Canadian Politics Research Articles

Canadian Political History and Ideas: Intersections and Influences

AbstractOver the last two decades, traditionally minded historians have argued that the rise of social and cultural history has fragmented Canadian history and caused the decline of Canadian political history. Despite these claims, current Canadian political history is proving to be a dynamic field that embraces the methodological and theoretical innovations of social and cultural history by incorporating gender, class, race and ethnicity as categories of analysis to create a “new political history.” However, the “new political history” in Canada has neglected to integrate the history of ideas. Studying the history of ideas in Canadian political history could expand the discipline beyond the current trends that include highly individualised political biography and studies emphasising politics, the state and ideology within Ian McKay's potentially reductive liberal order framework. Supplementing the “new political history” with the history of ideas, influenced by the work of Michael Freeden, would allow innovative analyses of institutional and popular politics to accompany the voices of elite political figures.

James Farney, Social conservatives and party politics in Canada and the United States, reviewed by Robert G Boatright

James Farney, Social conservatives and party politics in Canada and the United States, reviewed by Robert G Boatright

“Progressive” Canadian Politics and the Paroxysm of Identity

A review of McKay, Ian. 2008. Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920. Toronto: Between the Lines. Reid, Jennifer. 2012. Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Faction and Its Alternative

An unexamined symbol in Upper Canadian press and politics is the faction, despite factions being a target of editors and writers in the first competitive newspaper environments after 1827. This article shows how editors and writers constructed images of this political enemy. The author argues that in the pages of the press, the symbol of faction seemed a foil for the kind of political work writers and editors of all political stripes also symbolized regularly during elections from 1828 to 1841: a rational elective politics organized around new visible political groupings.

Political Posters for the Twenty-First Century: A Spotlight on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

Political Posters for the Twenty-First Century: A Spotlight on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

From “Revolution” To Farce? Hard-Right Populism in the Making of Toronto

This paper analyses the rise of authoritarian populism in the City of Toronto. We interpret the first term of Rob Ford’s mayoralty (2010–2014) as a racialized attempt to re-organize bourgeois rule within the contradictions of Canadian and Toronto politics. The Ford mayoralty has not congealed in a populist regime. As an unfinished project, Ford-ism does, however, represent a radicalizing moment in the uneven development of the new Right “revolution” that has remade Canada since the 1980s. In Toronto, the unevenness of authoritarian populism is expressed in Ford’s attempt to reinvent and cement a pre-existing political divide between “downtown” and the “suburbs.”

Across the aisle: opposition in Canadian politics

PREFACE PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Chapter One: Opposition: 'Somebody Has To Do It' PART TWO: PARLIAMENTARY OPPOSITION Chapter Two: From Coalition to Coalition, 1867-1920 Chapter Three: The Liberal Ascendancy, 1921-1956 Chapter Four: Minorities and Majorities, 1957-1992 Chapter Five: The Mill of Opposition, 1993-2011 PART THREE: CHALLENGES FOR PARLIAMENTARY OPPOSITION Chapter Six: Opposition, More or Less Chapter Seven: Opposition in the Federation Chapter Eight: Whither Parliamentary Opposition? PART FOUR: CONCLUSION Chapter Nine: The Problem of Parliamentary Opposition Today NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY

Parties, elections, and the future of Canadian politics

Introduction: Change and Continuity in Canadian Parties and Elections / Amanda Bittner and Royce Koop 1 Has Brokerage Politics Ended? Canadian Parties in the New Century / R. Kenneth Carty 2 Candidate Recruitment in Canada: The Role of Political Parties / William Cross and Lisa Young 3 The Effects of Constantly Campaigning upon the Canadian Parliament / Kelly Blidook and Matthew Byrne 4 Constituency and Personal Determinants of MPs' Positions on Social Conservative Issues in the 37th and 38th Canadian Parliaments / Munroe Eagles 5 City Ministers: The Local Politics of Cabinet Selection / Anthony M. Sayers 6 Women Candidates, Voters, and Legislators: A Gender Perspective on Recent Party and Electoral Politics / Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant 7 Revisiting the Ethnic Vote: Liberal Allegiance and Vote Choice among Racialized Minorities / Allison Harell 8 The Canadian Party System: Trends in Election Campaign Reporting, 1980-2008 / Blake Andrew, Patrick Fournier, and Stuart Soroka 9 Parties, Politics, and Redistribution: The Constitutional and Practical Challenges of Politicized Apportionment / Russell Alan Williams 10 Too Little, Too Soon: State Funding and Electoral District Associations in the Green Party of Canada / Harold Jansen and L.A. (Lisa) Lambert 11 When Partisans Are Attacked: Motivated Reasoning and the New Party System / J. Scott Matthews 12 Coping with Political Flux: The Impact of Information on Voters' Perceptions of the Political Landscape, 1988-2011 / Amanda Bittner 13 Situating the Canadian Case / Richard Johnston 14 Parties and Elections after 2011: The Fifth Canadian Party System? / Royce Koop and Amanda Bittner

