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A conference paper about the 2003 general elections in Ontario is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the role of political parties in Canada in supplying candidates with resources and intra-party transfers between Ontario provincial parliamentary candidates.

Like many advanced industrialized democracies, immigration has transformed the ethno-racial composition of Canada. The dominant account of ethno-cultural diversity's impact on social cohesion and democratic life is negative. Canada's positive experience with diversity and its approach to ethno-cultural accommodation has become a model of international success. The ways in which Canada's diversity is manifest has important spatial dimensions that have been under-acknowledged by Canadian political scientists. Canada is both a highly ethno-culturally heterogeneous and a highly urban nation. The ethnocultural transformation of Toronto, Canada's largest city and most important immigrant destination, underscores the urban reality of Canada's evolving ethno-cultural mosaic. The paper examines the role of urban governance arrangements and municipal policies in Canada's national policy infrastructure to support ethno-cultural pluralism. It compares the core City of Toronto with three outer suburban municipalities within the Greater Toronto Area - the City of Mississauga, City of Brampton and Town of Markham. These municipal communities share a common national, provincial and city-region context, all have exceptionally high levels of immigration, yet they vary in the extent to which they have developed multiculturalism initiatives to accommodate and manage ethno-cultural diversity. The paper uses the urban regime concept to conceptualize and synthesize the different ways Canada's national multiculturalism policy infrastructure, the city's political economy and its changing ethno-cultural demographics influence the urban governance of immigration and multiculturalism. The paper concludes with reflections on the possibilities and limitations of city politics and governance's contribution to an equitable and effective multicultural citizenship model in Canada. Toronto's dramatic ethno-cultural transformation, the role of urban political processes in managing it, and the variation within the city-region ought to be seen as a call to Canadian political scientists and policy-makers to take the urban dimensions of the country's ethno-cultural pluralism seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the political inclusion of migrants in multi-ethnic cities is presented which is prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association from September 3-6, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario. The paper discusses topics including ethno-cultural inclusion policies in Toronto, Ontario; London, England; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

How did Conservative government decisions to eliminate specific local units in London and Toronto affect women’s movement interests in these cities? The paper offers a preliminary look at the consequences of changes in urban structures in London since 1986 and Toronto since 1998, focusing at a conceptual level on institutional and movement-related factors drawn from the literature on political opportunity structures. It concludes that organized feminism in London seems reasonably buoyant despite the 14-year shutdown of regional government through 2000, while mobilization in Toronto appears to be suffering at least short-term effects following the closure and forced amalgamation of older downtown with inner suburban boroughs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the paper "Media (Non)Conformity to Executive Framing of the War on Terror," will be presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Toronto, Ontario from September 1-6, 2009. Presidents have strong incentives to control how the public perceives foreign policy, they have equally strong incentives to control how these policies are defined, or framed, by the media.

The article reports that the paper "Policy Certainty and the CNN Effect," will be presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 3-6, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario. The CNN effect is relevant only in a limited number of cases and is a far weaker phenomenon than its enthusiasts suggest. When there is no policy or an inconsistent, undecided or wavering policy between these sub-systems on an issue, then it is assumed that policy uncertainty exists.

The article focuses on the paper "Truth in Fiction: The Consequences of Fictional Framing for Political Opinions," which will be presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Toronto, Ontario. The process by which fictional media influence attitudes and the factors that may increase or decrease the effects of fictional framing need to be considered.

The article reports that the paper "Do Preconceptions Drive Voter Perception of Campaign Negativity?," was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Toronto, Canada from September 3-6, 2009. The information about that candidate will be treated very differently by this voter than the information about the opponent.

The article reports that the paper "When Can Governments Control the News?: Insights From Social Network Analysis," will be presented at the Annual Convention of the American Political Science Association, 3-6 September 2009, Toronto, Ontario. For all the growth in the volume of political communications research and its increasing international reach the field faces a number of challenges if it is to continue to develop.

