Browsing by Author "Lucas, Jack"

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    A Historical Comparative Analysis of Influential Factors on Wind Sector Development in Alberta and Ontario
    (2017) Cheung, Audrey; Jordaan, Sarah; Morton, Frederick; Lucas, Jack; Tyler, Mary Ellen
    The diffusion rate of wind technologies differs between jurisdictions. This study is a comparative historical analysis of how various political and socio-economic variables have influenced and interacted with one another to affect wind technology diffusion in Alberta and Ontario from 1993-2016. Technology diffusion (investment and capacity), political (institutional frameworks, policies, and government in power), and socio-economic (state-level public discourse and cost to consumers) factors are examined. Developing an understanding of the interaction between the different variables provides insight into the wind technology diffusion process. The exploratory analysis found that the priorities and policies introduced by the government in power are major determinants of the rate of wind technology diffusion in Alberta and Ontario. Socio-economic concerns appear to influence political actions, while the results of government actions and policies affect the state-level public discourse on wind power. Future explanatory analyses may uncover the precise relationship between the variables analyzed.
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    “Be Professional, Private and Pleasant”: The Conscious and Unconscious Gendering of Campaign Messages in Canadian and Australian Local Elections
    (2020-12) Croskill, Julie Lynn; O'Neill, Brenda; Franceschet, Susan; Young, Lisa; Lucas, Jack; Janovicek, Nancy; Raney, Tracey
    This dissertation examines Australian and Canadian local campaigns to investigate the extent to which gender and gendered stereotypes consciously affect candidates’ campaign messaging. The data for this study was gathered via in-depth interviews with 92 candidates who contested elections at the state/provincial level between 2010 and 2013. The data collected during the interviews included information on how candidates presented themselves in terms of their appearance, qualifications, character traits and family life; the issues that they highlighted in their local campaigns; the voters they targeted and strategies to connect with them; and information about their opponent relationships such as whether they formed civility pacts, employed negative attack messaging and how they responded if they were negatively campaigned against. The main conclusion is that gender affects political campaigns. Women’s campaign messaging looks different from men’s campaign messaging in several ways. For example, women are less likely to share personal information about themselves and their families and less likely to target an opponent with negative attack messages despite being more likely to be the target of such attacks. Among the most competitive women candidates, the differences found between their campaigns, and men’s campaigns, regardless of competitiveness, started to diminish. In terms of understanding why campaigns are gendered, there was minimal evidence detected that candidates consciously adjusted their messaging in response to what they perceived to be either voter-held or self-held beliefs about gendered stereotypes. Thus, gendered campaign messaging is the result of unconscious gender role stereotypes. By and large, women candidates did not cue gender in their local campaigns by highlighting women’s issues in their messaging, or by appealing to voters to support a woman candidate.
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    Contagion in the West: The Survival and Success of the CCF-NDP in Western Canada
    (2021-04-30) Molineaux, Connor John; Sayers, Anthony M.; Lucas, Jack; Thomas, Melanee
    The CCF-NDP is the lone survivor of a number of new political parties to emerge in Western Canada around the mid-twentieth century. While most of those parties long ago disappeared, the CCF-NDP has not only survived, but has thrived. The CCF-NDP has successfully formed government in all four western provinces, even as it faces a very different combination of parties in each. In Alberta, the NDP first formed government in 2015, an astounding seventy-five years after its first election in the province. How did the CCF-NDP manage to persist and succeed in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan for so long when most other parties have failed? In this thesis, I argue that the CCF-NDP has managed to survive because it possesses certain organizational features that other parties lack. As a social democratic party, the CCF- NDP has maintained a core base of committed activists who sustain the organization even when it is electorally weak. The party competes in elections across multiple provinces and at the federal level, giving it organizational redundancy that most other parties lack. And the party has consistently been willing to reach out to new groups of voters by moderating its policies, but without losing its central identity as a social democratic party. I show this using process tracing by identifying the factors that contribute to the success or failure of several insurgent parties, including the CCF-NDP, at critical moments of electoral dealignment across each of the four western provinces.
