Foreign direct investment (FDI) from China has recently met with increasing public opposition in many host nations. Why does the public respond less favourably to Chinese FDI than to FDI from other countries? We explore this question by conducting a series of survey experiments in Canada, where the majority of the public holds a negative opinion of Chinese investment. We find that the bias can be attributed to innumeracy about the relative size of China's FDI and misinformation about investment rules that govern FDI projects in Canada. Correcting both misperceptions substantially reduces the bias of respondents against FDI projects from China. These results suggest that corrective information can lead to positive change in public attitudes, a finding that has important policy implications for Canadian leaders hoping to expand the country's business ties with China.

Seldom read today, Bentham's Constitutional Code (1820-1832) nevertheless ranks among the most significant political treatises of the last century. It contains an extended statement of the ideas of Philosophic Radicalism on the eve of their partial victory in the Reform Bill of 1832. It must be nearly, it may be actually, the last work of any important figure of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. At the same time it is one of the first works in which through the fog of doctrinaire radicalism there can be seen fairly clearly the characteristic features of the contemporary state with its extreme centralization, its myrmidonian corps of bureaucrats, its elaborate administrative apparatus, and its miscellaneous services to the public. There are few books of a century ago in which the contemporary political scientist, provided he can overcome initial hurdles of style and manner, ought to feel more at home, if only because he will find there the twentieth-century student's interest in institutions and the emphasis on administration that plays so large a part in the study of government today.

The Constitutional Code may be regarded as Bentham's view of the best possible commonwealth—a Utilitarian Utopia. Like all Utopias it was the product of disappointment with the here and now. It is well known that Bentham turned to systematic consideration of constitutional questions only after repeated failure to persuade the rulers of England to accept his legal reforms and especially his Panopticon scheme for a model prison.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status and functions of the Bank of Canada against the background of the principle of responsible government. The Bank of Canada is not the only agency of the federal government that has been freed from the burden of direct responsibility to Parliament through a minister. But of all these agencies, and they are both numerous and varied, the Bank is the most important from the standpoint of the national economy, and it also enjoys a degree of independence that is quite exceptional. The contention of this paper is that the constitutional status of the Bank, as it currently seems to be, is a gross incongruity in a parliamentary democracy based on the principle of executive responsibility.

A discussion of the relation of responsibility between the government and the Bank of Canada must distinguish two distinct periods in its evolution up to this time. The point which demarcates these two periods is the emergence of “tight money” about the middle of 1955. Up to that time the Bank had not been the object of any significant public complaint or controversy. The hostility in the financial community that accompanied the Bank's founding in 1935 was speedily overcome by the diplomatic skill of the first Governor, and the Bank's handling of monetary problems during the war met with such universal acclaim that by 1945 the Bank enjoyed a reputation that might well have been envied by the older central banks of other countries. In the post-war period, the Bank pursued an easy money policy that placed no restraints on the private banks and, perhaps unfortunately, engendered no criticism from the general public. Not a word was to be heard anywhere against the Bank. When the calm was broken by Professor Timlin's critical paper on monetary policy, which she read to the American Economic Association in December, 1952, one received the impression in Ottawa that an act of blasphemy had occurred.

When Carl A. Dawson, a Canadian of American sociological training, went to McGill University in 1922, he went as a pioneer. He succeeded to the directorship of a school of social work, but the sociological point of view he brought was novel in Canada. Robert M. Maclver had taught at Toronto in the twenties. After he left to continue his work with great distinction in the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, the late Professor E. J. Urwick carried on in somewhat the same mood. It was the mood of the British scholarly liberals in which interest in welfare politics joined with social philosophy. Courses called sociology had certainly been offered in other Canadian universities, usually as a sort of sideline.

I do not believe that there had been any formal courses in sociology in the French universities of Canada, but Léon Gérin, Edouard Montpetit, and other French-Canadian scholars had long since studied, and in some measure emulated, the work of Frédéric LePlay, that same LePlay whose name lived on more among British sociologists than among those of his own France. I have no doubt Montpetit was familiar with Durkheim, whose work had so great an influence first on American sociologists and, later, on British and American social anthropologists. One should add that during all of this time Marius Barbeau, an anthropologist of British training, was rummaging around for evidence of the nearly lost arts of early French Canada. He had no fixed place in a university. Edward Sapir, also an anthropologist and one who had a great influence on American sociologists and social psychologists, had spent some time in Canada under the same auspices as other Canadian ethnologists–the Bureau of Mines. The sociological mood was not completely wanting in Canada, but sociologists were, to put it mildly, not a group with strong vested interests. In fact, the students of that time were inclined to complain that sociologists assigned them far too many books and articles concerning the States. Professor Dawson warned me, when I joined him in 1927, that my predecessor, also an American, had been given quite a runaround on this point. When it came up in one of my classes, I countered by assigning large doses from English social and housing surveys. When the students complained of that, too, I suggested that we might all get together and create our own research on Canada.

