The opioid overdose crisis has become a global public health emergency, claiming more than 100,000 lives each year. In North America, shifting opioid prescribing practices in response to the crisis have profoundly affected people living with chronic pain, who now face reduced access to prescription opioids. Against this backdrop, pain stakeholders have become increasingly active in policymaking arenas to shape how opioids and pain are understood. This study examines the Canadian Pain Task Force (CPTF) — a federal advisory body charged with creating a national pain strategy — by analyzing its reports, public and patient consultations, and internal documents. Through qualitative framing analysis, we find that stakeholders overwhelmingly depicted the overdose crisis as the result of illicit and irresponsible opioid use, while positioning stigma as both a driver and consequence of the crisis that compounded the challenges faced by people with chronic pain. From these problem definitions flowed policy proposals centered on expanding opioid access, reducing stigma, and advancing patient-centered care. These findings demonstrate how pain stakeholders shape, and are simultaneously shaped by, opioid policy debates — with consequences for both overdose prevention and chronic pain management.

Voter turnout has declined across established democracies, which has been accompanied by an increase in turnout disparities along class lines. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has largely been neglected in Canada. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2021), this article examines the turnout gap in Canada over time by class, education, and income, and whether the offerings of political parties impact these relationships. Results find major class-based participatory inequalities, which have worsened over time. The magnitude of the turnout gap between lower and higher socio-economic status (SES) individuals has mainly been driven by the demobilization of lower-SES individuals and a significant factor is the reduced saliency of economic issues in the party system. The findings contribute to our understanding of how economic inequalities translate into political inequalities and show that rising turnout inequality between politically relevant cleavages, represents a deterioration of democratic representation.

The 2007 adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) marked a critical juncture in the area of Indigenous rights. As a nonbinding agreement, its adoption is at the discretion of each state, resulting in significant state-level variation. Importantly, within-state variations remain underexplored. These differences are potentially significant in federal, decentralized countries such as Canada. This article examines why some provinces and territories lead in implementing the key principles embedded in UNDRIP, whereas others have dragged their feet. We collected 230 Canadian regulations introduced at the subnational level between 2007 and 2023, and assessed the impact of three key variables (i.e. political ideology, resource politics and issue voting). We found that none of these variables explained within-state variations on their own. To further explore the role of these variables, we subsequently compared two provinces at different stages of the UNDRIP implementation spectrum (Québec and British Columbia).

This article examines the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) in relation to a growing literature on bureaucrats’ role in immigration policy making, while challenging interpretations of the agreement as a “Europeanization” of Canadian policy. Canada is a prototypical liberal “migration state” that balances economic considerations, national security, rights and broader cultural concerns through its immigration regime. We open the “black box” of the state to examine how bureaucratic decision making informed the development of Canada’s asylum system. Drawing on interviews, archival materials and government documents, we show bureaucrats simultaneously sought to manage asylum backlogs and ensure compliance with international obligations while countering advocacy group opposition. The STCA reflects a uniquely Canadian approach to balancing competing imperatives in refugee policy, highlighting the role of bureaucrats in shaping immigration policy within domestic and international constraints. This research contributes to understanding the historical development of migration control policies in liberal democracies.

Research demonstrates that English- and French-speaking Canadians differ in a wide range of attitudes, including their political preferences, their vision of the Canadian federation and their national identity. In this article, we ask whether individual bilingualism is associated with a decrease in the attitudinal differences between anglophones and francophones. Using survey data collected in the summer of 2023, we attempt to determine whether knowledge of the French language is related to an increase in the responsiveness of English-speaking citizens toward issues that typically preoccupy French-speaking Canadians. Our analyses suggest that knowledge of French as a second language is strongly linked to the political preferences of Canadian citizens but does not bridge the attitudinal gap between Canada’s two main language groups. These results highlight the relevance of considering the different languages that people speak—and not just their mother tongue—to understand their political attitudes.

Affective polarization is often blamed on the rise of partisan news. However, self-reported measures of news consumption suffer serious flaws. We often have limited ability to characterize partisan media audiences outside of the United States. I use a behavioural data set of 728 respondents whose online behaviour was tracked over four weeks during the 2019 Canadian federal election. These data were paired to a survey for a subset of respondents. I find that audiences for partisan media are small, and web traffic is driven by an even smaller share of the population. There are few major partisan differences in news media use, and partisan news exposure is higher among highly attentive, sophisticated news consumers, rather than those with strong political commitments.

There is a lack of knowledge on deaths related to police use of force across Canada. Tracking (In)Justice is a research project that is trying to make sense of the life and death outcomes of policing through developing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and open-source database using publicly available sources. With a collaborative data governance approach, which includes communities most impacted and families of those killed by police, we document and analyze 745 cases of police-involved deaths when intentional force is used across Canada from 2000 to 2023. The data indicate a steady rise in deaths, in particular shooting deaths, as well as that Black and Indigenous people are over-represented. We conclude with reflections on the ethical complexities of datafication, knowledge development of what we call death data and the challenges of enumerating deaths, pitfalls of official sources, the data needs of communities, and the living nature of the Tracking (In)Justice project.

This article asks why states choose to explicitly label themselves as feminist and critically examines the case of Canada. Drawing on constructivist insights, I suggest that identity insecurity is a key contextual factor driving states’ decision to adopt a feminist branding. Through a thematic analysis of 1,551 statements from the Canadian House of Commons and additional documents published by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development from 2006 to 2017, I find that Canada’s choice to adopt a feminist brand occurred within a broader context of identity insecurity, with gender equality emerging as a strategic area to enhance the country’s role through strengthened leadership in this sector. This article advances the study of feminist foreign policies by highlighting the strategic motivations behind the adoption of the feminist label, offering insights into its diffusion despite differing levels of commitment to gender equality.

The comparative literature has devoted considerable attention to why individuals join political parties. This is especially important in the context of the declining party membership and activism that political parties face in contemporary politics. While the question of why members join parties has been well-documented, considerably less work has considered incentives to join other party positions. In the Canadian case, for example, we know very little about the incentives to join an electoral district association (EDA). This is surprising given the consequential role—both formal and informal—that local party associations and their presidents have been known to play in intra-party politics (influencing candidate nomination, membership recruitment and so forth). This study applies Clark and Wilson's (1961) framework of material, solidary and purposive incentives to local party association membership and asks why individuals join their local party executive and whether this motivation shapes the subsequent character of the EDA.