Given the Liberal party's dominant position in Canadian federal politics, it has been extremely difficult for the Progressive Conservatives to effect an electoral breakthrough and win enough parliamentary seats to form a government. In this century, the Conservatives have been in power for only 22 years. The last time the party formed a majority government was in the spectacular Diefenbaker victory of 1958 which gave the Conservatives 208 of 265 seats. After the demise of the Diefenbaker government in 1963, the Conservatives languished in opposition until 1979 when they won a plurality of seats and Joe Clark formed his short-lived government. It is the election of 1979 which provides the focus of analysis in this article, and especially the success of the Conservatives in supplanting the Liberals, although not with a majority government.

The traditional interpretation of Plato's Republic in the English-speaking world, expressed most sharply by Sir Karl Popper, was that it represented a serious proposal for political rule. However, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom have argued that Plato's real concern was to protect the position of philosophy within the city. Influenced by Simone Weil, this article argues that even Strauss and Bloom do not express the extent of Plato's rejection of the political life. By examining Plato's handling of such themes as gold and nakedness, the article concludes that Plato's central concern in the Republic was to explore how a soul could strive for the Good, given that the human condition inescapably required social life.

There is an almost universal expectation of considerable social reconstruction in Great Britain as soon as the United Nations have achieved victory, and even of instalments in the course of the war itself. This expectation rests upon keen disapproval of certain British social and economie institutions, but also upon confidence in and respect for a national character, which, in the centuries of its development, has achieved mighty and noble works in the building of its political and economic habitation.

In the following observations on the subject of reconstruction we shall be chiefly concerned with four factors: the influences that have produced the manifestly strong impetus to reconstruct; the cardinal reforms that are in mind; the agencies which have been established to collate, ponder, and implement the proposals; and finally, it will be well to find an answer to the question, what are the prospects of substantial advance?

Britain entered the war in a deliberate, not a romantic frame of mind. There was a job to be done, a terrible problem to be solved, not an adventure to be enjoyed. This sobriety led to the immediate raising of the question, “How can this shocking event be prevented from recurring, and to what extent are we as a nation responsible for it?” The result was a widespread canvassing of war aims and peace aims—the newspapers were at once full of the discussion. Generally, the first phase of attention was to international arrangements, and, in the course of time, this produced a spate of suggestions revolving around the conception of federalism. We need not do more than point to the establishment of Federal Union, and the series of papers written on the subject of World Order under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Commentators and critics often invoke the metaphor “Charter proofing” to emphasize how much the Charter and judicial review have influenced legislation. This metaphor implies that proposed legislation is evaluated carefully for its consistency with Charter rulings as a condition of passage because decision makers believe legislation should respect judicial interpretations of constitutional norms and/or because they engage in risk-averse behaviour out of self-interest to minimize the likelihood that legislation could subsequently be challenged and declared unconstitutional. However, it is not clear that the federal government is as worried about having legislation declared invalid as many assume. If this is so, federal government responses to the Charter raise an interesting puzzle. The government has both the resources and the institutional capacity to anticipate judicial concerns and integrate judicial norms into legislation to minimize the likelihood of having legislation declared unconstitutional. So why does it not act in a more risk-averse manner at the outset, in order to protect legislation from the possibility of judicial invalidation? This address offers a five-part explanation to this puzzle that emphasizes the significance of political strategizing about risk.

Résumé. À partir d'une recherche sur l'art engagé des artistes québécois en arts visuels, nous analysons ce que ce type particulier de contestation sociopolitique nous apprend sur les transformations qu'a subies l'engagement depuis la fin des années 1970. Nous explorons ainsi la représentation sociale de l'engagement dit passé ainsi que les caractéristiques actuelles des pratiques artisticopolitiques. Ce choix d'étudier l'engagement à partir d'une forme située hors du cadre strict de l'action usuelle, dans un espace ouvert (au sens où il ne correspond pas aux lieux, aux institutions et aux façons d'agir reconnus comme politiques), permet d'accéder à la diversité des configurations de l'engagement présent et aux déplacements et transgressions opérés quant à sa représentation plus classique.

Abstract. Based on research on the politically committed art of Québécois visual artists, we analyze what this particular form of socio-political contestation teaches us about the changes which political involvement has seen since the end of the 1970s. We explore the social representation of involvement said to be that of the past, as well as the characteristics of present day artistic-political practices. The choice made to study involvement from a perspective outside of the framework of usual political action, in an open space (open in the sense of lacking correspondence with the spaces, institutions and ways of acting usually recognized as political), opens on the diversity of current forms of involvement and on the changes and transgressions which have occurred with regard to the more classical social representation of involvement.

Although more and more common, the equality measures in employment have little effect on the structure of double-standard employment (the one, masculine: the other, feminine). After having dealt with the development of the job structure in Canada, this article initiates a reflection on the inherent limitations of catch-up measures, in suggesting that the sexual segregation of jobs is a sociocultural construct recreated, at least in part, at the administrative level. Even if the present measures to achieve equality remain inoperative they are nonetheless useful, especially in the context of the present economic crisis.

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.

Robert Nozick seeks to extract a substantive theory of distributive justice (“the entitlement theory”) from what he takes to be the formal properties of natural rights (or rights-based) theory. The unsoundness of his arguments supports the longstanding suspicion that all such theories are conceptually confused and ideological biased. Yet upon examination, the classical (chiefly Lockean) views that Nozick regards as a prototype of natural rights theory withstand that suspicion precisely in so far as they lack the formal properties of his own theory. I conclude that theories of the classical form are better equipped to resolve political arguments.

Canada and/in the World is a broad topic that has produced a wide range of diverse publications in the twenty-first century, not only in political science but also in history and other neighbouring disciplines. What they all share is an interest in investigating how Canada, either as a state, a polity, a society, a culture or an idea, intersects with and is part of the international. Yet, along this spectrum we find literature spanning from problem-solving to critical—to use Robert Cox's distinction (1986)—as well as from heavily empirical and policy relevant to theoretically informed. Some works aim to explain, some to facilitate understanding and others to challenge and deconstruct. Thus, while there might be a traditional core of positivist writing centring on liberal internationalism and to a lesser extent (neo)realism, which some claim can be condensed into a list of “the ten most important books on Canadian foreign policy” (Kirton, 2009), there are also strong critical voices that challenge core assumptions about how we conceptualize and examine Canada and/in the world.

In the nineteenth century, the dominant theory of the state restricted the latter's activity to external and domestic defence and the provision of an adequate law of contract by reference to which disputes between individuals could be settled. The theory, however, never represented much more than an ideal. In the twentieth century, it became necessary to abandon even the ideal. Already, before the turn of the century, technological progress had created problems which could be solved only by state action. The demand of organized labour for a measure of security and improved working conditions produced others. Still others resulted from the concentration of capital and mass production. These and other factors forced the state to intervene in spheres which had been traditionally reserved for private enterprise. With the war came even greater problems; and the state became more and more involved. In 1918, a vain effort was made in some countries to return to “normal” conditions; but for the most part the evolution continued unabated though not always in the same tempo or in the same angle of direction. In a few states it produced collectivism, in others a “new deal,” in others fascism; but in none did laissez-faire survive.