Canadian Institutionalism

Canadians have a remarkable faith in tinkering our way to better democracy

The following is an abbreviated version of my 2025 presidential address to the Canadian Political Science Association, available in full here.

Canadians have a remarkable faith in institutional reform as the key to solving political problems.

We talk a lot about the need to reduce party discipline and the power of the prime minister’s office, change the electoral system, do something about the Senate, revise the division of federal-provincial powers, otherwise rejig the constitution, and much more. Andrew Coyne’s book The Crisis in Canadian Democracy is a great recent example, presenting said crisis as a breakdown of our parliamentary and political institutions, and offering a comprehensive fix-it guide. Even Justin Trudeau got into the act; when asked after his resignation if he had any regrets, he came up with one: not changing the electoral system.

Canadians love to talk about overhauling our political institutions for the greater good. Other countries don’t. Setting aside the current chaos in American politics, when was the last time you heard the phrase “congressional reform”? Americans almost never talk about redesigning their institutions; they talk about the specific people in them. In Britain you do hear discussion of “parliamentary reform,” but not as the existential secret to better politics. In contrast, in Canada we often talk about institutional reform itself as the primary goal; that if we could just get the institutions right, we’d inevitably end up with better politics and policies.

There’s no secret why Canadians are like this. We spent the 1960s to the 1990s preoccupied with constitutional reform in the service of national unity. The entire question of Canada has long been up for grabs. So it’s unsurprising that we keep pondering how we can improve the institutional scaffolding of the country.

The discipline of political science in Canada has been in the thick of these discussions. Like Canadians generally, Canadian political scientists lapse easily into normative discussions of our institutions, more than in other countries. I figured this out early in my career when I showed up at international conferences yakking in standard Canadian terms about “excessive party discipline” and “the need to empower MPs,” and scholars from other countries gave me puzzled looks, because that was not the language and framing they used to study their own institutions.

One reason I talked that way was because governments themselves encouraged it. When I was a junior scholar in the early 2000s, there was a stampede of government- funded initiatives sponsoring nerd talk about institutions. I particularly want to give a shoutout to the late Winnipeg MP Reg Alcock, who in the early 2000s hosted early morning breakfasts in the parliamentary restaurant for assorted wonks like me, and later as Treasury Board President sponsored more formal gatherings, dragging in deputy ministers and others to hear our ideas. Those glory days are gone, but there are still vestiges, such as the Canadian Study of Parliament Group that bridges academics and parliamentary staff, which I once ran.

In some ways this has all been great. In particular, it is inspiring that Canadians can still largely talk about our institutions abstractly for the greater good, rather than just blaming one side for all our problems. Concerns about party discipline and PMO power nicely span both sides of the House of Commons, regardless of who is in power. This urge to improve has also given Canadian political science a feeling of relevance; that we are contributing to the public good and not just our own esoteric conversations.

But there are downsides to all this institutional reform talk, especially for political scientists.

The first is that studying power often requires being close to it. A lot of these discussions meant embedding ourselves in the state, or at least accepting a free breakfast, to study those same state institutions. I’ve written elsewhere about the “lone wolf” approach to studying Canadian political institutions, in which researchers must hunt for themselves, building their own personal relationships to power. We hung around institutions to build the necessary relationships to gain precious access to gather vital information to analyze the institutions that we were hanging around in the first place.

The second is the degree to which so much of this work, certainly mine, studied the distribution of power among white men and how it could be redistributed, largely to other white men. While we gradually paid more attention to the representation of women, racialized Canadians, and others, we took the institutional foundations, built by and for white men in a colonial society, for granted. We couldn’t see what just felt natural for us. As a small town kid I often got lost in the corridors of power. But I wasn’t uncomfortable in those corridors, and over time I could make my own way. I now know that many others could not get to that comfort level. Indeed, I was massively privileged, a white guy hustling around downtown Ottawa talking with other white guys, having breakfast with Reg Alcock while my wife Ruth Blaak Malloy was at home with our small children.

The fix-it approach to Canadian political institutions, with our perennial faith in tinkering our way to better democracy, is not a bad thing. It’s certainly far better than the bitter polarization south of us, where all problems are blamed on the other side, never the system itself. We don’t fully recognize just how much we talk about institutional reform compared to other countries, and it’s good that we can still have civil conversations about it.

But it can be narrow, particularly for political scientists like me who can easily be drawn close to the flame of power, failing to see a bigger picture. We need to keep talking about our institutions and how to strengthen our democracy. But we also need to expand the conversation.