Canadian Politics Research Articles

The Serfdom of Women Portrayed by Margaret Atwoodin The Handmaid’s Tale

The aim of this paper The Handmaid’s Tale is to scrutinize issues. As there is plenty of traditional feminist critique of male power structures in Atwood’s works, The Handmaid’s Tale argues the power structure of Gilead also analyses the feminine roles that support and allow the suppression of other women. Placing the novel in the contexts of Atwood’s career, feminism, and dystopian literature, provides a fuller understanding of how the novel functions as an expression of the divergence of women. Margaret Atwood focuses on the problems such as gender equality and the dangers of a hierarchical- structured system for women’s oppression. Her focal point is to mention the subservience of women in a male-dominated society and women’s enslavement in a consumer society in which women’s body is handled as object, an instrument and also as adorable item. Margaret Atwood is one of the foremost vivid writers in current Canadian literature. She has vigorously contributed to Canadian politics and its cause. Her works are mostly associated with social and political issues. She contemplates the relation between men and ladies and human basic rights. the topic of gender is the author’s major concern. She depicts the ladies in her novels that always search for their identity which is lost within the male-controlled societies. Oppression of ladies is another theme for her novels and it may be seen evidently in her writings. She encounters the lower position of girls in society. Atwood’s images of gender, the mistreatment and coercion of ladies, predominantly women’s bodies. She signifies the misery of her female characters limited in their feminine roles in her novels. Moreover, femininity is the main fear for examining The Handmaid’s Tale. In Gilead society, women are depressed about their freedom and ordered to serve the state in numerous ways and functions.

An Examination of H.D. Forbes’ Canadian Political Philosophy

An Examination of H.D. Forbes’ Canadian Political Philosophy

The Reproduction of “Petro-Nationalism” in Ethnic Media: A Case Study of WeChat Public Accounts’ Coverage of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Controversy

Over the past 2 decades, Alberta’s bitumen industry has emerged as a major point of contention in Canadian politics, with the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX) project being a recent controversy that has attracted both domestic and international media attention. This brief research report focuses on news coverage of TMX in a rarely studied form of ethnic media: WeChat newsfeeds (known as “public accounts”) targeting Chinese diasporas across Canadian metropolises. A thematic analysis of TMX-related WeChat articles published between January 2016 and May 2021 reveals an overall negative attitude toward the project’s opponents. This stance is mainly due to WeChat public accounts’ heavy reliance on the Canadian mainstream media’s framing of TMX. As a result, the Canadian mainstream media’s downplay of the climate emergency and decarbonization sets the news agendas of the surveyed WeChat public accounts. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to develop non-English alternative media to engage ethnic minority groups in broader public conversations on climate change mitigation.

Mark P. Thomas, Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and Olena Lyubchenko, eds., Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium, (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019)

Mark P. Thomas, Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and Olena Lyubchenko, eds., Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium, (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019)

Mark P. Thomas, Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and Olena Lyubchenko, eds., Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium, (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019)

Mark P. Thomas, Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and Olena Lyubchenko, eds., Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium, (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019)

Canadian Political Storytelling: Back to a Future?

This paper examines English language or bilingual screen narratives (film and television series) dealing with the public sphere produced in Canada since 1960. Forty-nine texts were analysed including docudramas such as biopics about political leaders, documentaries, films on women in politics, and films on First Nations politics. Applying Borins and Herst’s four-quadrant model of political fables, most instantiate the heroic fable except films on women and First Nations. Conditions of production, including the influence of US films and television series, as well as the limitations of public-sector funding through the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and National Film Board (NFB) are also discussed. This paper illustrates how the evolving transnational entertainment economy constrains cultural producers working within traditional creative and industrial modes of production while simultaneously offering opportunities to invent (or reinvent) alternatives. The paper concludes that enhanced arm’s-length funding for documentaries represents the best way to ensure a vibrant future for this genre of narrative in Canada.