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    Contours of the Religious Voting Cleavage in 21st Century New Brunswick
    (2017) Carleton, Alexander James Richards; Stewart, David Kenney; Sigurdson, Richard F; Sayers, Anthony Michael; Lucas, Jack
    At the federal level of elections in Canada, the years from 2000-2011 saw a cooling of a longstanding trend: Catholics voting for the Liberals. This constituency has been a staple of their electoral coalition and a large part of their success in the 20th century. An analysis of voting habits in New Brunswick reveals that voting by religion is still a phenomenon in the province, with Catholics holding on to their traditional preference. This remains the case in the province even across a variety of social and demographic variables.
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    An Exploration of Incivility in a Homeless Shelter as Identified by Frontline Staff
    (2018-01-12) Salt, Valerie; Gibbs Van Brunschot, Erin; Adorjan, Michael; Lucas, Jack
    Homeless shelters are institutions for populations who are deemed as ‘uncivil’ by their homeless status, but research has yet to systematically explore frontline staff’s identification and response to incivility in a shelter context. This exploratory mixed methods study addresses this gap through content analysis and quantification of daily activity logs written by frontline staff in a Canadian homeless shelter. The findings reveal that client incivility in this shelter can be categorized into offences which disrupt the general shelter environment, are verbally offensive to staff or clients, or involve physical contact with staff or other clients. Frontline staff hold substantial discretion in the consequences clients face for such behaviour ranging from surveillance to banishment. This study contributes to the incivility literature by identifying the types, patterns and frequency of client incivility to provide a benchmark of incivility in a shelter context.
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    Heterogeneity in Immigrants’ Municipal Engagement and Participation in Calgary
    (2024-04-03) Atwal, Ashpal; Lucas, Jack; Rice, Roberta; Rayment, Erica; Franceschet, Susan
    Canadian political science has a long history of studying elections at the provincial and federal levels, but there is a gap in studying municipal elections. Additionally, Canadian political science has some interest in studying immigrant participation in provincial and federal elections, but more research on immigrant involvement in municipal elections is required. The limited research on immigrant voting behaviour also combines immigrant communities into homogeneous groups for research purposes, which does not allow for a nuanced understanding of immigrant communities. Canadian political science, therefore, needs more research regarding immigrant participation in municipal government, engagement in local elections, and the differences among immigrant communities. My research addresses these gaps in three ways. First, I explore the differences between immigrant and non-immigrant groups in Calgary to establish potential differences in their levels of interest and attention to municipal politics. I then address the differences among immigrant communities when it comes to their engagement with municipal governments and their participation in local elections. I then turn to potential policy implications that could help immigrant communities engage with local government and elections. My research finds that while there are similarities between immigrant communities, there are also significant differences. These differences are important because they can shape how immigrant communities see municipal politics or their desires to participate. My research finds that scholars need to think simultaneously less and more about immigrants in Calgary’s municipal elections. Scholars need to think less about immigrants and immigration in the sense that what matters most is the duration, or the amount of time spent in a city, not their immigration status. However, scholars also need to think more about immigrants, as there were substantial differences among immigrant communities regarding interest, knowledge, and policy preferences. My thesis helps to build on the current literature by suggesting how Canadian political science could expand research into municipal politics and immigrant voting behaviour in a way that helps demonstrate the similarities and differences among Calgary’s diverse communities. While the thesis discusses several aspects of municipal government and participation, my research emphasizes the heterogeneity of immigrant communities’ participation in municipal elections.
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    It Takes a Village: Candidate Recruitment in Alberta's Municipalities
    (2022-04-25) Conrad, Laura; Lucas, Jack; Franceschet, Susan; Rice, Roberta; Sayers, Anthony
    Many political scientists consider recruitment to be one of the most important stages in the candidate emergence process and is largely thought of as being a main function of political parties. This is in part because political parties want to attract and nominate high quality candidates, but also because for candidates, having that party backing is necessary for electoral success. However, in non-partisan politics where parties have no formal function, who recruits candidates into office? And is recruitment as important in the absence of these party barriers? Further, political parties, are thought to serve as gatekeepers to women’s emergence as a candidate. Despite this theory, women’s presence in non-partisan municipal politics in Canada is no greater than that of the partisan provincial and federal chambers. Given how important recruitment is theorized to be to an individual’s emergence as a candidate, what role does this process play in women’s persistent underrepresentation in non-partisan municipal politics? I answer these questions using two data sources: the annual Canadian Municipal Barometer survey that was fielded to councillors and mayors in municipalities in Canada with a population of 9,000 or greater, as well as interviews with candidates running for these positions in the 2021 Alberta municipal elections in the province’s ten largest cities. I find that candidates are most often recruited by personal connections or by current and former politicians and that recruitment is an especially pertinent step in the candidate emergence process for serious candidates. I further find that women are recruited less often and are more likely to be self-starters than men. This helps to explain the gender disparity we see in non-partisan politics. These findings build on the existing literature by suggesting that recruitment can and should be theorized in the non-partisan environment. Given that women’s presence is no greater in these non-partisan chambers, it also suggests that we should revisit the theories that argue political parties serve as gatekeepers to women’s representation.
