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Canadian Political Science Association2025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College, Toronto, CANADA
June 3 to June 5, 20252025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College
June 3 to June 5, 2025
Local and Urban Politics
E05 - Roundtable: Situating Urban Politics in Canada: Comparing Across Space and Time
Date: Jun 3 | Time: 03:30pm to 05:00pm | Location:
Martin Horak (Western University)Zack Taylor (Western University)
Kristin Good (Dalhousie University)
Jack Lucas (University of Calgary)
Jen Nelles (Oxford Brookes University)
Abstract: The recent proliferation of scholarship on Canadian city politics has developed robust theoretical dialogues between the urban politics subfield and other areas of political science, ranging from electoral behaviour to critical policy studies. In empirical terms, however, this scholarship remains limited in range, its sights trained firmly on contemporary Canadian cities. It is time to seriously consider what we can learn from broadening our comparative empirical horizons in the study of Canadian urban politics. What can we gain, for instance, by contextualizing our emerging understandings of Canadian urban politics in cross-national comparative perspective? And what is revealed when we compare past and present, and situate contemporary Canadian urban politics in historical context? These are the questions that animate this roundtable. It will bring together the editors of two new volumes: Canadian Urban Governance in Comparative Perspective, edited by Kristin Good and Jen Nelles (University of Toronto Press, 2024), and City Politics in Canada (2nd ed.), edited by Martin Horak, Jack Lucas and Zack Taylor (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). The first is a state-of-the art survey of Canadian urban governance that adopts an explicitly cross-national comparative frame; the second features detailed studies of the evolution of politics in seven Canadian cities since the 1980s. The editors will discuss the choices they made in setting the comparative frame for each volume, and will share perspectives on how reaching beyond the contemporary Canadian context can enrich our understanding of the dominant forces that animate city politics in 21st century Canada.