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This article addresses an understudied aspect of public secularity in the Canadian province of Québec, namely how its self-perception as a postcolonial nation vis-à-vis English Canada has shaped its secular state building since the 1960s. In so doing, it shows that postcolonial legacies and imaginaries, a key theme for studying secularity in non- Western cases, may also prove decisive for the North Atlantic world. The historical account proceeds in two parts. In the first period (1960-1980), the Quiet Revolution's rapid disestablishment of Catholicism was intimately linked to its anticolonial spirit, where the Church was identified as an obstacle to economic development and political self-determination. In the second period (post-1980), the consolidation of Canadian multiculturalism and the challenge of immigrant religions led to a contradictory form of "cultural defense" (Martin 1978): an increased emphasis on the Catholic heritage as well as on laïcité, both underscoring Québec's unique identity in distinction from English Canada. Demonstrating the effect of postcolonialism in a North Atlantic example, and nuancing the concept of cultural defense by identifying its religious and secular forms, the article emphasizes the prospect of a common ground in the analysis of Western and non-Western secularities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature and extent of professional regulation in three Canadian provinces between 1868 and 1961. The literature on professions has established theories and explanations based on the experiences of the most dominant professional groups, especially medicine and law. An exploratory look at the extent and nature of professional regulatory legislation reveals that a wide variety of groups have been regulated, in many different ways. Differences in the extent and nature of regulatory legislation exist over time. Although dominant theories explaining the need for regulation highlight the social importance of expertise, public protection, and social closure, none of these theories fully explains the phenomenon. Although expertise, protection and social closure are integral to professional regulation, professional regulation is so extensive and variable that any single explanation is insufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research has shown that the narratives and policies adopted by receiving county states regarding immigration and immigrant incorporation - commonly referred to as 'citizenship regime' - structure the immigrant experience in important ways. While prior studies have utilized the concept of citizenship regime to explain cross-national variation in immigrant civic participation, existing researchers have neglected to consider the role played by this factor in shaping immigrant participation outcomes within multi-national destination countries - such as Canada - in which multiple national communities compete to define the content and boundaries of citizenship. The current study uses data generated by the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey by Statistics Canada to determine whether foreign-born Canadians residing in the country's two largest multicultural provinces - Ontario and British Columbia - are more likely to volunteer in civic organization activities than their counterparts in Québec, where recent governments have adopted 'interculturalism' as a strategy for managing diversity. Results indicate that, while no province effect appears in reference to long-term immigrants, significant variation in participation outcomes by province exists among immigrants arriving in the period following the emergence of the intercultural discourse in the late 1980s. These findings lend credence to the proposition that citizenship policies implemented at sub-national levels influence the participation outcomes of individual immigrants residing in multi-nation states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]