This paper looks at the experience of three recent Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform to explore the values held by ordinary citizens with respect to electoral systems and the impact of those views on their choice of appropriate systems. The three Assemblies in question (British Columbia, the Netherlands and Ontario) all operated in the same way but ended up recommending different systems. Data taken from successive surveys of Assembly members allow us to trace the patterns of deliberation and decision-making in each and reveals the relative importance of key determining criteria including proportionality, voter choice and local representation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the dual earner (or lone parent earner) family is producing need for care, notably for non-parental childcare arrangements. Needs do not, however, speak for themselves and they way they get articulated affects the range of conceivable solutions. Needs politics are, moreover, played out at different political scales. While much of the comparative literature focuses on the national scale, this paper takes a multi-scalar perspective. More specifically, it looks at the conditions under which a care model different from that established at the national level began to take shape in Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s. It then goes on to show how the failure to secure changes at other scales has left that model in jeopardy. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of spending money in elections and the limited resources available to political parties and candidates makes it reasonable to expect that parties strategically allocate resources to candidates (e.g., Schecter and Hedge 2001; Stonecash 1988; Pattie and Johnston 2009; Carty and Eagles 2005; Cross, 2004). While we find this literature to be quite informative, it is unclear how much local context affects the various strategies. Comparing party activity across levels of elections is challenging. One must worry about comparability of districts and other potential confounding factors. We expect that a significant advancement would be to employ a research design that "controls" the various constituency conditions across different types of elections in order to see whether similar political parties adopt the same strategy when facing the similar conditions. Using a real world situation from the province of Ontario, Canada, we evaluate party allocations when several provincial ridings (legislative districts) have the same boundaries as federal electoral districts. This boundary structure creates a rare opportunity for comparing party behavior in elections across levels of government while keeping most contextual factors the same (e.g., population). Our analysis focuses on party behavior during the 2003 provincial election and the 2004 federal election. Through this analysis, we determine that provincial and federal parties rarely adopt similar allocation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association to be held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada from September 3-6, 2009.

The article focuses on post-secularism citizenship of feminists in Ontario. It discusses stand of philosopher Jürgen Habermas on the relationship between religion and secular citizens and his post-secular state theory. It mentions a study conducted by Natasha Bakht, law professor at the University of Ottawa, on how Arbitration Act of Ontario affects women.

There is little room for debate and the inclusion of other's voices in policy formulation in the age of contagion. I will use SARS crisis (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) that infected Toronto for several months in the Spring of 2003 to explore its corrosive effects on deliberation and democracy. The tools of deliberative democracy, psychoanalysis, political economy will be employed in the course of this paper.Deliberative democrats believe that interested parties should come to the table to debate. In the process of bracketing their present interests and being open to the position of others, it is hoped that policy goals that are acceptable to all will emerge. Public policy was determined by hospital administrators, government officials and select Sr. Drs. - unions, nurses, hospital workers and public voices were excluded. The coercive practices that emerged (specifically that dictated that hospital employees' work in SARS clinics) has produced much litigation. Although the crisis was presented as a natural disaster - drastic cuts in public health meant and insufficient planning were the context in which this disaster occurred. Perhaps an even greater threat to deliberation was the racialized fear that engulfed public spaces in Toronto. The bustling and vibrant multicultural city where cultural differences and diversity are enjoyed became a site of contamination and danger. People avoided public transit, large corporations shut down downtown offices and Chinese communities became a 'no- go- areas.' Since the first carriers of the virus were Chinese, and the Chinese government had tried to cover up the epidemic, this triggered what amounted to mass fear of the Asian immigrant population. Through a discursive analysis of public rhetoric and popular discourse I will explore the representations of the Asian as "Other" as a threat to our civilized society. This had a palpable effect on the public space. A healthy multicultural society was in crisis. Rational communication, friendly exchange and a toleration of cultural differences between Asian and non- Asians were severely restricted. Although the fear of the Asian population seems to have waned in the aftermath of the crisis, and the crisis is long over, the financial effects -lost tourist dollars- seem to point to lingering anxiety. Given the prospect of future pandemics, the fear factor and its potential corrosive effects on democracy are worth exploring. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which aims to determine how public higher education institutions withstand financial downturns. The study compares the funding transitions of the publically funded system in Ontario with the University of California's system from November 2008 to 2009. The study found that comparative resiliency of Ontario is attributable to sustained commitment to investment programs while California's Master Plan has not equipped the state to navigate the financial challenges.