No country had been engaged in macro-constitutional politics so intensively for so long as Canada. Macro-constitutional politics, unlike ordinary constitutional politics are about the very nature of the political community on which the constitution is to be based. When constitutional politics is at the macro level, the constitutional question tends to dwarf all other issues. Except for a few short intervals Canada has been engaged in constitutional politics since the mid-1960s. Through this experience and most recently. Canadians have adopted a new constitutionalism requiring popular participation in constitution-making. Thus, as Canadians enter the fifth, and what they hope will be, the final round of macro-constitutional politics, they will find out whether they share enough in common to constitute themselves a single sovereign people.

Monetary policy in Canada is formulated and implemented in a state-directed policy network dominated by the Bank of Canada. State-directed networks embody a tension between democratic accountability and legitimacy on the one side and maintaining support from the business community on the other. This article assesses this tension in Canadian monetary policy, focussing on the relationships between the Bank of Canada and other actors. As a central bank, the Bank of Canada possesses a unique constitutional status, being tied to the government through a directive power of the minister of finance. The Bank has also developed close working relationships with financial institutions for the implementation of monetary policy. In reviewing these relationships, the article identifies problems related to the Bank's political accountability and its ability to maintain legitimacy. The article then reviews some reforms that might address these problems: making the Bank more independent, subjecting it to closer control by the minister of finance and endowing it with a council-based internal governing system.

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.

Social movements are conceived of as networks that provide structures within which organizations negotiate meaning through the construction of collective identities. Network analysis is applied as a method for mapping the relationship among 33 national Canadian women's organizations. Results show that these diverse groups form an expansive, but loosely coupled, network that is bound by a collective identity of “liberalized” feminism. However, minority women tend to be marginalized within the movement and there are surprisingly few linkages with other core social movements. Intra-movement position has significant extra-movement consequences as demonstrated by the finding that network position is a highly significant predictor of the perceived effectiveness of a social movement organization.

Since the Second World War, a public policy on human rights has been put into place in Canada to control discrimination through human rights legislation and human rights commissions. This policy has changed over time, incorporating elements both of expansion in human rights protections and of restraint in the enforcement of the legislation. This study seeks to explain this change by examining the evolution of the policy in the province of Ontario, home of the oldest and largest commission in Canada. The conclusion drawn is that the evolution has been shaped largely by conflicting pressures for reform and restraint, reflecting an underlying conflict between rival liberal ethics which comes into play as consciousness grows of gaps between the principles and practice of rights.

This article examines the complementary hypotheses that voting blocs can exist in small cities as well as large cities, and that voting blocs can develop and exist in non-partisan councils. In this respect the study compares the council voting patterns of two Alberta cities—Calgary and Grande Prairie—over the period of one council term, from 1983 to 1986. Well-defined voting blocs, revealed through Rice-Beyle cluster bloc analysis, are found in both councils. Moreover, discriminant analysis reveals that, contrary to previous research on bloc formation in partisan councils, bloc composition can be generally attributed to the interplay of the councillor background attributes.

Several previous studies have noted that women constitute a relatively small proportion of provincial legislators in Canada. Numerous explanations for this phenomenon exist, most of which are identified clearly by Brodie, Bashevkin, Burt and others. In this research note, the authors examine the relationship between the proportion of female legislators and the urban/rural nature of the electoral district. They find that there is a distinct difference in the proportion of female legislators who represent urban districts compared to rural districts. This urban-rural disparity exists regardless of political party affiliation. Moreover, the gap appears to be widening over time.