Much of the activity relating to the support of agricultural prices in Canada is conducted under the authority of the Wheat Board Act and the Agricultural Prices Support Act, but the programme in its broadest sense involves other legislation and a variety of government policies. Part of this programme originated in the inter-war period and earlier years. This paper, dealing with various aspects of the programme, is introduced by a brief outline of background developments.

Governments, both federal and provincial, have traditionally been concerned in the main with activities aimed at increasing efficiency in the production and marketing of farm products. These have included experimental and scientific research; efforts to improve the quality of plants and animals; the introduction and enforcement of grades and standards for marketing; and extension work designed to acquaint farmers with useful information as it became available.

During the First World War this pattern of activity was enlarged. At that time the federal Government took over control of the marketing of wheat. It gave to a body known as the Board of Grain Supervisors authority to fix the prices and to market the crops of 1917 and 1918. This proved to be the forerunner of a development that has since come to occupy an important place in government activity.

The traditional interpretation of Plato's Republic in the English-speaking world, expressed most sharply by Sir Karl Popper, was that it represented a serious proposal for political rule. However, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom have argued that Plato's real concern was to protect the position of philosophy within the city. Influenced by Simone Weil, this article argues that even Strauss and Bloom do not express the extent of Plato's rejection of the political life. By examining Plato's handling of such themes as gold and nakedness, the article concludes that Plato's central concern in the Republic was to explore how a soul could strive for the Good, given that the human condition inescapably required social life.

Professor Seaman contends that I am mistaken in asserting a logical connection between equality of right and unlimited acquisition. I argued that equality of right as employed by Locke in the Second Treatise logically entails the right of unlimited acquisition, and a consequent danger of environmental destruction, resulting from the necessary commitment of political structures to unlimited acquisition.

This study examines corporate contributions through political action committees (PACs) to US Senate incumbents from 1978 to 1988 by those industries which have sustained substantial environmental compliance costs and consequently have an incentive to develop relatively precise targeting strategies. The findings suggest that party, ideology, regulatory costs, and challenger attributes play especially important roles in corporate allocation strategies. These industries pursue relatively precise, sophisticated campaign contribution strategies, which reflect these influences.

Given the Liberal party's dominant position in Canadian federal politics, it has been extremely difficult for the Progressive Conservatives to effect an electoral breakthrough and win enough parliamentary seats to form a government. In this century, the Conservatives have been in power for only 22 years. The last time the party formed a majority government was in the spectacular Diefenbaker victory of 1958 which gave the Conservatives 208 of 265 seats. After the demise of the Diefenbaker government in 1963, the Conservatives languished in opposition until 1979 when they won a plurality of seats and Joe Clark formed his short-lived government. It is the election of 1979 which provides the focus of analysis in this article, and especially the success of the Conservatives in supplanting the Liberals, although not with a majority government.

Canadian courts have been torn between two constitutionalisms in their interpretation of the application provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The traditional, liberal constitutionalist approach establishes a distinction between public and private realms and between state action and inaction, limiting the Charter's application to the public, governmental sphere of positive legislation and executive conduct. However, the courts have oscillated between this and a postliberal constitutionalism according to which distinctions between public and private and state action and inaction are arbitrary and artificial. This article argues that this clash of constitutionalisms is responsible in large part for the courts' inconsistent and confusing record in interpreting sections 32 and 52 of the Constitution Act, 1982.