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Addresses some of the frustration felt by Canada's indigenous Indian population regarding the lack of attention afforded them in recent federal elections. Discusses Indian reaction to the Canadian Government's White Paper on Aboriginal peoples. Canadian natives felt this document actually represented a step backward in their struggle for equality. (MJP)

This article contributes to the emerging literature on election campaign strategies by studying the strategy adopted by the Liberal government in the 2000 Canadian federal election. Two questions are addressed: Why did the Liberal government choose in that election to focus its campaign on health care in spite of its poor record with regard to this issue? And, even more surprisingly, how did the Liberals manage to win this election and get a parliamentary majority using such a seemingly counterintuitive strategy? This case study suggests that an incumbent with a bad record on an important issue not only can redirect voters' attention toward other topics but can also define the debate about that issue in a more advantageous way. These ideas are tested with qualitative and quantitative data from the 2000 Canadian election. Content analysis of party campaign material and media coverage demonstrates how the incumbent Liberals successfully framed the debate about the health care issue so as to undermine the credibility of the official opposition. Statistical analyses of individual vote choice show that the Liberal campaign strategy had a significant impact on the election outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the degree to which the relative growth of suburban electoral districts in Canada's largest urban regions (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver) has lead to a loss of potential political influence within government on behalf of Canadian inner cities and/or to more support for fight-wing political parties. The study finds that although inner cities and suburbs have increasingly diverged in their voting behavior in both federal and provincial elections, the growth of suburban electoral districts has not directly translated into a loss of representation and influence for inner cities. Instead, representation and influence within government are highly dependent upon the party that is in power. At the federal level, the dominance of the Liberal Party has meant that inner cities have tended to wield greater, and the suburbs less, influence, whereas at the level of Ontario provincial politics, the suburbs have indeed been overrepresented and found to wield greater influence within government to the detriment of the inner cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]