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    Long-run patterns in the participation and representation of women in western Canadian provincial elections: 1917-2019.
    (2023-04-17) Hayes, Alex Daniel Woolliams; Sayers, Anthony Michael; Lucas, Jack; Brodie, Ian Ross
    Using the Canadian Elections Database, this thesis codes the gender of all candidates in western Canada’s provincial elections from 1917 to 2019. It then explores the trends and patterns apparent in women’s rate of participation (running for office), and representation (elected to office). A descriptive overview of the region of western Canada is undertaken first. This thesis then analyzes women’s electoral participation and success further into the effect of province, political party, and of ideology (left-right divide). It explores the percentages of female candidates running for office and elected over time, women’s success compared to men, and the effect of gender on difference in average votes. The rates of women running and elected have increased over time. Women have always run and been elected at lower rates than men. Depending on election context, women sometimes receive more average votes than men. More interesting is that this thesis finds women’s increasing direct role in provincial politics in western Canada is not linear. The importance of 1970 for women’s rate of participation and 1980 for women’s rate of representation are highlighted. Before these respective dates, women ran for office and were elected in low static numbers. After these dates women’s rate of participation and representation began to increase much more dramatically and substantively.
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    Navigating Turbulent Waters: The Politics of Municipal Water Governance in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Hamilton
    (2018-08-22) Klain, John Andrew; Lucas, Jack; Thomas, Melanee Lynn; Franceschet, Susan
    In Canada, water utilities are traditionally managed by municipal governments. Declining financial support from senior levels of government, public service reforms, and provincial policy interests in the 1990s caused Canadian municipalities to consider reforming their local water utilities. The current water governance literature argues that local financial circumstances condition the types of public policy decisions and governance reforms municipalities make, making these decisions contextual. However, amid similar political and economic circumstances, municipal governments in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Hamilton chose distinctly different governance models. Calgary considered privatizing its water utility, later reorganizing its department as a business unit. Edmonton considered privatization, only to corporatize its water utility alongside its electric utility. In Toronto, the city considered a municipal corporation, and a quasi-independent service board, only to keep its water utility a separate business unit. Hamilton signed a private contract, only to recreate a municipal water department after the contract ended. I argue that local dynamics conditions the decision-making process in municipalities, where politicians must balance the ideas and interests of local actors when making policy decisions. This thesis then, examines the decision-making process in each city between 1990 and 2005, demonstrating that water reform, and municipal public policy more broadly, is both contentious and politically driven.
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    Policy Entrepreneurship: Understanding Fiscal Policy Change for the Alberta Oil Sands
    (2018-09-13) Weber, Jessica Dawn Marie; Lucas, Jack; Morton, F. L.; Cooper, Barry; Brodie, Ian
    In 1995 and 1996 both the federal and provincial governments introduced major changes to their royalty and tax regimes for the Alberta oil sands industry. The stated goal of these reforms was to incentivize new investment. These changes came after decades of non-cooperation between the two levels of governments over oil sector policy and ignoring industry requests for fiscal reforms. Others have explained these changes as the result of a shift in priorities at high levels of government. However, there is no evidence that the policy change originated in government. Another explanation points to the creation of a new institution, the National Oil Sands Task Force. This is a partial explanation, but it does not ask explain how and why the Task Force was created. Using the policy entrepreneur model of policy change, this thesis provides an alternative explanation. Drawing on first-hand accounts from those who participated in the policy changes, interviews, and a contemporary newspaper analysis, this study concludes that a single person, Eric Newell, was a key factor—a successful policy entrepreneur—in achieving these reforms. The thesis documents how Newell determinedly created narratives, formed coalitions, and navigated multiple institutional venues to shape new fiscal policies for the oil sands industry.
