Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: On the whole, Canadians tend to be ill-informed about Arabs, their culture, religion, and history. In the minds of many, "Arab" and "Muslim" are interchangeable and synonymous "labels" for North Africans, Southwest
and Southeast Asian peoples, including religious
traditions of Sikhs and Hindus. Misperceptions of
Arabs are evident in the ranges of negative portrayal in popular culture, media productions, and school curriculums. Since September 11th, 2001, misconceptions regarding Arabs have been greatly multiplied in Canada, impacting the lives of Arab Canadians. Today, many Arab Canadians have become the object of suspicion because they are linked to an "Arab" ethnicity. In the public mind, being Arab Canadian is a strange concoction, underscoring a dichotomy: for a person is either a good Canadian or a bad Arab. This paper will investigate what it means to be Arab (and Arab Canadian) in the Canadian milieu in relationship to the common characteristics of Canadian identity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Social and cultural adaptation may be issues of importance to students of Chinese origin in Canada, where both Canadian-born and foreign-born Chinese students often experience many problems of adjustment, including the challenge of cultural difference to a new social context. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to provide an in-depth description of the key factors that contribute to differences in the social experiences of Canadian-born and foreign-born Chinese students, and to disseminate results that could be used by policy makers to enable them to better understand and address the needs, interests, and aspirations of students of Chinese origin in Canada. This study employed a qualitative methodology to uncover and describe the internal meaning of the participants’ lived experiences. This study occurred in a North-western Ontario urban community with a Chinese Canadian population of approximately 300. Three Canadian-born and three foreign-born Chinese students were interviewed in this study. Semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions were adopted in this study to allow the participants to express their views on their lives in Northern Ontario, Canada. Four themes emerged: (a) perceptions of ethnic identity; (b) cultural integration; (c) perceptions of academic performance and (d) the effect of Canadian education on career options. The findings of this study indicated that Canadian-born Chinese students differed from their foreign-born counterparts in the following areas: their viewpoints on ethnic identity; their perceptions concerning acculturation; and academic performance. However, both groups of students also shared similarities in their views about Canadian and Chinese educational systems, teaching styles, as well as their career expectations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Attitudes about sovereignty among Quebec youth are well known, particularly in light of the movement’s appeal to idealistic values and as an affirmation of the Québécois identity. It is assumed that those who support sovereignty must hold some negative opinion about the federalist structure; after all, they do aspire to break away from Canada. But that has not been adequately validated. The paper explores attitudes about federalism by reporting results from a survey of Quebec youth (18 to 34 years old) conducted in early 2006. The paper shows that when asked to indicate federalism’s main disadvantage, respondents provided a wide range of answers with no structured or coherent pattern. The main reason for this attitudinal dispersion is a lack of need to consider attributes of federalism. This explains why the highest level of dispersion is found among: those least attached to Canada, who may regard the Canadian federalism system as remote to their personal lives; francophones, for whom sovereignty is a semi-default position that requires little justification and little thought; and those least exposed to news media, who are least susceptible to any mainstreaming effects.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The way policy is coordinated across jurisdictional boundaries is an important to understand the structure and functioning of multilevel politics both within and beyond the nation state. The extent to which lower-level governments (provinces, communities, member states) coordinate their interests and policies among each other determines their capacity to speak with one voice vis-à-vis the central level. The degree of horizontal policy coordination varies between multilevel systems as much as the repertoire of modes of policy coordination available to and used by lower-level governments, ranging from mere policy-emulation by individual governments up to legally binding and enforceable interstate treaties. In order to account for these variations in intergovernmental policy coordination, this paper develops a theoretical framework that links the literature on comparative federalism with neo-institutional approaches on types of democracy.

We argue that the representation of lower-level government interests at the central level does not necessarily depend on the way functional and territorial interests are balanced in the second chamber of the central legislature. Rather, it is the type and degree of power-sharing inherent in executive-legislative relations of lower-level governments which determines the extent to which they can individually and collectively represent their interests vis-à-vis the central level. The effective representation of territorial interests, in turn, is a necessary albeit not sufficient condition for a broad repertoire of modes of policy coordination. We demonstrate the validity of our argument comparing four multilevel systems, the US, Canada, Switzerland, and the European Union (EU). The comparison reveals that the EU shares more similarities with federal polities than it is often assumed in the literature. It is the US that diverges from the overall pattern most.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Following in the footsteps of its southern neighbour, Canada is now engaged in a war against terrorism. Between the Canadian Forces’ policing missions in Afghanistan and militarized police missions focussed on domestic threats, the official discourse on terrorism has recast risk and responses to terrorism risk in a conventional, popular understanding of military strategy — paradoxically, in the meantime military intelligence and operations have been moving away from this model. The “war on terror” model proposes a vision of reality where a uniform threat may compromise Canadian national security and where public agencies are best equipped to protect Canadians because they are most readily able to adopt and properly develop the military tactics necessary to reduce our vulnerabilities. This model assumes that traditional boundaries between policing and war, law enforcement and security intelligence gathering, domestic and international, are no longer relevant.