The conundrum of Canadian–American relations

Forty years ago, political scientist Denis Stairs published The Diplomacy of Constraint, an account of Canadian involvement in the Korean War. Stairs explored the attempts of Canadian politicians, diplomats, and bureaucrats to constrain US intervention in Korea and, more generally, to influence the conduct of its foreign policy in the pressurized context of the early Cold War. Since then, historians and political scientists have continued to publish accounts of Canadian involvement in the Korean War and books on Canada–US relations in general. Why, then, should someone read The Diplomacy of Constraint today when there are more recent analyses? This review essay attempts to explain the longevity and usefulness of Stairs’ study. What have scholars learned from Stairs’ interpretation and approach? Has he influenced subsequent academic analyses? Can his study be considered a model of interdisciplinary scholarship? Finally, is new scholarship intrinsically better than old?

Canadian Political Economy and the Great Recession of 2008–9: The Politics of Coping with Economic Crisis

The emerging comparative political economy literature on the Great Recession of 2008–9 has devoted an increasing amount of time analyzing how domestic politics and the economic crisis were jointly determined. This article seeks to explore certain aspects of this dynamic relationship in the context of Canada, a country that has received little coverage in the comparative literature so far.

Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Gendered News. Media Coverage and Electoral Politics in Canada, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2013, 246 p.

Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Gendered News. Media Coverage and Electoral Politics in Canada, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2013, 246 p.. Un article de la revue Recherches féministes (Où en sommes-nous avec le féminisme en art?) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The Book of Others ( Book IV ): Canadian Multiculturalism, the State, and Its Political Legacies

THE MULTICULTURAL MOVE TO LANGUAGE It is always worth reminding Canadians that when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced Multiculturalism Policy to Parliament in October 1971, it was not an attempt to change fundamental character of modern Canadian nation-state. Rather, policy's intent was to manage non-French and non-English peoples of nation, as Eve Haque clearly explains in her discussion of Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism's (B and B Commission) production of other ethnic groups of Canadian body politic (186-237). The B and B Commission's work simultaneously cemented idea that French and English/British ethnicities constituted founding races of Canada (5-8, 14, 53-56, 87-93, 140-52). Furthermore, move to language rather than ethnicity for white French and English/British was a cover to preclude racial designation as foundational to nation, all while making it fundamentally so (6, 18, 62-71, 75-78, 160-62). Indeed, late Robert Stanfield, Progressive Conservative Opposition Leader, stood to endorse policy by saying that, wish to state immediately, Mr. Speaker, that emphasis we have given to multiculturalism in no way constitutes an attack on basic duality of our country (234). The duality that was already assumed and came to be enshrined in bilingual and multicultural articulation of nation-state as fundamental to its founding was soon after enshrined in legislation and law. MULTICULTURALISM AS RACIOLOGICAL THINKING Eve Haque's Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada returns us to origin scene of Canadian nation-state's formation and management of its non-French and non-English/British others, to provide an account of how language, race, and culture have produced modern context of contemporary multicultural Canada. Haque's engagement with Canadian multiculturalism focuses squarely on the Preliminary Report and Books I (The Official Languages) and IV (The Cultural Contributions of Other Ethnic Groups) (7); her focus cannot be downplayed, for effects of Book IV continue to mark Canadian multicultural policy, politics, and their associated imaginaries. Haque begins her study with Jacque Parizeau's 1995 outburst that money and ethnic vote were reasons that No Campaign was narrowly successful in last referendum in Quebec (3-4, 238, 264). By beginning there, Haque pinpoints how deep structures of language, culture, and continue to shape contemporary Canadian politics, public sphere, and national imaginary. This shaping of contemporary Canadian national imaginary is fashioned through a recourse that places two languages outside boundaries of and ethnicity, only to be remarked by their accent as cultures - founding cultures of Canada. Indeed, Haque's work seeks to unmake such remarking as troubling work of and raciological thinking. Furthermore, it is Haque's argument that multiculturalism as policy usefully operated and operates in a space where public policy as biologically based racial exclusions became increasingly politically and socially disreputable (6). The disturbing impact in aftermath is how language and culture has come to stand in for and raciological thinking and in new and sustained ways more than forty years later. It is precisely manner in which language and culture appear to foreclose discussions of race and racism in Canada that makes Haque's contribution and reading of historical documents so important to contemporary debates on multiculturalism and racism. Indeed, Haque's analysis in part points to reasons why term barbaric cultural practices is currently used by Government of Canada to describe exclusively non-white cultural in Canadian citizenship guide (Zine 2012, 18). …

