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During the twentieth century, as Canadian voters began to associate the brand of their major political parties with the characteristics of their leaders, the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership races evolved into events of national importance. This study examines this transformation through the 1948, 1958 and 1968 leadership conventions. It incorporates perspectives from inside the Liberal Party as well as the Canadian media’s portrayals of the conventions. This thesis explores the alternating pattern of anglophone and francophone Party leaders, the complications associated with the predictability of the outcome, the evolution of convention tactics to recruit delegate support, Party (dis)unity throughout the contests, and the political science theories that deconstruct the conventions and predict outcomes. It also details how, over time, the political ambitions of senior-ranking members trumped the interests the Liberal Party.

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between geopolitics and the emergence of a "nationalizing Canadian state" at the beginning of the twentieth century. Previous constitutional approaches and economic accounts are not sufficient to explain the emergence of a nationalizing Canadian state. All of these have been insightful, but like economic accounts of nationalism they ignore the larger realm of geopolitics. The literature on state formation has demonstrated that many factors stimulate state formation, but perhaps no other is as important as geopolitics. Geopolitics is concerned with diplomacy, arms, and territory. Such things are seldom discussed when writing about Canada. Canadians dislike being perceived as a military people. Yet geopolitical events have been central to the development of a distinct nationalizing Canadian state. During this period Canadian state elites took steps to gain further control of diplomacy, develop the military arm of the state so as to protect its sovereignty, and consolidate its territory. Additionally, all of these developments increased the scope of the state's functions. Moreover, under the leadership of Prime minister Wilfrid Laurier, the liberal nature of its regime meant that the national identity that began to develop had strong leanings towards civic nationalism. This thesis will attempt to integrate a sociological theory of nation-state building with the already established literature on the geopolitical relations between Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. Through the application of historical sociology, it illustrates the validity of exploring Canadian nation and state building in a geopolitical context and adds to the literature on state formation.

In this study, I undertake a discourse analysis of struggles over representation as they were manifested in the Charlottetown referendum campaign. I utilize transcripts taken during the campaign derived from the CBC news programs The National, The Journal, and Sunday Report as well as from The CTV News. The issue of (im-)partiality provides the analytical focus for this study. Who can legitimately speak on behalf of whom, or, to what extent do individuals have a particular voice which places limitations on whom they can represent? On the one hand, underlying what I call the ‘universalistic’ discourse is the premise that human beings can act in an impartial manner so that all individuals have the capacity to speak or act in the interests of all other individuals regardless of the group(s) to which they belong. On the other hand, a competing discourse based on group-difference’ maintains that all representatives express partial voices depending on their group-based characteristics. I argue that the universalistic discourse was hegemonic in the transcripts but, at the same time, the group-difference discourse was successful at articulating powerful counter-hegemonic resistance. Ironically, the universalistic discourse was hegemonic despite widespread assumptions of partiality on the basis of province, region, language, and Aboriginality. This was possible because the universalistic discourse subsumed territorial notions of partiality within itself. In contrast, I argue that assumptions of Aboriginal partiality will likely diffuse themselves to other categories, beginning with gender, in the future. I also describe the strategies used by the competing discourses to undermine one another. The universalistic discourse successfully portrayed the group-difference discourse as an inversion to a dangerous apartheid-style society where individuals were forced to exist within group-based categories. The group-difference discourse used the strategy of anomaly to demonstrate that individuals were inevitably categorized in the universalistic discourse; impartiality was a facade for a highly-partial ruling class. In examining these strategies, I demonstrate that the group-difference discourse justified its own position by making assumptions about the operation of power and dominance in society. Thus, impartiality was impossible not for the post-modern reason that inherent differences make representation highly problematic, but because power relations hinder the ability of representatives to act in a truly impartial manner.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the politics of separatism in multinational federations. Switzerland, Canada, and India are investigated in detail. Switzerland is a multinational federation that has not experienced a separatist movement for more than one hundred and fifty years. In Canada, there is a significant separatist movement in the province of Quebec. India has experienced a number of violent secessionist crises in a number of states over the past two decades. The cases thus exhibit a range in the dependent variable (presence or absence of secessionist movements). This study adopts a legal-institutional approach to the problem of secession in multinational federations. This approach marries the classical understanding of federalism as a system of government with divided sovereignty to the more recent state-society and new institutional approaches in political science. Federalism is operationalized around three core institutions: constitutions, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and party systems. These three institutions are situated as the independent variables in the study. The dissertation argues that the institutional structure of federalism is a critical determinant of stability or instability (the presence or absence of secessionism) in multinational federations.

This thesis marks the first attempt to systematically study Canadian minor parties. Minor parties, as distinct from third parties, are those that acquire less than 5 percent of the national vote (usually much less than one percent) and have never sent an MP to Ottawa. We know little about parties as a group except that their numbers have steadily proliferated over the last 20 years and that this growth shows no signs of abating. The goal of this paper is fill the knowledge gap surrounding minor parties and to assess the health of electoral democracy in Canada. Specifically, nine minor parties are studied through the experiences of their candidates during the 1993 federal election. The findings presented are based on data collected from government sources and on surveys and interviews administered to a sample of minor party candidates who ran in the greater Vancouver area. The dissemination of political beliefs not represented in mainstream politics was the dominant reason candidates gave for participating in elections. Winning is a long term ambition, but not expected in the short run for the majority of parties. Despite their modest aims, minor parties and candidates are unduly fettered in their ability to effectively compete in elections and communicate with the public. Minor party campaigns typically have scant political resources, including money, time and workers; electoral laws — concerning registration thresholds, broadcasting time allotments and campaign reimbursements — designed to promote fairness, disadvantage the system's weakest players; and subtle biases on the part of the press, debate organizers and potential donors close important channels of communication. Of these factors, money emerged as the most important, with media exposure — or the lack of it — a close second in terms of determining a party's competitiveness. The National Party, with superior resources, was often an exception to the above characterization, but ultimately, media neglect sealed its fate as a marginal party. Notwithstanding the great odds facing minor parties, winning is not impossible given the right alignment of factors. The Reform Party did it in 1993, providing other small parties with hope and an example to follow.

