Training the Excluded for Work: Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income, Marjorie Griffin Cohen, ed., Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003, pp. 276.

Training the Excluded for Work is an important contribution to debates about the importance and viability of job training policies and programmes that are directed to those who are “excluded” in the Canadian labour market. It is also timely insofar as job training, in contrast to post-secondary education policy, remains somewhat underexamined in Canada. This is particularly ironic, as job training has emerged as a key issue for policy makers, industry, workers and activists. Training is frequently touted as a panacea that will address a host of economic ills including unemployment, low productivity levels and lagging investment. On the one hand, many employer and industry groups view training measures as part of a larger strategy to address the imperatives of a global economy. Here, neoliberal rationales tend to prevail—job training becomes an investment in individual human capital. But on the other hand, job training can also be an important means by which marginalized groups, including youth, women, indigenous groups and racialized minorities, address the terms of their exclusion from (or limited inclusion in) the labour market. In doing so, other rationales come to the fore, most notably the need to address social inequities in the labour market. This edited book addresses this latter aspect of the training policy debate.

The Quest for Modernity in the Middle East and the Islamic World Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq, Eric Davis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, pp. xi, 385.

The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq, Brendan O'Leary, John McGarry and Khaled Salih, eds., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, pp. xxi, 355

Nationalism and Minorities Identities in Islamic Societies, Maya Schatzmiller, ed., Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005, pp. xiii, 346

Muslims and Modernity: An Introduction to the Issues and Debates, Clinton Bennett, London, New York: Continuum, 2005, pp. xviii, 286

These four books encapsulate a range of political issues that have shaped the formation of states and ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the beginning of the modern encounter between Europe and the Islamic world, from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt through the post-World War I demise of the Ottoman world up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Le débat public en apprentissage—Aménagement et environnement : Regards croisés sur les expériences française et québécoise, Louis Simard, Laurent Lepage, Jean-Michel Fourniau, Michel Gariépy et Mario Gauthier (sous la direction de), Paris : L'Harmattan, collection Villes et entreprises, 2006, 315 pp.

L'ouvrage collectif franco-québécois, Le débat public en apprentissage—Aménagement et environnement, se propose de faire un bilan des mécanismes de consultation publique au Québec et en France. Les institutions qui encadrent ces débats publics, surtout en environnement, en énergie et en construction routière, nous semblent relativement récentes, mais dans certains cas, comme dans celui du BAPE (Bureau d'audiences publiques sur l'environnement) au Québec, elles fonctionnent depuis maintenant plusieurs décennies, et l'heure est donc aux bilans. Ou, comme le soulignent des contributeurs français, on est prêt à un “ débat sur le débat ”. Pour dresser ce bilan, on a eu la bonne idée de faire appel à des praticiens et à des universitaires, et ce, des deux côtés de l'Atlantique. Le résultat est un volume riche en pistes et en idées dont l'intégration est cependant laissée au soin des lecteurs.

Cette note de recherche a deux objectifs. Premièrement, nous présentons l'index relatif de confiance (IRC), une nouvelle mesure du potentiel de croissance et de la solidité du vote basée sur la probabilité exprimée par les électeurs de voter pour l'ensemble des partis dans leur circonscription. Nous nous penchons en détail sur les avantages de l'IRC et montrons qu'il permet d’évaluer le potentiel de croissance et la solidité du vote des partis politiques au niveau des circonscriptions et au niveau provincial. Deuxièmement, nous appliquons cet index au cas du Parti québécois à l'aide d’échantillons de grandes tailles récoltés pendant les campagnes électorales québécoises de 2012, 2014, et 2018. Cela nous permet d'illustrer et de tirer des constats sur le potentiel de croissance du Parti québécois.

Résumé. Avec une méthodologie double, nous portons notre attention sur un groupe très peu étudié : les jeunes non-engagés. Grâce à des entrevues, nous distinguons quatre types de non-engagés: les critiques, ceux qui manquent de ressources politiques, les occupés, et ceux en attente de mobilisation. Les critiques ne représentent qu'une minorité des non-engagés, alors que les jeunes manquant de ressources sont plus nombreux. Cette étude démontre qu'une grande proportion de jeunes présente un potentiel d'engagement futur et que c'est principalement des barrières temporaires qui réduisent leur niveau d'engagement. L'analyse quantitative dévoile des variations d'attitudes, de profils démographiques et de volontés d'engagement entre types de non-engagés. Les non-engagés ne sont donc pas un groupe homogène.

Abstract. With a two-pronged methodology, this article takes a closer look at an understudied group: the disengaged youth. Using interviews, we discern four different types within this disengaged group: the criticals, those lacking political resources, the busy and those waiting for mobilization. The ‘criticals’ constitute only a minority of the disengaged group, while the young people who lack political resources are more common. Most importantly, a great proportion of young people show a certain potential for engagement. The quantitative analysis reveals that these types resemble distinct attitudinal and demographic profiles, and differ in their future willingness to participate. Thus the non-engaged are not a monolithic group.

Two ideologies have survived the turmoil of the twentieth century: nationalism and liberalism. It is therefore very important to confront them and to see how compatible they are. In this article the author presents and discusses the national policies advocated by the three most influential liberal schools: the neutralists, the autonomists and the nationalists.

This note derives hypotheses about the intergenerational transfer of Canadian partisanships from a social learning model, which posits that the adoption of attitudes is affected by the homogeneity of cues in the environment. As hypothesized, data from the 1974 Canadian national election study show that the rate of adoption of parental partisanships is affected by the consistency of each parent's federal and provincial party identifications. The second hypothesis, which posits that transfer rates are affected by provincial-federal party system correspondence, is also supported in three of four regression equations.

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on the ethical and political meaning of the French Enlightenment, more specifically concerning the religious implications of the idea of popular sovereignty as it is put in place at the time of the French Revolution. The study of the social status of religion in two thoughts elaborated before and after the Revolution shows the clear opposition between Rousseau's “civil religion” with its perspective of a moral regeneration of man, and Tocqueville's “democratic religion” with its liberal perspective. But it also reveals the ambivalence they share in their attempt to think through the problem of the “common soul” of a society where legitimacy rests only on its self-institution.