Almost overnight, regionalism in Canada has become the current fashion and a subject for much intellectual speculation as well as administrative experimentation. This symposium is but one of many testimonials to the growing interest in the subject. In 1964, the Committee on Statistics of the Canadian Political Science Association considered the problem. Early in 1965, Queen's University sponsored a conference on areas of economic stress that was the forerunner to a much larger conference on regionalism convened by the Province of Ontario. The Institute of Public Administration of Canada selected regionalism as the theme for its autumn conference. Recent reports of a royal commission in New Brunswick and of a legislative committee in Ontario are implicitly concerned with regionalism in so far as they propose basic remodelling of the local government services in their respective provinces. The Resources Ministers Council is grappling with the concept, as are also the federal departments of Industry and of Agriculture. On the international plane, the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Columbia River development have projected more grandiose conceptions of regionalism. In short, regionalism, with concomitant regional administrative structures, is being advanced as an answer to the new problems of interdependence that cut across traditional political boundary lines, whether they be municipal, provincial, or national.

The title chosen for this symposium suggests that regional interests are, indeed, a reality within the Canadian federal structure and that policy must accommodate itself not only to the familiar strains of dominion-provincial tensions but to the newer cross-currents of regionalism. The detailed implications of regionalism cannot be considered here, but resort to the analytical tools of the new school of systems analysts may help to develop certain general conclusions.

This study of urban building and real estate activity in Canada is concerned primarily with housing. It is part of a broader project stimulated by Silberling's thesis that among the various components of durable capital formation in the United States only investment in housing and in transportation have acted as prime movers determining the general level of economic activity. This paper falls into two parts, the first dealing with the nature of building and real estate cycles in selected cities in Canada, and the second relating these fluctuations to the growth and movement of population. Basic tables and brief notes on sources are included in an appendix.

The top section of Chart 1 is an index of urban building activity in Canada from 1866 to 1946. This index reflects four and a half major cycles in the eighty years since the Dominion was established. The cycles are similar in many respects to those found by American students. This Canadian index, like those used to illustrate the long cycles in American building, is based on building permits issued in major cities, and has been adjusted to eliminate the influence of changes in the cost of construction. Table I compares upper and lower turning points in the index with those reflected in Mr. J. R. Riggleman's index of deflated values of urban building permits per capita in the United States.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk was a central figure in the windy discussions of the theory of capital and interest which occupied a prominent place in economic literature in the 1890's. The two volumes of his Kapital und Kapitalzins were translated into English in 1890 and 1891, which meant that his views were generally known to English-speaking economists. An American student of economics, Charles Whitney Mixter, who was aware both of Böhm-Bawerk's writings and of his high prestige, was therefore elated to find that an earlier and obscure Scotch-Canadian writer named John Rae appeared to have foreshadowed Böhm-Bawerk's theory of capital in some important respects. Mixter somewhat hastily announced his discovery of “A Forerunner of Böhm-Bawerk” in an article with this title in the Quarterly Journal of Economics for January, 1897. Today this label would perhaps be regarded as faint praise and happily it was quite wrong. Mixter's error had arisen out of a misunderstanding of Rae's ideas and it was soon corrected, although not before it was repeated by Irving Fisher.

Mixter's find was enthusiastically acclaimed by Fisher who wrote in February, 1897:

No economist who is interested in the theory of capital in any of its aspects can afford longer to let Mr. Rae's investigations go unread. His work is a magnificent specimen of true scientific method and a rare example of orderly and convincing exposition. His style too is easy, forceful and captivating and his fund of ready illustrations commands instant admiration. Not the least remarkable feature of this many-sided work is the clear conception of sociology, or “Natural History of Men,” which it contains. It is difficult to realize that Mr. Rae wrote before that science was definitely founded. In short, the “New principles of political economy” is truly a masterpiece, a book of a generation or a century. It was written before the world was ready for such painstaking analysis. Now that its merits have been pointed out by Mr. Mixter, it is sure to be accorded a high place among the classics of economic science.

The political theory of Louis XIV is contained for the most part in the King's manuscripts which repose in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. These include the longest and most fruitful source, the Mémoires de Louis XIV pour l'instruction du Dauphin, some of his letters, and some of his miscellaneous short pieces. Many of the several thousand additional letters which Louis wrote either have been destroyed or scattered far and wide. There are a number of editions of his works but they have been almost entirely literary and designed for the popular market.

