Advocacy in times of political restructuring: When control and surveillance practices diffuse through institutional arrangements.

Contentious politics in Quebec traditionally rely on formal advocacy groups, recognize and finance by the provincial state (White, 2012; Laforest, 2000; Jetté, 2008; Dufour, 2022). Community groups are formal organisations whose mission is service delivery, popular education, organizing community on broader social justice causes. Two instances are particularly concerned inside the state: Minister for Health and Social Services and Secretariat of Autonomous Community Action and Social Initiatives. Since 2003, the gradual privatisation (Hacker, 2004; Mahoney and Thelen, 2010) of the health care system increased accountability, reduced available funding and created instability for community groups with an advocacy mandate. At the same time, mission- based funding provided for these groups did not increase on the period. In order to overcome the financial deficits that result from this type of governance, groups were progressively pushed towards funding from private foundations, which are themselves embedded in logics very far from autonomous community action role and status and modes of operation. In this context, the possibility of political action for advocacy groups changed, but did not disappear. To understand how this changing context had impacted on the strategies, targets and claims made by advocacy groups, we interviewed 22 different organisations active in the field, using semi-structured interviews between June and October 2021, both in Montreal region and in regions. The thematic analysis carried out reveals that a series of constraints on the part of different institutional actors produce representations of control over all facets of the work of groups with an advocacy mandate and limit their capacity to mobilize. In doing so, we argue that the constraints perceived by the associative milieu must be thought of within a plural conceptualization of institutional practices of control, including both visible practices of policing protest (Earl, Soule, and McCarthy 2003; Rafail, 2010), political profiling (Dupuis-Déri, 2015) and discrete forms of surveillance and soft repression (Ferree-Marx, 2004). The results presented demonstrate that the addition of repressive practices against mobilized groups limits the participation of their most vulnerable members and removes organizations from their mission of defending rights. This study is a first in documenting the institutional impediments to the advocacy mission of community organizations in Quebec. It contributes to documenting discrete forms of repression and control, and is part of the discussion on the place of social groups as political actors in the public space