On April 25, 1950, when convening the House of Commons Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Mr. L. Philippe Picard, M.P., remarked: “This committee, so far as I understand, has sat only about six times in the last twenty years, and it has been traditional that the committee would sit upon a request by any member to the elected chairman. There is no fixed date, no definite time at which we should sit. I wish to inform the committee that I have received a letter from the member for Winnipeg, Mr. Stewart, asking for the committee to be assembled.” The haphazard approach then taken by the committee towards its work, despite the importance of parliamentary control of public expenditure, was actually rather worse than its chairman's observations suggested: the committee had not in reality met in six of the previous twenty years for the consideration of public accounts, but on occasion had taken up quite other matters, as in its romp through the Bren Gun Contract in 1939. It is true that during those years other committees of the House of Commons studied various aspects of public finance, and that modern governmental procedures of accounting and auditing have made almost redundant the additional examination of some parts of the public accounts by legislative members.

I appreciate the opportunity Professor Vaughan's article provides to clarify some of my thoughts on the Judicial Committee and constitutional interpretation.

Vaughan and I are in agreement on two broad points. First, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council read a theory of classical federalism into the BNA Act. This theory of divided sovereignty was expressed most clearly by Lord Watson in the Maritime Bank case. Secondly, the BNA Act's treatment of federalism is highly centralist, both in the division of powers and in the federal government's imperial powers over provincial governments. Both these points are contained in the following passage from my introduction: “In their anxiety to preserve a division of powers appropriate for “classical federalism” and thereby resist the strongly centralizing tendencies of the constitutional text, the Judicial Committee developed an acute sensitivity to the competing claims of the provinces and the federal government.” I think Professor Vaughan would agree with that statement.

Old age pensions of $40 a month became available on January 1, 1952, to every Canadian over seventy years of age, who had lived in the country for twenty years. As Canada has now had pensions for old people (subject to a means test) for only a quarter of a century, the idea is usually thought of as relatively new. In point of fact, however, Canadians were interested in old age security as far back as 1889, when the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital mentioned with approval a French scheme to provide annuities for elderly workmen and their widows. The need for government action in the matter has been widely discussed in the Dominion ever since.

Great Britain's example in this, as in so many other matters, had an important influence. As early as 1773 a bill to provide annuities for “the industrious poor” had been passed by the House of Commons at Westminster, only to be rejected by the Lords. During the eighteen-eighties and nineties British enthusiasm for pensions for the aged revived, largely owing to Charles Booth. His monumental study of the Life and Labour of the People of London showed that some thirty per cent of the population of the metropolis lived in conditions of extreme poverty, because their earnings were not high enough to allow a decent standard of living, much less to make feasible any provision against old age. The government, Booth argued, ought under these circumstances to accept some responsibility for its elderly citizens.

This, one of the extremely limited number of full-length studies devoted exclusively to resale price maintenance in Great Britain, is a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Amsterdam. The author, apparently trained in economics at British universities, also claims a “connection with the trade in branded consumer goods” lasting “for a number of years.” In his introduction, Dr. Kuipers expresses particular dissatisfaction with the theoretical analyses advanced by British economists, which, he claims, are inadequately supported by “facts.” His own analysis he believes to be sufficiently comprehensive to enable him to derive a formula, “the adoption of which … would provide an adequate solution to the problem [of resale price maintenance] in Great Britain under present conditions” (p. 3). The degree to which other economists will recognize this ambitious claim will depend on whether they accept Kuipers' analysis of what “the problem” of resale price maintenance is and, for those who do, whether they also believe that his particular scheme is desirable and administratively feasible.

The volume is divided into two parts: the first deals in a general way with the legal and economic aspects of resale price maintenance in Great Britain and lays the basis for Dr. Kuipers' policy recommendations; the second part deals with the nature and extent of price maintenance in the British grocery trade. Although more than one hundred pages are devoted to the latter section, the empirical data upon which the statistical analysis is based are very sketchy. Dr. Kuipers is not unaware of this weakness but he considers the results “generally accurate” and “sufficiently near the mark.” Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, there can be little question that Dr. Kuipers has achieved as much as an individual investigator, working unassisted, could hope to do.

The Australian Loan Council is a unique body. Established in 1928-9 as a part of the Financial Agreement, after the opinion had become widespread that the credit of the whole of Australia, under existing conditions, could never be much higher than that of its weakest state, the Loan Council was given full legislative and constitutional status as the body which was to handle all borrowing by Commonwealth and state governments, except borrowing for temporary purposes or by the Commonwealth for purposes of defence. Against its decisions there is no appeal because the Council is not directly responsible to any one Parliament or electorate. “If,” as Mr. Forgan Smith of Queensland has complained, “any Premier agrees [at a meeting of the Loan Council] to a line of policy from which his State Parliament dissents, all that this Parliament can do is, by means of a vote of no confidence, to remove him from office. Nevertheless the decision of the Loan Council would stand.” It is more than probable that nobody foresaw the extent to which, in the depression, the Loan Council might “be made the instrument of forcing upon the Commonwealth and the States a common policy involving the very details of their internal administration.”