In spite of the plethora of literature on Louis XIV and his grand siècle (1638–1715), no systematic exposition of his political theory has ever been published, though a number of authors have touched on his ideas in passing, including the historian Lacour-Gayet who promised a study of Louis' political theory but completed only a preliminary survey of its antecedents. The purpose of this paper is to attempt in brief compass to remedy this deficiency.

Louis XIV is a classic example of a political thinker whose ideas are frequently alluded to but rarely examined. The popular tendency to refer to him as the prototype of all autocrats suffers the usual inadequacies of a stereotype; it overlooks the subtleties in his theories which greatly affect their interpretation. In order to avoid semantic wrangles it may be useful to follow the broad lines of Aristotle's analysis of monarchy presented in his Politics, Book IV, chapter x.

Abstract. We make use of a novel forecasting technique based on the Hotelling-Downs spatial framework to project vote outcomes in the second round of the two-round French presidential election system. In doing so we take advantage of the high degree of bimodality in the distribution of voter preferences to predict which candidates will make it into the second round. While our principal focus is on the 2007 election, we also look at the seven previous presidential elections in the French Fifth Republic, from 1965 through 2002.

Résumé. Pour prédire le résultat du deuxième tour de scrutin des élections présidentielles françaises de 2007, nous avons fait appel à une nouvelle technique fondée sur le modèle spatial de Hotelling-Downs. En procédant ainsi, nous avons pris en compte le haut degré de bimodalité de la distribution des préférences pour pronostiquer lequel des deux candidats remporterait la victoire. Bien que nous ayons surtout centré notre attention sur l'élection présidentielle de 2007, nous avons aussi examiné les sept élections présidentielles antérieures de la Cinquième République, tenues de 1965 à 2002, afin de tester notre méthode et prédire ex ante les résultats de 2007.

Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's “principle of montage,” this article excavates the political salience of what is referred to herein as the residential school system's “pan-territorial ideal.” The pan-territorial ideal materialized in 1930 with the opening of the Shubenacadie Residential School in the Maritimes, the system's final frontier. It was envisioned, forged and secured, in part, with the overt understanding that so called Indian education could be used as a vector of violence to control Indigenous peoples and their lands. This history clashes with dominant narratives that interpret residential school system violence as the product of mismanagement and neglect. From the early days of Confederation to its almost full legal autonomy from Britain in the early twentieth century and beyond, the Dominion's pursuit of the pan-territorial vision involved the selective harnessing of the residential school system as a field of state-sanctioned force to quell Indigenous resistance. In this, residential school violence cannot be reduced to a deviation from the norm. In crucial respects, it was an inherent feature of the system and Canadian modern statehood itself.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers a critical opportunity to assess the extent to which Canadians can be considered reliable defenders of democratic norms and institutions. In the face of such a serious threat to their physical and economic well-being, how willing are Canadians to condone the loosening of restraints on the power of the executive? This article addresses this question by drawing on the terror management and threat literatures. Combining a cross-sectional regression analysis with a vignette experiment and a candidate-choice conjoint experiment, it tests two hypotheses: that people experiencing debilitating anxiety about COVID-19 are more likely to favour weakening checks on the executive and that people will be willing to trade off legislative checks for the sake of their preferred lockdown policy. Both hypotheses are confirmed. In the face of an unprecedented health crisis, COVID-related anxiety and a desire for protective policies may trump respect for democratic norms.

Canada has long claimed the Northwest Passage as its “internal waters,” while the United States and other countries argue it is an “international strait.” The latter “free sea” position originates in Hugo Grotius, often styled the “father of international law.” However, Grotius later qualifies his own position by granting to coastal states the right to regulate maritime traffic. Grotius's works also inspire the English School of International Relations: an “international society” approach that Canada has historically followed in its overall foreign policy. Hence, a twenty-first-century Grotian vision might suggest a compromise amenable to Canada: Canada would grant passage to conforming American vessels, thus facilitating international trade, but Canada would also gain powers of effective jurisdiction, allowing it to secure and conserve the fragile environment. Canada might thus re-envision sovereignty not as a zero-sum contest for status symbols but as the exercise of functional jurisdiction for the common good of international society.

