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Everyone familiar with the study of Canadian politics knows the joke about how a French national, an Englishman and a Canadian were asked to write an essay about an elephant: the French national wrote about the culinary uses of the elephant, the Englishman wrote about the elephant and imperialism, and the Canadian wrote a paper entitled. "Elephant: Federal or Provincial Responsibility?" Though simple, the joke conveys the essence of Canadian politics: always defined by jurisdictional disputes. The joke misses the boat, however, by ignoring the fact that indigenous people are now (as they always have been) engaging in jurisdictional debates in an attempt to challenge the Canadian constitutional order and to reaffirm their own constitutional order and autonomy. This paper examines one such dispute—the Mi'kmaw claim of rights and responsibilities for the salmon fishery—and presents it as a case of contested sovereignties and a resulting jurisdictional dispute. In so doing, I pose the question: Is salmon a federal, provincial or Mi'kmaq responsibility? In seeking an answer, this paper proceeds in an exploratory manner to map both constitutional orders, and the interrelation between these orders that results in the debate over responsibility for the salmon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands on the work of Higgins, whose 1979 review remains the only synthetic overview of the field, by presenting an updated analysis of the study of municipal, local and urban issues in Canadian political science. We conclude that despite several discursive shifts—from the descriptive works of the 1950s and 1960s, through to the blossoming of interdisciplinary research in the 1980s and 1990s—Higgins' principal conclusion, that the various streams of urban politics continue to be studied in relative isolation from each other, still rings true. Despite the recent broadening of the literature, productive scholarly debates within and across research clusters are rare, and where debates do emerge, they are more often driven by current events and normative claims than by theoretical innovations. To remedy these deficiencies, we propose several bases for a new urban research agenda that is more methodologically and theoretically diverse and connected to work in other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of national identity in sustaining public support for the welfare state. Liberal nationalist theorists argue that social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities, which, they contend, can both mitigate opposition to redistribution among high-income earners and reduce any corroding effects of ethnic diversity resulting from immigration. We test these propositions with Canadian data from the Equality, Security and Community survey. We conclude that national identity does increase support for the welfare state among the affluent majority of Canadians and that it helps to protect the welfare state from toxic effects of cultural suspicion. However, we also find that identity plays a narrower role than existing theories of liberal nationalism suggest and that the mechanisms through which it works are different. This leads us to suggest an alternative theory of the relationship between national identity and the welfare state, one that suggests that the relationship is highly contingent, reflecting distinctive features of the history and national narratives of each country. National identity may not have any general tendency to strengthen support for redistribution, but it may do so for those aspects of the welfare state seen as having played a particularly important role in building the nation or in enabling it to overcome particular challenges or crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the 1990s, the academic literature on multiculturalism was heavily normative, dominated by political philosophers who developed idealized theories of a distinctly liberal-democratic form of multicultural citizenship. This "liberal multiculturalism hypothesis"--the notion that multiculturalism policies can be adopted without jeopardizing core liberal-democratic values--has been quite influential, shaping debates not just within the field of philosophy, but more widely in academia and indeed in public life. Many social scientists, however, question whether multiculturalism in the real world has been so benign. This paper considers the available evidence, empirically testing the liberal multiculturalism hypothesis, both in Canada and cross-nationally. What does this evidence tell us about the prospects for liberal-democratic multiculturalism and about the impact of multicultural policies on liberal-democratic values? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the length of political tenure in Canadian federally elected parliamentary governments since 1867. Using annual data on tenure length, we categorize the distribution of governing tenures in terms of a hazard function: the probability that an election will arise in each year, given that an election has not yet been called. Structuring the election call as an optimal stopping rule, we test whether that distribution responds predictably to characteristics of the political and/or economic environment. The results of using the continuous Cox and Gompertz models together with the discrete semi-parametric proportional hazard model suggest that governing parties in Canada do engage in election timing and that the only economic policy measure that is used consistently in conjunction with election timing is fiscal expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments and Indigenous groups bargain under the shadow of the law, and this paper pushes the judicial politics research agenda by examining empirically whether flickers in law's shadow systematically affect the implementation of the Canadian government's negotiation choice in the Indigenous land rights context. Through interviews and a time series analysis of Canada's specific claims policy, I find that judicial uncertainty increases the federal government's propensity to accept specific claims for negotiation. However, there is evidence that Indigenous protest action during the Oka crisis and Elijah Harper's role in scuttling the Meech Lake constitutional accord, more than other factors, greatly impacted the federal budget allocated towards negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, non-territorial forms of national self-government have attracted increasing interest in political science, especially in the guise of national cultural autonomy. National cultural autonomy is a model of self-government that was pioneered by Austrian theorists and politicians Karl Renner and Otto Bauer in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire, yet was never implemented in Austria-Hungary. This paper will examine some of the problems and possibilities that may attend a transfer of national cultural autonomy as a model of self-government into Canadian political discourse, especially as regards Quebec nationalism, Francophone communities outside Quebec, Anglophone Quebecers, self-government for Aboriginal peoples, and political values in English-speaking Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While an important component of incumbent support, the effect of economic conditions on vote choice (economic voting) can be undermined by the presence of multilevel institutions; voters are faced with the prospect of evaluating economic conditions and governments at different levels simultaneously. This paper tests the applicability of a model which seeks to account for how and how well voters cope with the complexity of multilevel governance. The accountability-centred model suggests that federal and provincial governments should only be evaluated for those actions and outcomes that they can reasonably be seen to have influence over. Additionally, it is asked whether high information respondents are better able to navigate some of the complexities of Canada's multilevel system. Analyses are conducted using data from the 1993 and 1997 Canadian Election Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the 2004 Canadian Election Study to analyze the factors that motivated a vote for each party and to identify the ones that mattered most to the outcome of the 2004 federal election outside Quebec. Particular attention is given to the impact of the sponsorship scandal, the sources of support for the new Conservative party and the factors that explain the NDP's improved performance. The findings are used to address some basic questions about the 2004 election and its larger implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]