The recent reissue of the classic study of Middletown by Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd should serve as a suitable occasion for a partial re-examination of a great landmark in community research. It is not necessary to elaborate on the significance of the Middletown studies. Although more than twenty years have elapsed since they were completed, they are still widely cited in contemporary writing. Moreover, a closer examination of the Lynds' treatment of power distributions in Middletown discloses striking similarities between this early study and the most recent work in the field. Modern writers might disclaim the openly Marxist position espoused by the Lynds, but in fact many of them continue to be strongly influenced by the scheme of analysis employed in the Middletown books. In this paper I propose to examine the Lynds' discussion of community power in both its normative and descriptive aspects, not simply because it seems valuable from time to time to return for curiosity's sake to the wellsprings of modern social science, but also because many of the issues discussed by the Lynds, and many of their findings, have contemporary relevance to the study of community power.

Scattered through two large and meaty books, one can find at least two approaches to this subject. One approach suggests in unmistakable terms what the Lynds believe ought to be true of power in the community; the other describes what they believe is true. I refer to these incorrectly, but for convenience, as “theories” of community power.

On May 3, 1940, the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations presented its report to the Prime Minister of Canada. This report, along with the specialized studies undertaken by direction of the commission, constitutes the most comprehensive investigation of a working federal system that has ever been made. In spite of the scope and quality of the commission's work, its analysis of federal-provincial relations has had surprisingly little influence on the directions that the theory and practice of Canadian federalism have taken since 1945. More specifically, the concept of provincial autonomy which is central to the commission's argument has been denied explicitly or implicitly by such influential writings on the Canadian federal system as the so-called Green Book proposals submitted by the federal government at the Dominion-Provincial Conference on Reconstruction in 1945, the Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, Mr. Maurice Lamontagne's book, Le Fédéralisme canadien, and the Report of the Quebec Royal Commission on Constitutional Problems, as well as by the actual developments in federal-provincial relations since the Second World War.

At the present time of uncertainty in the Canadian federal system it seems desirable to re-examine the perspectives of the Rowell-Sirois Report. This paper attempts to analyse one of these perspectives—provincial autonomy in the fields of health, welfare, and education.

One of the most interesting periods of Canadian economic history is that which encompasses the years 1890 to 1929. During this period, the prairie provinces were largely settled, new staple exports emerged, and regional interdependence increased. Any explanation of national economic growth over these years, then, necessarily involves an examination of the different responses among regions to these new sources of growth. In essence, we are asking the question: what is the relation between the spatial reallocation of economic activity and the growth of the Canadian economy over this period? To answer this question and to look at some of its implications, regional (provincial) gross-value-added estimates for selected years were made.

Regional estimates of gross value added were made for the years 1890, 1910, and 1929. These three years were chosen to satisfy, as closely as possible, the condition that they represent a similar level of economic activity at each point of time. These years were chosen since they are all years of relatively high economic activity. The first two years faced the additional constraint that they had to coincide with census dates. The choice of years of high level economic activity was made in order to avoid biases in the trend rates of growth which would arise if the initial and terminal dates were at different phases of the business cycle. For example, if the initial year coincided with a year of high unemployment and the terminal year low unemployment, then an upward bias in growth rates might have occurred. Initial and terminal dates chosen at the trough of business cycles would also have avoided this potential slope bias.

According to the classical theory of interest, which long served as a framework for the theory of money, prices, and income, the rate of interest is determined by the supply of and demand for savings. Monetary theorists, such as Wicksell, Fisher, Hawtrey, and Keynes, erected an imposing edifice on this foundation. Then came the Great Depression and disillusionment, the Second World War and the pegged market régime. At the same time, a growing ferment in the literature undermined the classical foundations. With regard to the savings function, agnosticism prevailed. As for investment demand, empirical studies and theoretical developments alike relegated the rate of interest to a minor role in entrepreneurial decision-making. In deference to considerations of debt management, open market operations were held in abeyance. Thus, little was to be expected of quantitative credit control as an instrument of public policy in the post-war period.

This note considers the possibility that the format of the interview schedules in the 1965 and 1968 national election surveys may have influenced respondents' ratings of the major political parties on the seven-point left-wing/right-wing scale. It argues that the use of 12 additional scales, defined by more widely understood adjectives such as good/bad and powerful/weak, reduced the willingness of respondents to admit their ignorance and increased their use of the midpoint on this scale. The instructions in 1968 also urged respondents to use the scales even if they were unsure of their meanings. Some idea of the magnitude of these effects is provided by the 1979 survey in which only the left/right scale was employed. Eliminating these artifacts in 1979 contributed to a picture of a party system that was more clearly differentiated and polarized along the left/right continuum.

This article argues that imperialism and the Crown have determined the development of Canadian federalism. It maintains that the prominence of the provinces, the most distinctive feature of this country's federal system, is traceable, first, to the empire's evolution in the last century and its dissolution in this and, second, to the capacity of the Crown to endow the provinces with unlimited potential for action in areas of jurisdiction not assigned to Parliament. The structuring effect of these primary influences is examined from several perspectives: geographic, economic, social and constitutional. The article concludes that the provinces have been the true beneficiaries of Canada's heritage of empire and Crown.

