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.

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.

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 proposes an empirical test of a classical hypothesis formulated by Philip Converse about the link between political information and opinion change. The study departs from previous ones on three aspects: (1) it is conducted outside the electoral field; (2) political information—the key variable of the analysis—is directly measured and is issue specific, and (3) the test of Converse hypothesis is carried through the utilization of a quasi-experimental design. The results—based on a sample of students expressing opinions about the Canada-USA free trade agreement—exhibit the expected non-linear relation between the individual's level of political information and his propensity to change opinion. This conclusion suggests that particular groups could be more sensitive to political information flows.

Professor Carmichael's critique appears to demolish my reading of Hobbes so completely, and contains such minute reasoning, that readers will be apt at least to carry away the impression that there can be no smoke without fire. In this case, there is. As I shall show, Carmichael's most confident judgments, and his essential arguments, are without foundations.

Although more and more common, the equality measures in employment have little effect on the structure of double-standard employment (the one, masculine: the other, feminine). After having dealt with the development of the job structure in Canada, this article initiates a reflection on the inherent limitations of catch-up measures, in suggesting that the sexual segregation of jobs is a sociocultural construct recreated, at least in part, at the administrative level. Even if the present measures to achieve equality remain inoperative they are nonetheless useful, especially in the context of the present economic crisis.

This note reports the results of an attempt to detect a systematic pattern in the development of terrorist activity of the Palestine Liberation Organization during the period 1967-1978. Since its establishment in 1964 the PLO has seen the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as insoluble by political, as distinct from, military means. A quantitative analysis of Palestinian military activities explores a downward trend in the annual frequency of activity in the administered territories and an upward trend in the annual frequency of activity within the pre-1967 lines. Israeli punishment did not work as a deterrent but remained an essentially retaliatory activity despite the apparent intentions of its authors. The changes in the military activity of the PLO were systematic rather than coincidental. The main cause of significant long-term increases in the activity of the Palestinian organizations was the impetus provided by political events for the recovery of operative bases of action and motivation for guerrilla activity. Reinforcement of both organizational and motivational militancy followed the perception by the Palestinian organizations that political victories could not be gained without terrorist activity.

A calculation similar in manner to that employed by the Advisory Committee on Election Expenses, and by the author for earlier elections, reveals that a conservative estimate of over-all spending by political parties and candidates in the 1972 federal general election campaign would have amounted to well over $31 million. To complete the picture of the cash outlay on the federal electoral process one should add the $20,435,277.54 spent by the chief electoral officer on the 1972 federal general election, as well as the value of free broadcasting time supplied to parties and candidates by the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the private stations. (In addition, the unknown costs of obtaining a party's nomination by constituency candidates and the pro-rated costs of the representation commissioner and electoral boundary commissioners calculated by Professor Norman Ward at $200,000 per election must be computed in order to arrive at the full cost of the electoral process.)