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Most quantitative, comparative welfare state research assumes that subnational welfare regimes are irrelevant or identical to their national counterparts. Many qualitative case studies, on the other hand, have underlined the differences between subnational and national regimes. In this article, we attempt to build bridges between these two strands of literature by examining the case for a Quebec model, that is, a subnational welfare state regime that is distinct from its Canadian counterpart(s). We reviewed seven publications from which we extracted 188 quantitative results relevant to the distinct subnational regime hypothesis. Although not all these results are independent nor based on conclusive evidence, they generally agree that a distinct welfare regime exists in Quebec. We conclude this article by discussing the implications of the Quebec case for the study of welfare regimes at the subnational and regional levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2017, the government of Quebec revisited the seemingly dormant question of Quebec's place in Canada by releasing a Policy on Quebec Affirmation and Canadian Relations. While the policy statement checks off most of the boxes associated with Quebec's traditional positions on federalism, I contend that it fails to diagnose the crux of the obstacles confronting Quebec and therefore it is likely to be reduced to a mere footnote in our ongoing deliberations around Canada's constitutional impasse. Following an examination of the policy statement, the chapter turns to an exploration of the growing gulf between Quebec and its federal partners with regards to the purposes of federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the resistance strategies adopted by French-Canadian traditionalist intellectuals towards the Canadian welfare state project from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. The article traces the political, legal, and media strategies put forward by François-Albert Angers (1909–2003) in his fight against the Canadian federal government. An economist by training, an academic, and an influential leader of Quebec's nationalist networks, Angers notably fought a legal battle with Canada's Department of National Revenue for nearly a decade (1947–57). Through this saga based on the constitutionality of family allowances, the analysis focuses on central themes of traditionalist discourse, not only in relation to issues of federalism and respect for civil rights, but also in relation to the place of Catholicism within Canadian society. This study thus aims to shed light on the ways in which conservative thinkers in Quebec reacted to the advent of a modern, interventionist Canadian state in the aftermath of the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the literature on federalism and public policy, the present article explores the recent politics of two highly-similar and closely integrated Canadian public pension programs created in the mid-1960s: the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP). This article argues that the parallel evolution of CPP/QPP can be understood by examining how the unique jurisdictional arrangements for the CPP/QPP interacted with other factors to generate by these linked programs have led to the emergence of specific federalism policy dynamics, while muting or foreclosing other potential policy dynamics. As shown, governments have engaged in a process of 'collusive benchmarking' that has limited the scope of the available policy options. Differing demographic trends in Quebec and the 'Rest of Canada' have strained but also reinforced this policymaking dynamic in recent years. Simultaneously, intergovernmental race to the top dynamics have facilitated the recent push for both CPP and, later, QPP expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary compares Israel's COVID-10 vaccination response to the much slower and less successful vaccination campaign in Canada. Although Canada did start with some structural disadvantages relative to Israel including less centralized and coherent emergency planning and a more complex demographic geography, there are, nonetheless, some important policy lessons Canada can draw from Israel. These include a more strategic use of national leadership in the vaccination campaign and the greater use of primary care resources and providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that federal systems in Canada and the United States allow for the successful pursuit of sub-federal offensive and defensive priorities in the negotiation of international trade agreements. It is also clear, however, that the coercive American intrastate system limits the relevance of American states in this process, especially when compared to Canada's relatively cooperative interstate model. Canadian provinces and territories also benefit from ideational considerations, including policy expertise and trust-ties with federal negotiators, which further strengthens sub- federal legitimacy and influence in this policy area. This study evaluates the incremental and significant impact of Canadian and American sub-federal governments across a number of sectors on the negotiations and final legal texts of the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement, the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comparative federalist approach, the main objective of this article is to understand how horizontal coordination in federal political systems is likely to materialize. Starting from the notion of ‘shared rule’, the article argues that ‘non-centralization’ may occur in a given policy area when the loss of resources at the constituent unit level is not compensated with an equivalent increase in federal powers. In the meantime, horizontal interdependence as well as vertical independence are facilitated through different incentives. The combination of these two factors leads to horizontal coordination where federal actors come to play a different role. The analytical framework advanced in the article is applied to two different cases, the Canadian inter-provincial trade, and the EU’s economic governance framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The various ways which federalism influences gender policies has recently received a surge of academic interest. This article contributes to this literature by moving beyond formally adopted policies to study the influence of federalism