This study challenges the claim that foreign-owned firms do not differ significantly from Canadian-owned firms with respect to political donations. Tests for association and correlation show that overall, foreign-owned firms are significantly less inclined to contribute money to Canadian parties. Behaviour varies according to nationality, so that British firms are most likely to contribute, followed by Canadian and then American companies. Japanese firms are least likely to contribute.

Philip Resnick argues that Montesquieu is seminal for an understanding of Canadian institutions. We find in nineteenth-century Canada, he says, not Montesquieu's separation of powers doctrine, so influential in the United States, but his teaching about the mixed constitution, that is, government by a combination of monarchic, aristocratic and democratic institutions. He argues that this influence shows in such typical features of our political culture as acceptance of hierarchical patterns, deference to authority and so on; these are reflections of the “disdain for democratic excesses” inherent in the mixed constitution. He then goes on to suggest that we have grown out of the mixed constitution in the twentieth century, but that as a result of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms relations between the political and judicial powers in Canada have so come to resemble the American that we are justified in saying that Canada in this one respect is now characterized by the separation of powers. We have moved from the Montesquieu of the mixed constitution to the Montesquieu of the separation of powers.

This study uses a game-theoretic analysis to suggest that governments can minimize the political risks associated with significant liberalization of trade by employing a multistep process in the reduction of state-supplied rents. The model argues that when governments precede significant reductions in state-supplied rents with a smaller reduction, or with a reduction that can be portrayed credibly as externally imposed, they may be in a position to evaluate, and hence mitigate, costs associated with significant trade liberalization. Substantive implications are explored in the context of United States trade policy and the still-curious ability of the Franklin Roosevelt administration to engage in strategic rent reductions without suffering meaningful political backlash.

The revelation, via a leaked draft, that the Supreme Court of the United States was going to overturn the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) sparked immediate questions about whether a similar retrenchment of abortion rights could occur in Canada. Key legal, structural, and political cultural factors mitigate the forces of American-style erosion of norms on the Supreme Court of Canada and in our broader politics surrounding abortion rights. Despite this generally optimistic comparative context, complacency about the status of abortion rights in Canada would be unwise. This short Currents article canvasses factors crucial for not only preserving the policy status quo in criminal law (that is, the absence of criminal law abortion regulation in Canada), but also for advancing the scope of abortion rights in the positive sense, as serious barriers to access persist at the provincial level.

The political use of political science

Political scientists claim for science and for themselves, as scholars, a maximum of independence in their dealings with government and Parliament. At the same time, science finds itself so inextricably bound up with the actual political process that it has become an “establishment” as strong and formidable as religion was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberal political scientists put themselves into a contradictory position when they demand for themselves, in the pursuit of their task as scholars, a political status which would protect them from the scrutiny of the elected representatives of the people, a condition which, they would refuse to grant to any other social group, and yet simultaneously in their teaching and writing set themselves up as the ardent defenders of representative and responsible democracy. What must one sacrifice, science or democratic responsibility? Is it necessary to aim at excluding science from the democratic process, at the risk of seeing our society regress towards a pre-industrial age, or should one regard representative and responsible democracy as relevant to questions of minor importance while significant issues which concern the present and future of society are to be dealt with by other political methods?

Herbert Marcuse owes his notoriety primarily to the loud echoes evoked by his words among American and European student militants; he is in danger of becoming their first victim as is the wont of fashionable men and ideas.

But the real interest of his intellectual approach lies elsewhere, in his unceasing and relentless efforts to criticize advanced industrial societies which he judges to be repressive; to explain the mechanisms through which this repression is internalized, thus blocking any perspective allowing for radical change; and to found a new type of industrial society, compatible with, and favourable to, the “liberation” of man.

This paper retraces the main lines of this intellectual development, stressing particularly its philosophical foundations and its innovations with respect to the sources from which it is derived.

To many Canadians anti-Americanism is not only as old as Canada itself, but it also seems to have been and still is an integral part of the entire Canadian experience. To the historian Baker, anti-Americanism is a recurring theme in Canadian history and exists today as it did a century ago. However, anti-Americanism, to the best knowledge of the authors, has not been investigated through systematic behavioural empirical research. The development of a scale to measure anti-American attitudes is a necessary step in the empirical investigation of Canadian anti-Americanism. The purpose of this research note is to present some data that contribute to the empirical development of a measure of Canadian attitudes towards Americans which may be used as an anti-American scale.

