During the last decade a good deal of discussion of the “communitarian critique” of liberalism has occurred. The debate is perplexing for a number of reasons. The competing positions are often difficult to characterize (or, sometimes, even to distinguish) and it is often unclear what would be the thèoretical or practical significance of affirming one position over the other. In this “guide for the perplexed” the authors discuss two ambiguities and two problems which they believe are central to the debate. Examining these problems and ambiguities suggests some distinctions and confusions, strengths and weaknesses, characteristic of both communitarian and liberal arguments.

The Representation Act, 1985 amended both the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. This article shows that in each case the amendments erode the principle of representation by population by increasing the likelihood that federal electoral districts across the country will have widely varying populations. The first section examines the legislative history of the Representation Act, 1985 and its implementation in 1986 and 1987. The second analyzes the unsuccessful legal challenge brought against it by the City of Vancouver in Campbell et al. v. The Attorney General of Canada. The third addresses more explicitly John Courtney's main conclusions about the redistribution process in Canada as he expressed them in his 1988 CPSA presidential address.

This article analyzes the attempt to offer a contextual or historical justification of political liberalism. This type of justificatory argument for liberal political principles has recently been advanced by John Rawls in a series of essays and by Charles Larmore in his 1987 book entitled Patterns of Moral Complexity. Both Rawls and Larmore argue that this justification for liberal political principles avoids the problems attributed to other forms of liberalism by communitarian theorists. The central theme of this article is that the attempt to ground political liberalism in a contextual argument is incoherent.

American presidents have enjoyed a significant boost of their popular support early after their election. This article examines the existence of this same honeymoon phenomenon in the context of Canadian federal elections since 1945. The study shows that the above-mentioned phenomenon exists in Canada, identifies the circumstances more conducive to producing it and tries to demonstrate that it mostly results from a majority effect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the gain in political resources due to the honeymoon effect could be beneficial to the government's legislative performance.

The adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has generated considerable interest among legal commentators who question the potential impact of United States civil rights jurisprudence on Charter adjudication. This article offers a preliminary analysis of the impact of US constitutional law generally, and civil rights jurisprudence in particular, on Charter adjudication in the Supreme Court of Canada between 1984 and 1988. Focussing on the Supreme Court's citations of US decisions, the study finds that the frequency of such citations has increased under the Charter. Moreover, the Court's use of these decisions has had a significant substantive impact in defining the nature of constitutional interpretation and the content of the Charter's legal rights.

Many interpretations of the Social Credit movement in Alberta are based on assertions regarding the class basis of its popular support. Since no previous study of Social Credit has offered an empirical account of its popular class base, such an account is provided here. The author analyzes the provincial election of 1935, in which Social Credit first gained power, by comparing party support in the cities, towns and countryside. Within the cities, a district-by-district analysis measures the pattern of class voting in urban areas. Class is found to have been a powerful determinant of voting in this election.

In a recent article in this Journal, Paul Sniderman, Joseph Fletcher, Peter Russell and Philip Tetlock characterize the patterns of support for language rights among anglophones and francophones as reflecting the practice of a “double standard,” whereby each group recognizes these rights more readily for themselves than for the other official language group. The authors conclude that two factors, strategic calculation of interests and core political values, are central to understanding support for language rights. This comment focusses on two of their key concepts, “language rights” and “strategic calculation.” It suggests that their discussion of language rights is rather narrowly limited to those recognized in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, thereby neglecting more controversial claims to language rights. Furthermore, “strategic calculation” is open to at least two mutually contradictory deductions regarding the anticipated patterns of support, both of which can be supported by their evidence. I conclude that the authors have presented an intuitively plausible hypothesis to explain support for language rights in Canada, but have not explored their key concepts in sufficient detail to sustain their case.