Recent northern First Nation land claim agreements have created a new category of First Nation citizenship. Although many embrace the category as an essential aspect of First Nation sovereignty, others reject it as a colonial imposition that constrains the possibilities for indigenous politics. There does indeed appear to be a gap between the legal category of First Nation citizenship and northern indigenous peoples’ ideas about political society. For one thing, the latter includes animals, while the former does not. In their recent book, Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka develop a model of animal citizenship. Although not primarily concerned with First Nation citizenship, they do assert the universality of their model, including its compatibility with indigenous ideas about proper human-animal relations. In this article, I assess those claims and show that, to the contrary, their model is in many ways antithetical to the knowledge and practices of northern indigenous peoples.

This paper examines judicial reasoning in the area of Aboriginal title, paying particular attention to the Supreme Court of Canada's Tsilhqot'in Nation (2014) decision. While the decision has been heralded as a ‘game-changer’ within media circles and legal commentaries for its recognition of a claim to title under section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, the authors argue that the decision does not depart substantially from prior judicial logics predicated upon the production of Crown sovereignty and the denial of Indigenous legal orders. In fact, the authors argue that the decision displays a clear judicial orientation towards the present jurisdictional divisions of Canadian federalism which not only serves to eliminate Indigenous legal orders and territorial responsibilities, but also provides federal and provincial governments with enhanced powers of ‘incursion’ into Aboriginal title lands.

Political parties have long been identified as critical players in Canadian democracy. In this address I focus on the activities of parties at the constituency level arguing that this is crucial to fully understanding many important questions in Canadian political science. By way of example, using data relating to the 2015 federal election, I argue that examining the relative vitality of local party associations in the period between election campaigns assists in a fuller understanding of election outcomes and that examining local party nomination dynamics is key to understanding the underrepresentation of women in the candidate pool and ultimately in the House of Commons.

This article introduces a new dictionary for the automated analysis of the tone of French media. We named it the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSDFr) in reference to the English lexicon developed by Young and Soroka (2012), the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD), from which the LSDFr was built. We compare the LSDFr to the only other French sentiment lexicon, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). First, we detail the construction of the dictionary. We then test the internal validity of the LSDFr comparing it with a corpus of manually coded texts. Finally, we test the external validity of LSDFr by measuring how the media tone, calculated using our dictionary, predicts voting intentions in the last four Quebec elections. Our goal is to enable other researchers to conduct media analyses with a comparable corpus of texts in French.

This paper revisits and rebuts the mainstream view that Brazil and Argentina were led to form the Southern Common Market to end more than a century of rivalry and competition. We find the elements characterizing an interstate rivalry diminishing in the nineteenth century through the promotion of peaceful settlements and strategic alliances while those that could prompt security concerns disappeared years before the Southern Common Market was formed. Except for diplomatic disputes over the distribution of shared water resources, a disagreement settled in 1979, the decades preceding the Treaty of Asuncion were typified by security alliances, co-operation on economic complementarity and the promotion of bilateral institutions. We find little evidence for the implied security motivations being proposed in the literature. Rather, the establishment of the Southern Common Market was driven primarily by Argentina's and Brazil's desire to improve economic performance and advance political leverage through the promotion of a common stance in global affairs. This view challenges a common component in integration theory that, as applied to the European Union and elsewhere, asserts the privileged role of security concerns as prime driver for integration. This matters because there is a misapprehension that affects both the theory about integration as well as the formulation of policy prescriptions for South America.

Proponents of both ward and at-large systems agree that these systems of election play a role in shaping the representational foci (that is, who representatives seek to represent) of city councillors and, in so doing, affect the quality of local democracy. Canadian cities employ both ward and at-large systems of election, and therefore provide an opportunity to explore the relationship between elective systems and focus of representation. We draw on data derived from both 52 interviews with and a survey of councillors in Canadian cities to test the proposition that cities' systems of election influence the representational foci of councillors. We find strong evidence that ward systems are related to a representational focus on geographically defined neighbourhoods, whereas councillors in at-large systems report prioritizing representation of their cities as wholes.

