There is little agreement about the degree to which parliamentary institutions can help overcome the democratic deficit in global governance. While much of the literature on the European Union's democratic deficit focuses on reforming parliament, most commentary on the subject in global governance and foreign policy holds out little hope that national parliaments could be used to mitigate the effects of the internationalization of public policy. This article examines the case of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT), established by the Australian government in 1996 in an explicit attempt to use parliamentary reform to address the democratic deficit. Although JSCOT was highly active, it did not significantly change the way in which Australian national positions in international negotiations were arrived at; the democratic deficit created in Australia by increasing internationalization has not been mitigated by the creation of this committee. While the JSCOT initiatives might have been motivated by the concerns of the government of John Howard to overcome the democratic deficit, the way in which JSCOT actually evolved departed considerably from those original intentions. Ironically, JSCOT evolved in ways not dissimilar to the evolution of NGO consultation in Canada in the 1990s: as a tool of political management, a means by which the government could channel protest, deflect opposition, and in essence legitimize its own policy preferences.

This project examines the policy process surrounding Canada's latest reforms of its financial–services industry legislation. The banks lobbied for a broadening of their eligible activities to mirror those of the multi–function banks in Europe and the United States and for mergers to permit them to compete with those banks on an equal footing. The government denied the institutions' requests and the pressure for action was deflected to a task force. My analysis of the policy change process is informed by the public choice paradigm and portrays the activities in the policy “black box.”

A traditional focus on the collective, institutional operation of the Supreme Court of Canada has obscured the practical impact on the Charter of Rights of the personal views held by the individual members of the Court. A study of all the Charter cases decided by the Supreme Court from 1983 to 1989 reveals a profound divergence of opinions within the Court. The differences are seen not only in each judge's overall support for Charter claims but also in the patterns of agreement between bilateral pairings of judges who have heard the same cases. The use of subsets of judges to sit on panels to hear Charter cases has meant that both the outcome of Charter cases and the content of our rights have depended to a large extent upon which judges happened to sit on the panels that heard the cases.

This article illustrates the contours of the continuing debate over Bentham's utilitarianism through an analysis of the secondary literature. It assesses the persuasiveness of the principal contemporary “authoritarian” (despotic, totalitarian, collectivism behaviouralist, constructivist, panopticist and paternalist) and “individualist” (facilitative and liberal) interpretations of Bentham's thought, indicating where they are consistent with his writings and where they are not. Distinctions and conflicts between contending perspectives are found to be rooted in a reliance on different elements of Bentham's vast corpus and emphasis on different components of his utilitarian theory. An examination of the contending perspectives underscores the tensions in Bentham's thought, including the most characteristic tension between, on the one hand, the axiomatic commitment to the individual and, on the other hand, the greatest happiness principle.

The European appropriation of Indian land in North America has often been justified through versions of the “agricultural argument” to the effect that the Indians did not need the land and did not really own it because they did not permanently enclose and farm it. Thus the European settlers could resort to original appropriation as described in Locke's Second Treatise. This article examines the agricultural argument as exemplified in the writings of John Winthrop, John Locke and Emer de Vattel. Analysis shows that the argument is formally consistent with the premises of natural rights philosophy because it assumes the equal right of both Indians and Europeans to engage in original appropriation. But the historical record shows that the argument actually applied to only a small portion of the land acquired by the Europeans. Sovereignty is the issue that should receive further inquiry.

Résumé. Cet article étudie les lieux investis par les activistes LGBT durant les mobilisations en faveur de l'ouverture du mariage civil aux couples de même sexe en France, en Espagne et en Belgique. Il montre que l'articulation entre les niveaux étatique et infraétatiques ne résulte pas uniquement des variations institutionnelles de la structure des opportunités politiques ou, à l'image du scale-jumping, de considérations stratégiques. Elle s'inscrit aussi dans des phénomènes plus vastes : la culture politique, l'histoire et l'organisation des mouvements LGBT dans chacun des pays analysés. Ce texte discute ainsi certaines observations de Miriam Smith (et de John Grundy) sur la déconnexion des niveaux d'action au sein du mouvement LGBT canadien.

Abstract. This article examines the places invested by LGBT activists while advocating the opening-up of civil marriage to same-sex couples in France, Spain and Belgium. It shows how the articulation between state and sub-state levels does not only result from institutional variations of the political opportunities structure or, as for scale-jumping, from strategic concerns. It also ensues from broader phenomena: political culture, as well as the history and organisation of LGBT movements in each of the countries under study. This text also discusses some of Miriam Smith (and John Grundy)'s observations on the disconnections of action levels within the Canadian LGBT movement.

The effects of Canadian mining companies on local communities abroad is an increasingly contentious topic as activists and academics, citing case studies, have drawn attention to alleged problems. Despite the policy relevance of this issue, there have been no generalizable analyses of whether mining companies headquartered in Canada behave differently from mining firms headquartered in other countries. This paper conducts the first rigorous statistical analysis of the effect of country of origin, or more specifically, “being Canadian,” on the occurrence of known social conflicts in Latin America. We use an original database of 634 mining properties in five Latin American countries, which allows us to differentiate between a country-of-origin effect and other probable determinants of social conflict in communities near mining properties. We find that Canadian mining firms perform slightly better than other foreign firms, but worse than locally owned firms.