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    Population Size and Incumbency in Canadian Municipal Elections: Two Essays
    (2022-05) Merrill, Reed; Lucas, Jack; Brodie, Ian; Tuxhorn, Kim-Lee
    In this thesis, I measure the relationship between the electoral success of municipal incumbents and municipal population size in Canada. I first ask how municipal incumbent success rates vary by municipal population size, and discover that acclamations drive overall population-size based trends of municipal incumbent success in Canada. Using an original dataset and a novel modeling approach that accounts for acclaimed incumbents, I find that municipal incumbent success rates generally fall as municipal population size increases. Furthermore, this relationship is particularly strong in Quebec. After excluding acclamations from the analysis, incumbent success rates increase as population size increases. Thus, voters in large municipalities favour incumbents when compared to their counterparts in smaller municipalities. To further investigate this trend, I then ask how the strength of an incumbency cue changes depending on population size, and find that incumbency cues have a stronger effect in larger municipalities. Taken together, these findings reveal that size-related patterns municipal incumbency in Canada are likely dependent on how voters from different sized municipalities process political information and view incumbent candidates.
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    Protecting After the Fact: Reactiveness, Fragmentation and Disconnection in Canadian Hazard Governance
    (2021-04-29) Gil Gonzalez, Juan Camilo; Lucas, Jack; Franceschet, Susan; Sayers, Anthony
    Canadian emergency management is a multilevel governance area in which municipal governments have most of the responsibility to manage emergencies. However, the provincial government possesses most of the jurisdiction in emergency management, the federal government has most of the fiscal capacity, and social actors provide important resources and services to affected communities or municipalities. Operationally, the emergency management system in Canada has an all-hazards approach that is divided into four policy phases: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Despite this all-hazards approach, the system has typically been reactive rather than proactive, where the mitigation phase is under-emphasized. Academics and multilevel practitioners have constantly proposed a more proactive approach, but the system remains reactive, and attempts at more proactive policy have been unsuccessful, despite wide agreement on the need for change. I therefore investigate reactiveness in Canada from a multilevel governance lens, using the following research questions: Why is Canadian emergency management still reactive? How do roles and interactions of multilevel governance actors factor into this reactive rather than proactive approach to emergency management? Using a novel multilevel survey of emergency management practitioners, I argue that one important source of the reactive approach in emergency management is due to fragmentation in the multilevel governance of this system, which prevents the implementation of a standardized mitigation (proactive) strategy. Furthermore, my empirical data shows extensive evidence of misperception and misunderstanding from survey respondents about actor roles and interactions in this system. I arrive at this conclusion from a comprehensive review of the Canadian emergency management literature, and from studying perceptions of key governmental and non-governmental emergency managers across Canada.
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    Public and health professional opposition to community water fluoridation: An investigation of trust and perceived risk in the context of new, local research findings
    (2018-08-23) Fundytus, Katrina Ann; McLaren, Lindsay; Lucas, Jack; Musto, Richard J.; Curran, Dean
    Background: Community water fluoridation (CWF) has remained a highly-debated topic among the public since it was introduced in 1945. Since then, several studies have provided support for the safety and effectiveness of CWF, although there are limitations to both the quantity and quality of the current evidence base. Despite the available scientific data, there exists a divide on public views toward CWF. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to understand how health professionals and members of the public in Calgary, who self-identify as opposed to CWF, make sense of locally-relevant and recent research evidence on fluoridation cessation and tooth decay in the city of Calgary. I sought to gain insights into fluoridation specifically and public health initiatives more generally. Methods: I undertook a critical qualitative study, informed by theories of risk perception and trust in authority figures and the scientific community. Four health professionals were purposively recruited to participate in one-on-one interviews based on their self-identified opposition to CWF. Participants were asked to discuss their views on CWF and public health research in general, with a focus on publications from a study of the short-term implications for children’s dental caries of terminating CWF in Calgary in 2011. To supplement interview responses, I analyzed online comments pertaining to the Calgary fluoridation cessation study. Results: Overall, I observed three prominent and overlapping themes: (1) Fluoridation research criticisms, which describes criticisms and negative comments from interviewees and online commenters about the Calgary fluoridation study specifically, and fluoridation research in general. (2) Selective Mistrust expressed by interviewees and online commenters toward the Calgary fluoridation cessation study, health research, and researchers, and (3) the Individualization of health, wherein interviewees and online commenters were skeptical toward health and government authority figures and their ability to make appropriate health decisions for the public, which led to the perception that the responsibility for oral health lies with the individual. Conclusions: With the publication of local research on fluoridation cessation, this study provided a ‘real time’ opportunity to gain a contemporary, nuanced understanding of what characterizes fluoridation opposition among some health professionals and members of the public.