Buildings produce a large proportion of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and municipalities control a number of policy levers that can help to reduce those emissions. This article explains variation among Canadian cities regarding policies adopted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with a particular focus on green building standards. By applying insights from the study of the politics of public policy to urban politics, this article finds that while electoral disincentives prevent most cities from enacting high impact green building policies, the success of some cities can be attributed to the influence of independent municipal environment departments. These departments facilitate policy learning by providing information and resources. The findings suggest that policy makers could improve the effectiveness of local climate change policy by creating municipal environment departments that have organizational capacity—funding, staff, and a cross-cutting mandate—and are insulated from interference from politicians and line departments.

In this work we offer results drawn from a dataset of a post-provincial election survey in eight Canadian provinces to assess the impact of party system congruency on partisanship. We postulate that partisanship will be more likely and stronger in provinces that share a similar political party system to the federal level. We extend this preliminary analysis to test the underlying mechanism by examining the impact holding partisan ties at the provincial level has on the likelihood and strength of federal identification, according to party system similarity. Our results show very limited support for the party system congruency factor, raising further questions of its applicability in the Canadian context.

Canada is beginning to slowly embrace an ethic of Indigenous-settler biculturalism. One model of change is afforded by the development of biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where recent Indigenous Māori mobilization has created a unique model in the Western settler world. This article explores what Canada might learn from the Kiwi experience, focusing on the key identity marker Pākehā, an internalized and contingent settler identity, using Indigenous vocabulary and reliant on a relationship with Indigenous peoples. This article gauges Pākehā’s utility in promoting biculturalism, noting both its progressive qualities and problems in its deployment, including continued inequality, political alienation, and structural discrimination. While Canada has no Pākehā analogue, terms such as “settler” are being operationalized to develop a larger agenda for reconciliation along the lines recommended by the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. However, such terms function best when channelled towards achieving positive concrete goals, rather than acting as rhetorical screens for continued inaction.

Indigenous peoples have, to varying degrees, turned to the courts to litigate their ongoing disputes with Canada's settler colonial governments. Scholars have examined well the ways courts are used for strategic political ends by a variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous litigants and are laden with settler values and institutional logics that are foreign to Indigenous peoples. However, it is less clear what effect turning to the courts in pursuit of strategic goals has on specific relationships between Indigenous peoples. This gap is more pronounced in Métis scholarship where there have been few final appellate cases. This paper argues the interaction between the Manitoba Métis Federation and Treaty 1 peoples seeking leave to intervene at the Manitoba Court of Appeal in MMF v. Canada illuminates the way litigating Indigenous-settler disputes can advance divisive, exclusionary, zero-sum political relationships between Indigenous peoples. These fractious interactions serve to undermine the construction of a co-ordinated and related inter-Indigenous decolonizing politics.

This paper proposes the analysis of policies as the result of hegemonic phenomena. This perspective understands the diffusion of frames of reference as a phenomenon that is intrinsically conflictual. In so doing, our aim is to work around one of the main problems in the existing literature focused on the role of ideas and discourses: it tends to neglect the cognitive and symbolic struggles in which agents, who possess unequal resources, are engaged. We suggest analyzing the organization of a hegemonic phenomenon by focusing on the debates related to agri-environmental policies in England, France and Hungary. Generally, this article contributes an original outlook on the production of political order.

This study examines the link between new Quebecers’ use of the French language and their relationship with the Quebec and Canadian political communities; more specifically, the study examines the case of first and second generations of visible minorities living in Quebec. As in earlier studies, the findings indicate that new Quebecers who use French more frequently in their daily lives have a more positive relationship with the Quebec political community. Similarly, new Quebecers who attended French schools express a more positive relationship with the Quebec political community. In both cases, the relationships are observed for first and second generations of new Quebecers. However, even when they use French in most spheres of life and attended French schools, new Quebecers still express a weaker preference for the Quebec political community than other French-speaking Quebecers.

In this article I use new archival and elite interview data to improve our knowledge of how the Canadian Multiculturalism Act came into existence. I show why some Canadians began to seek such an act, why political parties promised an act and how this act was created. The evidence in this article will also correct claims that scholars often make about this act and the policy of multiculturalism that it contains. This evidence also improves our knowledge of why the policy of multiculturalism in this legislation does what few scholars would expect. This is because scholars often claim that policies of multiculturalism are used to “repudiate” and remove understandings of a country. But my evidence helps to show why the policy of multiculturalism in this act promotes understandings of a country. Scholars also claim that policies of multiculturalism can be divisive if they are unaccompanied by nation-building policies. But my evidence helps to show why the policy of multiculturalism in this legislation was designed to be a nation-building policy.

