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Constitutional entanglements in Canada–Quebec relations are well known. From one referendum on Quebec’s sovereignty to the other, from one pan–Canadian constitutional meeting to the other, the ‘Quebec problem’ seems irresolvable. One dimension is constantly overlooked in this debate: territorial identity. Territorially–based cultural claims emerge in the core of urban Quebec under the leadership of partitionist and localist movements. Originally based in Montreal, the partitionist movement is driven by Anglo–Que´be´cois claims over local municipalities and certain parcels of the territory in the event of an independent Quebec. This paper seeks to understand a dual reterritorialisation process: 1) state territorial rescaling policies such as decentralisation and metropolitan reform, and 2) the use of territorial claims underpinning social mobilisation strategies. When state territorial restructuring policies do not correspond with the local territorial political culture, as I argue in the case of a ‘frontier–city’ like Montreal, it spurs the activation of strategic territorialisation. This paper begins with an analysis of Montreal’s territorial political culture, rooted in the coexistence of opposite territorial myths and a common feeling of distinctiveness. Then follows a discussion of strategic territorialisation and the poly–scalar nature of such mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for discussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental. Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of such an argument for theories of the social production of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]