Voters are deterred from casting a vote and more likely to vote strategically if their preferred choice is less competitive in their electoral district. We use 2019 Canadian Election Study data to show that respondents’ answers to a “how likely are you to vote” question depend on their estimate of their preferred party's local chances of winning, relative to other parties. This deterrent effect on turnout from the competitiveness of a voter's preferred party is concentrated among certain parties (NDP, Green, People's Party of Canada). Under first-past-the-post (FPTP), voters with particular policy perspectives are systematically deterred from voting, relative to other voters. Furthermore, we find that despite supporters of all parties having an incentive to vote strategically if their party is outside the top two in the district, strategic voting is heavily concentrated among voters who prefer parties other than the nationally most competitive two parties.

For three weeks in early 2022, the streets of downtown Ottawa were occupied by protestors associated with the so-called Freedom Convoy. The inability of Ottawa's municipal police to end the protest was not only a spectacular failure of local policing but also a failure of national security policy. This article brings together literatures on Canadian federalism, multilevel politics and federal capitals to argue that the occupation of Ottawa demonstrates a misalignment between the political and jurisdictional responsibility for Ottawa's public and national security. Potential reforms range from the expansion of federal authority over the Parliamentary Precinct to the restructuring of the National Capital Region as a federal district or territory.

Abstract. Ontario's Midwifery Act came into effect on January 1, 1994, at a time of radical health care restructuring, marked by hospital closures and staffing cuts. In addition, feminist backlash was rampant in the popular media. Given these conditions, some have suggested that midwifery legislation was implemented because it aligned with the government's cost-cutting initiatives, while others have suggested that the government was responding to the dissatisfaction with obstetric practice outlined by a well-organized lobby. While these factors were no doubt important in the passing of the legislation, I offer a more critical reading of the policy texts, suggesting that the legislation and its enabling regulations problematize not only costs or client satisfaction but also the knowledge of midwives and the women they serve. In framing the issue as one of public safety, the policy ensemble introduced a new form of birthing expert—the expert midwife—reimposing a hierarchical relationship in the birthing process, serving to reify medical science and to objectify birthing women. In so doing, the legislation potentially silences claims for both professional and reproductive autonomy.

Résumé. La Loi sur les sages-femmes de l'Ontario est entrée en vigueur le premier janvier 1994 au cours d'une période houleuse dans le domaine de la santé qui fut marquée par des fermetures d'hôpitaux et des réductions de la main-d'œuvre. De plus, à cette époque, les médias populaires avaient clairement adopté une position antiféministe. Étant donné cette conjoncture, on proposa dans quelques articles que cette loi fut adoptée parce qu'elle cadrait bien avec les priorités gouvernementales de coupures budgétaires, tandis que d'autres insistèrent que le gouvernement ne faisait que réagir au mécontentement à l'endroit de la pratique obstétricale exprimé par un groupe d'intérêts puissant. Ces facteurs ont sans doute joué un rôle important dans l'adoption de la loi, mais je propose, en contrepartie, une interprétation plus critique des textes de politiques publiques. J'avance que la loi et sa réglementation soulignent une problématique qui va au delà des coûts et de la satisfaction de la clientèle, englobant aussi le savoir des sages-femmes et celui de leurs clientes. En formulant le débat en termes de sécurité publique, la législation a instauré une nouvelle forme d'expertise – l'experte sage-femme – qui réimpose une hiérarchie professionnelle dans le domaine de l'accouchement, ce qui a pour effet de solidifier la position de la médecine traditionnelle et d'objectiver les femmes. Ce faisant, la loi risque de négliger les revendications d'autonomie des professionnelles et des partisanes de l'accouchement naturel.

Les élections générales de 1970 au Québec ont marqué tant les esprits que la discipline de la science politique au Québec, en particulier les analyses s'intéressant au comportement électoral et à l’étude des partis. En effet, pour la première fois de l'histoire de la province, un parti indépendantiste, le Parti québécois (PQ), faisait son entrée à l'Assemblée nationale, « un réalignement important des divisions partisanes » (Lemieux, 1976a : 60) remettant en question le bipartisme tenace de l’échiquier politique québécois. Cette élection, ainsi que celle de 1973, ont aussi illuminé les défauts du mode de scrutin majoritaire uninominal à un tour (MU1), le PQ récoltant respectivement 7 sièges pour 23% du vote et 6 sièges pour 30% du vote–frustrant une grande partie de l’électorat.

Post-war balance of payments problems are partly the results of policy applications of the “modern view” of the balancing mechanism of international trade theory. Derived from the Keynesian income-expenditure theory of income determination, the “modern view” relegates the role of the stock of money to a secondary place in determining national income. It asserts that control of the stock of money through monetary policy is incapable of significantly, or dependably, influencing the circular flow of income and thereby the balance of payments. One reason for this view is the conviction that monetary velocity behaves in an erratic and unpredictable manner. In contrast, pre-Keynesian theory attributed a central role to the stock of money, and so to monetary policy, in the balancing mechanism of international trade. It contained an explicit acceptance of the quantity theory of money which argues, among other things, that monetary velocity does behave in a predictable manner.