In the 1930s, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was criticized for allegedly perverting the meaning of the British North America Act and the intentions of its framers. This notion persists, partly because its historiographical basis—the idea that the Fathers of Confederation envisaged a dominant federal government—remains substantially intact. To the Ontario Reformers, however, the Confederation agreement had not established federal dominance. On the contrary, it had implemented the broad claims to local autonomy which Reformers had been advancing ever since the 1820s. And while those claims rested on a legally heterodox conception of colonial constitutional status, the BNA Act gave legal effect to that conception as applied to federal-provincial relations. This allowed Oliver Mowat to do what earlier Reform leaders could not have done: enforce the local claims in court.

Recently, students of public policy making in North America have added the analysis of “political discourse” to the tools of their trade. According to the “political discourse” school, the extent to which policy ideas gain acceptability cannot always be explained rationally in terms of their logical or empirical validity, nor instrumentally in terms of the interests they serve. Often, their careers must be accounted for, at least in part, by a detailed exploration of their ideological assumptions and appeal, and their rhetorical structure and persuasiveness. Despite its many plausible and promising features, this type of analysis has, to date, rarely been performed in specific instances of policy discourse. The author presents a “political-discourse” analysis of the 1985–1988 debate over Canada's Bill C-82, “An Act Respecting the Registration of Lobbyists.” That debate brought together some of Canada's most factually informed and instrumentally motivated policy actors. Nevertheless, the participants uniformly based their arguments on broad assumptions unsubstantiated by empirical analysis, and advanced those arguments in the rhetoric of the public good and democratic theory. The author concludes that underlying the two basic positions taken in debate over C-82—support for a regime of substantial disclosure of lobbying activity on the one hand, and opposition to disclosure on the other—were two competing sets of assumptions concerning the nature and workings of the faculties of reason and perception in politics.

For over a decade, a major theme in the literature of social science has been the recognition of the increasing importance of specialized knowledge as a basis of power and wealth in modern societies. A fundamental question for political science hence becomes: how can we best understand the nature of the institutions which govern the acquisition and the application of specialized knowledge? What conceptual tools allow us to analyse the functioning of these institutions at present and to predict their future evolution?

In a content analysis realized in 1977 for the purposes of the C.R.T.C, Arthur Siegel noted that the image of Canadian geopolitical reality presented in their news programme by the English and French television networks of the CBC was heavily influenced by the linguistic cleavage. A comparative analysis undertaken in 1987 shows that the coverage of Canadian news has failed to evolve despite the urgings of the C.R.T.C. and the will of CBC management to understand this situation. It is suggested that competition between public and private television networks, as well as the professional norms guiding journalists, are better explanations than the presumed political prejudices of these journalists.

This article examines several major demonstrations that turned violent, with particular emphasis on the organization of the groups, their political status, their objectives, the style of action of the participating groups and the actions of the police forces. After examining how these factors combined to affect the dynamics of the collective action process in each of the incidents, a series of hypotheses is drawn up charting the relationships between these factors in order to establish some hypotheses about the causes of violent outcomes during demonstrations.

This article examines changes in individuals' identification with Canadian federal political parties in the period 1977 to 1981. The analysis suggests that differences in class and ideology have a significant, if not very large effect on shifts in partisan identity. There was a slight bias toward more upper-class identification with the Progressive Conservative party and more lower-class identification with the Liberal party. Unstable partisans were at least as ideologically constrained as stable partisans, and partisan instability was more pronounced amongst the more left-wing individuals. Changes in partisanship were more likely among younger respondents, particularly lower-class and more left-wing youth. The largest bloc of unstable partisans was closest ideologically to the more left-wing stable New Democratic party partisans, and shifted only between the New Democratic and Liberal parties. A smaller bloc moved to the Progressive Conservative party and was ideologically closest to its more right-wing stable partisans.

In a recent number of this Journal, D. Marc Kilgour describes a formal analysis of the power of provinces and citizens to effect a constitutional amendment, given the requirements specified by paragraph 38(l)(b) of the Constitution Act, 1982. He concludes that the amending formula—essentially the Fulton-Favreau formula proposed in 1964—distributes power more equitably among provinces than it does among citizens when power measures the capacity of provinces and citizens to change the outcome of the amending process by changing their positions on the issue.

Historically, Canadian Confederation was both a compact of equal provinces and a compact of founding peoples, which established the province of Quebec in order to conserve French-Canadian culture in its historic homeland. This observation suggests a solution to the apparent conflict between the principle of provincial equality and the demand for special status for Quebec. The appearance of conflict arises from the habit of equating constitutional status with legislative power. If one distinguishes between status and power, it becomes possible to preserve the constitutional equality of the provinces while according special powers to the government of Quebec in furtherance of its unique historic purpose.

This research note examines the correlates of turnout in Canadian school board elections. Using individual-level data from the Canadian Municipal Election Study, we find that gender, education, left-wing ideology, Conservative partisanship and parental status were associated with participation in Calgary's 2017 public school board elections. Some of these patterns relate to the specific details of Calgary's 2017 election; others, we suggest, may be characteristic of school board elections more generally. We relate our findings to the literature on ballot roll-off and low-turnout elections.