The articles in this symposium reflect on Richard Simeon's article, “Studying Public Policy,” published forty years ago in this journal. In this introduction, we review these articles’ contribution to three themes in “Studying Public Policy”: first, the goal of the study of public policy should be policy analysis and explanation, not policy prescription; second, the analysis of public policy outcomes requires a holistic and contextually situated analytical framework; and third, building theory requires methods of comparative analysis, not single case studies. We also propose items for a future policy studies agenda.

This article evaluates the impact of partisanship, globalization and postindustrialism on provincial revenues since 1980. It is often argued that the first of these no longer has an effect, while the second and third erode fiscal capacity. These arguments are assessed with multilevel models, hitherto little used for macro-level estimations in political science. This approach is particularly suited to testing these influences. The study finds that partisanship is, in fact, strongly associated with provincial revenues. Globalization and postindustrialism have a more muted effect, though alternative estimations support somewhat different conclusions regarding the former. The social preconditions of partisanship's impact, moreover, deserve more attention.

This paper draws upon data collected from an online voting experiment to test the implications of “going negative” in a multiparty election campaign. Specifically, we investigate two sets of questions: First, does the attention and vote share that candidates receive vary according to the tone (positive/negative) of their election campaign? Second, does the attention and vote share that candidates receive vary according to whether or not all candidates engage in similar (positive/negative) campaigns? While studies of “negative campaigning” have been prominent in the American context, our work builds upon this literature by using an experimental design to test for their effects in a multiparty setting.

The 2011 Canadian federal election results changed the face of federal politics in Quebec. In a sudden and spectacular reversal of electoral fortunes, BQ support crumbled while that of the NDP surged. While most commentators focused exclusively on the 2011 election itself to explain what had happened, we offer an interpretation that takes a longitudinal approach. Using data from the Canadian Election Study and political party manifestos from 2006 to 2011, we propose a three-dimensional proximity model of voter/party congruence to explore the evolution of the ideological stances of Quebec voters and parties. Empirical results suggest these ideological distances between the NDP and Quebec voters decreased over time, whereas the BQ has distanced itself from voters. Furthermore, ideological distances between party and voters are a significant predictor of vote.

Past studies have shown that religion plays an important role in voting behaviour in Canada. Yet, little is known about the changes this religious vote has undergone over the past few decades. Using Canadian Election Studies data, we analyze the evolving impact of religious affiliation and level of religiosity on vote choice in federal elections between 1965 and 2011. We find that, as the marginal impact of Catholic and mainline Protestant traditions has declined, the effect of level of religiosity has gained in importance. In 2011, religious citizens were overall more likely to vote Conservative and secular individuals were more likely to vote NDP both in Quebec and in the rest of Canada. Some distinct voting patterns also remain for non-mainline Protestant groups in the ROC and religious nones in Quebec.

In this article I engage with recent scholarly commentary concerning the realm of human sexuality in the work of Thomas Hobbes. This has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been a neglected area of enquiry given the paucity of Hobbes's analysis of this aspect of the human passions. I argue that this new field of enquiry is to be welcomed as it allows us to explore and understand Hobbes as a fully erotic philosopher. Moreover, his erotic philosophy is best understood through the prism of his thorough-going materialism.

Drawing on the work of Richard Simeon and using the cases of equalization in Canada and Belgium's social security system, this article shows how nationalist ideas combined with institutional management structures, government formation rules and the configuration of party systems to condition the territorial dynamics around these two programmes. In Canada, resentment against equalization in many provinces, often because it is perceived as accommodating Québécois nationalism, has translated only into moderate pressures on the programme because federal parties have largely stayed away from this divisive issue and federal executive discretion over the programme has meant that provinces cannot force change. In Belgium, pressures on social security have been more intense because the absence of pan-Belgian parties has given greater resonance to Flemish nationalist ideas within the political system.