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Globalization is widely believed to have restricted the freedom of policy makers - many fear that the forces of a global economy prevent different political parties from making substantially distinctive policy choices. InPartisanship, Globalization, and Canadian Labour Market Policy, Rodney Haddow and Thomas Klassen explore this contentious issue by comparing labour market policy in Canada's most populous provinces, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta, between 1990 and 2003. Using the most up-to-date theoretical approaches available, Haddow and Klassen examine industrial relations, workers' compensation, occupational health, employment standards, training, and social assistance, measuring the impact of partisanship and globalization on policy-making in these areas. They situate Canada in relation to recent international scholarship on the comparative political economy of developed democracies, and explore the role that institutions play in conditioning labour market policy. Partisanship, Globalization, and Canadian Labour Market Policywill not only be of interest to experts working in the field of labour market policy, but also to students and teachers of comparative political economy, partisanship, and governance in Canada.

Summary We examine the relationship between union power and redistribution in Canada’s ten provinces between 1986 and 2014. Subnational jurisdictions are thus the focus of research questions that have previously been addressed at the international level. Multilevel models with time-series cross-sectional data are used to estimate the long-term association between union density and redistribution through provincial transfer payments and income taxes. We found that higher union density correlates with considerably more redistribution over the long term but not over the short term. This finding is confirmed by three distinct measures of inequality and poverty reduction, an indication that it is quite robust. The association is significant for the entire study period and for its second half. This finding is consistent with power resource theory in its original form, but not with more recent work in that area or with comparative political economy scholarship, which generally now neglects or downplays the impact of organized labour on social and economic policy outcomes. Our findings suggest a need to re-assess the diminished interest of recent researchers in the political influence of organized labour. It will also interest scholars in other countries where tax and transfer systems are decentralized, and where the impact of organized labour on such measures has been understudied at the subnational level. Additionally, we show that unionized voters in Canada are more favourably disposed than their non-unionized counterparts toward redistribution and toward pro-redistribution political parties. Unions may consequently affect redistribution in part by socializing their members to favour it. This possibility is advanced with preliminary data in this paper. We argue that further scholarly attention is both required and deserved on this subject in Canada and elsewhere.

This article seeks to measure and explain interprovincial differences in inequality and poverty reduction since the 1980s for non-elderly Canadian families. These variations are compared with dissimilarities among the advanced capitalist welfare states, where they are large. Interprovincial discrepancies are shown to be ample by this international standard. The article also finds that power resources theory, which draws attention to the role of union strength and partisan incumbency in explaining welfare state variations, accounts for an important part of these interprovincial differences. These findings suggest that sub-national jurisdictions can be more consequential for welfare state outcomes than comparative research has acknowledged, and that power resources accounts deserve more attention in Canadian social policy scholarship. Cet article cherche à mesurer et à expliquer les différences interprovinciales en matière d'inégalités et de réduction de la pauvreté chez les familles canadiennes depuis les années 1980. Comparées avec celles existant entre certains pays membres de l'OCDE, ces différences apparaissent fort importantes. Cet article conclue également que la théorie des ressources de pouvoir, qui insiste sur le rôle des partis politiques et des syndicats, est en mesure d'expliquer dans une large mesure ces différences interprovinciales. De tels résultats démontrent donc que les juridictions sous-nationales peuvent être plus conséquentes en matière sociale que la littérature en politique comparée ne le suggère habituellement, et que la théorie des ressources de pouvoir mérite plus d'attention dans l'étude des politiques sociales au Canada.

This article evaluates the impact of partisanship, globalization and postindustrialism on provincial revenues since 1980. It is often argued that the first of these no longer has an effect, while the second and third erode fiscal capacity. These arguments are assessed with multilevel models, hitherto little used for macro-level estimations in political science. This approach is particularly suited to testing these influences. The study finds that partisanship is, in fact, strongly associated with provincial revenues. Globalization and postindustrialism have a more muted effect, though alternative estimations support somewhat different conclusions regarding the former. The social preconditions of partisanship's impact, moreover, deserve more attention. Cet article évalue l'impact de l'esprit de parti, de la mondialisation et de la désindustrialisation sur les revenus provinciaux depuis 1980. Parmi ces facteurs, la littérature suggère que le premier n'a plus d'effet, alors que les deuxième et troisième minent la capacité fiscale des États. Ces arguments sont examinés à l'aide de modèles multi-niveaux, une approche particulièrement bien adaptée à l’étude de ces facteurs, bien que traditionnellement peu utilisée dans les estimations de données de niveau macro en science politique. L'étude conclut, d'une part, que l'esprit de parti et les revenus provinciaux sont fortement associés. D'autre part, l'article démontre que la mondialisation et la désindustrialisation ont un effet moindre, bien que d'autres estimations fournissent un portrait plus nuancé concernant l'impact de la mondialisation. Enfin, les conditions sociales déterminant l'effet l'esprit de parti méritent une plus grande attention de la part des chercheurs.

Globalization is widely believed to have restricted the freedom of policy makers ? many fear that the forces of a global economy prevent different political parties from making substantially distinctive policy choices. In Partisanship, Globalization, and Canadian Labour Market Policy, Rodney Haddow and Thomas Klassen explore this contentious issue by comparing labour market policy in Canada?s most populous provinces, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta, between 1990 and 2003.Using the most up-to-date theoretical approaches available, Haddow and Klassen examine industrial relations, workers? compensation, occupational health, employment standards, training, and social assistance, measuring the impact of partisanship and globalization on policy-making in these areas. They situate Canada in relation to recent international scholarship on the comparative political economy of developed democracies, and explore the role that institutions play in conditioning labour market policy.Partisanship, Globalization, and Canadian Labour Market Policy will not only be of interest to experts working in the field of labour market policy, but also to students and teachers of comparative political economy, partisanship, and governance in Canada.

Since the mid-1960s, the guaranteed annual income (GAI) has frequently been discussed as a possible solution to the problem of poverty in North America. Its salience in contemporary Canadian debates reflects both continuities and discontinuities with existing social policy. Selective social security measures (targeted at the least advantaged citizens) have always been more important in Canada’s welfare state than in those of much of western Europe.¹ The GAI, a selective policy, reflected this heritage. But the Canadian welfare state nevertheless developed a number of universal and contributory programmes during and after the Second World War, although these remained modest by

This volume is the first sustained attempt to describe, analyze, and assess the \"comparative turn\" in Canadian political science.

Canada has had less experience than most developed nations with efforts to deepen democratic accountability through formal state-society links in policy-making and implementation. Nevertheless, experiments with such mechanisms have become more common since the early 1990s. This article examines these and assesses their future prospects. Reforms have either been corporatist, implying a careful balancing of business and labour interests in arrangements that mirror those created in some Western European nations; or associational, smaller in scale and more flexible in design. The impediments to successful corporatist initiatives are substantial in Canada; they are rooted in the country’s Westminister style of parliamentarism and in a societal setting where class organizations are fragmented and organized labour relatively weak. Consequently, there has been a trend towards associational reforms in recent years, or towards corporatist initiatives that are modest in scale. With the partial exception of Quebec, only efforts of this type have had much chance of success. While even smaller scale initiatives often fail, the article argues that they address important “compatibility problems” encountered by governments in Canada today. Consequently, we are likely to see more of them in the future.