Canadian regional development today involves multiple actors operating within nested scales from local to national and even international levels. Recent approaches to making sense of this complexity have drawn on concepts such as multi-level governance, relational assets, integration, innovation, and learning regions. These new regionalist concepts have become increasingly global in their formation and application, yet there has been little critical analysis of Canadian regional development policies and programs or the theories and concepts upon which many contemporary regional development strategies are implicitly based. This volume offers the results of five years of cutting-edge empirical and theoretical analysis of changes in Canadian regional development and the potential of new approaches for improving the well-being of Canadian communities and regions, with an emphasis on rural regions. It situates the Canadian approach within comparative experiences and debates, offering the opportunity for broader lessons to be learnt. This book will be of interest to policy-makers and practitioners across Canada, and in other jurisdictions where lessons from the Canadian experience may be applicable. At the same time, the volume contributes to and updates regional development theories and concepts that are taught in our universities and colleges, and upon which future research and analysis will build.

Arising from a conference held at the University of Calgary in honour of Mildred Schwartz, Regionalism and Party Politics in Canada brings together current scholarship on regionalism and parties in order to make sense of the transition of the party system. Canada's party system is clearly in a state of flux: we are moving from the two-and-a -half party system that has dominated the country for most of the past century to something new. A look at the current Parliament suggests that regionalism has become the most dominant and important cleavage in Canada. Divided into four sections, the text first examines different approaches to the study of regionalism. It then moves on to the place of regionalism in Canadian society before turning towards regionalism's relationship to the Canadian party system. The volume concludes with an examination of how Canada compare with the rest of the world in terms of the regionalsim of its parties and party systems.

For the general reader.