Year of refusal: crisis and ideology in the Communist Party of Canada, 1956-7

Just as they did for other communist parties around the world, events in 1956 brought a crisis to the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). Khrushchev's Secret Speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary produced a reckoning with what exactly it meant to be a communist and a marxist-leninist. In Canada, this reckoning would lead to a mass exit of party members and to a precipitous decline in the general fortunes of the party after 1956. In existing histories, this crisis has been presented as though it played out in quite strictly bipolar fashion as a conflict between a growing minority of independent marxists on the one hand and, on the other, a larger group of party leaders and their supporters who remained committed to a Soviet-aligned marxist-leninist politics in Canada. In fact, the ideology of the crisis was more complex. Ideological reactions to 1956 could range, at least, across stalinist, liberal, marxist-leninist, or independent-marxist iterations. Taking 1956 to constitute a year of refusal in the CPC, this essay follows the trajectories of these ideologically distinct 'modes of refusal' and suggests an alternative history.

Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs

In this scrupulously researched study of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), Sarah A. Nickel challenges dominant historical narratives of Indigenous politics in British Columbia. Most significantly, she brings a gendered analysis to the narrative that is long overdue. The depth of her method drives the book, pairing dense archival research with detailed community narratives based on seven years of oral history work. Bolstered by Indigenous critical theory, she weaves two intricately related threads throughout the book: the challenge of pan-Indigenous unity, and the location of Indigenous women within it.Assembling Unity traces UBCIC’s constant negotiation between pan-Indigenous unity and the local autonomy of its constituent communities. Nickel navigates this artfully, negotiating this tension with impressive frankness and nuance. Crucially, she does not try to resolve it. The book shows that unity does not necessarily mean unanimity and builds a methodical argument against racist expectations of Indigenous uniformity that are all too common to Canadian politics (169). It further situates the problem of unity within the political moment of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the rise of Red Power, and the concurrent radicalization and bureaucratization of Indigenous politics through this period. In this context, UBCIC is constantly revising its position vis-à-vis the settler state.Here a second tension arises, between recognition and refusal. At different times UBCIC strategically engages with state process, refuses it outright, or does both at once. This comes to a head in the final chapter on the Constitution Express—a movement that constructed Indigenous sovereignty both in relation to Canadian federalism and outside it. While I sometimes wished for more on this point, and the nuances between refusal and resistance, I really appreciated Nickel’s ability to embrace the complexity of these decisions for UBCIC. By demonstrating that refusals “are not simply all or nothing” but “exist on a spectrum and can overlap and compete” (93), the book complicates the engagement/disengagement dichotomy that dominates social movement scholarship. It also shows these phenomena are not exclusive to Indigenous peoples’ relations with the state by featuring dynamics of recognition and refusal within and against UBCIC itself.Where this is most present is in the organization’s fraught relationship with Indigenous women. Women’s movements unfold not as a subplot to UBCIC’s political dynamics but as central to them. The book captures the way the masculinist sociopolitical structures of the settler state reproduce themselves in Indigenous politics, from watershed moments of women’s exclusion to quotidian moments of misogyny. Yet it does so in a way that is both critical and generative. Women both build and challenge unity within UBCIC, and their disruptions prove to be as important to its development as their support. Women’s perspectives weave throughout the book, particularly through the stories of the BC Indian Homemakers Association and BC Native Women’s Society. It is an analysis of Indigenous feminism that moves beyond its contrast to white feminism, contextualized instead within the movement for sovereignty and nationhood.Indeed, Nickel is exceedingly careful to avoid “settler-centric” narratives of Indigenous political action (19). Countering the popular perception that the modern Indigenous movement was born in reaction to the federal government’s 1969 White Paper, she instead traces its rise through a century of pan-Indigenous organizing in British Columbia. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I especially appreciated this insight as a caution against the lure of “myopic moments” which “collapse Indigenous politics” (8) with colonial plot points.Assembling Unity captures a great deal of complexity without undermining the achievements of UBCIC. Rather, it redefines the terrain of success as one that is fraught, nuanced, negotiated, and nonlinear. Historians and nonhistorians alike will appreciate its breadth of analysis and significant contributions to settler colonial studies, Indigenous feminist thought, political anthropology, and geography.

