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Copyright of Canadian Public Policy is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In-depth interviews with government officials are a critical research method for the study of government. Historical and institutional factors, and particularly the informal internal dynamics that influence policy, require a depth of understanding that is often best investigated through such interview methods. At the federal level in Canada we see many trends that point to the increasing centralization and control of government information. There has been political interference in Access to Information Requests; the outcomes of scientific research have been suppressed; and media access to politicians has become highly constrained. This led us to ask whether tightening controls on information have also affected access to research interviews with government officials. This paper explores this issue by interviewing both academics and public servants in the Canadian federal government. We ask is there evidence of a tightening grip on access to governmental research interviews and, if so, is this affecting how and what we research? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Canadian Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Republicanism has emerged as an important school of thought in political theory and has exerted a strong influence on Anglo-American legal scholarship. Republicanism has, however, been largely absent from Canadian constitutional law scholarship and this absence is particularly noticeable in the legal literature on federalism. In this article, I intend to show that a particular version of republicanism, which stresses the norm of non-domination, provides a promising normative framework for analysing the multinational elements of Canadian federalism. The argument seeks to achieve two main goals. First, it aims to build on Philip Pettit's suggestive analyses of minority rights and federalism in order to arrive at a robust republican conception of multinational federations. Second, the argument aims to demonstrate that republican theory can benefit from a close contextual analysis of a particular set of political institutions and that Pettit's version of republicanism is amenable to this kind of attention to context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada, advocates of universal child-care often point to policies implemented in Quebec as providing a model for early education and care policies in other provinces. While these policies have proven to be highly popular among citizens, initial evaluations of access to these programs indicated they led to a multitude of undesirable child developmental, health, and family outcomes. These research findings ignited substantial controversy and criticism. In this study, we show the robustness of the initial analyses to 1) concerns over whether negative outcomes would vanish over time as suppliers gained experience providing child-care; 2)concerns regarding multiple testing; and 3) concerns that the original estimates measured the causal impact of child-care availability and not child-care attendance. A notable exception is that despite estimated effects stemming from the policy indicating declines in motor-social development scores in Quebec relative to the rest of Canada, our analyses imply that on average attending child-care in Canada leads to a significant increase in this test score. However, our analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity in program impacts that occur in response to the Quebec policies and indicates that most of the negative impacts reported in earlier research are driven by children from families who only attended child-care in response to the implementation of this policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Public Policy is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)