Constitutional commentators who interpret conflicts between individuals and communities in terms of a struggle between individual and collective rights do not accurately capture the jurisprudence developed in the courts regarding such conflicts. Such conflicts are more clearly analyzed when they are framed in terms of identity-related differences. The difference perspective has three advantages over the “individual versus collective rights” perspective. First, the difference perspective accurately retrieves the courts' reasoning by framing it in terms of the values actually at stake. Second, it avoids the traditional dichotomy between individual and collective rights. Third, it provides a means to compare claims of individuals and groups without reducing group interests to individual interests.

Railway nationalization, the anvil on which national public enterprise was hammered together between 1917 and 1923, forms a misunderstood episode in the development of the Canadian state. This article examines the convergence of domestic politics and international economics that facilitated an unprecedented transformation of Canada's capacity to control its economy. State autonomy was used to create public enterprise as an instrument by which the gains of industrial restructuring could be distributed to favoured domestic financiers while its costs were imposed upon foreign investors. This power to manage the gains and losses arising from industrial change formed a new expression of economic sovereignty, one that ought to be viewed as an important step in the transition from imperial to national governance.

In the 1980s, Canada went from having one of the lowest levels of female representation in its national legislature to having one of the highest among countries with single-member district electoral systems. The authors examine the common assertion that this increase was largely due to the surprising Progressive Conservative landslide in the 1984 federal election. By simulating plausible alternative election results they find there would have been a substantial increase in the number of women in the parliament, regardless of how the vote split in 1984. The simulations are followed by probit analyses for 1980, 1984 and 1988 which examine what factors affected the probability a major-party candidate would be a woman and what factors affected the probability that a successful candidate would be a woman.

This article examines the effect of the media during the 1988 Canadian election. Using National Election Study data, three questions are investigated: do those with different patterns of media exposure change their vote intentions at different times; do those with higher media exposure remain more stable in their vote intentions, and do the media prime leadership? The article argues that patterns of media exposure have an effect: those with higher exposure to the media lead the opinion of others by about one week, they are more stable in their vote intentions, and they are more likely to vote on the basis of their trust in the leaders than on issue positions (in this case, the Free Trade Agreement) or party identification. However, there were few differences between those who relied on television as opposed to print for their information.

Observers of the development and evolution of Canadian environmental policy have noted evidence of what appears to be a pattern of lagged emulation of United States environmental initiatives by Canadian authorities. The record of recent Canadian court activities in the area of environmental assessments is cited as evidence that Canadian environmental policy is converging with that of the US. Other commentators, however, have failed to observe the increase in litigation required to justify the convergence hypothesis. Using evidence gleaned from a database of over 150 Canadian superior court decisions on the environment between 1980 and 1989, this article finds little evidence of a systematic pattern of convergence in the judicialization of Canadian environmental policy, and suggests that the reasons for this lie in the different institutional and constitutional structures which define the roles and relationship of the judiciary, legislators and administrative agencies in each country.

This article summarizes the conclusions of a comparative study of the environmental policy experiences of two Canadian provinces, Alberta and Ontario, in the period 1971–1993. The examination led to the conclusion that there is a pattern of environmental politics and policy-making common to both provinces, although it emerges at a different pace. This divergence is a function of well-known societal differences between the two provinces. Furthermore, in the Ontario and Alberta experiences, the policy-making capacity of the state can be seen to be severely challenged by the cross-sectoral nature of environmental policy issues. A number of observations regarding the effects of federal-provincial relations and of American influences on environmental policy-making at the provincial level in Canada are also possible.