on collaborative research conducted with the Cree of Eeyou Istchee, we show how these initiatives can allow Indigenous peoples to reconcile mining with ways of life seemingly at odds with extractive development. From local perspectives, the Eeyouch have managed to persuade the developers of the mine operating on their territory to meaningfully engage with Iiyiyiuituwin—the “Eeyou way of life,” fundamentally anchored in respect for and reciprocity with the land. While numerous Indigenous Nations exercise their sovereignty by opposing extractive development, others realize it through building relationship with corporations in ways that sustain their enduring political philosophy.

How is a sovereign prerogative brought to market? We know much about how states shape markets and vice versa, but less about the dynamics when states not only set market rules, but are also the sole producer of the good. This article takes up the case of citizenship by investment—“golden passport” programs that offer citizenship in recognition of an investment in a country—to unpack the challenges that appear when states commodify sovereign prerogatives. In these cases, the state holds multiple roles that generate conflicts of interest and a concern for credibility. To address these concerns, states may adopt two strategies: institute a division of labor in issuing the product, and outsource elements of supervision to third-party actors. Empirically, the analysis shows how migration service providers retooled murky discretionary grants of citizenship in peripheral countries into formal citizenship by investment schemes. The conclusion addresses how these strategies apply in markets for other sovereign prerogatives, particularly government debt, and discusses the implications for citizenship and neoliberalism.

Were the ancient Coast Salish farmers? Conventional anthropological wisdom asserts that the ethnographically known communities of the Northwest Coast of North America were “complex hunter-fisher-gatherers” who lacked any form of concerted plant food cultivation and production. Despite decades of extensive ethnobotanical and paleoethnobotanical study throughout the Pacific Northwest demonstrating the contrary, this “classic anomaly” is still a cornerstone of anthropological and archaeological canons. The recent discovery of a spectacularly preserved wetland wapato (Indian potato, Sagittaria latifolia) garden, built 3,800 years ago in Katzie traditional territory near Vancouver, British Columbia, has helped recast this picture, alongside evidence for other forms of resource management practiced by Northwest Coast peoples. This article examines “origins of agriculture” stories from three distinctive perspectives: Coast Salish Katzie people who cultivated wapato for millennia; settlers who colonized the Fraser River Delta historically, bringing with them their own ideas about what constitutes farming; and archaeologists, who are challenged by these data to reevaluate their own understandings of these cultural constructs. These perspectives have critical bearing on the historical appropriation of lands and waterways by settler communities in British Columbia as well as contemporary questions of sovereignty and stewardship in this region and well beyond.

In this paper, I argue that Indian Residential School (IRS) litigation, and the emphasis on “cultural loss” or genocide, threatened to expose the illegitimacy of Canada’s claim to sovereignty and the settler collective’s occupancy of Indigenous lands today. When settler illegitimacy is brought into view, settler collectives typically respond with violence. In IRS case law, this violence consists of the dehumanization of the Indigenous collective as property. I trace this violence on the part of Canada (government and law) in Blackwater v Plint (1996–2005). I suggest that Canada’s “disturbing defence strategy” in Blackwater likely contributed to Canada’s signing of the 2006–2007 IRS settlement agreement that brought Baxter v Canada to a close. I conclude that settler illegitimacy, genocide, and law’s racialized violence in the present ought to trouble the settler collective’s vision of both decolonization and the role of settler law in decolonization.

Questions about the ways in which colonial subjects were acquired and maintained, and how it was that multiple and often contradictory sovereignties came to overlap in history, may not be purely academic. We raise them today because they spring from issues that remain unresolved, concerning rights to land, resources, and self-determination. Following recent scholarship on the English East India Company, the author redefines the Hudson's Bay Company, during the period before widespread settler colonialism, as a state (or “company-state”), and in this way argues that the HBC-state possessed its own kind of sovereignty. The article make three main arguments: that it was up to the HBC, not the Crown, to found Rupert's Land, defend its establishments, make alliances with locals, and challenge intruders; that HBC rule extended to cover not only the company's employees but, eventually, an indigenous “home guard” population; and that the HBC welfare regime transformed the relationship between ruler and ruled.