on social learning amongst women's organizations. Using a most-likely case study design, this exploratory work traces the policy positions held by women's organizations in Canada during a seven-year period now known as the Great Pension Debate. Focusing on four empirical indicators of issue attention, participation in policy discussions, specificity of policy proposals, and consensus for reform, the findings suggest that the plurality and temporal proximity of successive policy venues - such as royal commissions and parliamentary committees - created by various governments offered women's organizations an optimum environment to engage in ongoing exchanges leading to the development, and greater specification, of policy positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal bylaws are routinely contested in court on the grounds that they are “ultra vires” or beyond the legal authority of the municipality. Many of these challenges allege that the municipal exercise of power infringes on federal or provincial powers as assigned by ss. 91 and 92 of the British North America Act, 1867. These conflicts have not been systematically studied and we address this lacuna by surveying the reported cases of municipalfederal and municipal-provincial conflicts in the LawSource database of Canadian judgments. Our preliminary finding-that challenges on federal grounds are much more likely to succeed than those on provincial grounds-requires an explanation. After factoring some disparities in the case sets (including a disproportionate number of zoning cases in the provincial context), we argue that the persistent diff erence in win-rates is due to a greater acceptance of municipal autonomy in the provincial context (despite their origins as “creatures of the province,” a number of provincial statutes have granted broad authority to many municipalities) whereas the federal conflicts run more clearly against constitutionally-defined interests. We conclude by considering this asymmetry and its significance for Canadian multi-level governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining multi-level vertical party linkages in Canada’s largest province, this paper makes two primary contributions to the literature. First, drawing on data from a unique survey of constituency associations, the paper focuses on an often unexplored aspect of parties: their local organisations. Second, the paper offers an exploratory analysis of constituency level factors in order to determine which types of constituency associations are the most likely to be integrated. The results of the logistic regression demonstrate the possibility of non-party-based factors such as electoral strength that may contribute to vertical party integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to make three methodological and substantive contributions to the literature on substate cleavages in political values. Considerable controversy characterizes this literature. The paper argues that this controversy is due to how indicators representing political values are chosen and constructed. The paper proposes to use factor analysis to select and construct indicators of political values. The analysis identifies five dimensions, which collectively account for 57% of Canadians’ political values. They include support for moral traditionalism, egalitarianism, pluralism, openness to immigration and personal responsibility. Second, the paper shows that there is only limited variation across provinces in political values. Third, the paper shows that this result holds when considering regional variations rather than provincial variations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article develops the concept of jurisdictional framing: describing a policy field as properly belonging to one particular level of government. It applies this concept to explain how federalism frustrated Canadian attempts to create national assisted reproductive technology policy. Canada's failed policy can be traced to how the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies and the federal government failed to align their substantive framing strategies with the procedural requirements of the Canadian Constitution. Future policy studies should focus on the interaction between substantive and jurisdictional framing, as policy failure can stem from the language used to justify legislative authority in unforeseen ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper compares the public indebtedness of the Canadian provinces and the US states (including a share of the federal debt) over the 2000–2007 period. It presents rankings of the most indebted subnational jurisdictions based on five public debt concepts. Among the provinces, Quebec (with the lowest average rank) and Alberta (with the highest average rank) display the most stable position across the rankings. All other provinces show important fluctuations in their position in the rankings. Hence, allocating the federal debt to subnational states and the specific debt concept being considered significantly influence the rankings, quite spectacularly in some instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federalism is often praised for being able to accommodate diversity within the confines of a single state while preventing secession. Federalism, however, is fraught with tensions and instability. Federalism is typically adopted as a second-best alternative among actors whose first choice is either a more centralized state or a more decentralized state. These preferences persist over time. Instability in federation, then, comes from federal partners pushing in opposite directions at the same time. From this dynamic comes the much-examined propensity for secessionism to develop within federations. Largely unexamined in the literature on federalism, but equally problematic from the standpoint of stability, is the equal and opposite risk of consolidation (or centralization). This article examines sources of federal instability by exploring the origins and evolution of federalism. I use examples from Canada to demonstrate the extent to which my argument is applicable to real world federations. In conducting the exploration, we come to understand how federations can be both unstable and durable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the prospects for US state and Canadian provincial climate policy innovation and diffusion are limited in several respects. Subnational climate leaders tend already