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This paper examines events surrounding Canada's negotiations on the question of recognizing the People's Republic of China in 1949 and 1950, and the reasons why the negotiations failed. The focus is on the work of officials in the Canadian Embassy in Nanking and External Affairs in Ottawa, particularly External Affairs Minster Lester B. Pearson. Both Nanking and External Affairs, Ottawa, strove to promote recognition, which was approved in principal by the Canadian government but never actualized. Pearson and his department, spurred by Canadian officials on the ground in China, chiefly Ambassador T. C. Davis and his second-in-command, China specialist Chester Ronning, favoured early recognition, as a means of influencing the Communist government away from total dependence on the Soviet Union. The Canadian government weighed the desirability of recognition against what it saw as the necessity of solidarity of the North Atlantic alliance with the United Kingdom and the United States, in particular, against what they perceived as the machinations of the Soviet Union in its perceived drive for world domination. In the final analysis the Canadian government, fearful of alienating the United States, opted for solidarity of the Western Alliance on the recognition question. The focus of the essay, based in large measure on External Affairs documents and the Pearson Papers, is to look at the recognition question and how it played out, in Canadian domestic terms, rather than in terms of Great Power relationships, which is largely the preoccupation in the historiography. A brief window of opportunity occurred in late 1949 and early 1950, when Canada might have recognized without potentially serious repercussions on Canada-US relations. That moment passed quickly and the outbreak of the Korean War and China's entry in the conflict against UN forces, essentially destroyed any opportunity for Canada and Communist China to develop normal relations.

This thesis is an examination of a moral, cultural and political movement referred to as the New Right. Its specific focus is on three Canadian right-wing organizations, each of which exhibits particular characteristics while at the same time sharing the basic ideological assumptions of the others. These organizations and their particular characteristics are: i) the prolife/profamily REAL Women of Canada and moral conservatism, ii) the anti-bilingualism and anti-Charter Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada (APEC) and cultural conservatism, and iii) what was arguably the dominant New Right organization during its time — and as I show, among the weaker links in the New Right chain — the Reform Party of Canada and conservative populism. Though Reform was a relatively successful federal political party and the other two are pressure groups, the members in each nevertheless conceive of their respective organizations as vehicles for the authentic views of "the people." In other words, of these organizations see themselves as the true representatives of the majprity of citizens in English-speaking Canada who, they allege, have been deliberately denied political influence commensurate with their numbers since the era of left-leaning, "special interest" politics, policies and moral-cultural values took hold beginning in the late 1960s. By analyzing the New Right phenomenon in general and the three Canadian groups in particular, this project seeks to a) understand the ideological perspective of the movement; b) assess whatever tension, be it normative, policy-driven or strategic, existed between the groups examined herein; and c) determine whether or not such tension was indicative of a fundamental wealkness in the Canadian New Right. I also draw upon three basic questions to frame the analysis presented herein: 1. Is the Canadian New Right ideologically coherent? 2. What explains the New Right's relative lack of success in Canadian politics? 3. Is there a future for the New Right in Canadian politics? I keep these questions in mind throughout the thesis and reconsider them specifically in the concluding chapter.

Although Ronald Inglehart's New Politics theory has attracted criticism, its influential distinction between materialist and postmaterialist values tends to go unquestioned. The influence of this distinction is particularly apparent when analysts interpret the "new" social movement emphasis on esteem and belonging as a "postmaterialist" departure from a traditional, or "materialist" focus on security. This way of understanding contemporary feminist and ethnocultural-minority movements is misleading because it rests on a onedimensional view of esteem and belonging. By treating esteem and belonging as expressive, which is to say as purely aesthetic or psychological goods, New Politics obscures the instrumental significance of esteem and belonging for movements that represent traditionally, marginalized constituencies. This work undertakes a qualitative study of the participation of national socialmovement organizations, "old" and "new," in Canadian constitutional politics. The analysis is based on these actors' presentations to parliamentary hearings and royal commissions on major constitution-related issues between the years 1938 and 1992. Above all, the study illustrates what New Politics theory neglects: the instrumental role of social esteem and civic belonging as bases of voice and self-defence. I argue that attending to this role can help analysts to understand better the postwar politics of recognition. The work develops this argument in three major ways. First, I demonstrate the instrumental importance of esteem and belonging for the mid-century traditional left. Second, I show that problems of misrecognition and disesteem presented feminists and ethnocultural minorities with severe difficulties in garnering a meaningful hearing for their security needs. Third, I analyze the discursive ways in which postwar "new" movement participants came to pursue forms of respect that had proved elusive in the past. The work's overall conclusion is this: the material nature of the politics of recognition is demonstrated by the extent to which increased esteem and belonging for traditionally disrespected groups has been paralleled by an expanded menu of recognized security concerns. The study's major message follows from this conclusion: because struggles over esteem and belonging have crucial material stakes, they should not be contrasted a priori with struggles that may appear to target questions of security more directly.