Student Research Showcase
September 22, 2025 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speakers: Sophie Helpard and Andrew Zhao, UC Berkeley
Learn about the research Canadian Studies funds through our Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowships, as recipients present overviews of their projects.
Measuring the Societal Benefits of Public Investment in Sport in Canada
Sophie Helpard, Master’s student, Public Policy
Sophie’s research examines how public investment in sport affects social welfare. Her fellowship supported her capstone project, a policy benefit-cost analysis on the impacts of increasing federal funding to Canada’s national sports organizations. It examines whether increased funding leads to general improvements in outcomes in wellbeing measures such as mental health, physical health, and labor productivity.
The Political Legacy of Indian Residential Schools
Andrew Zhao, PhD student, Political Science
Andrew’s research explores the intersection of identity and politics. His fellowship supported a study on the long-term political impacts of Canada’s Indian residential school system on surrounding communities. The schools left a well-documented legacy of physical and psychological harm to survivors and their kin. But another legacy remains under-explored: how did the schools affect the politics and beliefs of nearby communities, and does that impact persist to this day?
The 51st State? Canadian Resistance to American Annexationism since 1775
October 14, 2025 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Professor Gregory Wigmore, Santa Clara University
Since their founding era, Americans have periodically tried to convince their northern neighbors to join them in a continental union, sometimes by force. This talk will offer a sweeping survey of the prospect—or threat—of the American annexation of Canada (and its colonial antecedents) over the past 250 years. It will highlight major turning points in the cross-border relationship and the responses of government officials, the press, and Canadians more broadly. Extending the focus through the 2025 Canadian federal election, it will examine how generations of politicians and opinion-makers have harnessed opposition to annexation for political purposes.
Dr. Gregory Wigmore is an associate teaching professor in the Department of History at Santa Clara University, where he teaches early US and Canada history. He received his bachelor’s in journalism and history from Carleton University, and his PhD in history from UC Davis. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of social and political history and foreign relations in North America, especially the role of frontiers and borders. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, “The Limits of Empire: Allegiance, Opportunity, and Imperial Rivalry in the Canadian-American Borderland.” His op-ed articles have appeared in the Globe and Mail and the National Post.
Understanding Post-Trudeau Canadian Politics and Policies
November 4, 2025 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Panelists: Professor Evert Lindquist, University of Victoria; Professor Alasdair Roberts, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Since 2024, Canadian politics has entered into a new era of uncertainty. The result of the US presidential election raised diplomatic and economic tensions between Canada and the United States to a level unprecedented in modern times. Domestically, the election of Mark Carney as the Canadian prime minister marked a new era of Canadian politics after Justin Trudeau’s 10-year premiership. What do we need to know to better understand Canadian politics and public policy in this age of changes and challenges? In this event, two experts will share their thoughts of the major issues at stake in Canadian politics and public policy today.
Dr. Evert Lindquist is a professor of public administration at the University of Victoria and editor of Canadian Public Administration, the journal of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. His research interests include the evolving role of federal agencies, public sector reform, and how governments address complex policy challenges. Professor Lindquist is a recipient of the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal Award for Excellence in Public Administration. He holds a BA from Carleton University; an MA from Western University; and a PhD from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Alasdair Roberts is a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was the inaugural director of the university’s School of Public Policy. He has received numerous awards for his writing on problems of governance. Professor Roberts is the first non-US citizen elected as a Fellow of the US National Academy of Public Administration. In 2022, he received the Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration from the American Political Science Association (APSA). He received his BA from Queen’s University; his JD from the University of Toronto; and his MPP and PhD in public policy from Harvard.
Canada at a Crossroads: Evaluating the Carney Government’s First Nine Months
December 2, 2025 | 12:30 - 2 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Panelists: Parm Kahlon, Core Firm; Jordan O'Brien, Porter O'Brien; Jordan Paquet, Bluesky Strategy Group
When Mark Carney won the 2025 Canadian Federal election, he assumed leadership of a nation facing multiple structural problems and widespread discontent. Canadians united against threats from the United States, but major debates remained over issues such as housing costs, immigration, and Canada’s stagnant economy. During the campaign, Carney distanced the Liberal Party from its Trudeau-era platform and promised to be a steady hand to deliver urgently-needed reform. Nine months on, how well is the Carney government delivering on those promises? Join our panel representing Canada’s major political parties as they debate Carney’s performance in tackling the country’s most pressing challenges.
Parm Kahlon is a founding partner and strategist at Core Firm. She served as Special Assistant to Alberta premier Rachel Notley, and worked with various MLAs with the BC NDP. She has also served as managing director for UFCW 1518, one of British Columbia’s oldest and largest unions.
