The Role of Provinces,States, and Territories in Shaping Federal Policy for Indigenous Peoples’ Health

ABSTRACT

Under both Canadian and United States law, the availability and quality of healthcare and health services to Indigenous peoples are primarily a federal responsibility. Nevertheless, sub-national authorities—most importantly provinces, states, and territories—play a crucial role by virtue of covering (often through federal mandate) services, and regulating health facilities and health personnel off-reserv(ation). While both federal governments have undertaken efforts to transfer, within their fiduciary obligations, their responsibilities for Indigenous peoples’ health to the management of Indigenous peoples themselves, that transfer has considered or included provincial, state, and territorial authorities and resources unevenly, and, in some cases, in tension with the objectives of respecting standards for quality and access. This article applies the methodology used by Canadian researchers of the sub-national health authority issue to the health transfer experience in the United States. The article summarizes findings that demonstrate similar deficiencies as those present in the Canadian transfer process. The article further outlines the experiences of Hawai`i and Ontario as offering models through which to address some of these deficiencies. The article finally suggests that there is a positive relationship between greater participatory models adopted by provinces, states, and territories and better health outcomes among Indigenous groups so included.     

Do Lawyers Get More Votes?

ABSTRACT

In many western democracies, law has been the dominant occupational background of politicians. This raises the question whether lawyers get more votes when they run for election compared to non-lawyers. To our knowledge, this question has not been examined empirically over an extended period of time. Our study aims to fill this lacuna. We collected longitudinal data about the careers of all candidates in Canadian federal elections from 1921 to 2015. Our dataset is composed of about 32,000 observations including the occupation and electoral performance of every candidate who ran for office. Our analysis shows that lawyers do get more votes but that their personal electoral boost is very small.     

Cultural Nationalism,Anti-Americanism,and the Federal Defense of the Canadian Football League

ABSTRACT

During the 1960s nationalism flourished in Canada as did American influence, both cultural and economically, as well as separatist sentiment in Quebec. The Canadian federal government became more interventionist to combat threats to Canadian sovereignty: internal threats from Quebec and external threats from the United States. The federal government used sport as a nation-building tool and eventually acted to protect the Canadian Football League (CFL) as a display of resistance to Americanization and in an attempt to unite French and English. Canadian football had become a symbol of the nation and therefore could be used by the government in a symbolic way to resist cultural imperialism and promote national unity. On two occasions the federal government acted to ensure the CFL preserved its Canadian identity; first, to prevent Canadian-based football teams from joining an American professional football league, and second, to prevent American-based teams from joining the CFL. John Munro was the key Canadian politician who formulated policy to protect Canadian football.     

Four Pathways to Aboriginal Self-Government in Canada

Abstract

Recent decades have seen the rising of a vital, multifaceted politics in Canada, focused on the future relations between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state. While there are many debates about specific arrangements, there is consensus that the negotiated establishment of Aboriginal self-government constitutes a major piece of unfinished business for the Canadian federation. This essay seeks to contribute more structure and focus to contemporary debates by examining four different models of Aboriginal government: “mini-municipalities,” a third order of government institutions, the public government federal option, and nation-to-nation relations. Each form has different implications for the relationship between Aboriginal and Canadian political communities, and each has different implications for the institutions and practices of Canadian federalism. We argue that further concurrency of powers and greater asymmetries in intergovernmental relations are likely to be notable features of the Canadian federation, and that no single model or pathway is likely to emerge as the dominant one in the near and medium term.     

Incomplete Sovereigns: Unpacking Patterns of Indigenous Self-Governance in the United States and Canada

ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, both the Canadian and United States federal governments introduced modern land claim agreements as a first step forward in the states’ recognition of Indigenous goals for self-determination. Since then, both the United States and Canadian federal governments have incrementally expanded their recognition of Indigenous rights to include Indigenous goals for political self-determination. Yet, despite the fact that both countries began implementing broadly similar policies at approximately the same time, the degree to which Indigenous political and economic self-determination has been realized varies considerably both within and between the two countries. The variation in Indigenous self-governing power and authority suggests that the policy shift towards Indigenous self-determination is incomplete and has faced important barriers to implementation. This paper investigates two key aspects of this variation in Indigenous self-determination in the United States and Canada: (1) institutional histories embedded in geography, and (2) the temporal nature of policy frameworks. I argue that the full realization of Indigenous self-determination has been shaped in different ways and, ultimately, is limited by the intersection of embedded institutional legacies and federal political dynamics.     

