Urbanization is challenging traditional politics. Forces attempting to stop the growth of the power of the metropolis must abandon the idea. New types of problems, their urgency, new élites, an urbanized citizenry, and a new balance of power are calling for a new type of political society. Historically dated nation-states may disappear.

This article reviews the positions taken by the Atlantic provinces in Canadian constitutional reform negotiations over the past 25 years. It is based on public statements and documents and interviews with advisors to Atlantic governments. The stereotypes of regional dependence on federal transfers and conservative political culture are challenged as explanations for Atlantic constitutional positions. Atlantic leaders have not acted as dependents of Ottawa. While seeking to preserve federal authority in fiscal and regional policy, these provinces have sought to make it more responsive through guarantees for equalization and regional development, and through more regionally sensitive intrastate institutions. In some fields, preserved or enhanced provincial authority has been sought. And at key junctures, regional leaders and populations have opposed and blocked federal government preferences. Conservative values are not evident in regional support for rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or aboriginal self-government, among other relatively progressive positions. Differences among these provinces and between individual leaders, plus a shortage of bureaucratic resources in intergovernmental affairs, have limited the coherence and effectiveness of Atlantic interventions at times. While no common regional position has emerged, certain key goals are reasserted frequently. Selected reforms to intrastate institutions and the interstate division of powers have been sought to facilitate the use of both federal and provincial authority to end these provinces’ “have-not” status.

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.

Potentially, the most complete and accurate information concerning any broad class of law-violators is obtainable from statistics on inmates of penitentiaries. This is true because the longer term of the penitentiary convict makes possible a correspondingly more intensive study of his characteristics than can be made for the offender concerning whom we have only the information provided by the police, the courts, or the municipal jails.

The research upon which this report is based grew out of an interest in evaluating, at least partially, the extent to which one major recommendation of the so-called “Archambault Report” has been implemented. The pertinent recommendation stressed “the need for formulating definite policies in regard to the compilation of statistics and definite principles of gathering such statistics which would be observed by all authorities throughout Canada.” More concretely, it recommended (p. 174) that “there should be a close cooperation between the [Department of Justice, Penitentiaries Branch] … and the [Dominion] Bureau of Statistics, with a view to formulating definite policies….” The major statistical section (forming the Appendix) of the Annual Report of the Commissioners of Penitentiaries, is a direct result of the foregoing recommendation.

The Australian Loan Council is a unique body. Established in 1928-9 as a part of the Financial Agreement, after the opinion had become widespread that the credit of the whole of Australia, under existing conditions, could never be much higher than that of its weakest state, the Loan Council was given full legislative and constitutional status as the body which was to handle all borrowing by Commonwealth and state governments, except borrowing for temporary purposes or by the Commonwealth for purposes of defence. Against its decisions there is no appeal because the Council is not directly responsible to any one Parliament or electorate. “If,” as Mr. Forgan Smith of Queensland has complained, “any Premier agrees [at a meeting of the Loan Council] to a line of policy from which his State Parliament dissents, all that this Parliament can do is, by means of a vote of no confidence, to remove him from office. Nevertheless the decision of the Loan Council would stand.” It is more than probable that nobody foresaw the extent to which, in the depression, the Loan Council might “be made the instrument of forcing upon the Commonwealth and the States a common policy involving the very details of their internal administration.”

Reduction of deficits. The first evidence of the powers of the Loan Council came in April, 1931, when Australia was fumbling for a proper policy to stem depression. On the initiative of the Council the so-called Copland Committee was appointed and on the basis of the report of this Committee the “Premiers' plan” was drawn up, which aimed, through a variety of measures, at a prompt balancing of budgets. These were long steps forward, but the question as to what could be done to keep governments in line still had to be answered, and here again the Loan Council had an important role. Early in 1932 New South Wales defaulted on its debt, and then approached the Loan Council for additional authority to borrow.

On April 25, 1950, when convening the House of Commons Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Mr. L. Philippe Picard, M.P., remarked: “This committee, so far as I understand, has sat only about six times in the last twenty years, and it has been traditional that the committee would sit upon a request by any member to the elected chairman. There is no fixed date, no definite time at which we should sit. I wish to inform the committee that I have received a letter from the member for Winnipeg, Mr. Stewart, asking for the committee to be assembled.” The haphazard approach then taken by the committee towards its work, despite the importance of parliamentary control of public expenditure, was actually rather worse than its chairman's observations suggested: the committee had not in reality met in six of the previous twenty years for the consideration of public accounts, but on occasion had taken up quite other matters, as in its romp through the Bren Gun Contract in 1939. It is true that during those years other committees of the House of Commons studied various aspects of public finance, and that modern governmental procedures of accounting and auditing have made almost redundant the additional examination of some parts of the public accounts by legislative members.

Our civilization is properly called an urban civilization, for the forces which shape it gather in the cities and spread out from them. The cities integrate, and in many ways dominate, the entire society. An inquiry into the nature of the city, then, is also an inquiry into much that is important to the nature of civilization itself. The defects of cities are defects of the whole system of living.

There are different types of large cities, but the type which is most significant in this inquiry is the industrial-commercial metropolis. Resort cities, capital cities, shrine cities, and the like may be conspicuous, but they do not have the same kind of influence. It is the metropolis which expresses the essence of our system. All references to cities in this paper are to this type.

The most thorough studies of cities have been made in the United States, but in so far as other observations have been made they indicate that with caution the results may be extended to other large cities of the world. It has been shown that the large expanding city has a natural form which is repeated in all cities, and which is not only unplanned, but for the most part not responsive to efforts at control. There is a basic pattern which no city escapes; a spatial order of population groups and institutions and of functional parts of the economy, and a number of states of social organization and disorganization which are related to this order. This paper is principally concerned with the typical forms of disorganization, and the conditions under which they arise and some of the results of efforts to deal with them.

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.