The Rise of Native Self-determination and the Crisis of the Canadian Political Regime

This first commentary is part of a larger study which the author is doing at Abo Akademi, on minority communities and the right to development, using case examples from various societies. It presents an intriguing view from an outside commentator on some aspects of Native politics in Canada. In this paper, the author attempts to discuss how a marginalized people are exploiting a historical moment of national crisis to overcome repressed status. In Canada this end is being achieved by the emerging movement for Native rights.

Supplemental Material for Is the Messenger the Message? Canadian Political Affiliation and Other Predictors of Mask Wearing Frequency & Attitudes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Supplemental Material for Is the Messenger the Message? Canadian Political Affiliation and Other Predictors of Mask Wearing Frequency & Attitudes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Puzzling Persistence of Racial Inequality in Canada

AbstractThis article examines the failure of Canadian public policy in addressing racial economic inequality directly. Our analysis contends that Canada's key policy regimes were established in the postwar era, when approximately 96 per cent of Canadians were of European descent. As a result, the frameworks, problem definitions and policy tools inherited from that era were never intended to mitigate racial economic inequality. Moreover, this policy inheritance was deeply shaped by liberal universalism, which rejected racial distinctions in law and policy. These norms were carried forward into the more racially diverse Canada of today, where they have steered attention away from the use of racial categories in policy design. As a result, racial inequality was not a central priority during major policy reforms to core policy regimes in recent decades. In theoretical terms, our analysis contributes to Canadian Political Development through a sustained consideration of the intersecting roles of ideational frameworks, path dependency and policy inertia.

Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada

AbstractTo enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideological representation in Canadian municipal politics. Combining our municipal ideology estimates with elite survey data from more than 900 Canadian municipal politicians, we find evidence of a strong relationship between mass and elite ideology. This relationship is consistent across differing municipal population sizes and institutional structures. We conclude with additional detail on our publicly available individual and aggregate measures and describe their potential uses for future research on ideology and representation in Canadian politics at all levels.

Queering Representation: lgbtq People and Electoral Politics in Canada. Manon Tremblay

<i>Queering Representation: lgbtq People and Electoral Politics in Canada</i>. Manon Tremblay

Representation and Ministerial Influence on Cabinet Committees in Canada

AbstractCabinet committees are important sites of executive politics in Canada. This article examines the extent to which two representational attributes—gender and region—determine influence, as a function of cabinet committee structure. Employing a dataset of ministers under the three most recent prime ministers, I find that female ministers are less likely than male ministers to be influential in terms of connections to other ministers, to belong to the core of most influential ministers and to be represented on the most powerful committees or chairing committees. However, there is evidence of improvement over time. While regional representation is an imperative in cabinet making for Canadian prime ministers, its role in determining ministerial influence within committees is not evident: ministers from less-represented regions are no more likely to be influential than other ministers. This analysis highlights a neglected but central arena for social representation in Canadian government.

Racialized Women in Canada: Is COVID-19 the Turning Point to More Equality?

The purpose of this paper is to show that currently, the most important issue in gender and politics in Canada is the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on racialized women. I use critical-race feminist theory and Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw’s concept of ‘intersectionality’ to evaluate Canadian case studies that demonstrate my argument. Racialized women face unique challenges which neither racism nor sexism can sufficiently address, and I argue that these challenges have been worsened due to the pandemic. This topic is important because, in the midst of the pandemic, it can be easy to disregard or forget the injustices experienced by racialized women. However, by revealing the direct impacts of the pandemic on such women, this paper brings attention to these injustices and advocates for more equality in Canadian society.

Guns in the North: Assessing the Impact of Social Identity on Firearms Advocacy in Canada

