Applying the regime politics approach to the study of judicial behaviour, which regards the Supreme Court as largely operating to preserve the policy agenda of the existing lawmaking majority, this paper evaluates the Court's behaviour during the Conservative government's tenure. There is evidence to support the basic core of the regime politics thesis. The Court rarely invalidates laws passed by the sitting government. Nonetheless, the Court's behaviour during the Conservative government's tenure was distinctive. Incorporating a measure of issue salience—the relative importance of the policies affected—into the analysis demonstrates the Court's impact on the Conservatives' policy agenda stands in sharp contrast to previous governments. It is the only government of the Charter period to have policies in its election platforms blocked by judicial review and the only government in Canadian history to effectively lose all of the constitutional reference cases it posed to the Court.

The article examines the impact of visible minorities on support for the Charter of Values and the ban of religious symbols for civil servants among Francophone Quebecers. Building on group conflict theory and contact theory, we expect that the proportion of visible minorities in a region will have a positive effect on support for the Charter of values and the ban of religious symbols among sovereignists while to have a negative effect among federalists. Our results show that the presence of visible minorities decreases support for the ban of religious symbols, except among those who are very supportive of Quebec sovereignty.

“Indigenous resurgence” centres on three contentions: (1) that colonialism is an active structure of domination premised, at base, on Indigenous elimination; (2) that the prevailing normative-discursive environment continues to reflect this imperative; and (3) that Indigenous peoples must therefore turn away from this hostile environment and pursue independent programmes of social and cultural rejuvenation. The principal movement advocated under the resurgence paradigm thus appears as one of disengagement with the settler order. I also argue, however, that there is an important secondary drive within the movement that presses in the opposite direction. It figures further engagement both as a longer term goal (in the form of renewed dialogue on decolonization) and as an immediate imperative (in order to expose and remove obstacles to reciprocal dialogue). I aim, here, to excavate this secondary drive and consider what it connotes in terms of settler engagement.

This paper studies the prevalence of ballot order effects in two different types of Canadian elections which differ greatly by the strength of party cues they provide to voters. Provincial elections are best described as a typical competition between well established and institutionalized parties, hence providing voters with strong party cues. Alternatively, municipal politics provide voters with much weaker party cues. We use electoral results from recent provincial and municipal elections in Québec and find ballot order effects in municipal elections but not in provincial ones. Although ballot order effects may also be the product of alphabetic preference bias, we argue that in any case these are cognitive biases that are ultimately the product of insufficient cues that voters need in order to cast well-informed votes. The paper, therefore, sheds some light on an understudied type of election in political science.

Recent decades have been marked by increasingly divided partisan opinion in the US. This study investigates whether a similar trend might be occurring in Canada. It does so by examining redistributive preferences, using Canadian Election Studies data from every election since 1992. Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sorting that is comparable to that in the US. Over time, like-minded citizens have increasingly clustered into parties, with increasingly stark divisions between partisans.

This paper examines how Canadian constituency campaigns perceive and use data in elections. We apply a conceptual framework for data-driven campaigning, developed from existing literature, to participant observations and interview responses from the Conservative, Liberal and NDP campaigns in a single riding during the general election of 2015. The rhetoric of “big data” notwithstanding, we find significant variation in the extent and nature of the use of data at the constituency level, and that the increasing use of data in electioneering may have a centralizing effect on traditionally stratarchical political party organization.

The Canadian government and military struggled to control its media framing of the war in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009. This content analysis (n = 900) critically investigates the mediated dynamic of framing Canada's military mission in Afghanistan. This study found that while journalists overwhelmingly indexed their stories to elite sources, they frequently impeached the frames sponsored by government and military leaders. Journalists used elite criteria to fact check the frames of military and government leaders. Most of the coverage was episodic and event-oriented rather than thematic and contextual. While Canadian journalists challenged official claims of improving security, for instance, their coverage lacked context and critical appraisal of Canada's military mission in Afghanistan, raising questions about journalism's normative role in Canadian democracy.