Mireille Paquet

The Federalization of Immigration and Integration in Canada

Between 1990 and 2010, a gradual process of institutional change has affected Canadas immigration and integration governance regime. The central characteristic of this process is the emergence of a new legitimate institutional group of actors: Canadian provinces. This change corresponds to a federalization of Canadas immigration and integration governance regime. It is a break from the previous pattern of federal dominance and provincial avoidance. It is not the result of diminished federal intervention in immigration and cannot be explained by exogenous shocks. Current explanations of this evolution focus on federal decisions and have trouble explaining provincial mobilization. Using a mechanistic approach to the analysis of social processes and insights on gradual institutional changes, this article demonstrates that provinces have been the central agents bringing about the federalization of Canadas immigration and integration governance regime between 1990 and 2010. Via a mechanism of province building centred on immigration, provinces have triggered and maintained in movement a decentralizing mechanism. The interactions of these two mechanisms, over time, gave rise to the federalization of immigration and integration in Canada.

Bureaucrats as Immigration Policy-makers: The Case of Subnational Immigration Activism in Canada, 1990–2010

Since the 1990s, subnational governments in Canada have become increasingly active towards immigrant selection and immigration integration. In dialogue with scholarship on immigration policy-making and public administration, this article demonstrates that bureaucrats, acting as policy entrepreneurs, have been instrumental in initiating subnational immigration activism in Canada between 1990 and 2010. By studying immigration policy-making ‘from the ground up’, three types of entrepreneurs are identified based on empirical research in the 10 Canadian provinces: classical entrepreneur, policy puzzler and diagonal innovator. New research questions are generated by the demonstration that subnational immigration politics in Canada is a form of client of mode politics, but where clients are absent and where independent within state actors are the moving forces.

This Is Not a Turn: Canadian Political Science and Social Mechanisms

Mechanism-based explanations are gaining in popularity in the social sciences. Canadian political science has somewhat embraced these debates. Recent work has explicitly identified with mechanismic explanation and, at the same time, there is a point to be made about the compatibility of CPSs cannons with a mechanism-based understanding of causation. In this paper, we survey past and recent work aligned with this ontological approach. We demonstrate a heterogeneous engagement with the methodological literature regarding mechanisms and different understandings as well as uses of mechanisms in political analysis. This survey allows us to argue for the potential of mechanism-based explanations for CPS while also forcing us to advocate for a sober and discerning use of this approach.

Wicked problem definition and gradual institutional change: federalism and immigration in Canada and Australia

Abstract This article examines the impacts of problem definition, defined as a social mechanism, in bringing about gradual institutional change. Focusing on a similar process of gradual institutional change in Canada and Australia, it shows that problem definition is one pathway by which actors’ interests and behaviors are redefined inside an institutional regime. By tracing the process of federalization of Canada and Australia’s immigration regime since the 1990, it demonstrates that problem definition contributed to the rise of subnational governments as legitimate actors in the management of immigration. In these two countries, the specificities of the operation of this mechanism, including the actors mobilized for change, and the content of the policy problem being put forward generated different processes of federalization that nonetheless resulted in inclusive immigration federalism. In dialogue with historical institutionalism, this points to the potential of the mechanismic approach for theory building regarding the consequences of the dynamics of problem definition.