Reduction of deficits. The first evidence of the powers of the Loan Council came in April, 1931, when Australia was fumbling for a proper policy to stem depression. On the initiative of the Council the so-called Copland Committee was appointed and on the basis of the report of this Committee the “Premiers' plan” was drawn up, which aimed, through a variety of measures, at a prompt balancing of budgets. These were long steps forward, but the question as to what could be done to keep governments in line still had to be answered, and here again the Loan Council had an important role. Early in 1932 New South Wales defaulted on its debt, and then approached the Loan Council for additional authority to borrow.

The history of Quebec as a province since Confederation has not received the attention it merits. This is the more surprising when one considers the study which has been devoted to the history of Lower Canada, to the old province of Quebec, and to New France. Political disputes at once violent and petty are supposed to constitute the history of Quebec since Confederation. It is unfortunate that this view is so widely held, because along with factional struggles went important and interesting economic, social, and political experiments all more or less closely connected with French-Canadian nationalist aspirations. While many of these experiments were local in origin, their growth had an influence far beyond the boundaries of the province. In this paper I propose to consider only one of these developments: some early French-Canadian views on protection.

Multiple-employer collective bargaining includes all systems of bargaining in which representatives of a number of separate firms act as a group in negotiating with representatives of their workers. The group negotiations need not cover the whole content of the contracts signed by the participating companies, nor does the group action necessarily extend from negotiation to administration of the collective bargaining contract. The employers' bargaining unit may be of any size. Industry-wide bargaining is only one form of multiple-employer bargaining; characteristics of multiple-employer bargaining are also present, although sometimes less pronounced, in local or district bargaining systems.

A significant proportion of the collective bargaining systems in Canada are organized on a multiple-employer basis. The Department of Labour estimated that in 1946, 26 per cent of all workers under collective agreements were covered by agreements negotiated by associations or groups of employers. The ratio would be 46 per cent if workers covered by agreements extended under the Collective Agreement Act of Quebec were included. The relative importance of multiple-employer collective bargaining is probably much the same today.

In a world beset by problems of accelerated development and structural adjustment, influencing the level and direction of investment has become a major governmental preoccupation. Investment is the key to economic growth and transformation; hence there is concern over where it will go. In this connection investment control in post-war Britain provides a fairly good but neglected case study. Although generalization must hurdle many obstacles of time, place, institutional framework, and history, British experience affords some insights into the nature and workings of investment control, its limitations, and its possibilities.

La science politique n'a pas encore réussi à élaborer de grands ensembles théoriques. A vrai dire, les politicologues doivent se contenter de quelques généralisations, assimilables tout au plus à des hypothèses de travail d'une nature bien particulière, de typologies destinées à faciliter le dépouillement des données politiques. Signalons à la volée, les multiples typologies des régimes politiques, les essais de classification de « l'homme politique » et les théories des « élites ». Toutefois, devant la nécessité de développer et de multiplier démarches et recherches en vue d'échaffauder un début de théorie, il nous paraît intéressant, utile peut-être, de tenter de découvrir la dynamique qui agite et soutient les divers éléments d'une telle typologie.

Ainsi, la typologie des partis politiques, mise au point par Maurice Duverger. Le juriste français a regroupé autour de deux principaux pôles les divers types de partis politiques que connaît le monde contemporain. Les « partis de notables », groupes restreints composés de personnalités en vue dans un milieu et dont l'objectif unique se définit par l'organisation des campagnes électorales, se dressent contre les « partis de masse », créés par les mouvements socialistes européens et destinés à rallier tous les sympathisants d'une même cause politique, de façon permanente. Bien sûr, Duverger reconnaît la possibilité de multiples variantes, sur un continuum reliant ces deux pôles extrêmes.

Political coalitions have been studied by many authors, but few of them have shown that the presence or action of rivals or neutrals, outside the coalition, is an important factor in its formation or evolution. A structural approach is proposed, which underlines the cohesion requirements in the coalition formation and evolution. Then five research propositions are formulated, the last three of them bearing upon the political usefulness of rivals. The propositions are applied to the events related to the failure of the electoral system reform in Québec. This application leads to conclude that the propositions have a certain heuristic capacity but that some of them have to be altered for more appropriateness in future research.

This note reports the results of an attempt to detect a systematic pattern in the development of terrorist activity of the Palestine Liberation Organization during the period 1967-1978. Since its establishment in 1964 the PLO has seen the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as insoluble by political, as distinct from, military means. A quantitative analysis of Palestinian military activities explores a downward trend in the annual frequency of activity in the administered territories and an upward trend in the annual frequency of activity within the pre-1967 lines. Israeli punishment did not work as a deterrent but remained an essentially retaliatory activity despite the apparent intentions of its authors. The changes in the military activity of the PLO were systematic rather than coincidental. The main cause of significant long-term increases in the activity of the Palestinian organizations was the impetus provided by political events for the recovery of operative bases of action and motivation for guerrilla activity. Reinforcement of both organizational and motivational militancy followed the perception by the Palestinian organizations that political victories could not be gained without terrorist activity.