Interest representation and organisation in civil society: Ontario and Quebec compared

Abstract

Since the ‘cold climate’ of New Public Management starting in the 1980s, civil society organisations (CSOs) in different provinces in Canada have fared differently. This article compares the shift and evolution of government-CSO dynamics in Ontario and Quebec. While Ontario has seen the marketisation and instrumentalisation of CSOs, many CSOs in Quebec have been protected by a government policy to promote and fund autonomous activities, including advocacy. Based on studies carried out between 1996 and 2008, the article examines how the majority of Quebec CSOs came to obtain some measure of control over their operating environment, and to keep at bay government efforts to co-opt or incorporate them into public programmes. The analytic framework calls upon concepts of state and civil society agency, political opportunity structure and politics, and identity-building strategies such as framing and naming, to explain the differences between the trajectories of Quebec's and Ontario's CSOs.