Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have recently argued in Zoopolis (2011) that domesticated animals ought to become our democratic co-citizens. In this paper I claim that the acceptance of animals into our democratic negotiations—championed in Zoopolis as a broadening of justice and inclusion—also has the potential to render our political institutions dangerously unjust. Through an engagement with the work of Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I argue that we must be wary of a democracy's susceptibility to the emergence of unbridled or tyrannical liberty when expanding the criteria of freedom and agency to accommodate animals, or the animalistic, in the political sphere.

Many commentators—including some animal rights theorists—have argued that non-human animals cannot be seen as members of the demos because they lack the critical capacities for self-rule and moral agency which are required for citizenship. We argue that this worry is based on mistaken ideas about both citizenship, on the one hand, and animals, on the other. Citizenship requires self-restraint and responsiveness to shared norms, but these capacities should not be understood in an unduly intellectualized or idealized way. Recent studies of moral behaviour show that civil relations between citizens are largely grounded, not in rational reflection and assent to moral propositions but in intuitive, unreflective and habituated behaviours which are themselves rooted in a range of pro-social emotions (empathy, love) and dispositions (co-operation, altruism, reciprocity, conflict resolution). Fifty years of ethological research have demonstrated that many social animals—particularly domesticated animals—share the sorts of dispositions and capacities underlying everyday civility. Once we broaden our conception of citizenship to include a richer account of the bases of civic relations, it becomes clear that domesticated animals and humans can be co-creators of a shared moral and political world. We have nothing to fear, and much to gain, by welcoming their membership in the demos.

Sixty years ago, in late 1953, Quebec launched the hearings of the Royal Commission on Constitutional Problems—or Tremblay commission. Commenting the publication of its report, political scientist Alexander Brady boldly argued in this journal that Quebec had been, until the late 1950s, the “guarantor” of Canada's fiscal system's flexibility (1959: 270). Emphasizing the system's evolution since the 1950s “constitutional problems,” some specialists now contend, as the economist Robin Boadway does, that Canada became the “textbook best-practice of fiscal federalism” (2007: 99). The Tremblay commission's sixtieth anniversary and the termination, in 2014, of the current agreement on federal transfers, provide an opportunity to reassess this evolution and question the validity of this kind of statement.

This article discusses the evolution of the role and the nature of the work that elected representatives in Westminster-type parliamentary systems accomplish in their riding. Drawing on recent data documenting the riding activities of Quebec's Members of the National Assembly and Members of Parliament, we re-evaluate the conclusions of surveys conducted more than 40 years ago. The new data points to gender-based differences in the way elected representatives understand their role and the expectations of their constituents. Today's elected parliamentarians are still primarily concerned with their function as representatives of the people, while they are less driven by personal ideas. We also find that the nature of riding activities varies according to each individual's profile. Finally, we note a strong degree of collaboration between elected representatives and observe changes in the types of issues with which they now concern themselves.

In a 1985 publication David Cameron reported that historically leftist governments had governed with smaller deficits than rightist governments. The party ideology variable was incorporated into a large body of subsequent research, mainly by economists, to study the growth of public spending and indebtedness. Most agreed with Cameron; some did not. Virtually all studies focused on western European nations (but not subnational governments). This study analyzes provincial deficits or surpluses over the period 1966 to 2009 and determines that rightist parties, despite controls for economic and other political variables, have lower budgetary deficits, a finding which contradicts Cameron but is consistent with five previous studies of provincial spending in Canada.

Policy consultants are external analysts who provide paid policy-related advice to governments on a contractual basis. Previous research on policy work has examined the work done within governments and by policy consultants separately but has not systematically compared and contrasted the two. A key question regarding the nature of policy advisory practices and policy advice systems in general, however, is whether consultants are duplicating the work of government officials in order to help “triangulate” internal advice or whether there is more of a complementary approach in which consultants supplement the work of internal analysts. This article explores the differences among the two groups using data collected over the past five years in two sets of surveys into internal and external policy work in Canada. The analysis finds a “complementary” relationship to exist, contrary to the conventional wisdom that outside or external advice is sought mainly in order to avoid biases in internal advice.

There has been renewed interest in recent years in both the foreign perceptions of the United States as well as the foreign policy attitudes of the American public. In this light, it is interesting to observe that there is a substantial body of research on Canadian public opinion toward the United States but relatively little on American public opinion toward Canada. Further, most literature neglects the effect of spatial proximity to the other country on perceptions. This article addresses both shortcomings in the literature. It investigates the mutual perceptions of the Canadian and American publics drawing on public opinion data from both Canada and the US. The explanation of attitudes toward the other country has three main foci: the roles of political party identification and political ideology; the role of spatial proximity to the Canada–US border; and the interactive relationship between political attitudes and border proximity.

This article looks at the evolution of the Régie de l'énergie du Québec's participatory tools and analyzes, through semi-structured interviews with key actors, the operation and effects of these tools. Guided by the policy-tools approach developed by Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès, the study shows that the Régie de l'énergie's participatory tools are both robust and malleable, and that they have developed, as a result of both their own effects and the strategies of actors, an increasingly confined, regulated form of governance that follows its own logic.