Abstract: "A New National Policy? Energy Policy Under the Harper Conservatives Over the past decade a picture of the Conservative government’s industrial strategy has emerged. While exhibiting a strong commitment to market principles, the Harper Conservatives have favoured one sector of the economy – energy – over others. The federal government has crafted an economic/ industrial strategy which focusses on Canada’s oil and gas and electricity sectors. Various proposals range from pipelines to liquified natural gas terminals to a trans-Canada electricity grid. On a political level this new national policy is very different from its predecessors. While the federal government has an important regulatory presence, it has been relegated to a secondary role in the organization and implementation of the policies which form this new industrial strategy for Canada. The emerging energy policy is led by the provinces and the private sector. While it fits the pattern of state-led development in Canada from the 1870s to the present, it is very different from its predecessors. What distinguishes this current set of diverse and uncoordinated policies from earlier national development strategies, is the unwillingness of the national government to intervene in the market to promote the national interest. With a national government unwilling to engage in direct intervention in the energy sector, the policy vacuum has been filled by the provinces and private sector who are eager to exploit the substantial reserves of Canadian oil, natural gas, coal, and electricity."

Paper / Communication

Abstract: This paper examines new trends in lobbying by the Canadian oil sector through a detailed examination of two case studies. The first is the campaign by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to promote the Alberta oilsands in general. The second is the campaign by the TransCanada Corporation to promote the Energy East pipeline in Quebec. The paper argues that lobbying in the Canadian oil sector has become increasingly sophisticated and now employs a number of the strategy and communications techniques normally associated with election campaigns. To demonstrate this point, the paper provides a detailed empirical account of each case, and the specific techniques used, by drawing on primary documents and media reports. To explain these developments, the paper adopts the lens of political marketing theory and argues that the same forces driving changes to election campaigning in Canada are also driving changes in the nature of lobbying.

Abstract: The 2015 federal election campaign has revealed deep disagreement regarding the relative capabilities of major political parties in managing the Canadian economy. Stephen Harper has stood behind the Conservative Party’s successful record in guiding the economy, Justin Trudeau has stressed the Liberal Party’s history of fiscal restraint and balanced budgets under Minister of Finance Paul Martin, and Thomas Mulcair has made the claim that New Democratic governments have been the most successful at the provincial level in terms of producing balanced budgets. Each federal political party has a distinctly different approach to economic policy based on their own political ideology. Each has made the case that history supports their claim that their respective party will make the best economic steward. But the reality is that in Canada, most economy-related policies are determined at the provincial level. If political stance is to have an important influence on economic outcomes, then the political affiliation of provincial governments should be at least as important as their federal counterparts. This paper will explore the role of political ideology for Canadian economic outcomes. We do this by analysing the relationship between political ideology and economic performance across the ten Canadian provinces. Anecdotally, right-wing parties tend to benefit the most from economic voting across a number of countries (Whitten and Palmer 1999), though research regarding the connection between ideology and economic outcomes is inconclusive. Some papers (e.g. Bjà¸rnskov 2005) have explored the connection between ideology and economic growth at a cross-national level, and have found some evidence that right-wing governments have better records in terms of economic growth, but there has been no major study to assess how changes in political ideology have affected growth over time, particularly at the subnational level in Canada. The difficulty in assessing the role of political ideology in determining economic outcomes is that there is no clear relationship between party and ideology at the Canadian provincial level. Each provincial government in power at a particular time period has to be assessed based on its composition, and its policy decisions. In this paper we will resolve this difficulty by a direct measure of ideology based on the personnel and the historical record of provincial government decisions. We measure political ideology with the Word Fish software, using major documents laying out the position of the government; for example, speeches from the throne, and budget documents. The methodology will be to examine the effects of ideology on provincial economic outcomes, including economic growth and unemployment rates, controlling for national and world outcomes, as well as federal economic policies, and party affiliation of federal government. References: Whitten, Guy D., and Harvey D. Palmer. ""Cross-national analyses of economic voting."" Electoral Studies 18.1 (1999): 49-67. Bjà¸rnskov, Christian. ""Does political ideology affect economic growth?."" Public Choice 123.1-2 (2005): 133-146."