"Social Movements, Interest Groups and the State in Canadian Political History"

Throughout Canada’s history, a wide array of social movements, interest groups and civil society actors have sought to implement social and political change.  Some have worked directly through conventional political channels, others have formed new political parties, and others have engaged in lobbying, petitioning and a host of different direct action strategies in their efforts to transform Canada’s political system, public policies and social values.  Many of these movements operated in multiple national contexts, and Canadian social movements were frequently either directly connected to international movements, or were drawing on lessons learned in other national contexts.  This course will examine a variety of social movements and interest groups that attempted to transform Canada, paying attention to their strategies for accomplishing political change, their internal dynamics, and their impacts on Canadian society.  While primarily being focused on social movements in Canadian history, it will also examine the growing interdisciplinary literature on social movements (particularly from political science and sociology), and critically analyze the efforts of scholars to explain these movements.

          The course will begin with an introduction to some of the theoretical literature on social movements and a broad overview of Canadian social movement history.  We will then focus on a series of major social movements in Canadian political history.  The final three weeks will be devoted to student presentations of the social movements and interest groups that they have chosen to study for their major research papers.  These papers may overlap with the movements studied in the first part of the course, or might address a different topic of interest to the student.