The studies of non-voting made in the United States and Europe have firmly established that failure to vote is associated with conflicting political preferences, with lack of interest in politics, with low position on the social stratification scale, with a feeling of political powerlessness and, to a lesser extent, with sex (women voting usually less than men) and with age (the very young and the very old voting less than the average). But while identifying the causes of non-voting these studies have been unable to determine with any precision the true level of voluntary non-voting and the relative size of the various groups of non-voters. The reason for this failure is in the non-coincidence of four types of electoral universes used and often confused during the research and the analysis: (a) the universe of the cases studied; (b) the universe of the sample (when the research is done by sampling, as is normally the case); (c) the electors registered on the rolls and thus able to vote; and (d) the potential electors. Unless there is a close coincidence between these four universes, determining the true level of electoral participation and the relative importance of the various types of non-voters becomes an open confrontation between hard data and guess work.

Previous studies have noted that Canadians tend to support one political party at the provincial level of government and another party at the federal level, yet no attempt has been made to discover which voters switch their electoral support. This study is concerned with an examination of one electoral district as both a federal and a provincial constituency in two 1964 elections to determine (a) the nature and degree of vote switching from one election at one level of government to a second election at another level and (b) the characteristics of the people who switched their votes.

The city of Saskatoon was selected for the study for two closely interrelated reasons. First, two elections were held remarkably close together in time: a provincial general election on April 22, 1964, followed by a federal by-election on June 22, 1964. Second, Saskatoon had returned CCF members to the provincial legislature since 1944, but had elected as its member of parliament the Progressive-Conservative candidate since 1957. The Conservative candidates had a poor record in provincial elections, generally running a modest third, while in federal elections the party's candidate polled more votes than his combined opposition in 1958, 1962, and 1963. As Table I indicates the voters of Saskatoon had on six occasions in the period from 1956 to 1963 consistently supported the CCF provincially and the Progressive-Conservatives federally. The 1964 elections followed basically the same pattern The main differences were that provincially the Liberals and Progressive-Conservatives improved their position considerably in comparison with past elections (with the Liberals electing one member in the five-member district), while federally the Progressive-Conservative vote dropped substantially with a lower voter turn-out than had been the case in recent federal elections (see Table II).

Previous research has analyzed the various characteristics associated with the adoption of policies by the Canadian provinces. Since a number of provinces have appeared as regional leaders in the adoption of these policies, there would seem to be an emulation effect among the provinces similar to that found for the adoption of policies by states in the United States. The provinces that demonstrated leadership varied to some extent, depending upon the types of policies in question.

The interactions of a group of non-identical voting units may be studied by applying the concept of the Shapley value from n-person co-operative game theory. In this theory one assumes that voting units, or players, may form coalitions of various kinds in order to achieve success in the game, and one may assign a “value” to each such coalition based on what it can accomplish against arbitrary coalitions of the remaining players. The relative value of an individual player is calculated by considering how much he brings to each coalition he might join, that is, by how much the value of that coalition increases because of his membership, and summing this figure over all coalitions of which he could be a part.

Alberta is responsible for over a third of Canada's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Reducing the country's emissions requires policies and initiatives that reduce emissions in the province. Yet the study of provincial climate change policy in Canada has largely focused on lower-emitting provinces like British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario. This article argues that Alberta is best understood as a “reluctant actor” on climate change, whose policies are influenced by decisions and pressures from outside its borders. The literature on Canadian-American environmental policy making and international policy transfer are used to explore provincial GHG targets and carbon pricing policies. The article finds that Alberta's 2002 targets and Specified Gas Emitters Regulation were determined by economic competitiveness and leakage concerns, while the adoption of new GHG targets in 2008 and a carbon tax was the result of policy transfer through political bandwagoning and the desire for reputational benefits.

Open political debate on immigration and integration policies (IIP) among Canadian political parties has been relatively limited. As Canada's immigration and integration systems become more decentralized, what about political debates about IIP in Canadian provinces? This article examines how IIP evolved across time by focusing on political parties’ claims, frames and pledges in party platforms and newspapers, using the cases of Ontario and Quebec. In Ontario, IIP were primarily framed as an economic and social resource. However, following the event of 9/11, new frames began to be introduced, contributing to a heightened salience and polarization. In contrast to Quebec, however, this politicization was not sustained. In Quebec, IIP were only marginally a matter of debate until the mid-2000s. This changed following the Hérouxville event, as these topics became salient, and dominant frames of immigration as economic and social resources were challenged by those of immigration as economic and cultural threats.

Any attempt to assess the direction of social change in a particular society is a risky business at best. Yet, inasmuch as sociology, in its official texts on method, rests its claim to scientific status on its predictive capacities, it must somehow, sometimes, take this risk and say something about what are the significant changes occurring in the social organization of a society. In order to achieve any such general assessment the social analyst needs, it seems to me, to consider the society as a whole, and through time.

Sociologists are generally reluctant to view the whole of a society as a proper subject of study and reluctant also to study social phenomena through time. Indeed, what is at present felt to be adequate methodology, or should we say prestigeful methodology, requires living respondents whose answers can be given statistical treatment, and therefore becomes largely irrelevant for studies with historical dimensions; and while it may be quite useful in measuring change it is quite helpless of itself to account for it. Furthermore its preference for piecemeal and detailed verifications makes it a rather awkward instrument to use when dealing with general analyses. Anthropologists, by tradition, have commonly achieved such analyses in the case of less complex cultures. Even they, however, when confronted with large societies, have tended either to adopt the sociological habit of narrow investigation or to postulate that an image of the larger whole can be gleaned through the minute study of a particular instance, a particular cell such as a village, or a town. In choosing the first alternative, they abdicate what seems to have been a traditional objective of anthropology. In the second case, they stand in danger of missing the target through oversimplification.