Canadian Federalism Uncovered: The Assumed, the Forgotten and the Unexamined in Collaborative Federalism

Abstract

Canadian federalism has experienced pressure for change in recent years. By the end of the twentieth century, collaboration became the catch word and federations throughout the world, including Canada, witnessed an emergent movement toward collaborative governance, collaborative public service delivery, collaborative management and collaborative approaches to addressing social and economic issues. But even if the number of collaborative arrangements has grown since the 1990s, the understanding of the design, management and performance of collaborative arrangements in the Canadian federation remains weak. Accordingly, this dissertation argues that, in order to understand and open the black box of intergovernmental collaboration, it is necessary to put collaboration in a historical context and explore the roles of elites and political institutions in shaping intergovernmental collaborative practices. The role of the former provides the necessary complement of agency, while that of the latter represents a perspective that gives theoretical importance to political institutions. The integration of the two theoretical schools, elite theory and historical institutionalism, into one approach constitutes an attractive solution and offers the tools necessary to explore the complex processes of intergovernmental collaboration. The theoretical framework constructed in this dissertation is then applied to analyze whether the Agreement on Internal Trade, the Social Union Framework Agreement and the Council of the Federation can be considered in reality as examples of collaborative federalism.