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    Recognizing Campaign Effects on Social Media: A Computerized Text Analysis of the 2015 Canadian General Election on Facebook
    (2019-09-13) Czarnecki, Lucas; Sayers, Anthony M.; Tuxhorn, Kim Lee; Stewart, David K.; Lucas, Jack; Brodie, Ian
    Previous research demonstrates that traditional campaign strategies such as door-to-door canvassing and advertisement have minimal persuasive effects on voters’ political attitudes and vote choice while simultaneously demonstrating strong activation effects on voters’ existing preferences. From this literature, numerous theoretical perspectives on campaign contact have emerged. The most predominant is the minimal effects thesis, which posits that campaigns have minimal effect influencing voters’ political attitudes, vote choice, and consequently, election outcomes. In contrast, the activation effects thesis posits that campaigns are consequential to election outcomes because campaign contact activates voters’ existing political preferences and mobilizes the electorate to vote. This thesis proposes to reconcile the two theoretical perspectives by demonstrating that the same type of campaign contact may have both minimal persuasive effects on voters’ political preferences and strong activation effects on voters’ emotions. The thesis hypothesizes then that campaign contact evokes emotional responses that encourage rather than discourage voting. To this end, the thesis examines campaign effects online from a unique dataset queried from Facebook consisting of federal party leaders’ campaign messages (N = 1,711) and the responses to those messages from everyday Facebook users (n = 92,813) during the 2015 Canadian general election campaign. Computational social science methods are employed to directly measure campaign contact’s persuasive and activation effects on partisan and nonpartisan Facebook users. The results demonstrate that campaign contact online has a minimal persuasive effect on Facebook users’ self-expressed political preferences as well as strong activation effects on those preferences. Activation effects manifest as emotional responses that are most pronounced when individuals react to attitude-divergent rather than attitude-consistent campaign messaging. Exposure to attitude-divergent contact evokes Facebook users to experience discrete negative emotions such as anger, which previous research has shown to increase the electorate’s propensity to vote. The efficacy of negative emotions, however, may incentivize political parties to adopt strategies that demonize political opponents and which may, therefore, contribute to negative partisanship online.
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    The Size and Sources of Municipal Incumbency Advantage in Canada
    (Sage Publications, 2019-10-25) Lucas, Jack
    This article uses a new dataset of nearly 2,000 municipal elections from 1874 to 2018 to estimate the size of municipal incumbency advantage in Canada for the first time. Incumbency increases the probability that a candidate will win the next election by more than 30 percentage points and accounts for well over half of overall incumbent success. Incumbency advantage varies modestly by institutional context but varies substantially over time, with a distinct decrease during a period of partisan elections in the mid-twentieth century. These findings represent one of the first estimates of municipal incumbency advantage in an advanced democracy outside the United States and provide a new approach to estimating and comparing incumbency advantage in multi-member and single-member districts. The findings suggest important similarities between Canadian and American municipal elections, demonstrate that incumbency advantage has varied significantly at the municipal level over time, and illustrate the value of historical election data for scholars of urban electoral politics.
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    The Illiberal Search for Order: Protestant Preventive Societies, Theodore Roosevelt, and Sexual Repression in Progressive Era New York City
    (2023-08) Connolly, Michael R. D.; Towers, Frank; Chastko, Paul; Lucas, Jack
    This thesis explores the intersection of political reform, moral policing, and social control in Progressive era New York City, centred around Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure as President of the Police Commission from May 1895 to April 1897 and Charles Parkhurst’s Society for the Prevention of Crime (SPC). The SPC and other preventive societies played a crucial role in pushing for increased policing of vice, especially sex work, and sought to redefine sexual boundaries based on conservative Protestant values. As President of the Police Commission, Roosevelt followed the illiberal methods employed by reformers like Rev. Dr. Charles Parkhurst, President of the SPC. Roosevelt’s enforcement of vice laws, specifically targeting saloons and disorderly houses, endeared him to the moral reformers, but it alienated the working class and led to his unpopularity in New York City which dogged him during his 1898 run for governor. The narrative delves into the contrasting approaches of traditional reformers, who sought non-partisan municipal administration, and Progressives, who aimed for systemic change to improve social cohesion and efficiency. The enforcement of conservative moral values curtailed individual liberties and led to increased tension between the working class and reformers.
