The police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black American, prompted massive protests across the USA and around the globe in the spring and summer of 2020. Like those south of their border, Canadian protesters gathered to bring renewed attention to a longstanding problem: systemic racism and police impunity. While race and dissatisfaction with the police have received a great deal of attention in popular media, surprisingly little political science research considers the relationship between race, attitudes towards the police and protest. Do attitudes towards police differ across racial groups in Canada? Are attitudes towards the police related to protest activity? We answer these questions using data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS) Cycle 34, GSS Cycle 35 and Statistics Canada’s Impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians’ Experiences of Discrimination. We find that Black and Indigenous Canadians express the lowest confidence in police relative to other People of Colour (POC) and compared with White Canadians. We also find more confidence in the police is associated with lower probability of protest (in general).

Any margin of the multinomial distribution is multinomially distributed. Retaining this closure property, a family of generalized multinomial distributions is proposed. This family is characterized within multiplicative probability measures, using the Bell polynomial. The retained closure property simplifies marginal properties such as moments. The family can be obtained by conditioning independent infinitely divisible distributions on the total and also by mixing the multinomial distribution with the normalized infinitely divisible distribution. The closure property justifies a stochastic process of the family by Kolmogorov’s extension theorem. Over time, Gibbs partitions of a positive integer appear as the limiting distributions of the family.

Droughts are becoming increasingly common in India, where 50 per cent of the labour force works in agriculture, and most agricultural production is rainfall-dependent. This paper investigates the extent to which rural households adapt to drought – defined as rainfall deficiency – by reallocating labour from agriculture to other sectors of the economy. We estimate a household-level fixed-effects regression model and find that household agricultural employment declines in the year following a drought. Furthermore, these effects are mediated by job skills and land ownership. We find that households with working members who have completed primary education account for most of the workers who exit the agricultural sector. In contrast, we find that households that own land increase their agricultural labour share after experiencing a drought. Thus, while we find that drought causes households to diversify away from agriculture on aggregate, the extent of this structural change is mitigated by the behaviour of landowners.

For more than 150 years, politicians, the federal government, and missionary churches misled Canadians about deaths, abuse, and the genocidal intent in residential schools for Indigenous children. More recently, the identification of suspected unmarked graves at former school sites has triggered a renewed spread of misinformation denying the harmful legacy of residential schools. To what extent does the Canadian public endorse residential school denialism? Can education counter this misinformation? In this study, we develop and test a scale for measuring residential school denialism. We find that nearly one in five non-Indigenous Canadians agree with denialist claims, while an equal share feel they do not know enough to offer an opinion. Denialist beliefs are more common among men, conservatives, those with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and white Canadians who strongly identify with their racial in-group. In an experiment, we also show that educational information reduces non-opinions and increases the likelihood of rejecting denialist arguments.

The Comprehensive Assessment of Neurodegeneration and Dementia (COMPASS-ND) is an observational study of more than 1100 participants across the dementia spectrum. This research note describes the development and features of the neuropsychological research battery, which is available in English and French. The training of staff and procedures for quality assurance are described. The battery assesses learning and memory, processing speed, attention, executive function, visuoperceptual processing, and language, and the available test scores are described. We outline our goals for future work including: (1) increasing the sociodemographic diversity of the participant cohorts, (2) determining the psychometric properties of the battery, (3) establishing robust normative data from control participants followed longitudinally, and (4) examining longitudinal data on individuals at risk of dementia and across the dementia spectrum. The COMPASS-ND neuropsychology data will provide a unique open-access database of deeply phenotyped participants with or at risk of dementia for Canadian and international researchers.

This commentary examines Thomas Adeoye Lambo’s seminal 1955 article ‘The Role of Cultural Factors in Paranoid Psychosis among the Yoruba Tribe,’ published in the Journal of Mental Science, as the British Journal of Psychiatry was then known. Seventy years later, this groundbreaking work remains profoundly relevant to contemporary psychiatric practice and research.

