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Channeling theory posits that external funding for social movements, rather than coopting activism, channels activism into more structured and less militants forms. Studies on channeling, however, focus on private funding. The following article examines whether public funding has a comparable effect on social movements. Using the human rights movement in Canada as a case study, it examines several issues relating to channeling: why funders support activism; funding as social control or altruism; how funding is related to consolidating movement gains; and the impact of funding on mobilization, activism, and internal movement dynamics. To address these questions, this article draws on an innovative new data set that includes lists of grants extracted from more than 30 years of government budgets in Canada. It also draws on several years of archival research on a network of 19 organizations in every region of Canada, as well as interviews with former members of these organizations. In addition to demonstrating that public funding has a comparable channeling effect as private funding, this article provides the first comprehensive survey of the extent of state funding for the human rights movement in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries around the world have adopted neoliberal or austerity policies. Among states that fund organizations, this may have a detrimental effect on civil society. Looking at the Canadian context, this article examines whether subnational governments, provinces, step in during times of national budget cuts and changing political environments to fund organizations. We do this by analyzing the effect of critical events, regime changes, and the founding of key organizations on state funding in the province of Nova Scotia between 1960 and 2014. We do this to examine how the interaction of national and subnational political context shapes subnational funding of organizations. We find that critical events appear to be linked to increases in provincial funding, however, do not appear to be linked to cuts in funding. Regime changes and founding of key organizations have less clear-cut relationships with provincial funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Images of collective action shape public understanding of social movement campaigns and issues. Modern media includes more images than ever before, and these images are remembered longer and are more likely to elicit emotional responses than are textual accounts. Yet when it comes to media coverage of collective action, existing research considers only the written accounts. This means that little is known about the extent to which images of collective action events conform to or diverge from the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of reporting found in articles that tends to marginalize protesters and legitimizes authorities. The authors address this gap by analyzing newspaper photographs of one of the most significant recent cases of Indigenous-state conflict in North America—the 1990 “Oka Crisis.” This 78-day armed standoff between Indigenous peoples and Quebecois and Canadian authorities was sparked by the attempted expansion of a golf course onto Mohawk territory. The mass media produced thousands of articles and photographs in their coverage of the event. This article uses these photographs to assess the manner in which images frame collective action and collective actors. The authors find that images of collective action frame these events differently and in a more nuanced way than do textual accounts. For example, while challengers are just as likely to be shown in images of collective action, they are less likely to be specifically named. In addition, officials are more likely to be shown in dominant positions, but certain groups of officials (particularly government representatives) are also the most likely to be shown as emotional and angry. These findings illustrate the sometimes conflicting messages depicted in images of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Canada, women's rights organizations have successfully mobilized the law to foster gender equality. In doing so, they have been constrained by legal understandings of equality and discrimination, which have shaped their strategies to seek justice. In return, their mobilization, mainly through litigation, has contributed to craft or to alter legal categories (such as "substantive equality," "women," "sexual harassment," etc.), which in turn sustain their identities and their interests. However, claims made in the name of gender equality raise two issues: They tend to overlook the intersection of gender with other grounds of discrimination such as religion or race/ethnicity; and they tend to conflict with multiculturalism, a value enshrined in Canadian law. The recent decision taken by the province of Ontario to ban religious arbitration for family matters offers an illuminating case study of this tension between gender equality and religious rights in the Canadian context. This article analyzes women's rights activists' legal understandings of gender equality and religious/ethnic discrimination to explain how these representations have influenced women's mobilization against religious arbitration in Ontario. Bringing together the insights developed by critical legal studies about intersectionality and the study of legal mobilization, this articles explores through a concrete example the tension between feminism and multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous peoples in both Canada and the United States have engaged in numerous protests. Nevertheless, although these protests led to an ongoing national social movement in the United States, this has not been the case in Canada. This article draws on the sociological literature of social movements to explain this difference. Both cases have some key factors necessary for the formation of national social movements. These common factors include making purposeful political challenges and using noninstitutional tactics of protest. However, other necessary factors—strong leadership by social movement organizations, well-developed political networks, and the development of a strong national collective identity—are much weaker in Canada than they are in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before 1968, there was more diversity and more frequency of Native-directed social change in institutions, social movements, and religious movements in the United States than in Canada. When Canadian and U.S. nation-states exert direct administrative controls over Native communities and impose change, there are few options for self-directed change. Since 1968, Native nations in both countries enjoy greater possibilities for self-directed change, although the patterns are uneven and moving in somewhat different directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]