The Canada-United States Automotive Products Trade Agreement of 1965 has been a source of controversy between these two countries, yet has also shown considerable resistance to change. An adequate political understanding of the creation, content and history of the Pact requires an examination of the complexes of issues and goals within which the Canadian and American governments approached its negotiation. These influenced not only what issues were dealt with in the APTA but also how and how successfully. Canada was initially favoured, as is demonstrated by the outcome of the talks. However, the Pact postponed, rather than resolved, the differences between the two governments; subsequent controversies between them over the Pact stem in large part from these unresolved differences.

This address examines the relationship of political science and democratic governance by considering changes in both the political world and the discipline in Canada since the 1960s. It argues that the developing dynamics in political life, as significant as they have been, have not fundamentally altered the essential features of democratic governance in Canada. It suggests that a number of factors account for the diminished capacity of the discipline, as a collective scholarly and teaching enterprise, to contribute to democratic political life. On the one hand is the relative paucity of institutional mechanisms in Canada to link political science to democratic governance; on the other is the discipline's own fragmentation that lessens its focus on questions central to democratic governance.

This article discusses the ideological origins of Canadian Confederation. As such it directly challenges a belief commonly held by Canadian political scientists and historians that Canadian Confederation was the product of a purely pragmatic exercise. The author argues instead that the ideological origins of the Canadian federal state may be traced to the debate that divided eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, America and France—a debate between the defenders of classical republican values and the proponents of a rising commercial ideology formulated during the Enlightenment. Only by understanding how this debate unfolded in nineteenth-century Canada can we understand the particular configuration of the Canadian state that emerged triumphant in the 1860s. Furthermore, an understanding of this debate also offers political scientists a broader context for interpreting long-held Canadian attitudes toward authority, the uses of political patronage, the public debt, capitalism, and the state and economic development.

There are three ideal types of revolutions: spontaneous, planned and negotiated. The role and importance of structural factors versus human agency vary according to the general category to which a particular revolution belongs. In spontaneous revolutions, both the transition and conslidation phases are heavily conditioned by prevailing structural factors, especially those that result in the weakening of ruling state institutions and the political mobilization of one or more social groups. By contrast, in planned revolutions self-declared revolutionaries take the lead in both mobilizing supporters and weakening the state, in fact often having a highly elaborate ideological—as well as tactical and strategic—blueprint for the acquisition and consolidation of power. Negotiated revolutions see the greatest coalescence of forces involving both structural developments and human agency. The seeds of the revolution have germinated, but the prevailing structural developments are not by themselves sufficient to bring about the revolution's success. Actors representing both state and society must step in to negotiate, and only then might the revolution succeed and be consolidated.

The political importance of rights in liberal democracies, and of universally accessible health care in Canada, are trite observations. However, the increasing use of the language of rights to defend existing patterns of health care in Canada is a curious if not alarming phenomenon. What do citizens mean when they say that they have the right to health care? How can health care rights be defined philosophically and politically? This article examines the increasing popularity of rights claiming for health care, and argues that the ''right to health care'' has a non-possessive, normative nature that is at odds with legalistic individualistic rights claiming. This is a significant philosophical finding, one that informs the political debate over health care by revealing that legal rights claims are not sufficient to defend social entitlements. The conceptual project undertaken in this article illuminates directions of reform and suggests that differentiated citizenship provides a better model than legal rights to guide reform efforts.

This article examines Hobbes' conception of natural right in society as presented in Part Two of Leviathan (primarily chapters 21 and 26 through 28). In contrast to Hobbes' earlier works, this section contains an implicit but important account of natural rights (called “true liberties”) in society and a corresponding set of restrictions on the proper use of law and punishment. Authority is thus absolute, but its proper use is limited. I argue that these limits are significant, that they represent an important revision in Hobbes' theory and that the resulting conception of natural right provides a useful basis for understanding rights today.

These notes are replies to criticisms that have been made over the years of my essay, “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation,” which originally appeared in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32 (1966), 143–71.

