Student Research -Department of Political Science
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/124856
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Open Access Satisfaction with Democracy in Canada During the COVID-19 Pandemic(2024) Wood-MacLean, Bradley D.Across the nation, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated selfless citizen sacrifices, including a willingness to comply with civil rights violations to “flatten the curve.” Despite most people being willing to pull together, there was vocal opposition to what some perceived as flagrant government overreach. While salient issues often become polarizing, the resulting divisiveness in satisfaction with democracy reached an arguably all-time high in dramaticism during the pandemic. Emboldened citizens paraded swastika-ridden flags on Parliament Hill, claiming the government was undermining their democratic freedoms, yet at the same time, others counter-protested them, casting them as radicals. Here, I evaluate how satisfaction with democracy was affected during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. This paper employs a series of regression analyses, combining traditional individual-level rolling survey data taken throughout the pandemic with a “stringency index” of government-imposed restrictions and epidemiological data to investigate the effect of government policy and the pandemic itself on satisfaction with democracy in Canada. The analysis yields two important findings. First, the stringency of government-imposed restrictions has a negative relationship with satisfaction with democracy, but this effect dissipates as respondents increase in concern about the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the standard effects on Canadian public opinion persisted, for instance; Liberal partisans were more satisfied with democracy than their non-Liberal counterparts, and Albertans responded more negatively to restrictions than the rest of the country.Item Open Access The Desuetude of the Notwithstanding Clause—Fact or Fiction?(2022-08) Buck, CharlesThis major research paper investigates whether Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is conventionally usable at the federal level. After 40 years of nonuse by Parliament, this ‘notwithstanding’ clause may be entering a state of constitutional desuetude. This occurs when a constitutional provision’s animating quality abates as a consequence of its long-standing, conscientious nonuse and repudiation by political actors. To test this claim, this project draws from a suite of qualitative and quantitative evidence. Analyzing Hansard, public opinion polls, leadership debates, autobiographies, Supreme Court decisions, and the secondary law and politics literature, I find that Section 33 is not constrained by desuetude. Its national use, therefore, is legally and politically legitimate.