Canadian Studies Announcements

In This Issue:

News from Canada

• Mark Carney leads Liberals to election victory

News from Berkeley

• Faculty affiliate Alison Gopnik elected to National Academy of Sciences

Upcoming Events

• Student Research Showcase: Canadian Multiculturalism in a Global Context

External Events

• Canadian Films at CAAMFest 2025

NEWS FROM CANADA

Mark Carney Leads Liberals to Election Victory

Prime minister Mark Carney led the Liberal Party to its fourth consecutive electoral victory last week, in one of the most dramatic political comebacks in Canadian history. Only a couple months ago, the Liberal Party seemed destined for a historic wipeout. Instead, the Liberal Party won its highest number of seats in ten years, although it ended up a few seats short of an outright majority.

The election overall was marked by the collapse of support for Canada’s smaller parties, as voters polarized between the Liberals and the Conservatives. Both the Liberals and Conservatives increased their number of seats and share of the total vote. Both parties won their highest percent of the vote share in decades: the Liberals won 43% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 41%. And the Conservatives actually gained more new seats than the Liberals (23 vs. 17), with some inroads in Toronto. Nevertheless, it was a disappointing result for the Conservatives, who held a 27-point polling lead over the Liberals only a few months ago.

In a historic first, two incumbent leaders of major parties lost their own seats. The most notable loss was for Conservative PM candidate Pierre Poilievre, who was ousted from the Ottawa-area seat he had held for two decades by a Liberal challenger. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh likewise lost re-election to a Liberal candidate in Metro Vancouver. And Green Party co-chair Jonathan Pedneault resigned from party leadership after a fifth-place finish in Montreal failed to win him a seat for a second consecutive election.

The biggest loser of the night was the NDP, traditionally Canada’s third party. The party had its worst-ever federal results with a loss of 17 seats, including Singh’s, leaving just seven NDP MPs in Parliament. As a result, the NPD lost its official party status for the first time since 1993. Singh took responsibility for the poor showing, and resigned as party leader. The silver lining for the party is that the Liberals’ failure to win a majority means that the NDP may hold the balance of power in the new Parliament.

As for Poilievre, he may soon be back in Ottawa. He recently announced plans to run for a new seat in a friendlier Alberta riding after another MP announced he would step down to open up a seat for him. Poilievre is almost certain to win this election, as his new district voted over 80% for the Conservatives.

Image: Canadian Studies community members watch live results come in at last week’s election watch party.

NEWS FROM BERKELEY

Faculty Affiliate Alison Gopnik Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Canadian Studies faculty affiliate Alison Gopnik was one of eight UC Berkeley faculty elected to the National Academy of Sciences last week. The Academy is a congressionally chartered institution that provides guidance to the government on science and technology. Membership is one of the highest honors accorded to scientists in the United States, and recognizes individuals who have made outstanding and continuing contributions to science.

Gopnik is a professor in the Department of Psychology and a preeminent developmental psychologist. Her research focuses on “theory of mind” – how we come to understand our own minds and those of others – and she was one of the first cognitive scientists to conduct studies in the field. Her research has focused on how children learn to understand their own minds and how they make sense of the world around them. She has conducted research to mathematically model how children learn, and has applied her findings to artificial intelligence. She appeared as a guest on KQED Forum last week, to argue for the importance of caregiving to society.

Gopnik was raised in Montreal, where both of her parents were professors at McGill University. She received her BA in psychology and philosophy from McGill, and a doctorate in experimental psychology from Oxford. She taught at the University of Toronto before joining the UC Berkeley faculty in 1988.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If you require an accommodation to participate in an event below, please let us know with as much advance notice as possible.

Tuesday, May 6 | 12:30 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP

Learn about the research Canadian Studies funds through our Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowships, as recipients present overviews of their projects. Speakers will evaluate the success of Canada’s multicultural model in an international context, considering the integration of new immigrants, Quebec, and Indigenous nations.

The Role of Migration Destination Contexts in Lebanese Transnational Voting Across Canada, the USA, & the UAE

Nadia Almasalkhi, PhD student, Sociology

External voting has become an increasingly significant avenue for transnational political engagement, yet participation remains uneven across diasporic communities. This comparative study examines how host-country contexts shaped diasporic electoral mobilization in Lebanon’s 2018 and 2022 parliamentary elections, focusing on the Lebanese diaspora in Canada (Ontario and Quebec), the United States (California and Michigan), and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Abu Dhabi). Drawing on 112 semi-structured interviews, this research analyzes how national immigration regimes, political systems, local community composition, and consular practices influenced voter participation, mobilization strategies, and barriers to electoral engagement.

Public Reason and Canada’s Constitutional Crisis

Britt Leake, PhD candidate, Political Science

Britt’s research examines the conditions under which democracy succeeds or fails in societies with extensive ethnolinguistic or religious diversity. Britt will explore Canada’s failed constitutional reform efforts in the 1980s and 1990s the through the lens of the Habermas-Rawls debate on public reason, a concept in political philosophy examining the circumstances under which citizens divided by different worldviews can endorse a shared constitutional order. Why did several ideologically distinct attempts at consensus all fail to gain legitimacy with key political constituencies? Britt argues that the key to real constitutional consensus might be the pursuit of urgent, shared interests. Canada’s relative stability and lack of external threats in the late twentieth century made it harder to articulate the shared interests needed to overcome cultural divides, in contrast to times when the threat of American expansionism drove Canadians towards unity.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

Canadian Films at CAAMFest 2025

May 8-11 | San Francisco, CA | Buy tickets

Four Canadian films will be screened at this year’s CAAMFest, the nation’s leading showcase for Asian-American films hosted by the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). The films include:

• Between Pictures: The Lens of Tamio Wakayama, a documentary chronicling the journey of a Japanese-Canadian photographer from the Civil Rights-era US South to Vancouver’s former Japantown.
• Made in Ethiopia, a documentary exploring the impact of a new Chinese factory on a rural Ethiopian farming community.
• Mongrels, a drama that follows a Korean family that immigrates to the Canadian prairies amidst a troubling feral canine infestation.
• A Stone’s Throw, which follows Amine, a Palestinian elder, through two exiles from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf oil platform.

Canadian Studies Program

213 Philosophy Hall #2308

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