Jordan O’Brien is the cofounder and partner of the public relations and consulting firm Porter O’Brien. He has advised chief executives, cabinet ministers, and leaders of the opposition. He also worked for the Government of New Brunswick for ten years, including as chief of staff and deputy minister in the Office of the Premier.
Jordan Paquet is the vice-president of Bluesky Strategy Group. Over the course of his nearly 20-year career, he has worked across multiple levels of Canadian government, including the Prime Minister’s Office under Stephen Harper; as Principal Secretary to Conservative Opposition leader Rona Ambrose; and most recently as the Chief of Staff in Prince Edward Island’s Government Members Office.
Navigating the Tensions in Canada’s Climate & Energy Policy
February 5, 2026 | 2 - 3:30 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Panelists: The Hon. Alison Redford, 14th Premier of Alberta; Dr. Peter Bevan Baker, MLA, Prince Edward Island; Michele Cadario, Rubicon Strategy.
Canada has an international reputation as an outspoken proponent of ambitious climate change action. At the same time, Canada has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and the petroleum industry represents a critical sector of the Canadian economy, especially in Alberta. Federal policymakers walk a difficult line between economic growth, energy security, and environmental stewardship, and disagreements over hydrocarbon policy have been a frequent source of inter-provincial tension. This panel will explore how the politics of this issue have evolved over time, and how Canada can navigate difficult policy tradeoffs at a time of global and domestic uncertainty.
The Hon. Alison Redford served as the 14th Premier of Alberta from 2011 to 2014. Before being elected premier, she served as a Member of the Legislative Assembly representing Calgary and as Alberta’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General. She currently serves as a permanent board member for Invest Alberta.
Dr. Peter Bevan-Baker is a member of the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island with over ten years experience. He was the first Green Party member elected to the provincial legislature; as party leader, he served as Leader of the Official Opposition from 2019-2023, the first Green to ever assume that role at any level of Canadian government.
Michele Cadario is the Executive Vice President of Rubicon Strategy. She has 25 years of experience in federal and provincial politics, and previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Paul Martin and to BC Premier Christy Clark.
Building and Fracturing Transnational Nativist Coalitions: Canada, Catholic Immigrants, and the Venezuela Boundary Dispute of 1895
March 12, 2026 | Noon - 1:30 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Dr. Brendan Shanahan, Yale University
This presentation examines the rise and fall of the domestic and transnational coalitional politics of the American Protective Association (APA). At its apogee in the early-to-mid 1890s, the APA was the largest nativist society in the United States. It was also led by a Canadian immigrant, W. J. H. Traynor, based out of Detroit. Shanahan’s presentation will show how APA leaders like Traynor and propagandists allied to him formulated a distinctly transnational Anglo-North American form of late-nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism that envisioned subversive (often Irish-origin) Catholic forces on the march in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. That ideology both propelled the APA’s institutional growth in the United States and proved sufficiently flexible to enable its expansion into Canada. However, Shanahan will also show how a brief war scare between the British Empire and the United States in late 1895 over Venezuela’s international boundary line – which raised the prospect of a US invasion of Canada – gravely harmed the APA from without and fractured its cohesion from within.
Dr. Brendan A. Shanahan is a lecturer in history at Yale University, and an associate research scholar with Yale’s Committee on Canadian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. His research and teaching focuses on North American immigration and citizenship policy, and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. Dr. Shanahan received his BA from McGill University, and his PhD and MA from UC Berkeley, where he was a Hildebrand Fellow and active member of the Canadian Studies Program. He is currently working on a project about transnational nativist, anti-Catholic politics in the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Thawing Ice, Rising Tensions: Canada’s Arctic Security Challenge
March 30, 2026 | 1 - 2:30 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Panelists: Alexander Dalziel, Macdonald-Laurier Institute; Professor Christian Leuprecht, Royal Military College of Canada. Moderator: Professor Michaela Mattes, UC Berkeley.
In recent years, climate change has opened up once-inaccessible Arctic regions, leading to a new era of great-power competition. Countries like China, Russia, and the United States are scrambling to claim new shipping routes and untapped natural resources that were once buried under ice. How can Canada, which controls 1/4 of the global Arctic, secure its vast northern regions in the face of increasing pressures from not just longtime rivals, but also traditional allies like the United States? Can it pivot a defense strategy historically reliant on the US to new key allies like the European Union? And how can it most effectively bolster and protect Canadian sovereignty in an era of geopolitical confrontation?
