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Interlocal agreements are becoming a popular policy tool for facilitating intergovernmental coordination and cooperation in Canada and the United States. Indigenous and local governments are also turning to these agreements despite long histories of colonialism, exploitation and dispossession by the settler State toward Indigenous communities. To what extent do interlocal agreements between Indigenous and municipal governments require stringent accountability measures to facilitate intergovernmental coordination? Using a hierarchical Bayesian item response theory model, we explore this question by analyzing 317 interlocal agreements between Indigenous and municipal communities in Canada. We find that accountability strength varies significantly across agreements, contrary to our expectation that accountability requirements would be strong across agreements due to the long history of colonialism. We also find that some of the variation may be a function of the policy area addressed by each agreement, although this finding is likely the result of measurement uncertainty in our estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Canadian Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

Scholars who study centralization and decentralization in Canada usually rely on the distribution of authority and financial/human resources to identify transfers of "power to" and "power over" among different levels of government. We argue that patterns of non‐financial asset ownership are a useful yet frequently overlooked measure of "power to." We demonstrate that Canadian municipal policy responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic were shaped in part by the physical assets owned by municipal and provincial governments. These patterns of non‐financial asset ownership reveal Canadian municipalities to be more important policy actors than typically assumed. A full understanding of the distribution of power within the Canadian federation requires attention to government ownership of physical assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties regularly make promises to the public about what they hope to accomplish if and when they are elected to office. Once in office, the winning party, usually via the executive branch, announces its agenda by delivering a "speech from the throne" or a "state of the union/nation" address in the legislature. To what extent are governments able to fulfill the promises they make in these speeches? To answer this question, we investigate the impact of three structural constraints on promise fulfillment over time—procedural (e.g., majority vs. minority configurations); informational (e.g., new vs. incumbent governments); and economic (economic recession)—using an original dataset drawn from Canadian speeches from the throne between 1962 and 2013. Our findings, which both challenge and confirm the findings of existing literature on promise fulfillment, suggest that only procedural and economic constraints matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many First Nations communities lack access to safe drinking water. In this article, we examine an under‐appreciated tool for improving First Nations water security – governance – and develop a framework for guiding the design and analysis of First Nations water governance models. In particular, we argue that three key ideas from the public administration literature – financial resources, regulation, and formalization – should be integrated with Indigenous insights and philosophies that are specific to each First Nations community. We illustrate how this might work by focusing on the insights, traditions, and philosophies of an Anishinaabek community in southern Ontario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a rich literature on the negotiation and contents of comprehensive land claims agreements, very little has been written on the dynamics of their implementation. This article contributes by sketching out a framework for analyzing the interactions between Indigenous, federal, and provincial/territorial governments in the implementation of modern treaties in Canada. It finds that a useful way for conceptualizing these situations is to focus on two characteristics relating to the treaty provisions and the signatories while remaining sensitive to the effects of time and other contextual factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government policy-making affecting Indigenous communities in Canada has often been met with stiff resistance from Indigenous leadership. We examine multilevel governance as an alternate model for Aboriginal policy-making by examining a particular case study: the process leading up to the 2005 Kelowna Accord. We find that although multilevel governance may have the potential to produce highly desirable outcomes, its emergence seems to depend heavily on political agency. Meaningful and enduring change to Aboriginal policy-making will therefore likely require significant institutional adjustments to the Canadian federation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2001, ten governments in Canada have passed fixed election date legislation. The typical assumption in the literature is that governments did so as a way to address public concerns about the undemocratic nature of calling and timing elections. This argument, however, does not explain the timing (that is, when the legislation was passed by each jurisdiction) of this policy change. We approach this puzzle deductively by applying the theoretical insights of multiple streams theory to the Canadian experiences. Our findings suggest that although all three streams were important, the political stream is crucial for explaining the timing of the legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While academic interest in accountability and transparency mechanisms in Aboriginal governance has risen over the past few years, very few studies have examined how these mechanisms operate in practice. One author, Shin Imai (2007), argues that Indigenous groups in Canada are faced with an accountability paradox that gives too much power to the federal government to intervene in band affairs, while giving too little power to band members to hold their local officials accountable for their actions. This paper examines the extent to which Aboriginal groups can avoid this paradox by reviewing three experiments in institutional design and self-government in Aboriginal communities: the Sechelt Indian Band and the Westbank First Nation in British Columbia, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador. While considerable variation exists in terms of how well these communities overcome Imai's paradox, each community's accountability regime is an improvement over the one imposed by the Indian Act. The effectiveness of these regimes depends heavily on the institutional designs chosen by the Indigenous groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a rich and well-developed literature on Canadian federalism, multilevel governance, and aboriginal-settler relations, scholars have tended to ignore the variety of inter-governmental agreements that have emerged between aboriginal and municipal governments in Canada. This article examines ninety-three such agreements to construct a typology of aboriginal-municipal inter-governmental partnerships in British Columbia. It finds that over time there has been a shift from mundane, service-provision agreements towards more collaborative, cooperative and sometimes decolonizing, horizontal and multilevel governance partnerships. As a result, the authors suggest that scholars study these agreements to further explain and understand the evolution of aboriginal-settler relations and multilevel governance in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Indian Act, aboriginal women in Canada do not have the same equality rights as aboriginal men living on-reserve and non-aboriginal women living off-reserve. The Indian Act's provisions governing the division of matrimonial real property on Canadian Indian reserves have dispossessed many aboriginal women of their property entitlements during and after separation and divorce proceedings. Despite the existence of this problem for the last fifty-five years, the Indian Act has proven highly resistant to reform. A number of First Nations, however, have recently been able to address this issue by developing local matrimonial property laws through the First Nations Land Management Act, a federal piece of legislation that is separate from the Indian Act. Not only have these local laws provided solutions to a policy problem left unaddressed by the federal government, they have also given aboriginal women greater equality rights during and after divorce proceedings while respecting local preferences. This article argues that government and aboriginal policy-makers should consider making greater use of the subsidiarity principle when engaging in reforms to the Indian Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]