This article analyzes the attempt to offer a contextual or historical justification of political liberalism. This type of justificatory argument for liberal political principles has recently been advanced by John Rawls in a series of essays and by Charles Larmore in his 1987 book entitled Patterns of Moral Complexity. Both Rawls and Larmore argue that this justification for liberal political principles avoids the problems attributed to other forms of liberalism by communitarian theorists. The central theme of this article is that the attempt to ground political liberalism in a contextual argument is incoherent.

Libertarian writers such as Hayek, Friedman, Hospers and Nozick have insisted that welfare state policies are, per se, inimical to the classical liberal notion of freedom. The purpose of this article is to test the internal coherence of the libertarian attack upon the welfare state. Special attention is given to Friedman's contentions in his Capitalism and Freedom. It is argued that the libertarian attack upon the welfare state is misguided. Indeed, it is suggested that in order to achieve the type of individual liberty that libertarians wish to secure the state must be assigned a positive welfare role.

This review essay identifies major monographs about the study of government and political institutions in Canada published in English over the past 50 years. Our review is woven around a general argument that key books about Canadian political life have mirrored the evolution of the discipline in the country as a whole. For instance, important books on federalism were written at turning points in Canada's constitutional history, while the recent uptick in social diversity and political communication studies mirrors broader societal trends. Equally, greater diversity in hiring within the academy has contributed to a broadening of subject matter, perspectives, methodologies and authorship. Thus, we explore the intersection between scholarship and society, with political scientists and their books as much products of their time as they have been contributors to the evolution of the political world around them. The sources that we identify have given shape to the study and practice of Canadian domestic politics.

In this work we offer results drawn from a dataset of a post-provincial election survey in eight Canadian provinces to assess the impact of party system congruency on partisanship. We postulate that partisanship will be more likely and stronger in provinces that share a similar political party system to the federal level. We extend this preliminary analysis to test the underlying mechanism by examining the impact holding partisan ties at the provincial level has on the likelihood and strength of federal identification, according to party system similarity. Our results show very limited support for the party system congruency factor, raising further questions of its applicability in the Canadian context.

In the original publication of ‘Riding the Orange Wave: Leadership, Values, Issues and the 2011 Canadian Election’ (published online January 10, 2014), an error appeared. The caption for Figure 1 appears incorrectly; it should read, “Campaign Dynamics of Vote Intensions.” The publisher regrets this error.

The Canadian party system experienced a period of remarkable transition between 2006 and 2015, with the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Liberals trading places as the main competitor to the Conservatives. While national-level explanations are often used to explain this volatility, William Cross's research has shown that local association revitalization played a central role in the Liberals’ 2015 resurgence. This article examines the relationship between NDP local spending and success between 2006 and 2015. It shows that the NDP was consistently outspent by its opponents overall but that it often had a spending advantage in marginal ridings. As a result, this article finds little evidence that the NDP's local spending disadvantage cost the NDP seats, even though it finds a positive correlation between NDP local spending and NDP vote share.

Recent years have witnessed an increased attention toward legislative decision-making in urban Canada. Various studies have been undertaken which attempt to analyze the fundamental patterns of city council voting in different Canadian centres. Although influenced theoretically by discussions in the American legislative voting literature, they have frequently detected trends at variance with findings in the United States. Nevertheless, the direction of such Canadian studies has tended to be less focussed, with hypotheses and theoretical approaches frequently being rejected. This particular work was undertaken in an attempt to break out of a predictable mould which has tended to feature replications of similar research modes across the range of cities. The goal here is to redress the lack of theoretical initiative and to develop new explanations for the dynamic that underlies the municipal decision-making process.

Prime ministers in parliamentary systems confront a challenging agency problem in leading cabinets toward cross-government priorities: ministers tend to prioritize departmental interests and may lack incentives and/or information enabling co-ordinated effort. In Canada, a novel mechanism for both increasing incentives and information provision has been developed in recent decades: the mandate letter. These letters are issued by Canadian prime ministers to their ministers, reinforcing government priorities, each minister's responsibilities, and specific policy expectations. This article examines mandate letters as mechanisms inducing interministerial policy co-ordination, focusing on the 2015–2021 period, under Justin Trudeau, as the first Canadian prime minister to release these letters publicly. Using topic modelling and social network analysis, I find that Trudeau has increasingly sought to strengthen ministerial co-ordination and ministers’ focus on crosscutting policy priorities. This case study contributes to our understanding of intraexecutive co-ordination and the agency problem in cabinet government.

The life of the overseas Dominions in the past generation has been dominated by the related movements of democracy and nationalism. Here my concern is with a general and comparative treatment of the nature of Dominion nationalism and its influence on the relations of the Dominions to the outer world.

