After 30 years of relative neglect, Canada’s notwithstanding clause has been invoked in six different provincial laws since 2018. We argue that this resurgence can be explained by the growing judicial invalidation of provincial statutes and federal-provincial partisan conflicts. Drawing from an original dataset of Charter cases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada (1982–2020), we show that provincial statutes have been invalidated at much higher rates since 2010. We also show how increasing partisan conflicts between conservative provincial governments and the Liberal federal government have helped frame the notwithstanding clause as a partisan tool for resisting centralizing rights decisions. The strategic environment facing provinces has shifted as partisan federalism conflicts lower the political costs of using the clause, while rising invalidation rates incentivize provinces to use it to protect their jurisdiction. This supports the “regime politics” understanding of judicial power as partly a function of federal (central) regime power.

In affluent democracies, a broad rise in wealth concentration since the 1980s has not been accompanied by a broad rise in wealth taxation. As a large literature points out, conditions such as growing financialization, tax competition and tax avoidance have all curtailed the ability of left governments to tax wealth. This article argues that, despite the global constraint on taxing wealth, as left governments continue to influence wealth concentration and more advanced economies enter an era of slowing population growth, financial wealth of the rich tends to gain at the expense of (more equal) housing wealth. In response, left governments increase taxes on financial assets relative to housing wealth. By contrast, when population growth is still high, left subtly by adjusting the relative difference by which different types of wealth are taxed. In particular, as governments tax housing wealth more heavily instead. These predictions are tested using data from 15 to 16 advanced economies (1970–2015).

Examining the rich history of subnational electoral reforms in Canada, we identify three distinct waves of reform, as well as three paradoxical trends pertaining to both the nature of the proposed alternative system and the process by which reform was attempted. First, while reduced constraints and lower stakes at the municipal level should encourage more frequent electoral experimentation, changes to provincial legislation have left many local governments without the authority to alter their own electoral rules. Second, despite the fact that public engagement has become a key aspect of modern reform efforts, governments have compensated by introducing new obstacles. Third, governments often employ different processes depending on the nature of the proposed change, subjecting reforms aiming to (re)introduce plurality to fewer hurdles.

Cet article étudie le rôle des fonctionnaires parlementaires de l'Assemblée nationale du Québec et la nature des relations qu'ils entretiennent avec les acteurs politiques. En prenant appui sur la séparation classique entre les sphères politiques et administratives, cette étude illustre l'ambiguïté inhérente à cette relation au plus haut niveau de l'État. Les hypothèses examinées portent sur la perception de la hiérarchie, la distinction des rôles entre fonctionnaires parlementaires, fonctionnaires de l'exécutif et le personnel politique, ainsi que les qualités attendues des fonctionnaires parlementaires. Sur la base de données empiriques originales, les résultats mettent en évidence des perceptions communes entre élus et fonctionnaires parlementaires, tout en faisant ressortir certaines nuances. Il conclut que la séparation entre les domaines politique et administratif observée dans le cas étudié favorise le bon fonctionnement du parlement et protège l'institution des querelles partisanes, mettant en évidence le rôle essentiel des fonctionnaires parlementaires pour assurer la stabilité de la branche législative de l'État.

The Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) is a civil society organization that was created in 1985 to advance women's substantive equality. Political science scholarship in the early 2000s focused significant attention on LEAF—unanimously characterizing the organization as among the most successful groups involved in legal mobilization in the post-Charter era. However, we know very little about the organization's advocacy outside of the courts. To address this limitation, we provide an analysis of all the advocacy-related activities undertaken by LEAF between 1985 and 2022. The findings illustrate that beginning approximately in 2006, LEAF diversified its “collective action repertoire” to undertake more political mobilization, while also dedicating greater attention to issue areas such as Indigenous rights. Our study challenges the judicial-centric approach adopted in previous studies of LEAF and underscores the importance of studying advocacy through a longitudinal lens and with approaches that account for the dynamism of civil society.

Even though the Parti Conservateur du Québec (PCQ) did not manage to elect any members to the Assemblée nationale in Quebec's 2022 general election, this political party nonetheless received nearly 13 per cent of the popular vote. The party mainly campaigned on issues related to the economic right, but also discontent with the Legault government's COVID-19 health measures. We assess the extent to which these different drivers of support explain vote choice in favour of the PCQ using individual-level survey data from the 2022 Quebec Election Study. We find that the PCQ did succeed in gathering support on the basis of these issues, but that it was also able to attract voters with a lesser appetite for climate change mitigation as well as a populist and cynical outlook on politics. The party also appears to be especially popular among younger, male and less educated voters living outside the Greater Montreal region.

This research note presents the results of audit studies that were conducted with the constituency offices of provincial and federal elected representatives across Canada. We investigate whether individuals from ethnic minority groups, the LGBTQ+ community and French or English speakers are discriminated against when contacting their constituency office for administrative services. Survey experiments administered to both candidates of the 2021 Canadian election and a representative sample of Canadian citizens complement these studies. Our results indicate the absence of discrimination towards constituents from an ethnic minority or who identify with the LGBTQ+ community. We found, however, that emails sent in French were less likely to be answered by Members of Parliament (MPs) than those sent in English. Constituency offices of anglophone MPs and those representing ridings with a small proportion of francophones were significantly less likely to respond to French emails. A similar pattern, albeit more moderate, is observed among constituency offices of francophone MPs in response to English emails. The survey experiments show similar discrimination from citizens but less so from candidates.

Obtaining losers’ consent after an election is often taken for granted in liberal democracies. However, it can pose a real challenge for any type of democratic decision-making in which participants hold conflicting views about the issues of the day. In this research note, we examine losers’ reactions to the votes taken in a citizen deliberative assembly. In such an assembly, much effort is devoted to informing the participants about the merits and limits of various options and ensuring that they form their own reasoned opinions about the issue. Based on this information, people are bound to reach different conclusions, and any vote on a specific option therefore generates winners and losers. While there is a large literature exploring the winner-loser gap in elections, we know little about how participants in a deliberative assembly react when they realize that the assembly chooses a different position than theirs. We leverage data from a citizen assembly held in Canada. We find a high degree of satisfaction with the conduct of the assembly, among both winners and losers.

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.