This article utilizes the “regulation approach” in order to rethink the origins and resolution of crisis. It provides an account of the political conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s which gave rise to a model of development in Canada which can be labelled “permeable fordism.” Rapid economic growth after the Second World War had specific national traits but these were based on wage relations and macro-economic policies similar to other countries which have been labelled fordist. The political compromise of Canada's “fordism” was, in contrast, quite different. The compromise was based on a new national discourse more than on one stressing the capital-labour relationship and organized by class-based parties. The article demonstrates how these differences were rooted in the political conflict of the 1930s and 1940s, the moment when the earlier model of development came apart around the challenges posed to Canadian federalism by the Depression and the Second World War.

This article examines Hobbes' conception of natural right in society as presented in Part Two of Leviathan (primarily chapters 21 and 26 through 28). In contrast to Hobbes' earlier works, this section contains an implicit but important account of natural rights (called “true liberties”) in society and a corresponding set of restrictions on the proper use of law and punishment. Authority is thus absolute, but its proper use is limited. I argue that these limits are significant, that they represent an important revision in Hobbes' theory and that the resulting conception of natural right provides a useful basis for understanding rights today.

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on the ethical and political meaning of the French Enlightenment, more specifically concerning the religious implications of the idea of popular sovereignty as it is put in place at the time of the French Revolution. The study of the social status of religion in two thoughts elaborated before and after the Revolution shows the clear opposition between Rousseau's “civil religion” with its perspective of a moral regeneration of man, and Tocqueville's “democratic religion” with its liberal perspective. But it also reveals the ambivalence they share in their attempt to think through the problem of the “common soul” of a society where legitimacy rests only on its self-institution.

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 rash of conflict of interest incidents involving cabinet ministers in Canada in 1986, 1987 and early 1988 can in part be explained by the fact that no clear connection exists in most of the conflict of interest rules between the substance of the rules and basic constitutional principles. Unless ministers understand the reasons for the increasingly complex rules, a high degree of compliance with them is unrealistic. The article explores the connection between the rule of law, social equality, the principle of ministerial impartiality and conflict of interest legislation and guidelines. The conflict of interest rules have usually been drafted hastily in reaction to scandals, with little thought given to their constitutional basis. Thirty-five recent conflict of interest incidents are classified and analyzed. Many might have been avoided if the constitutional reasons for the rules had been better understood. Nevertheless, with regard to the overlap between conflicts of interest and political patronage, the Canadian political system has not developed a clear set of expectations for ministerial behaviour in all circumstances.

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 studies the varied fortunes of public administration in Quebec political discourse. After being the object of both discussion and reforms from 1840 to 1870, the administration was largely neglected for the next 90 years, except in the context of political scandals. Then, after two decades of great attention, the administration fell under attack in the 1980s. After looking at the enduring themes of this discourse, the article concludes that, in addition to the conditions prevailing in all the provinces, in Quebec the apolitical nature of traditional ideology prevented the development of a local theory of the state.

In the Quaderni del Carcere, Antonio Gramsci provided the foundations for a socialist theory of democracy. This theory can be drawn from some of Gramsci's most important concepts: his views of intellectual activity on the one hand, and the conceptions of hegemony and civil society on the other. The former provides a general conception of a non-bureaucratic relationship between leaders and the led, the latter points to a participatory model of political activity. This thesis, however, is formulated within the framework of a realist epistemology in which the class structure is conceived as the long-term determinant of the general historical process. Hence, although Gramsci's thought sheds new light on a non-class domain of political activity, it is constrained by both socio-economic conditions and the realism of available knowledge.

This study measures the effects of macroeconomic conditions upon the popularity of the incumbent party in Canadian federal general elections from 1945 to 1988. In so doing it uses a model similar to the retrospective voting models used in electoral studies in the United States. The results suggest that for the elections from 1945 to 1972, bad economic conditions preceding the election benefited the incumbent party. For the elections from 1974 to 1988, these effects were diminished or reversed. Such results have precedents in separate studies that use Canadian poll data. However, they contradict the general conclusion of American studies that bad conditions hurt the incumbent. This contradiction suggests that the model's assumptions about voting behaviour, which appear to be verified by the American studies, do not apply universally.

This article is a comparative case study of environmental regulation in Canada and the United States, focussing on one important area of environmental regulation, pesticides, and on the treatment of North America's most commercially important pesticide, alachlor. Alachlor is a clear case of policy divergence: Canadians have banned the substance while the US has decided to keep it on the market with minimal restrictions. Three major explanations for the divergence are explored: science, interest group politics, and legal and institutional arrangements. The article concludes that while different interpretations of the risks posed by alachlor contributed to the different decisions, they can only be explained with reference to the economic importance of alachlor and the need to maintain the legitimacy of current institutional arrangements. The concluding section outlines a framework for explaining similarities and differences in environmental, health and safety regulations across nations.