Assembling a visa requirement against the Mexican ‘wave’: migrant illegalization, policy and affective ‘crises’ in Canada

Using the example of a 2009 visa requirement imposed onto Mexican nationals travelling to Canada, this paper frames migrant illegalization as an assemblage that brings together transnational connections, discursive and affective productions, modes of racialization and migrant negotiations. More specifically, the paper maps the events leading to the crafting of the visa requirement and the ensemble of stakeholders – Canadian immigration officials, politicians and business representatives, the Mexican and American governments and Mexican migrants –who responded to it. Through that analysis, the paper argues that migrant illegalization is not always a consistent or predictable set of practices, processes and actors, but instead an often contradictory assemblage of actions and reactions dependent on the social and political context.

Elite Attitudes on the Centralization of Power in Canadian Political Executives: A Survey of Former Canadian Provincial and Federal Cabinet Ministers, 2000–2010

Abstract.In contemporary Canada, the idea of the powerful first minister is widely acknowledged. The recent debate has focused on Donald Savoie's thesis that the concentration of power to the centre has accelerated and ministers have effectively lost their influence on decision making in cabinet. This article identifies two research gaps. First, the study combines both the experiences of federal and provincial cabinet ministers to construct an understanding of Canadian cabinet decision making at both levels of government. Second, the research investigates the new generation of cabinet ministers; no study has yet consulted ministers of the 2000–2010 decade.Résumé.Dans le Canada contemporain, l'idée du premier ministre puissant est largement reconnue. Le débat récent s'est fixé sur la thèse de Donald Savoie que la concentration de pouvoir au centre a accéléré de le et les ministres ont perdu efficacement leur influence sur la prise de décision dans le cabinet. Cet article identifie deux écarts de recherche. Premièrement, l'étude combine les deux les expériences de ministres fédéraux et provinciaux pour construire une compréhension de prise de décision ministérielle Canadienne aux deux niveaux de gouvernement. Deuxième, la recherche examine la nouvelle génération de ministres – aucune étude a consulté pourtant des ministres de la 2000–2010 décennie.

Early Socialism in Canada: International and Regional Impulses

International and regional impulses have shaped Canadian socialism from the movement’s origins in the nineteenth century to the present. Many of Canada’s early socialists arrived as ready-made socialists from abroad. From the British Isles, continental Europe, and the United States, these idealists and dissidents imported radical political ideals, which they subsequently adapted to meet the emerging conditions of an industrializing, urbanizing Canada. Directed at a broad cross-section of society, the early Canadian socialist rainbow featured many colours: Chartists, Christian socialists, cooperators, and, by the nineteenth century’s end—communists, anarchists, and other adherents of European radical movements. This process of importation, adaptation, and change took different forms in the distinctive regional contexts of Canada’s multi-ethnic federal state. Building on an interdisciplinary literature, the authors illuminate the ways in which international and regional impulses shaped Canada’s socialist tradition, helping to explain persistent tensions and forces within contemporary Canadian politics.

Self-determination and the Use of Referendums: the Case of Quebec

On two occasions (1980 and 1995), Quebeckers rejected the Quebec government's sovereignty proposal. Many lessons can be drawn from the Quebec referendum experience. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the origins and motivations of the independence movement. It focuses more specifically on the 1980 and 1995 referendums, examining in both cases the political context, the judicial–institutional framework within which these public consultations were held and the arguments raised during the referendum campaigns. Furthermore, it analyses the results as well as the political, constitutional and juridical consequences of the federalist victories. The article concludes that attempts by Quebec sovereignists to question the Canadian political system have invariably resulted in a stronger and more consolidated central state while significantly weakening the Quebec state's ability to determine its own political future.

Crime, Justice, and Inequality: Oh Canada, Where Art Thou?