The pairing of Australia and Canada has become a rich source of comparative studies with respect to foreign economic policy. This matching has been largely inspired by the like-mindedness of the two countries. Yet, if Australia and Canada may be said to have similar objectives in terms of the international system, the methods through which they have attempted to pursue these objectives have differed sharply. Using international-level and domestic-level modes of analysis, this article explains the reasons for the contrasting style in the case of agricultural trade. It is demonstrated that a number of mutually reinforcing factors combine to give a tough-minded quality to Australia's approach. In contrast, because of both a greater complexity in the domestic policy-making process and the range of foreign policy options, Canada's style in the agricultural trade issue has become increasingly nuanced.

Economics first appeared in a Canadian university curriculum more than eighty years ago; thirty years later several universities were offering groups of courses in economics that could qualify a student for the equivalent of an honours degree in economics; but it is only in the past thirty-five years that a steady flow of scholarly writing in Canadian economics has developed. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of this Journal provides an appropriate occasion to review briefly the expansion of economic scholarship in Canada.

The first university course in political economy to be offered in Canada was in 1878 when the Department of Philosophy at Queen's University introduced a course of lectures based on Adam Smith, Mill, and Jevons. Ten years later, in 1888, Adam Shortt was appointed lecturer in political economy and in 1891 he became the Sir John A. Macdonald Professor of Political Science. The University of Toronto appointed its first professor of political science in 1888, and (Sir) William Ashley gave lectures in both political economy and constitutional history. McGill entered the field in 1899 when Dr. LeRossignol of Colorado was appointed visiting professor for one year. In 1900 Stephen Leacock was appointed lecturer in political science, and in 1901 (Sir) William Flux was brought over from England to occupy McGill's first chair in economics. The succeeding chairs of political economy in Canadian universities were occupied by A. L. McCrimmon at McMaster in 1904, E. Bouchette at Montreal in 1907, and A. B. Clark at Manitoba in 1909.

Empirical data from exploratory research on ethical risks in a municipal environment were coded thematically. An ethical risk diagnosis was performed in a municipality confronting a major integrity crisis. A data collection strategy composed of semi-directed interviews with strategic actors and focus groups of operational actors spanned the period from November 2015 to March 2016.

This research follows a feedback-about-experience model (Wybo and Wassenhove, 2009). Thus, through collective reflection, this study's aim is to create a pool of practical recommendations to enable greater understanding of ethical risks and to target risk mitigation strategies for said risks.

As for our analyses, we intersected our results along two axes: a risks’ analysis from three indicators (risky behaviours, risk factors and mitigation strategies), and a stakeholders’ transactions analysis. To underline the cross-cutting nature of the data and their contextual links to specific transactions, our results are presented in a consolidated manner. In the discussion section, strategies for mitigating ethical risks are emphasized in order to highlight an important discrepancy between our results and conventional suggestions about public service ethics set forth by institutional experts.

This article evaluates the impact of partisanship, globalization and postindustrialism on provincial revenues since 1980. It is often argued that the first of these no longer has an effect, while the second and third erode fiscal capacity. These arguments are assessed with multilevel models, hitherto little used for macro-level estimations in political science. This approach is particularly suited to testing these influences. The study finds that partisanship is, in fact, strongly associated with provincial revenues. Globalization and postindustrialism have a more muted effect, though alternative estimations support somewhat different conclusions regarding the former. The social preconditions of partisanship's impact, moreover, deserve more attention.

The problem of deciding upon a national wage-price policy has become increasingly urgent in recent years both because of the growing importance of “full employment” as an objective of economic policy in the United States and elsewhere, and because of the economic conditions accompanying and following the war which have had the effect of creating a “full employment” situation. Many economists, including some with such widely divergent views on public policy as Sir William Beveridge and the late Professor Henry Simons, have in recent years expressed concern over the possibility that labour unions might create inflationary pressures by demanding large wage increases in time of “full employment.” (The problem may arise before full employment is reached; this possibility is mentioned below.) However, the economists who are concerned with this possibility are by no means agreed as to what policy can or should be adopted to cope with it. In this paper we shall analyse various possible alternative policies and the theoretical problems that underlie them.

Traditionally the government, as regulator of the currency, has been responsible for maintaining its value, i.e. controlling the general price level. While discharging this responsibility is by no means an easy task, it is, theoretically at least, capable of achievement. However, to couple this responsibility with that of maintaining continuous full employment of the labour force, is to saddle the government with two responsibilities which it may be impossible to discharge simultaneously. The following argument will serve to clarify the nature of the difficulty.