Shopping or Specialization? Venue Targeting among Nonprofits Engaged in Advocacy

Studies of venue shopping have typically analyzed the case of an individual advocacy group or issue campaign rather than comparing venue strategies across multiple groups. Moreover, this literature focuses on interest groups and advocacy coalitions whose principal mandate is to influence public policy. Using original data, we test theories of venue selection among nonprofit organizations that report engaging in policy processes but the majority of which do not self‐identify as an advocacy group. Our analyses explore the “where” of nonprofit advocacy across three different venue types: branch (executive, legislative), domain (bureaucracy, elected officials), and level of government (local, state, federal). Like interest groups, we find that nonprofits shop among both executive and legislative branches and among elected and bureaucratic domains; however, they tend to specialize in one level of government. Geographic scope and revenue source predicted venue targeting, but most other organizational characteristics including age, capacity, and structure did not.     

Reform in the Canadian Parliament and the US Congress: Institutional Choices and Member Power

A spate of recent work on the Canadian Parliament highlights the importance of constituency pressures in understanding the legislative behavior of individual Members of Parliament (MPs). In light of this renaissance, we reexamine decisions by Canadian Liberal Party MPs to defy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his cabinet by supporting party-weakening reform in 2002. More specifically, we model votes on the question of selecting committee chairs through secret ballot as a function of factors both internal and external to the Parliament. While we find some evidence of exogenous, constituency-based forces, we find that support for reform was largely driven by internal party power dynamics. We gain additional insight into our findings by comparing this reform to analogous reforms in the US Congress. The patterns we uncover highlight the stark difference between the “double monopoly of power” held by party leaders in Westminster-style legislatures and the lack of such a monopoly in Congress. We conclude by advocating for more such comparisons, arguing that careful efforts to synthesize these and other similar reforms can improve our understanding of both legislatures despite the obvious and important differences between them.     

The New Nature of Things? Canada's Conservative Government and the Design of the New Environmental Subject

Since coming to power in 2006, Canada's government under Stephen Harper has worked to recalibrate federal regulatory, legislative and economic development frameworks as they overlap in the littoral zone of the environment. We argue that Harper's Conservative government is pursuing a totalizing strategy in reconfiguring the desired Canadian environmental subject. This strategy approaches an integrated design that eclipses the incremental strategic options most Canadian federal governments have understood themselves to be constrained by. This design's basic features include the discursive strategies employed to collapse “the environment” into a singular resource extraction paradigm, a programmatic concentration of power to the executive branch of the Canadian government, and a classical conservative ideology that associates environmental regulation and management with dominion over and improvement of national territory, to the exclusion of other frames and relations. We query the articulation of consent and certainty in relation to the environment and extractive economies in Canada.     

Teaching Canadian Literature

Abstract

Canada and the United States are two democracies on the North American continent sharing a common border, common British heritage, and for the most part a common language. At the same time, the two political systems abound with structural differences. Canadians, unlike voters in the U.S., cannot split their votes among various parties and candidates, and the single house Parliamentary system with tight party discipline renders an individual back-bench MP relatively powerless. The questions addressed by this article concern similarities and differences of Canadian and U.S. urban voters as they make electoral selections in these similar cultures and dissimilar, yet democratic, political systems. First, do social factors such as class, ethnicity, and religion provide similar bases for cleavage in Canada and the U.S.? Canadian society supposedly has a more easily defined class structure than the U.S. Does this difference carry over into the area of electoral choice? Do ethnicity and religion, as reported, differentiate party support in both countries? Second, individual factors such as the voter's party identification and impression of the party leaders (or presidential candidates) have been shown in the U.S. to be of dominant importance in predicting an individual's vote. What is the relative importance of these factors in determining voting choice in the two countries? The three-party Canadian context renders difficult any clear-cut comparisons to the two-party U.S., but useful avenues of speculation emerge. The NDP has a working-class base, but cannot attract the poor. Class does not significantly distinguish PC's and Liberals, the dominant parties, and on ethnicity and religion PC and NDP supporters bear a strong resemblance to each other. In the U.S. the expected associations obtain between Democratic vote and working class, Catholic religion, and foreign-born parentage. Party identification and attractiveness of the party leader, long recognized as important influences on voters in the U.S., seem from these data to play a similar role in Canada. Consequently, the individual electoral decision is dominated by more similarities than might be suggested from observing the differences in electoral and decision-making structures. Perhaps culture rather than political structure is dominant (within certain limits) in a voter's electoral decisions.     