Since Canada’s colonial beginnings, it has become increasingly riddled with classism, racism, sexism, and other damaging outcomes of structured social inequality. In 2006, however, many types of social injustice were turbo-charged under the federal leadership of the Harper government. For example, a recent southern Ontario study shows that less than half of working people between the ages of 25 and 65 have full-time jobs with benefits. The main objective of this paper is to critique the dominant Canadian political economic order and the pain and suffering it has caused for millions of people. Informed by left realism and other progressive ways of knowing, I also suggest some ways of turning the tide.

Has the Web Really Contributed to a Decline in the Scholarly Quality of Undergraduate Citation Behaviour?: A Canadian Case Study

This paper reports on a pilot study designed to further and expand upon the work of Philip M. Davis and Suzanne A. Cohen at Cornell University. It attempts to determine whether student's increasing reliance on the Internet is actually affecting the quality of their research by conducting bibliometric analysis of papers submitted by Canadian politics students at the University of Regina. . .

Narrative Threads: Juliet’s Costumes and Their Contexts

Examining records in the Stratford Festival Archive of costumes made for Juliets from 1960 to 2008, this paper discusses the significance of Juliet's costumes in themselves, in relation to costume changes that tell her story visually, and in broader social contexts: specifically, Canadian celebrity culture in 1992, inescapable Canadian politics in 1968, and the North American beauty myth in 1960.

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 by Benjamin Isitt (review)

Reviewed by: Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 by Benjamin Isitt Stuart Henderson Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 Benjamin Isitt Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011; 424 pages. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 9781442611054 To paraphrase an old saw, nobody disagrees with Marxists with more vehemence and conviction than other Marxists. This is one of the lessons of Canadian historian Benjamin Isitt’s Militant Minority, a dense and carefully presented study of working class politics in Canada’s westernmost province in a time of significant [End Page 169] upheaval. Tracing the political movements, battles and achievements on the British Columbian Left from the early Cold War period up to the triumphant (if unsustainable) victory of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the provincial election of 1972, Militant Minority provides a thick and reasonably comprehensive approach to its complex subject. A deeply committed reading of the shift from an “Old” to a “New” Left politics (a shift that he, following American historian Maurice Isserman, takes pains to stress should not be understood as a rupture or a break but rather a continuity), Isitt offers a brave excursion into some pretty fraught territory. Indeed, this book aims in no uncertain terms to be provocative, and to unsettle its readers. Opening with an anecdote regarding a 1954 “incident” at which a representative of the Victoria Library Board declared that “any book which incites the downtrodden working man to revolt should be removed,” Isitt explains that he “hope[s] this book is worthy of that description” (3). And yet, as politically motivated as the author claims to be, Isitt is no mere cheerleader. The great strength of this book is, rather, in its unflinching determination to present a warts-and-all portrait of a multivalent (and not always pretty) association of left actors. Throughout this study Isitt is compelled to point out the inconsistencies, absurdities and stupidities that went hand in glove with the brilliance, commitment and integrity that characterized this burgeoning political movement. As a result, feathers will almost certainly be ruffled, as long-held beliefs are here frequently disassembled, and many names are named. Isitt explains that he has a three-fold purpose with Militant Minority: “(1) to restore political economy, and an emphasis on labour institutions, as valid subjects of working class and social history; (2) to provide a regional Canadian equivalent to Isserman’s study of the transition from the Old Left to the New Left, a ‘horizontal history’ grounded in the major political traditions of the Canadian working class and broader economic and political currents; and (3) to expand our understanding of B.C.’s political culture, class-polarized party system, and volatile labour-relations climate in a way that is relevant to a wider, interdisciplinary Canadian and international literature” (17). For the most part, Isitt succeeds on all three scores. [End Page 170] Beginning with a chapter devoted to “The Political Economy of British Columbia” is a clever decision, as the reader is provided with the wide and sturdy base onto which Isitt can build his arguments. (Indeed, for those readers unfamiliar with British Columbian politics in these years, or Canadian politics more generally, this chapter will prove utterly crucial to understanding the subsequent chapters—though broad in implication, Militant Minority is a highly local history.) This is followed by chapters on the fortunes of the British Columbia Communist Party (a.k.a. the Labour-Progressive party), the rise of the provincial CoOperative Commonwealth Federation (a social democratic party which would be reborn as the NDP in the 1960s), the outlying voices of Trotskyists and Maoists as well as anarchists and anti-war activists, the wildcat activism of (and within) many unions in the late 1960s, and a concluding chapter on the 1972 election which was won by the NDP. It must be said that Militant Minority is heavy on footnotes and appendices, even for an academic text—the book (based on a Ph.D. dissertation) appears to be twice as long as it actually is—and it is marked by an abundance of local detail and attention to internecine battles between...