Huainanzi 淮南子 contributes a model of sage rulership as, among other things, rule through wuwei 無為, or “non-action.” Through analysis of several concepts core to the text’s political cosmology of governance by wuwei—qi 氣 (vital breath, energy-matter), resonance (gan-ying 感應), and sincerity (cheng 誠)—this article suggests that Huainanzian sagely wuwei refers to an act that seemingly straddles a patterned level of reality of distinct forms, on the one hand, and a primordial, chaos-like reality, beyond the bounds of form, on the other. In an effort to grasp, first, how a singular Huainanzian cosmos may present two seemingly structurally antithetical faces, and second, how the sage-ruler’s program may not only embrace, but put to powerful political effect, the paradoxical union of these two “faces,” this paper draws on a heuristic of fractal and Euclidean geometries, simplified from modern mathematics. The article thereby contributes a further representational modality for thinking through Huainanzi’s extensive, multi-faceted political cosmology, joining in discourse a recent swell of research interested in the same.

Environmental taxation is often justified by the ‘double dividend’ hypothesis, yet evidence overwhelmingly derives from high-income countries. In low-income countries (LICs), where broadening the tax base is a central fiscal priority, we identify a special case – the ‘tax base’ double dividend– in which environmental levies simultaneously curb emissions and strengthen revenue capacity. Exploiting Uganda’s 2018 reform of vehicle import duties as a natural experiment, we use administrative microdata covering all motor vehicle imports and a difference-in-differences strategy to assess this proposition. The reform generated substantial revenue gains alongside modest improvements in the emissions profile of imports. Effects varied by vehicle type, highlighting the need for policy tailoring. Drawing on these results, we outline design principles for LICs, emphasising sequencing, enforcement and inter-agency coordination. Uganda’s experience shows that administratively simple, import-based carbon taxes can serve as an effective and politically feasible entry point to carbon pricing while advancing domestic resource mobilisation.

The racial segregation of schools is commonly cited as the foundational injustice of the U.S. education system and an ongoing impediment to educational equality. For liberal experts and reformers, school segregation is defined as a pattern of racially separate schools serving either White students or students of color. This paper argues that this prevailing understanding of the school segregation issue is intellectually inadequate and politically limiting. Drawing on a case study of Chicago’s movement for racial educational justice in the 1960s, I show that this simple framing of the issue initially gained prominence as an alternative to the more radical and contextualized critique of urban school segregation articulated by local Black grassroots activists. In contrast with official liberal discourse and reform proposals, Black urban activists in the early 1960s challenged school segregation as a set of educational policies and practices that render schools both separate and unequal, locking Black students out of more privileged White schools and contributing to the uneven development of schools across the racial divide. By recovering this suppressed grassroots critique of urban school segregation, this paper calls for a broader theorization of contemporary school segregation as dynamic and relational rather than a static statistical pattern that simply compounds the existing concentration of disadvantage within segregated neighborhoods.

To enhance the supervision of regional environmental issues, China initiated a nationwide campaign in 2007 to establish environmental courts and formulate local environmental regulations. This study selected Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2004 to 2021 as its research sample to examine the impact of local environmental legislation and the establishment of environmental courts on corporate carbon emissions. The findings indicate that the combined effect of these measures significantly curbs carbon emissions. Additionally, the study identifies that the intensity of local environmental court establishment and the implementation of corporate pollution charges or environmental protection taxes are critical mechanisms through which environmental legislation and court establishment reduce corporate carbon emissions. Finally, the interaction of environmental legislation and court establishment on corporate carbon emissions is most pronounced in regions where the government exhibits lower environmental concern, in state-owned enterprises, in enterprises located in the eastern region and in highly polluted cities.

Ethnographic methods of all varieties contend with the idea of the “truth” of accounts and the meanings attached to them, as well as the importance of context in mitigating truth or falseness in how these accounts are presented. Discerning truth from lies and the purpose of both in the context of making meaning in a time and place is at the heart of the ethnographic enterprise. Because powerful images or messages evoke emotional reactions on social media or contributory websites like message boards, the relative accuracy of the representations they make is often less important than their reach and the ways they make and remake “reality” for their audiences. A picture or an image, even one attributed to a context or a meaning wholly independent of the context from which it emerged, becomes part of how people online see or experience an event. The context in which information is presented and the speakers or presenters of this information also condition its uptake and resonance. This paper argues that ethnography is uniquely suited to understand the effects and reach of decontextualized information and the ways it makes meaning, both on- and offline.