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Existing studies of policy diffusion rely on quantitative or qualitative methods depending on the number of cases and the policy at hand. Studies of diffusion in Canada, for instance, almost exclusively use qualitative techniques due to the limited number of subnational units. In this article, we explore whether machine learning techniques can complement qualitative approaches in these contexts. In 2015, the Canadian federal government decided to impose the legalization of cannabis and gave the provinces and territories a short time frame to develop and implement legislation. Previous qualitative research on this case found that within-province policy development was more salient than interprovincial diffusion. Using a plagiarism detection software, we find limited evidence of exact matches between provincial legislation, but a cosine score approach reveals significant similarities across provinces. These results suggest that computational and qualitative techniques together should be used where possible to identify and analyze policy diffusion in certain contexts. [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]

The Province of Alberta seems an unlikely early advocate of multiculturalism; yet, several months before the federal government unveiled its official policy on this issue, it was an Alberta premier, Harry Strom, who demanded that multiculturalism be a condition for constitutional reform during the 1971 Victoria Constitutional Conference. What explains this puzzle? Using William Riker's concept of heresthetics and the literature on Alberta politics, Western alienation, and Canadian federalism, the authors argue that Strom introduced multiculturalism at the conference as a strategic manoeuvre to bolster and defend Alberta's compact perspective on federalism and to block any constitutional change that would prevent Alberta from recognizing itself as an equal and autonomous partner in the Canadian federation. The authors' findings suggest that Riker's concept of heresthetics may be useful for analyzing other instances of intergovernmental relations in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past fifty years, Indigenous peoples in settler countries have mobilized to demand policy and institutional changes from their respective states. Although some scholars have employed multilevel governance (MLG) to make sense of these developments, none has examined systematically whether MLG accurately describes these phenomena. We address this lacuna by creating a more robust definition of MLG and applying it to a sample of Indigenous–settler interactions in Canada. Our findings suggest that MLG is an applicable concept for some, but not for all of the Indigenous–state interactions that are typically assumed to be instances of MLG. This conceptual clarification should help scholars from a variety of countries to use MLG more effectively to analyze the relationships between Indigenous peoples and their respective states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Official participation in Canadian First Ministers' Conferences has long been exclusive to federal and provincial first ministers. In March 1992, however, the membership of this intergovernmental arena was expanded permanently to include territorial premiers. Using the tools of historical institutionalism and drawing upon relevant literature and eleven elite interviews with former first ministers and senior civil servants, this paper seeks to explain why this instance of incremental institutional change occurred. It finds that significant friction between the institutional and ideational layers of the Canadian federation during a period of mega-constitutional reform allowed federal, provincial and territorial actors to draw upon ideas about democracy and the political and constitutional maturation of the territorial North to expand permanently the membership of First Ministers' Conferences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]