Pierre Bédard, leader of the French Canadian party in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada from 1792 until 1812, and a staunch defender of British political institutions, is compared with two of his compatriots whose opinion of the British system is less admiring. To understand the dilemma of colonial politics Bédard attempts to reconcile the idea of tolerance and freedom that he finds in British constitutional authorities like Locke and Blackstone with his perception, illuminated by those same authorities, that British rule in Lower Canada was intolerant. What emerges is an unmatched description of the constitutional principle enabling free criticism of government in Parliament and in the press. Blanchet and Taschereau, in contrast, provide an argument that promotes reflection on the limits of political dissent even in an essentially tolerant polity.

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.

This article investigates press coverage in Canada and the United States of the 1982 and 1984 Salvadoran elections employing the concept of the “demonstration election,” which posits that some elections occur not to select governments and solve problems but rather to confer international legitimacy on the government holding the election. The press plays a vital role in creating this aura of legitimacy. There is some evidence that the American press played a legitimizing role in the elections. While the elections received twice as much coverage in the American press as they did in the Canadian press, with the exception of some differences in leader evaluation and emphasis on issues, Canadians received essentially the same media portrayal of the elections as did Americans.

This study proposes an empirical test of a classical hypothesis formulated by Philip Converse about the link between political information and opinion change. The study departs from previous ones on three aspects: (1) it is conducted outside the electoral field; (2) political information—the key variable of the analysis—is directly measured and is issue specific, and (3) the test of Converse hypothesis is carried through the utilization of a quasi-experimental design. The results—based on a sample of students expressing opinions about the Canada-USA free trade agreement—exhibit the expected non-linear relation between the individual's level of political information and his propensity to change opinion. This conclusion suggests that particular groups could be more sensitive to political information flows.

Studies of bloc voting in the United Nations have appeared periodically since the early 1960s. This article examines the evolution of UN voting in its first four decades using multidimensional scaling, which is compared to factor analysis and found to be superior for representation and interpretation. UN voting is important for showing how world politics is reflected in that body, hence the frequent use of UN votes as a dependent variable in the analysis of foreign policy behaviour.

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.

The Nobel prizewinner F. A. Hayek has spent his long career defending classical liberalism and the free market from those wishing to introduce planning and greater “rationality” into social life. As this study tries to show, Hayek's defence of market liberalism is predicated on his theory of social knowledge and how liberal principles and processes are best suited to cope with our limited ability to utilize this knowledge. He argues that we can cope best with our ignorance by resisting the temptations to set up centralized decision-making mechanisms and by accepting the discovery procedure of the market mechanism. Unlike other attempts to defend classical liberalism, Hayek offers a radically new knowledge-based foundation. If Marx's work could be labelled an economically-based sociology, Hayek's work could be labelled an epistemologically-based politics. But is his epistemological defence simply an ideological move to defend against attacks levelled at capitalism, or has he provided an indisputable foundation to justify the maintenance of liberal orders?

Despite much attention, aboriginal governments in Canada have not yet been the focus of comprehensive, sustained and focussed research on the part of the academic and aboriginal communities. In this article 14 areas which require study are cited under three major headings: aboriginal communities and their governments, the components of governance and the wider policy environment. These clusters of research subjects are related in a systematic fashion. A selection of the literature is placed in context and practical suggestions for fostering co-operative approaches to research are suggested. Throughout, it is argued that a critical focus for such efforts on the part of political scientists, other scholars and analysts should be placed on the needs, experiences and goals of aboriginal peoples and their governments.

At present, the federal government is engaged in community-based self-government negotiations with a number of Indian bands and tribal groups across Canada with the objective of bringing about legislative arrangements for a limited form of self-government outside the Indian Act. An important part of these negotiations involves the federal government's promise to allow the incorporation of “customary or traditional structures,” where desired, into redesigned Indian governments. This article explores the difficulties confronting Indian leaders in their attempts to revitalize traditional governing practices within their respective communities. Through a comparison of traditional and contemporary governing practices in two plains Indian societies, the Blood and Peigan Nations, this article addresses the question of whether present Indian government, which represents an externally imposed form based on the Indian Act, has been institutionalized within these communities. If institutionalization has occurred, then a return to traditional governing practices, the author argues, is effectively precluded. After analyzing traditional and contemporary governing practices the author concludes that strong traditionalist orientations remain within these Indian communities, thus providing the opportunity for political revitalization.