In some important and obvious respects nationality within all the Dominions has common features: it is a growth among immigrant peoples not politically severed entirely from the parent state, and not devoid of loyalty to the parent stock; it is mainly rooted in a culture derived from an older land, and draws inspiration from no wells of a past distinctive only to itself; it cannot in the nature of things nurture the sentiment of “we alone,” and it has not attempted to do so; it is expressed principally in a language common to two powerful world states, one of which has had a great literature for many centuries, and hence it has to be content only with such idioms of speech as local environment slowly brings. In all cases this Dominion nationality has a short history with the emotional shallowness of such. Its spirit is not steeped in the legendary glories of country and town. Unlike the small and intense nationalities of Europe, including the Irish, it rests its claims upon present achievements and future hopes rather than on reference to an epic past, or the tale of oppression suffered at the hands of another. In every Dominion it was both inspired by and expressed in the struggle of people for self-government and democracy, and the political institutions arid ideologies to which it is wedded have a common ancestry. It has arisen within Communities which grew big and prosperous quickly, thanks to a conjuncture of highly favourable world circumstances, notably the rapid industrialization which brought speedy benefit to frontier countries with rich natural resources and abundant land, countries linked to the heart of industrialism and world trade in the period, the British Islands. Related intimately to this circumstance was the Pax Britannica, or long era of relative peace secured by British sea power, which controlled the exits and entrances to the strategic seas and enabled the flow of people and capital, the unhampered occupation of wide territories, and the pursuit of the arts of peace to absorb these frontier communities, and thus achieve that sense of community expressed in their nationality.

Statistics provide data for action. A statistic which will not be used was not worth the trouble of collecting. I consider this a part of the definition of the subject and will not undertake to support it here. The action of course need not follow immediately; it may not be taken until the results of many other observations are available.

Specifically, statistics deal with random variation. In any practical situation, after we have accounted for every variable which can be brought under control, we still cannot say exactly what will happen. In manufacturing a coil spring, we may use metal of fixed chemical specification, even from the same heat, have a fixed setting on the machine which coils the spring, the same time and the same temperatures in tempering it, and still the tensions of the successive springs which are produced will vary. Given a variety of wheat whose seed is the purest strain we can procure, we plant a number of plots in soil of the same chemical composition, apply the same manurial treatment, see to it that the slopes and the irrigation are the same, plant the seed and cultivate the grain in the same way, and yet we find that the yields vary. In no practical case can theory provide an exhaustive account of the relevant variables, our physical control of real situations is never perfect, and consequently we are never in a position where the result will come out exactly to order.

Political opponents of Mr. Norman Manley, Jamaica's able chief minister, whose party has supported federation, once quoted against him a speech in which he referred to The West Indies as “the most improbable federation ever conceived.” Even its friends must admit that the original federal agreement lent colour to his description, by establishing a central authority which the Prime Minister, Sir Grantley Adams, recently characterized as both weak and poor. The constitution of 1958 gave the national government very limited jurisdiction and no power to tax. Its main sources of income were contributions from the unit governments, which produced an annual revenue of some nine million West Indian dollars—less than one-fifteenth of that in Trinidad or Jamaica. Profits on the currency issue yielded an additional three million dollars.

Thus the political framework of The West Indies resembled the American Articles of Confederation or the Federal Council of Australasia far more closely than that of a genuinely federal state. West Indians have sometimes said that their constitution was modelled on the Australian, because each assigned residual powers to the units. This view, however, is misleading, since in Australia as in Canada the national government has paramount power to tax and thus authority has inevitably gravitated to the centre.

There is current in Canada very little accurate information about the evacuation of Japanese from the defence area of the Pacific coast between February and October, 1942. Widely in use across the Dominion, but in the process of change, are the pre-war stereotypes of Japanese character which are still basic to some proposed solutions for the settlement of the so-called Japanese problem. This paper deals with aspects of the problem on which there is no recorded information, namely the reaction of the Japanese people to the handling of the Japanese problem since December 7, 1941.

In the process of working out a status for people of Japanese ancestry in British Columbia, the main historical effort of the Caucasians has been to limit as much as possible their acceptance in British Columbian society. These desires for total rejection have been supported by three major stereotyped rationalizations: the Japanese maintain a low standard of living, the Japanese are penetrating peacefully into this country, and the Japanese are unassimilable. We did not know before the Pearl Harbor attack just how widely these stereotypes were distributed, nor did we know their potency. But as a result of years of agitation and manipulation by politicians together with the breakdown of international security, vague fears, although not always verbalized, came to be widely held. Thus the war crisis made the historically developed stereotypes suddenly effective among many more people than they were before Pearl Harbor. As a result, attitudes based upon traditional conceptions of rights of citizenship and civil liberties were more than neutralized: they were completely ineffective in the presence of individual and organized demands for stringent action, justified by these rationalizations, especially by the one regarding peaceful penetration.