Wrapped in Two Flags: The Complex Political History of Nunavik

ABSTRACT

During the first half of the twentieth century, northern Quebec was under federal jurisdiction. Tired of English Canadian supremacy and increasingly aware of northern Quebec’s considerable natural resources, which could provide a solid basis for future moves toward independence, the Quebec government began to take over responsibility for its northern territories in the 1960s. It established a regional administration to take charge of its northern affairs and sent officers to northern Quebec’s remote communities. For two decades, both governments administered the region and imposed two political systems on the local Inuit. This article is based on lengthy fieldwork and archival research. The historical background is described to show how Nunavik has developed as a political and social entity through its relationships with the Quebec and Canadian governments. This conflictual situation has created tensions in the Inuit community, resulting in political dissensions over the goal of self-government. Finally, this article details how the Inuit have exploited federal–provincial tensions to further their own interests.     

Securitisation through re-enchantment: the strategic uses of myth and memory

ABSTRACT

This article is an investigation into the attempt by the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper to securitise the Canadian polity through re-enchantment. Through the strategic use of discourses and the shaping of the regime of signification, the article explains how the Harper government attempted to re-enchant national myths of Anglo-conformist nationalism, militarism and loyalism. Using discourse analysis of government documents and speeches, the article examines three sites of discursive intervention: (1) National Museum and Archive policy, specifically, the renaming of the Canadian national museum; (2) the militarisation and royalisation of national institutions and commemorations, notably the renaming of the Canadian navy and (3) the privileging of anglo-centric and loyalist tropes in the performance of citizenship rituals, and associated with this, reforming Citizenship legislation. The article concludes with an analysis of the reasons for the overall failure of the Conservative government’s attempts to securitise through re-enchantment.     

Recognition of native rights in Northern Quebec: Settlement of comprehensive claims,constitutional protection and economic development

In order to allow for hydro development in Northern Quebec, it was necessary for the federal and provincial governments to negotiate conditions of settlement with the tree and Inuit people. These negotiations resulted in the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975.

A process to define aboriginal rights was established when the Canadian Constitution was repatriated in 1981–1982. In 1983, the Constitution was amended to recognize, among other things, rights or free ‐doms acquired by way of land claims agreements, as well as existing aboriginal and treaty rights. However, after a series of constitutional meetings, participants did not agree on an amendment to entrench the right to self‐government.

In the context of future development and actual practices, the exercise of rights is also extremely crucial; and, indeed, it is only through practice that those rights can be measured.     

Why are Canadians Reluctant to Leave Their Province?

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the puzzle of Canadian interprovincial migration. Despite the opportunities afforded by a large country like Canada, the proportion of residents moving to a new province has been in steep decline since the 1970s. A body of literature suggests that federal redistribution explains the limited incentives of residents to move across provinces, by equalizing the quality of services throughout the country. However, most of the available evidence relies on migration trends observed after the fact. This article introduces an original survey asking Canadian respondents squarely whether they have ever considered leaving their province. The findings support the idea that satisfaction with provincial services refrains intra-country migration. Moreover, the results show that views about the federation matter to explain attitudes toward migration. Canadians favorable to centralization, who tend to be younger and more educated, are more likely to consider moving to another province.     

Teresa's experiences

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the notion of personal experience in relation to mysticism. I observe that St. Teresa of Jesus includes both her ordinary and extraordinary experiences in her writings on prayer, and I argue that these experiences are essential to her theology.     

