The police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black American, prompted massive protests across the USA and around the globe in the spring and summer of 2020. Like those south of their border, Canadian protesters gathered to bring renewed attention to a longstanding problem: systemic racism and police impunity. While race and dissatisfaction with the police have received a great deal of attention in popular media, surprisingly little political science research considers the relationship between race, attitudes towards the police and protest. Do attitudes towards police differ across racial groups in Canada? Are attitudes towards the police related to protest activity? We answer these questions using data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS) Cycle 34, GSS Cycle 35 and Statistics Canada’s Impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians’ Experiences of Discrimination. We find that Black and Indigenous Canadians express the lowest confidence in police relative to other People of Colour (POC) and compared with White Canadians. We also find more confidence in the police is associated with lower probability of protest (in general).

For more than 150 years, politicians, the federal government, and missionary churches misled Canadians about deaths, abuse, and the genocidal intent in residential schools for Indigenous children. More recently, the identification of suspected unmarked graves at former school sites has triggered a renewed spread of misinformation denying the harmful legacy of residential schools. To what extent does the Canadian public endorse residential school denialism? Can education counter this misinformation? In this study, we develop and test a scale for measuring residential school denialism. We find that nearly one in five non-Indigenous Canadians agree with denialist claims, while an equal share feel they do not know enough to offer an opinion. Denialist beliefs are more common among men, conservatives, those with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and white Canadians who strongly identify with their racial in-group. In an experiment, we also show that educational information reduces non-opinions and increases the likelihood of rejecting denialist arguments.

Le fonctionnement normal des municipalités associe trois pôles : le conseil municipal, le maire ou la mairesse, et l’administration. Pourtant, dans quinze villes québécoises, on trouve également un comité exécutif, souvent présenté comme l’équivalent local d’un conseil des ministres. Rarement analysé, sa présence interroge pourtant la politisation des institutions municipales, conçue ici en référence avec la place croissante des partis politiques ainsi que la prise en main du processus décisionnel par les élus et les élues. À partir d’une analyse institutionnelle et documentaire, l’article montre que le comité exécutif participe à la politisation des institutions municipales de trois façons. Lieu de l’action municipale efficace, il est aussi celui du jeu politique et partisan sous l’autorité mayorale, ainsi que celui de la professionnalisation politique. Sa présence sur la scène médiatique défie également l’étiquette apolitique traditionnellement attribuée aux municipalités. En outre, il illustre une certaine hétérogénéité dans le fonctionnement des municipalités québécoises, qui tiennt compte des différentes réalités politico-territoriales par-delà des modèles institutionnels relativement semblables.

How do perceptions of demographic change affect the strength of white identity and corresponding attitudes toward immigrants, immigration and personal perceptions of victimhood? While white identity has received scholarly attention in the United States, we know much less about its effects in Canada. We conducted a preregistered survey experiment in which we exposed respondents to different framings on Canada’s increasing ethnic diversity. We find that perceiving demographic change increases feelings of white identity, particularly when framed as an increase in Canada’s visible minority or immigrant population. However, exposure to these trends does not in turn robustly affect respondents’ attitudes toward immigrants, immigration admission preferences or own perceptions of personal victimhood. These findings suggest that white identity is both present and can be primed in Canada; however, it has not yet been politically mobilized in the same way as in other contexts, such as the United States.

Canadian politics is shaped by three intersecting areas of constitutional law: Aboriginal rights, federalism and Charter jurisprudence. While a canon has emerged on the role of courts in Canadian democracy, it is often asserted that Charter scholarship dominates the field. Is this true—and does it matter? We address these questions through a systematic survey of 423 studies published between 2012 and 2022 in leading Canadian journals, books and edited volumes. We find that most work is produced by legal scholars, is descriptive, focuses on the Charter and examines a narrow range of cases and themes—most notably the court’s relationship with other institutions, its legitimacy and its power of judicial review. We argue that advancing our understanding of courts in Canadian democracy requires moving beyond our tendency to stick to our lanes—engaging core theories of judicial politics, employing explanatory methods and analyzing multiple areas of constitutional law.

Cet article propose une lecture critique du concept de métapolitique, souvent mobilisé pour décrire les stratégies culturelles de l’extrême droite contemporaine. À partir d’une revue de la littérature et d’une analyse des usages émiques du terme, notamment dans l’espace numérique, l’article met en évidence l’ambivalence conceptuelle de la métapolitique, oscillant entre outil analytique et rhétorique performative. L’article identifie quatre usages émiques majeurs de la métapolitique, tels qu’ils sont mobilisés par les acteurs eux-mêmes : la création de récits, la diffusion d’idées, la production culturelle et la mobilisation des affects. L’article souligne les ambiguïtés du concept et ses fonctions performatives. En le comparant à des concepts concurrents – la cooptation et la normalisation –, l’article montre que la métapolitique permet de saisir des dynamiques plus diffuses et de long terme. Enfin, il en propose une reformulation analytique, attentive aux dimensions raciales, genrées et numériques des discours d’extrême droite, afin de penser leur impact sur la redéfinition du sens commun.