to be the cleanest states and provinces, and even they have been strategic in the sectors they regulate and the instruments they employ. In some cases, this selectivity appears to be motivated by opportunities to shift compliance costs to other states. Efforts to pool risks through state and provincial collaboration also are flagging in the wake of the Canadian and US federal governments' failure to adopt nation-wide policies to level the playing field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on policy implementation in Canada and around the world is seeking to address the nexus of the mandates, resources, and cultures of public agencies and their wider institutional and socio-political context. This article examines the implications of the transition in the framing of policy implementation processes from 'administration' to 'governance' by looking at regional economic development policy implementation in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Manitoba since the mid-1980s. These two provinces are part of geographically determined regions classified under Canada's official regional development policy as socioeconomically disadvantaged in relation to the rest of the country. Regional development policy itself has undergone a noticeable shift in policy discourse among public managers over the past decade towards an emphasis on 'promoting innovation' as the rationale for policy intervention. The implications of these transitions suggest that policy implementation or program delivery tasks in complex intergovernmental systems are best viewed as strategic, and not merely operational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paired comparisons of liberal-welfare regimes are underrepresented in housing policy literature. This paper adopts historical institutionalist theory in comparing two such cases: Canada and Australia. Despite these countries’ many similarities, social housing policy differences have been shaped by institutional differences in federal systems, welfare states and social housing itself. Australia's earlier welfare state supported much larger postwar production, but Canada caught up once it departed from the residual US model in the 1960s. Although the 1970s economic shocks challenged Australia's welfare state more than Canada's, the latter's centrifugal federalism became a bigger threat to social housing. In 1985–1995 Australia expanded its social programmes, including demand-side assistance, while Canada devolved and retrenched social programmes, including social housing. Although supply-side social housing is an orphaned legacy in each case, Australia has higher assistance to low-income tenants, more active policy discourse and stronger recent signs of post-neoliberal re-engagement than Canada. These two cases illustrate the importance of institutional differences, including ‘‘institutional design’’, in creating different forces of change at key junctures, leading to divergences in policy paths. These findings suggest value in reinterpreting the existing secondary literature from the perspectives of welfare regime theory and historical institutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Environmental assessment (EA) has long been recognized as one of Canada's most important regulatory tools for protecting the environment while meeting the public's expectations for economic growth. The value of this process resides in its ability to provide useful information to decision-makers in an efficient and effective manner. In Canada, the federal government is responsible for implementing the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act 1995, while provincial governments are responsible for administering their own EA legislation. Importantly, such a multi-tiered approach to regulation can have a major impact on the collective outcomes of the decisions being made. This paper presents the results of a constant comparison of provincial, territorial, and federal Environmental Assessment Acts to clarify the extent to which requirements vary between jurisdictions in Canada. It then discusses these results in the context of the challenges facing multi-jurisdictional regulation of EA in Canada. Our study also demonstrates that constant comparison is an effective method for determining the common ground between the requirements of different environmental legislation, providing a grounded starting point from which strategic discussions on co-ordination between governments might proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian Constitution remained a British statute from 1867 to 1982, a situation that endured even after the country became independent in 1931. As a result, every time Canadians wanted constitutional changes, legislation had to be passed in Westminster. Between 1980 and 1982, following the Quebec referendum on independence, the then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau undertook to change this situation. This meant devising a Canadian amending formula and, most importantly for Trudeau, the inclusion of an entrenched bill of rights in the constitution. Trudeau's initial project was opposed by eight of 10 provinces and this situation proved difficult for the UK. The opposing provinces lobbied British lawmakers in order to convince them to vote against the federal request. That situation eventually forced Ottawa to accept a diluted version of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social policy innovation in Canada remains stunted despite recent attempts at social policy renewal via intergovernmental agreements. The fusion of accountability and policy learning is typically blamed, yet this ignores other potential factors. This article examines the Labour Market Agreements for Persons with Disabilities to highlight impediments to social program expansion and reform within governments as well as between governments, and how the design of recent agreements serves to reinforce those impediments. We find that the linkage of accountability and policy learning means that learning gets caught up in long-standing federal-provincial disputes over jurisdiction, and leads to a perverse form of learning. We also find significant barriers to innovation in the nature of federal government funding, which provides neither incentives for “have provinces” to expand their programming nor sufficient funds for “have not” provinces to successfully transform their programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]