Like other policy subsectors, power generation has been affected by the governance changes of the last two decades, including a shift to more collaborative state-society relations. Collaborative governance implies new kinds of public engagement designed to provide both input legitimacy, through the involvement of a broader range of actors in policy design, and output legitimacy, through enhanced feedback and policy learning. This paper compares the impact of “governance-driven engagement” in the power generation subsectors in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, arguing that engagement increased the complexity of the policy mix in the subsector without succeeding in providing better feedback and learning. The paper notes a recent trend towards more expert-driven and less collaborative processes, as both provinces struggled to rationalize and simplify power generation policy goals and instruments.

While the act of adopting a new portfolio raises a number of interesting queries, little attention has been paid to portfolio adoption, what motivates and what conditions predicate it. The Canadian case provides an excellent laboratory to test some broadly held assumptions about portfolio adoption, particularly given the contrast of the ten provinces' unique political cultures with their shared jurisdictional roles. We illustrate our case using a dataset that contains information on 85 portfolio adoptions in the Canadian provinces since 1982. Findings suggest little by way of a clear set of partisan or institutional motivations for portfolio adoption, although there is some evidence that governments are more likely to adopt portfolios in the first 100 days of governing and they are more likely to do so when elected with larger caucuses, possibly because of the need to find larger roles for party loyalists.

Drawing on the literature on the process of cabinet appointments and on ministerial careers and the types of mobility that they involve, this article examines the hypothesis that the rate of ministerial promotion and demotion within a cabinet differs for women and men. To verify this hypothesis, we compiled a database that integrates the several hundred individuals who served as ministers in the Quebec Executive Council between 1976 and 2012. The quantitative analysis consists of descriptive statistics and negative binomial models; it takes into consideration a number of variables, including age, education, and past political mandates. Our results show that the ministerial careers of women and men follow a similar trajectory. Specifically, women and men begin their ministerial careers with minor portfolios, but as their ministerial experience accumulates, ministers of both sexes take on portfolios of increasing importance. In other words, the ministerial careers of women do not lag behind those of men. This observation negates the idea that the ministerial careers of women are less illustrious than those of their male counterparts.

This article investigates the nature and role of authority contests—the claims and counterclaims about whose ideas matter on policy debates and via what procedures they should be heard—in policy paradigm contestation, reform and abandonment. Examining the authority contests around prairie Canada's grain marketing policy illustrates an additional pathway—a value-driven model—to Hall's model of endogenous policy anomalies. It further documents differences across governments in how they resolve contentious policy debates, showing that governments make fewer efforts to supplement their own representational authority with expert and/or popular authority when they enjoy majoritarian support from the affected region than when they do not and when their support for paradigm change is value-driven rather than a response to policy anomalies.

When it comes to buying military aircraft, what leads states to prefer one supplier over the other? This paper explores this question from the perspective of international relations theory. First we use social network analysis to map out fighter jet transfers during and after the Cold War and examine the extent to which historical structures of international hierarchy shape contemporary supplier-receiver relationships. Next, we use a basic probit model to analyse the origins of fighter jets in the world's air forces today to evaluate the effect of interstate orders of super-ordination and sub-ordination on sourcing patterns. All things being equal, the more a state is embedded in US security and economic hierarchy, the more it is likely to buy American-made fighter jets.

The literature on activism characterizes the recent transformations of activism as part of a process towards the “personalization of politics”. For structural or cultural reasons, committed citizens appear to be developing a new relationship to politics, seeking personal satisfaction in their engagement. We propose an alternative interpretation, and characterize this transformation as “do-it-yourself” (DIY) politics. Based on the protests against shale gas development in Quebec, we show that the DIY politics is the “logical” (in the sense of rational) result of citizens developing the means to compensate for the lack of institutional opportunities in the context of developments that potentially threaten their lives and livelihoods. Hence, rather than a quest for personal fulfillment, DIY politics must be understood as a more prosaic and contingent reaction to a specific situation, an individual and collective response to a situation experienced and perceived as problematic. In the conflict surrounding shale gas development in Quebec, which serves as our case study, we show that 1) the initial impulse to mobilize may be accurately interpreted as moving from the “territory of the self” (“territoire du moi”) to the “territory of the us” (“territoire du nous”), and that 2) it is the double failure of institutional representation that underpins civic engagement: the failure of institutional representation and the lack of representation by collective actors already in place.

Many provinces have enacted substantial reforms of their social assistance regime in the 1990s. However, we know surprisingly little about the ideas that underlie welfare reform in Canada. In particular, few empirical studies have directly examined the ideas of policy actors. This article presents a retrospective case study of a major policy initiative, namely Saskatchewan's Building Independence (BI), and examines its alignment with three paradigms of social assistance. Data come primarily from interviews with policy actors. This study concludes that the policy ideas informing BI align closely with the activation paradigm but also share some similarities with the entitlement and workfare paradigms. The significance of this finding is then discussed in light of three issues: 1) Aboriginal people, 2) the perspective of social assistance clients, and 3) “Third Way” ideology. This article concludes with a research agenda on ideas and policy change.

This paper explores how local government structure affects policy co-ordination. It compares the delivery of economic development services in two Ontario cities. In London, a specialized agency is the lead, but lacks full functional control, while in Hamilton policy control is consolidated in a single municipal department. The findings support the hypothesis of those who argue in favour of general-purpose governments, as the municipal hierarchy in Hamilton was instrumental in achieving policy co-ordination. Proponents of specialization argue that it limits the need for co-ordination between governments but, as the London case demonstrates, this logic breaks down when there are too many players with too few responsibilities.

Despite criticism of ongoing protectionism, this study argues that Canada's internal trade regime has evolved significantly since the implementation of the original Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). This includes thirteen formal amendments to the AIT and numerous regional agreements in Western, Central, and Atlantic Canada. Borrowing from the liberal International Political Economy (IPE) literature it argues that existing regional agreements complement and offer a potential framework for broader internal trade reforms at the national level. Of these the New West Partnership Trade Agreement (NWPTA) offers a promising model for Canada's internal market, with revised rules and norms related to negative lists, labour mobility, procurement, and investment and dispute settlement. Ongoing efforts to remove barriers will also be linked to a strengthened Internal Trade Secretariat, confidence-building measures, increased transparency and further reform of technical language.