Municipal parties in Canada are unique: They are not branches of national parties, they have no established ideological orientation and their lifespans vary considerably. In light of these characteristics, political scientists tend to overlook the factors that contribute to their emergence and disappearance as well as the diversity of their forms. The objective of this article is to fill this gap. Taking the city of Montreal as a case study, we draw on an electoral database spanning from 1960 to 2001 and a systematic press review to show that a party’s longevity is influenced by factors that are either external to the parties (institutional, economic and provincial political context) or internal to the parties (strong internal coordination, charismatic leader and ability to survive after a leader’s departure). For Montreal, this translates into a longer lifespan for two types of parties: platform-based parties and government coalitions.

Cet article examine la mise en œuvre de la Politique d’aide internationale féministe (PAIF) du Canada au Mali à partir d’une approche qualitative basée sur des entrevues effectuées auprès de personnes oeuvrant dans le milieu. Il montre que la PAIF ne s’applique pas de façon linéaire : il s’agit plutôt d’un processus narratif impliquant traduction, filtrage et légitimation. Les acteurs intermédiaires locaux, notamment via le Projet de services d’appui sur le terrain (PSAT), jouent un rôle clé en réduisant les frictions normatives et la perception d’ingérence. En mobilisant les notions de narratif, courtiers en développement et résonance locale, l’analyse révèle que ces ajustements favorisent la recevabilité de la PAIF, tout en limitant sa portée transformatrice.

Since the adoption of the Charter, scholars have argued that Parliament defers to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) on questions of constitutional law. This is surprising given Canada’s previous history of parliamentary supremacy, Parliament’s enforcement of Court decisions and cognate findings internationally that show how elected officials can constrain high courts. Accordingly, we develop a theory of how Parliament influences the constitutional decision-making of the Supreme Court. Specifically, we argue that the Supreme Court will be less likely to grant leave to appeal in cases where it might disagree with Parliament to avoid any policy costs associated with that disagreement. Using a dataset of statutes reviewable between 1968 and 2020, we find that judicial review is less likely when the SCC faces a counterpartisan Parliament, and that judicial review increases under copartisan Parliaments when Parliament is less likely to oppose Court decisions.

Many Indigenous nations in the settler state of Canada have two governments: elective band councils and a customary leadership not subject to regular elections. When these groups struggle for authority, outsiders often side with the band councils on the assumption that elections are necessary for a government to be democratic. But this assumption reflects an unwarranted electoral bias. In fact, non-elective customary governments can be more democratic than elected band councils. As we show, customary governments sometimes draw wider participation from Indigenous communities, and they can create responsiveness through non-electoral mechanisms that promote voice and exit. This gives Canada a democratic reason to promote Indigenous democratic innovation through policy and legal reforms that facilitate state recognition of customary governments.

The political and social preferences of homeowners command significant attention from political scientists. Homeownership appears to make individuals more politically right-wing in their preferences over redistribution and increases their political activism. Comparatively little is known about renters. While often treated as a single group, our main argument is that renters are heterogeneous in their political preferences and behaviour. Our contribution is to differentiate between renters who would like to own, a group we call “prospective homeowners,” and those who would prefer to rent, or “satisfied renters.” We use a first-of-its-kind, nationally representative survey of Canadian renters to show that prospective homeowners are more right-wing than satisfied renters but are not more likely to vote for right-wing parties. Our findings suggest that many of the effects ascribed to homeownership may in fact predate the purchase of a house.

Similar to pipelines used in oil and gas development, telecommunications networks of cable, satellite, fibre optic and wireless infrastructure extend deep into Indigenous territories as a form of “extractivism” (Greer, 2019). These developments raise barriers to substantive reconciliation between settler states, corporations and Indigenous peoples. Yet despite important analyses of corporate policy discourses regarding how natural resource extraction impacts reconciliation, there are few studies of such rhetoric in the context of telecommunications. In this article we analyse publicly available “reconciliation” policies of four commercial telecommunications providers. Drawing from theories of reconciliation and extractivism, we find these policies strategically constrain symbolic and material understandings of reconciliation in ways that support the status quo and prioritize profit accumulation and symbolic partnerships over substantive reconciliation. Existing corporate reconciliation frameworks fail to recognize the desires of Indigenous peoples for self-determination over digital infrastructures in ways that might improve—and ideally, transform—their relationships with telecommunications providers.