“Hold This for Me”: Counter Memory and Trauma in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

ABSTRACT

African Caribbean Canadian author Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon augments many African diasporic narratives’ efforts to counter and rewrite exclusive histories. While Brand’s novel challenges and nuances dominant historical narratives by offering counter memory of African diasporic experiences, particularly experiences of enslavement, it also simultaneously illuminates the conflicts that emerge when “holding” and passing on memories that are traumatic. Therefore, Brand’s text emphasizes both the importance of employing counter memory to revise hegemonic historical narratives and the necessity of assessing the impact of trauma on individual and collective remembrances.     

The Sector Theory and the Canadian Arctic, 1897–1970

ABSTRACT

Although European discovery in the Arctic began during the Middle Ages, sovereignty issues did not become a major concern until the early twentieth century. At that time, the controversial sector theory was taken up by Canada, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, but opposed by the United States and Norway. This article examines the sector theory in Canadian state practice, clarifying the version of the theory to which Canadian officials subscribed and the aims they hoped to achieve through its use. The international response to Canadian claims is also described.

The article demonstrates that Canadian use of the sector principle during the 1920s was pragmatic and successful, but in later decades, confusion arose both inside and outside the government. Inconsistent public statements were made by government representatives in the 1950s and 1960s; these have puzzled and misled scholars ever since. Differences between the Canadian and Soviet versions of the sector theory, lack of adequate institutional memory in Ottawa, and partisan political rivalries all played a part in creating the confusion, but perhaps the key factor was the inherent difficulty of state control over this remote yet geopolitically crucial region.     

Promoting a Different Type of North–South Interactions: Québécois Cultural and Religious Paradiplomacy with Latin America

ABSTRACT

The historiography on Canadian–Latin American relations states that economic incentives, along with geopolitical concerns during the Second World War, have always been the chief reason behind Canadian interests in the region. This article argues that social groups from Quebec had other incentives to establish connections with Latin America. Quebec’s civil society became well connected with Latin American groups before the North American Free Trade Agreement facilitated economic and political cooperation, thanks mostly to the intensive Catholic missionary effort in the region, and positive representations of Latino culture in French Canadian sociopolitical circles in the 1940s and 1950s. As a result, Francophones’ interests diverged from Canada’s main objectives in the region; Quebec’s civil society’s engagement was distinctly more cultural and social in nature. Because of the difference of objectives, this article shows that social groups from Quebec attempted to influence Canadian–Latin American relations to suit their interests.     

Participation in cultural legislation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the recent legislative process concerning the funding of cultural institutions in Finland. The drafting of the bill was opened up to participation by artists and other professionals and facilitated by an outside partner. The text draws on research conducted to evaluate the participatory element in the law-drafting, and further analyses it in the wider framework of participatory decision-making and governance. The research shows that within the confined scope of the participatory phase of the law-drafting, the deliberative process succeeded in creating positive experiences of participation. However, set in the wider framework of the legislation, the effect of participation remains limited. A notion of ‘placebo participation’ is suggested to explain this perceived empowerment despite a lack of strong evidence for effective participation. The process is further interpreted in terms of incompatibility of interests between political participation and institutionally led participatory governance.     

Canadian and Australian farm interest groups

It is not surprising that the organization and behaviour of farm organizations differ depending upon whether they operate in unitary or federal states or in parliamentary or congressional type environment. The question is how different or similar are they and their behaviour in states which are both federal and both parliamentary.

This article examines the variations between Australian and Canadian farm organizations and examines some of the possible explanations for them. Some of the differences stem from the origins of the organizations, others from variations in the two countries’ political institutions or their usages.     

Femonationalism and populist politics: The case of the Swiss ban on female genital mutilation

This article examines configurations of Swiss national identity that were generated in the course of the drafting of the 2012 Female Genital Mutilation Act, a new law that seeks to regulate practices of female genital modification (including female circumcision and genital cosmetic surgery). Our analysis of Swiss parliamentary debates on this legislative proposal between 2005 and 2011 shows that Swiss MPs came to depict female circumcision as a threat to the Swiss nation but portrayed genital cosmetic surgery carried out in Swiss clinics as a signifier of “Swissness.” The Swiss debates over women's genital modifications produced an unusually high level of political unanimity between pro‐feminist left‐wing MPs and anti‐feminist conservative and populist MPs, all of whom claimed to defend women's rights. In this process, MPs formulated criteria for membership and non‐membership of the Swiss nation which, we argue, reflect wider political dynamics, best understood through the lens of femonationalism.