Alexander Dalziel is a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He has over 20 years of experience working in Canada’s national security, intelligence, and foreign policy communities. He specializes in Arctic geopolitics, including international security cooperation between North America, the Nordic countries, and NATO. He holds an MA in History from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Dr. Christian Leuprecht is a Class of 1965 Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and a professor in the Department of Political Studies and the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. An expert in security and defense, he has held positions and advised governments in Canada and Europe. He received his PhD in political studies from Queen’s University.
This discussion was moderated by Professor Michaela Mattes, Travers Department of Political Science.
Beautiful Destruction: The Tar Sands, the Post-Modern Sublime, and the Subsumption of the Earth
March 12, 2026 | Noon - 1:30 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Dr. Troy Vettese, UC Berkeley
Artists, rather than scholars, were the first ones alive to the fact that something rather unusual was underway in the boreal landscape of northern Alberta. The photography of Louis Helbig and Edward Burtynsky captured the awesome destructive beauty wrought by the tar sands industry, a force capable of reshaping the Earth as if it were a canvas and the industry an abstract expressionist painter. Helbig and Burtynsky’s work evoke the sublime, but this aesthetic seems to bear little relation to the sublime described by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century. It is not the vastness of nature that inspires the sublime, but rather its destruction.
The viewer of such artworks experienced an uncanny dread, without understanding why. Decades of research in ‘energy studies’ have done little to elucidate this problem. Scholars still seem to trail artists in grappling with the profound implications of the transition to non-conventional fossil fuels. This undesired Energiewende has proven much more significant than the shift to wind and solar, allowing the fossil fuel industry to tighten its grip on the planet. This talk will discuss the limits of previous approaches, such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘petro-states’, and instead will apply the Marxist categories of real and formal subsumption to understand the industry’s changing relationship to the Earth’s elementary systems.
Dr. Troy Vettese is an environmental historian. He is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley, and a John A. Sproul Fellow with the Canadian Studies Program. He researches the transition from conventional to non-conventional fossil fuels, with a focus on the tar sands industry. Dr. Vettese holds a PhD from New York University, and master’s degrees from the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford. He completed his undergraduate education at McGill University. Dr. Vettese has held fellowships at Harvard University; the European University Institute; Copenhagen University; and the New Institute, Hamburg. His first book, Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2022), was co-authored with climate scientist Drew Pendergrass and has been translated into half a dozen languages.
Taking the Long-Term View: Technology Relations between Canada and the Bay Area in the Age of AI
April 23, 2026 | Noon - 1:30 p.m. | 223 Philosophy Hall
Panelists: Professor Timothy Barfoot, University of Toronto; Carl Choi, RLWRLD USA; Professor Matei Zaharia, UC Berkeley; Moderator: Professor Claire Tomlin, UC Berkeley.
Canadians have made foundational contributions to the world’s technological advances. Before Apple and Google dominated the market, Research in Motion’s Blackberry invented the mobile office. Today’s AI landscape rests on the work of titans like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Richard Sutton, Joelle Pineau, Doina Precup, and Ilya Sutskever. Their long-term research pursuits at both universities and companies have fueled modern neural networks and machine learning.
The Bay Area, meanwhile, has long been a hub of technological innovation. It is a place where scientific theory mixes with venture funding and engineering expertise to make designs into successful products. The relationship between the Bay Area and Canada’s technological talent has always been strong, and this panel will explore the current landscape and the outlook for the future. How can we ensure that both the long-term research pursuits as well as the start-ups necessary for innovation thrive in both environments? What can we learn from the different ecosystems, and the relationships that we’ve built up to now?
Timothy Barfoot is a professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) and a researcher in robot autonomy and vehicle navigation technologies. He is Director of the UofT Robotics Institute, co-Faculty Advisor of UofT’s self-driving car team, and previously worked as Director of Autonomous Systems at Apple in California. Prof. Barfoot holds a BASc from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from UTIAS in robotics.
Carl Choi is the President of RLWRLD USA, a physical AI startup developing robot foundation models for industrial environments. Before joining RLWRLD, he was a partner with Alumni Ventures in Silicon Valley, where he led investments in AI, robotics, and foundational technologies. Mr. Choi holds a bachelor of mathematics from the University of Waterloo, a BBA from Wilfrid Laurier University, and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Matei Zaharia is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on computer systems for large-scale workloads such as AI, data analytics, and cloud computing. He is also the co-founder and CTO of Databricks, a cloud-based platform for data analytics. Professor Zaharia holds a bachelor of mathematics from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, he taught at MIT and Stanford.
Claire Tomlin (moderator) is a professor in the Department of EECS at UC Berkeley and holds the James and Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering. Her research interests include unmanned aerial vehicles, air traffic control and modeling of biological processes. Professor Tomlin holds a BASc from the University of Waterloo, an MSc from Imperial College, London, and a PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley.