Canada's federal system, composed of ten provincial governments and three territories, all with varying economies and political cultures, is often blamed for the country's failure to develop coordinated policy responses to key issues. But in other federal and multi-level governance systems, the ability of multiple governments to test a variety of policy responses has been lauded as an effective way to build local and national policy.

Despite high-profile examples of policy diffusion in Canada, there has been surprisingly little academic study of policy learning and diffusion among provinces. Featuring cutting-edge research, Provincial Policy Laboratories explores the cross-jurisdictional movement of policies among governments in Canada’s federal system. The book comprises case studies from a range of emerging policy areas, including parentage rights, hydraulic fracturing regulations, species at risk legislation, sales and aviation taxation, and marijuana regulation. Throughout, the contributors aim to increase knowledge about this understudied aspect of Canadian federalism and contribute to the practice of intergovernmental policymaking across the country.

Brendan Boyd is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, Economics and Political Science at MacEwan University, where he teaches courses in environmental policy and politics. His research is focused on learning and cross-jurisdictional influences among Canadian provinces responding to climate change

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Andrea Olive is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Olive completed her PhD at Purdue University in 2009 where she taught courses in environmental policy and was assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Dearborn before coming to the University of Toronto, Mississauga in the summer of 2012. She is the author of Land, Stewardship, and Legitimacy: Endangered Species Policy in Canada and the United States (UTP, 2014).

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