Identity is an important aspect of group politics in Canada. This article examines the impact of gun owner’s social identity on the political participation of gun owners and, thus, the success of the Canadian gun rights movement. It investigates whether Canadian gun owners are politically active, and if so, why? The article is based on an online survey of 16,880 Canadian gun owners. Cross‐tabulation, probit regression, and negative binomial regression were used to assess the impact of gun owner’s social identity on political participation. Results indicate that gun owners are avid political participants and that this can be explained by the existence of a strong gun owner’s social identity within a subset of Canadians. This has implications for our understanding of how social identities tied to serious leisure communities can impact politics.Related ArticlesCagle, M. Christine, and J. Michael Martinez. 2004. “Have Gun, Will Travel: The Dispute between the CDC and the NRA on Firearm Violence as a Public Health Problem.” Politics &amp; Policy 32 (2): 278‐310. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2004.tb00185.xJoslyn, Mark R., and Donald P. Haider‐Markel. 2018. “Motivated Innumeracy: Estimating the Size of the Gun Owner Population and its Consequences for Opposition to Gun Restrictions.” Politics &amp; Policy 46 (6): 827‐850. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12276Smith‐Walter, Aaron, Holly L. Peterson, Michael D. Jones, and Ashley Nicole Reynolds Marshall. 2016. “ Gun Stories: How Evidence Shapes Firearm Policy in the United States.” Politics &amp; Policy 44 (6): 1053‐1088. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12187

Vocal, visible and vulnerable: female politicians at the intersection of Islamophobia, sexism and liberal multiculturalism

ABSTRACT To understand the burdens of “representing diversity” in multicultural democracies, this paper empirically explores Twitter posts about two female Muslim Canadian politicians, Iqra Khalid and Maryam Monsef. Using a mixed method approach, the study reveals that the majority of the most retweeted posts referring to the two members of Parliament were negative in tone. Khalid received more abusive tweets than Monsef, even though she is less prominent, due to the former’s introduction of an anti-Islamophobia bill. When we examined all the tweets using digital methods, however, we found that the tweets are mostly neutral and that only a small fraction counted as abusive language. This analysis thus reveals that toxicity in the online chatter is manifested mainly in the most retweeted posts, main topics, and recurrent hashtags which audiences often engage with, and that the “long tail,” which comprises the majority of tweets, are mainly neutral. This highlights the disproportionate effects of social media amplification of certain attacks and raises questions regarding the status of individual voices. It also supports findings of intersectional discrimination: so-called visible minority women are attacked, regardless of their political prominence, especially if they seek to redress discrimination.

The Perfect Victim: ‘Young girls’, domestic trafficking, and anti-prostitution politics in Canada

This article explores debates among politicians in Ontario, Canada, regarding anti-trafficking legislation introduced in 2016 and 2017. We find that contemporary discussions in the political sphere have shifted away from concerns about the trafficking of migrant exotic dancers and toward the sexual exploitation of girls and young women, represented as idealised, inculpable victims. We suggest that this conflates the diverse experiences of girls and adult women, configures them all as child-like, and renders both groups as being in need of state protection. The new ‘perfect victim’ serves to legitimise policy approaches that criminalise sexual services, despite those laws being deemed harmful to sex workers in courts and other venues.

Climate and Energy Politics in Canada and Germany: Dealing with Fossil Fuel Legacies

Canada and Germany are both pursuing major energy transitions and far-reaching climate programs but differ in terms of policies towards some energy sources and their preferred policy instruments. Both countries have committed to large scale emission reductions despite the challenge of regional divestment from fossil fuels: hard coal in North Rhine Westphalia and the Saarland; lignite in the Rhineland, on the German-Polish border in the Lusatsia (Lausitz) region, and in central Germany; coal in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia; and oil in Western Canada. We contrast the current Pan Canadian framework (PCF) on Clean Growth and Climate Change to the German Climate Law and the European Green Deal setting targets to become climate neutral by 2050. Germany has plans for a dual phase out of nuclear energy by 2022 and coal by 2038. In contrast, Canada differs by province in terms of policies on fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Both are leaders in renewable energies, but differ in the type of renewable energy which dominates. We further examine the international action components of the PCF and its implications for collaboration with Germany and the EU. We discuss potential partnerships and strategic alliances between Canada and Germany in the context of their mutual interest to enable an energy transition and to lead to the implementation of the Paris agreement for climate change action. We identify political challenges within each federation, and especially the approach to impacted coal regions in Germany and Poland as well as the Canadian oil sands. Barriers to progress for meeting identified targets and timelines are considered. We conclude with insights on the possibility and likelihood of linking policies and regulatory measures across the Atlantic, and the political threats of advancing towards decarbonization and an energy transition away from fossil fuels in each jurisdiction.

Introduction: Carbon Politics in Canada and Europe

Introduction: Carbon Politics in Canada and Europe