Abstract. The dominant theory of international liberal norm-dissemination argues that states will tend to move from rejection of international norms to internationalization through gradual, predictable stages. The presumption is that the mass public consistently presses the state (in partnership with international norm carriers) for greater liberalization. This theory is shown to have serious weaknesses when applied to mature democracies. A study of the UK's response to adverse rulings from the European Court of Human Rights indicates that policy elites respond differently depending on the norm, the security context and public opinion. Further, the public does not consistently advocate liberalization, but sometimes the reverse.

Résumé. Une théorie principale sur la propagation des normes libérales internationales avance que les États ne passent que graduellement du rejet des normes internationales à leur adoption, en passant par plusieurs étapes prévisibles. Elles présument que le grand public (en conjonction avec les créateurs des normes internationales) exerce des pressions continuelles sur les États pour plus de libertés civiques. En fait, cette théorie n'explique pas l'évolution des attitudes vis-à-vis les libertés civiques dans les démocraties avancées. Une étude du Royaume-Uni, par exemple, démontre que, lorsque la Cour européenne des droits de l'homme dénonce une violation de la Convention, les élites politiques réagissent différemment en fonction de la norme en cause, des questions de sécurité et de l'opinion publique. En outre, le public n'est pas toujours en faveur de la libéralisation, au contraire.

This article examines the relationship between Canada's development assistance policy and its welfare state institutions. Through an analysis of the Canadian experience, the article argues that the differences between the social policies of developed countries help to understand the nature of their participation in the international aid regime. Although this hypothesis is not entirely new, it is here refined with the help of the comparative literature on the welfare state, and assessed systematically for Canada. Through this case study, the article explores the extent to which values and principles institutionalized at the domestic level influence foreign policy and the international order.

It is widely held in the Northwest Territories that consensus rather than partisanship may be the most appropriate principle to guide the anticipated restructuring of the Territories' government. This note argues to the contrary that the social basis for consensus politics is absent in the NWT and that present practice in the Legislative Assembly of the NWT owes more to nonpartisanship than to consensus and does not predict a consensual future. However, this practice also does not necessarily point to a parliamentary system in the future; this study identifies four alternative systems as possibilities. It argues that, whatever the format of the Assembly, consociationalism, including significant devolution of power to local governments, represents the most promising direction to explore because it reflects the Territories' social structure and addresses the fundamental concerns of the cultural communities of the NWT.

Of all the levels of the state or government in Canada, the local one is the most often subjected to structural change or reorganization. The processes by which that change occurs—or by which it is postponed or avoided—are the focus of this article. In particular, the consequences of choosing one process of change rather than another are explored. After developing a framework to define and explore the processes of change, the article proceeds to analyze 81 instances between 1953 and 1983 in which reorganization of local government in Canada either actually occurred or was merely proposed.

Perhaps the most important concept in wide use by social scientists for the analysis of political attitudes and behaviour has been the left-right dimension. Not surprisingly therefore, the terms “left” and “right” themselves have been used in survey research on public opinion in Canada, and have subsequently been central to the data analysis of several recent articles on Canadian politics. Important to these papers has been the assumption that the terms “left” and “right” are understood by the average Canadian in such a manner that data gathered in response to questions using these terms will be valid. This paper argues that this assumption is mistaken.

The Citizens' Constitution Theory, formulated by Alan Cairns, provides a powerful explanation of the changes in Canadian politics during the 1980s. It tackles a research question that has far-reaching implications for the fundamental dynamics of Canadian political life—namely, how does constitutional change affect political participation? Cairns's thesis has gained widespread acceptance in the relevant Canadian literature, but the linkages between attitudes and behaviour at the core of the theory have never been subjected to systematic tests with attitudinal research data. The purpose of this investigation, then, is to make operational the Citizens' Constitution Theory and to evaluate the empirical support for it. The authors outline the central elements of the Citizens' Constitution Theory and discuss how Cairns relates the core concepts to each other. They then suggest that the same concepts and their linkages might also be explained by an alternative theoretical perspective that comes from one variant of New Politics Theory. The empirical section of this analysis uses recently collected survey results to mount three different tests of the two theories. In the first instance, the focus is on the question: how well do both theories predict each set of linkages that can be found in the Citizens' Constitution Theory? The second test treats both theories comprehensively, as causal models, and examines the empirical support for them using path analysis. The final section evaluates the generalizability of both theories. The main finding is that New Politics Theory provides as good an explanation—and by some standards, a better explanation for recent changes in the patterns of Canadian political participation than does the Citizens' Constitution Theory.