Of all the levels of the state or government in Canada, the local one is the most often subjected to structural change or reorganization. The processes by which that change occurs—or by which it is postponed or avoided—are the focus of this article. In particular, the consequences of choosing one process of change rather than another are explored. After developing a framework to define and explore the processes of change, the article proceeds to analyze 81 instances between 1953 and 1983 in which reorganization of local government in Canada either actually occurred or was merely proposed.

Michel Foucault offered his readers an “analytics of power” and later began a “genealogy of the subject.” The two tasks were related, and both were premised on Foucault's rejection of traditional modes of political thought or reason. This article explores Foucault's attack on political rationality, something here called Foucault's triple murder: that is, his rejection of the role played in political thought by the ideas of sovereignty, History (as a predictable evolutionary or revolutionary process) and Man (as a transcendental subject). Foucault's restructuring of political thought is shown to be the foundation of his work.

This article examines the impact of economic crisis on the process of regionalization in Belgium and the influence of both on the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces in the Belgian political system. It argues that the usual approach to this suject, which identifies centripetal forces with the national government and centrifugal forces with regional governments, misses the possibility that important proponents of further fragmentation may be located at the national level. The economic crisis of the early 1980s did lead to an increase in centrifugal pressures in the system but not to an increase in the power of the new regional executives. Rather, it led to a major rearrangement of the economic policy-making process at the national level.

In the past century, the notion of human rights has expanded significantly to include a variety of social rights. The introduction of this new category of human rights inspired a lively debate concerning the authenticity of such claims, focussing particularly on the ways in which social rights differ from political rights. This article examines the major points at issue in the debate. The important differences emphasized to date are those relating to costs, universality, and the correlativity of rights and duties. In each of these major areas of dispute, analysis indicates that the allegedly fundamental distinctions between social and political rights are in fact differences of degree, not of kind and, in fact, social rights conform both to the broad logic and the established practice of human rights.

The federal election of 1984 brought to an end 16 years of virtually uninterrupted Liberal government whose foreign policy was characterized by an evident desire to set Canada apart from the United States and give a truly Canadian flavour to the country's diplomacy. The Conservatives have drawn a lesson for themselves from the limited results of such policy and have re-aligned the country more closely with the United States to resolve various issues inherited from the Liberals, free trade being one of them. If free trade were to become a reality, there would be serious implications for the future of Canadian industry, for the social and economic well-being of the population, and, most important of all, for the existence of Canada as a sovereign state.

A great number of polls have been made public by the media during the 1985 electoral campaign in Quebec. The polls correctly predicted the winning party, but were not very good for forecasting the actual vote. A difference of 3 percent has been observed between the prediction and the vote with respect to the Liberal party and third parties considered as a whole. It is shown that the discrepancy must be attributed more to those who do not answer polls at all than to those individuals not willing to reveal their vote intention. Finally, the campaign seems to have had a small impact on the vote, the Liberal party increasing its share by 2 per cent and third parties loosing many votes among those who were tempted to support them at the beginning of the campaign.

This note extends the authors' earlier work on incumbency in Canadian federal and Ontario provincial elections by examining riding by riding results in the 1984 federal and 1985 Ontario provincial elections. In particular, the authors test their earlier hypothesis that incumbency effects are swamped by large shifts in voter preferences. The results indicate that incumbency had a significant impact, and that this impact was not reduced by the large shift in votes in the 1984 federal election. The authors reject the hypothesis that large shifts in party allegiance reduce incumbency effects.

It is widely held in the Northwest Territories that consensus rather than partisanship may be the most appropriate principle to guide the anticipated restructuring of the Territories' government. This note argues to the contrary that the social basis for consensus politics is absent in the NWT and that present practice in the Legislative Assembly of the NWT owes more to nonpartisanship than to consensus and does not predict a consensual future. However, this practice also does not necessarily point to a parliamentary system in the future; this study identifies four alternative systems as possibilities. It argues that, whatever the format of the Assembly, consociationalism, including significant devolution of power to local governments, represents the most promising direction to explore because it reflects the Territories' social structure and addresses the fundamental concerns of the cultural communities of the NWT.

Interpretation of the intentions of government in policy matters is a crucial, if normally implicit, aspect of policy analysis. Canadian policy analysts enjoy a significant advantage in having at their disposal a large body of legal-historical evidence of policy conflict between levels of government, which, if properly interpreted, can aid the process of determining the intentions of government policy. Using an example of conflicting interpretations of government intentions contained in the literature on Canadian political economy, it is argued that the use of legal-historical records can aid policy analysts by providing evidence of policy alternatives not only in the case of policy decisions, or “acts of commission,” but also in the case of nondecisions, or “acts of omission.”