Since well before the turn of this century economists have been attempting to explain the phenomena associated with pricing in the transportation industry. Of recent years this subject has received both descriptive and prescriptive treatment at the hands of welfare economists. In the course of this paper it will be argued that the current descriptive theory is based upon a fundamental misconception of the nature of transportation output and that, in consequence, the policy prescriptions, even when they are right, are usually right for the wrong reasons.

As a starting point it will be useful to recall a controversy which began with a journal article, written some sixty years ago, in which Professor Taussig was endeavouring to show that railway rates could be fitted within the framework of general price theory. He argued that the wide differentials which were apparent in the railways' charges for their services could be explained by the preponderant influence of joint costs. If this were true, the rates charged for output A would be the consequence of passive adjustments in price to changes in the output of B in response to changes in demand for the latter product. Actually Taussig argued that the commodities transported (e.g., coal and copper) were sold to different consumers and should be treated as different products. Many years later the criticisms of Professor Pigou precipitated a lengthy debate over the validity of the joint cost doctrine, Pigou contending that railway output was homogeneous and measurable in units of ton-miles.

“Group Government” was the principle of political organization put forward by Henry Wise Wood, president of the United Farmers of Alberta, 1915-31, at the time that body entered politics in 1919. By the phrase, Mr. Wood meant that political organization should be on an occupational, or functional, basis and that political action by economic groups should replace political parties. As such, the idea had affinities with the doctrines of pluralism and even corporativism. When applied to representative and parliamentary institutions, however, it raised those constitutional issues which are common to multi-party and coalition government. Fundamentally, that is, it came into collision with the principle of cabinet unity. Group government, however, encountered an immediate constitutional problem in the prevalent form of the domination of the legislature by the cabinet, and to this aspect of the matter, the present paper is addressed.

The farmer's movement which followed the slackening of the wheat boom of the first decade of this century was, in its political aspect, a revolt against the party system. The ground for this revolt was that the parties were controlled, it was alleged, not by the rank and file of the voters, but by the party organization, the professional politicians. This small group was in turn said to be controlled by the “interests,” upon whom the parties were dependent for funds. It followed that the parties existed to serve, not the people, but the “interests”; it also followed that there was no difference between the two traditional parties. Hence the need for a people's nonpartisan organization, which would sweep away the old parties, curb the “interests,” and make the will of the people effective. The validity of this analysis need not be examined here; the effect of these beliefs is what concerns us.

The mishandled problem of reparations and inter-Allied war debts looms large in customary analyses of the wreckage of the European peace settlement after World War I. The seminal source of trouble then was the insatiable appetite of the Versailles victors for “spoils,” joined by the Shylock American insistence on repayment of war debts.

After World War II the war debt problem was gently erased, but reparations proved even more troublesome. Although those powers which a generation before had moulded the Versailles Treaty were, under American leadership, comparatively tame in their reparations demands, the Soviets were not. This is readily understandable, since the German armies spent their destructive fury on Eastern and not on Western lands. The Soviet loss of life and resources in repelling German armies from the heart of Russia was truly colossal. The war wiped out hard-won advances (factories, inventories, power plants, residences, tractors) achieved since 1917 under lash and by dint of incredible austerity.1 The Soviet economy was planned and, with its insistent commodity needs, could absorb immense quantities of manufactured goods. Despite bomb-smashed German city centres and residences, German manpower remained, as well as powerful industrial facilities which operated up to the closing months of the war. Any trained observer would expect the Soviets to demand maximum one-time drainage and continuing arrangements whereby some German industrial facilities would be worked by some German labour to produce goods and services for Eastern benefit. This was precisely the policy later carried out within the Soviet Zone of Germany which, if it was not “milked dry,” was converted into a massive pumping station for current product reparations.2 A less self-regarding Soviet policy toward the leading “ex-enemy” country would have been astonishing in view of the substantive drainage from “liberated” satellite areas.