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    To Trade, or not to Trade: Explaining Lobbying Behaviour in the Canadian Dairy Sector
    (2019-09-05) Goodwin, Brett Owen; Tuxhorn, Kim Lee; Lucas, Jack; Stewart, David K.; Brodie, Ian
    There is a the motivating question behind this thesis: I am interested in better understanding how international trade negotiations impact the decisions taken by domestic firms when lobbying the government in a small open economy. I want to focus on the role of lobbyists in the relationship between trade policy and firm preference for two reasons. First, data complied on lobbying behaviour indicates that certain sectors have exhibited unusual variations in lobbying patterns. Explaining this empirical question is the core object of the analysis below. A second motivation is to assess the extent to which domestic lobbyists are able to impact the outcome of free trade negotiations in a meaningful way. In addition to the theoretical contributions to the role of lobbying behaviour, the findings in this thesis with respect to intra-industry dynamics and lobbying behaviour will be of keen interest to policy-makers since this behaviour lends insight into the market structure and relative power of firms in the dairy sector.
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    Tuning into General Education: Understanding Student Experience in Undergraduate Education
    (2020-12-10) Ulmer-Krol, Simon Francis; Scott, David M.; Lund, Darren E.; Burwell, Catherine; Lucas, Jack
    General Education is a program that is generally defined as “the home for a well-rounded education that nurtures skills in communication, numeracy, and critical thinking” (Furman, 2013, p. 130) in post-secondary education. The purpose of this research was to investigate how students experience learning and living within a university in Western Canada that has structured all of its degree programs around General Education. Following case study methodology (Merriam, 2009), data was collected through multiple avenues, including: the review of four institutional and curricular documents, four semi-structured interviews with university faculty, and an online survey and three focus group interviews with current and graduated students. Interpretation of the data was guided by a hermeneutic lens (Smith, 2006), revealing that the student experience of General Education at this university is fundamentally experimental in nature, resulting in great divergences of experiences and understandings of the program. Students experience General Education as both transformative and hermeneutic, challenging and overcoming previously held assumptions and prejudices. Other participants, however, report their experiences as frustrating, irrelevant to their education, and interfering with their core studies. This study’s findings are significant in several respects, including providing the first investigation of a General Education program situated in a Canadian institutional context. These findings can further provide deeper insights into the tensions and incongruities that exist between the philosophical aims of General Education programs and how they are experienced by the students they are meant to serve.
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    Waste Collection Technologies, Informal Waste Pickers, and Urban Exclusion: A Case Study of Calgary
    (2020-09-22) Adeyemi, Dare Moses; Burns, Ryan; Smart, Alan; Tam, Chui Ling; Lucas, Jack
    Waste management engineers and administrators have conceived of technological efficiency and optimization as the “modern” way to sustainable waste collection and management. This instrumental ideology of technology offers a progressive chant for modern waste collection technologies and a less enthusiastic one for the tools and techniques of informal waste pickers. Few efforts have gone into conceptualizing the social context and implication of waste collection technologies. In this thesis, I used a qualitative case study to explore the impact of residential waste collection technologies on the exclusion of informal waste pickers in Calgary. I draw on Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology to situate waste collection technologies within social, economic, and political contexts in Calgary. I argue that the social relations of ownership and control over waste collection technologies in Calgary illustrate complex and contested values, norms, and privileges, which create an unequal social, material, and technical relationship contributing to the exclusion of pickers and the exploitation of labor and waste. Calgary’s new curbside program protects the social norms of private asset ownership and consumerism, as well as the interest of private homeowners and some bureaucratic and large capitalist individuals in Calgary. A local third-sector organization, Calgary Can, has resisted these acts through its hook program; local bottle pickers have also resisted them through their collection activity and technologies. These realities push back against the colloquial understanding of modern waste collection technologies as value-free, a conception that dominates academic research and city policies and programs in waste management.