The welfare state—as a term of abuse or approval, depending on the point of view—is a phrase which has only recently come into common use, although contrasts between the so-called “negative” and “positive” state have been frequently drawn during the past two decades. The idea that the primary function of government is to make a good life possible, is, however, as old as Aristotle, and political theorists in democratic countries have long been agreed that the state exists for the well-being of its citizens, and not vice versa, although their views of what constitutes the welfare of the people have been markedly divergent. The expansion of government activities, which is conveniently summarized under the term “social welfare state,” in this country as in others is usually considered a twentieth-century phenomenon. Its origins in Canada, however, may be traced to the first thirty years after Confederation, when the proper function of government was a matter of general concern and wide debate. During this early period public opinion as to what the state ought to do for the social well-being of its citizens developed rapidly, and underwent a marked transformation.

Present-day critics of the British North America Act are given to pointing out that, as a nineteenth-century document drawn up when laissez-faire theories were at their height, it has become increasingly ill-adapted to further social welfare by state action. Yet contemporary historians have shown that in both Great Britain and the United States, during the past century, the classical doctrine of laissez-faire, interpreted as government abstention from interference with individual or group action, was more honoured in theory than in practice. This contention is supported by illustrations of early factory, mines, public health, and education acts in England, and of such American intervention in economic affairs as tariffs and grants to individual industries. There is much evidence that similar developments took place in Canada, which lends support to similar conclusions concerning the mythical nature of laissez-faire.

This article shows how Athens in the late fifth and early fourth centuries mitigated Robert Michels' famous “iron law of oligarchy.” It is argued that Athens' success es related to its practice of universal male citizen participation in the administration of the city. At several points a comparison is drawn between how the International Typographical Union (ITU), studied in Lipset, Trow, and Coleman's Union Democracy, mitigated the “iron law,” and how Athens did so. The purpose of this article, however, is not to draw as many comparisons as possible. It is rather to suggest that the very possibility of comparison implies that the lessons of Athens are still relevant, if properly interpreted. This last clause is important, for it is argued that the way in which mass participation mitigated the iron law at Athens was subtle, and easily misinterpreted, perhaps especially by those who are eager to see greater participation in contemporary Western democracies.

There are many works on decentralization, but few of them have studied in a systematic way the power relations that are associated with the transfer of attributions from a superior level to an inferior level of government. In order to compensate for these shortcomings a conceptual framework and two research proposals are formulated about the different components of decentralization and the power relations pertaining to them. The model is then applied to various decentralization policies which were adopted since the 1980s in different countries. Two main conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, in the power relations between the actors of the different levels of government, those of the superior level are maintaining their domination by controlling the more important resources in the new relationships created by the decentralization policies. Second, the actors of the superior level of government are seeking to present their domination as plausible with reference to some values generally associated with centralization or decentralization.

Although North American integration has been the topic of heated public debate, it has not yet received adequate theoretical attention from the field of international relations. This article reviews the movement to codify North American integration, and explores the implications for integration and international relations theory. The first section reviews the intellectual history of integration theory as it developed in the European context. The second considers the North American experience of codifying integration, 1982–1994. The third part returns to integration theory and international relations, offering some amendments and suggestions considering the North American experience. The article argues that the clearest understanding of regional integration in the 1990s can be achieved through an approach which stresses developments in the global political economy as catalysts for change, and looks to national and transnational institutions and social forces to explain variations in integration projects. Because other international relations theories such as neofunctionalism and interstate bargaining are unable to integrate these levels of analysis, they offer an incomplete view of present dynamics.

Following public debates on the topic of trust in Quebec, this article examines the alleged social capital differential between Quebec and the rest of Canada. The literature has found lower levels of generalized trust in Quebec, but explanations offered are diverse and conjectural, with historical, sociological and political factors all in contention. We test contextual and compositional influences, including cohort differences, language and linguistic ability, religion, ethnicity, and neighbourhood-level measures of diversity, using pooled cross-sectional data from the Canadian General Social Survey (2003, 2008 and 2013) linked with precise measures of neighbourhood-level ethnic and linguistic diversity drawn from the Canadian census. We identify those Quebecers who have low levels of trust and those who more closely resemble their counterparts in the rest of Canada. We find that individual linguistic ability and linguistic heterogeneity of the neighbourhood are important correlates of trust and that among francophone populations, social distrust is found most in unilingual homogenous communities.

