A student of Ramsay Cook, he is a prominent defender of Pierre Trudeau's conception of federalism: no special status for Quebec and maintenance of linguistic minority rights.
In 1985, while a faculty member at Acadia University, his published doctoral dissertation Prelude to Quebec's Quiet Revolution was nominated for the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction.
Thanks to this book's success, he is still considered to be a major authority on the thought of former Le Devoir editor André Laurendeau.
He frequently appears in the media to comment on current events, most notably on CPAC's weekly call-in show Goldhawk Live.
Behiels says they find its basis in a right-wing political party capable of reconfiguring the role of the state – federal and provincial – in twenty-first-century.