In its most basic aspect, federalism is primarily practiced through intergovernmental relations (IGR) between officials of federal and subnational units. The literature on Canadian federalism often highlights the importance of yearly meetings for policy coordination and harmonization in the country. However, as with other federations, the ways in which these relations are structured tend to vary a lot between policy sectors. While some sectors hold very informal meetings in a non-consistent manner, others manage relations through IGR councils that have permanent staff and secretariats. Few political scientists have produced systematic studies of the effects of such variation on intergovernmental collaboration. In this paper, we ask whether the varying degrees of IGR institutionalization across policy sectors in Canada affect collaboration between governments. The analysis relies on a systematic comparison of IGR meeting press releases for the years 1997-2012, which combine manual coding and automatic scaling.