Abstract. Headlines play a key role in influencing how and about what citizens are informed. In news media, their task is threefold: to represent stories, signal informational hierarchy and draw publicity for (or sell) what follows. This article examines the representative dimension of headline news content for the 2006 Canadian federal election campaign, testing whether public media headlines more faithfully reflected story-level coverage than commercial media. Comparing both public and commercial media coverage of this watershed election presents a unique opportunity to assess whether the overarching macro-incentive of commercial media—profit-making—may have influenced micro-level relationships between headlines and stories. Results of 55-day multiplatform analysis (N = 11,002) involving CBC election media and 12 commercial newsrooms reveal few differences with respect the representativeness of headlines from public and commercial media, save for the presence of journalists' opinion in headline content.

Résumé. Les titres influencent comment les citoyens sont informés, et à propos de quoi ils en pensent. Les titres ont trois objectifs dans les nouvelles : ils résument les nouvelles, signalent quelles nouvelles sont les plus importantes, et vendre l'histoire complète qui suit. L'article examine le niveau de représentativité des titres dans les nouvelles sur la campagne de l'élection fédérale canadienne de 2006. Plus précisément, il teste si les titres venant des médias publics sont plus représentatifs que les nouvelles dans le média commercial. En comparant la couverture médiatique dans cette élection structurante, nous explorons si la motivation des médias commerciaux, notamment le profit, peut influencer le lien entre les titres et les articles. Les résultats de l'analyse multiplateforme de la campagne qui durait 55 jours (N = 11 002) incluent la couverture sur la CBC et 12 médias commerciaux. Ils indiquent qu'il n'y a pas beaucoup de différence dans la représentativité des titres entre les sources publiques et commerciales, sauf la présence de l'opinion dans le contenu des titres.

Abstract. Most of the empirical work on the decision making of justices on the Supreme Court of Canada has taken as its exclusive focus the divided decisions of the Court. In contrast to this extensive body of research on divided decision, the much more limited knowledge of unanimous decisions is troubling because such decisions constitute nearly three-quarters of all of the formal decisions of the Court. The analysis reported below provides a first step towards understanding the neglected nature of unanimous decisions. This investigation of the nature and causes of unanimity in the Supreme Court of Canada explores two competing explanations: one drawn from the most widely accepted general explanation of judicial voting (that is, the attitudinal model) and the other from the perspectives of the justices themselves. To determine that perspective, the author interviewed ten of the current or recent justices on the Court. After describing these two alternative accounts of unanimity, empirical tests are conducted of the implications of each view. We find substantially more support for the perspectives of the justices than for the perspective derived from the attitudinal model on unanimity.

Résumé. La majeure partie du travail de recherche empirique portant sur la manière dont les juges de la Cour suprême du Canada prennent leurs décisions se concentre exclusivement sur les décisions divisées de cette institution. En contraste avec cette foison d'études sur les décisions divisées, le corpus beaucoup plus limité de connaissances sur les décisions unanimes pose un problème important, car celles-ci représentent presque les trois quarts de la totalité des décisions formelles de la Cour suprême. L'analyse présentée ci-dessous se veut un premier pas vers une meilleure connaissance de la nature, trop négligée jusqu'à présent, de ces décisions unanimes. Cette investigation sur la nature et les causes de l'unanimité dans les décisions de la Cour suprême du Canada explore deux voies se trouvant en compétition : l'une qui résulte de l'explication la plus largement acceptée du vote judiciaire (soit le modèle attitudinal), et l'autre qui découle de la perspective personnelle des juges. Pour élucider cette perspective propre des juges, les auteurs ont interviewé dix juges actuels et récents de la Cour suprême du Canada. Après avoir décrit ces deux explications alternatives de l'unanimité, ils effectuent des tests empiriques sur les implications respectives du modèle attitudinal et des perspectives propres des juges. L'étude révèle que les perspectives propres des juges ont beaucoup plus de poids que la perspective dérivée du modèle attitudinal en ce qui concerne l'unanimité.