The usefulness of the modern view of the balancing mechanism of international trade turns partly on the relative stability and behaviour of monetary velocity on the one hand and of the Keynesian investment multiplier on the other. In all countries, but particularly in those that are sensitive to external disturbances, the balancing mechanism of international trade is an issue of vital concern for public policy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative stability and behaviour of monetary velocity and of the investment multiplier in an open economy that is subject to external disturbances and in which international trade plays a relatively important role in aggregate output and income. The article deals with the Canadian economy during the period 1926–58.

During the last two centuries economic and demographic changes have taken place with unprecedented speed. The population of the world, after several centuries of stability, has increased from 728 million in 1750, to 1,171 million in 1850, and then to 2,171 million in 1940, a phenomenal leap of 1 billion in ninety years. Meanwhile the European whites, the most prolific of the world's races in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were streaming overseas. From 1815 to the 1920's, some 55 million Europeans emigrated; about 19 million of them were from the British Isles. Some 36 million settled in the United States, over 4 million in Canada, 10 million in South America.

The outlines of the demographic phenomena associated with this expansion are well known; perhaps even better known are the revolutionary agricultural, scientific, industrial, and commercial changes of the same period. The succession of events need not be traced here; and of the actual increase in aggregate or per capita productivity of the industrialized nations no precise estimate can be made. The rise in the gross value of international trade from $3 billion in 1840 to $40 billion in 1913 is one indication of the expansion of economies.

This study has two main purposes: the estimation of certain demand relations, and the assessment of the usefulness of Canadian consumer expenditure surveys as a source for the derivation of such estimates. Results from five surveys of Canadian urban family expenditures in the post-war period have been published, and the returns from a sixth are now being processed. These reports have received relatively little attention from economists, probably because of the limited scope of most of the surveys. Their principal objective was to provide appropriate commodity weights (or a check on existing weights) for the Consumer Price Index (CPI); the sample interviewed was mostly restricted to the CPI target income group and often to only a few cities. The surveys for 1947–48 and 1959, however, do not contain any family-size or income restrictions. The former sampled the non-farm population and the latter those living in cities with populations of 15,000 and over. For these two surveys, expenditures on major commodity groups were cross-classified by income and family-size. It is only for these two surveys that Engel curves can be fitted. Estimates of income and family-size parameters were obtained for this study by using two methods of estimation—least squares and instrumental variables. The results obtained from the latter method provide, under certain assumptions, a measure of the extent of the downward bias in the least squares estimates of the parameters caused by transitory income. In addition, estimates of the income elasticity of consumption are obtained on the basis of different methods of grouping the spending units surveyed, in an attempt to test the hypothesis that this value is unity.

There are here presented charts and tables of the prices of seven agricultural commodities, namely wheat, oats, barley, rye, eggs, butter, and cheese, which were assembled in the course of a study of comparative prices in Canada and the United States for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Notes on the major influences determining the general trends of these prices are given by way of preface. It is hoped that the price data will prove of interest and value to other investigators. No discussion of the difficulties of compiling and comparing such price series is included; these difficulties are, of course, very great.

The five years 1850-5 may be taken as the turning point of the long decline in prices after the Napoleonic Wars. From 1840 to 1850 this decline had been particularly severe, the price level in Great Britain falling 28 per cent, and in the United States, 15.5 per cent. From various scattered records we may be certain that a similar drastic decline was experienced in Canada. The panic of 1847, followed by abundant harvests in Great Britain and the United States sent down prices for wheat sharply: in England from 50s. 6d. per quarter in 1848 to 38s. 6d. in 1851; in Canada from $0.875 per bushel in 1848 to $0.737 in 1852; and in the United States, from $0.85 to $0.708 in the same period. Poor harvests in 1852 and 1853, and the outbreak of the Crimean War in March, 1854, sent up the price of all foodstuffs, both in Canada and the United States.

If this paper were not too slight it might have been given a sub-title: a note on cultural lag in political science. For one of the things I want to suggest is that political scientists, whether out of envy or pure admiration for their economist colleagues, have in recent decades increasingly taken over an equilibrium-market concept from economics without realizing that they have been taking cast-off clothing. The epithet is perhaps unfair. But it does seem that just when economics has been moving away from its concept of the economy as a pure price system and turning to a notion of the economy as a system of power, carried on by power blocs rather than by maximizing individuals, political theory has been taking over the concept of the equilibrating price system and working it into a general theory of the political process. As economics adopts power concepts in a search for realism, political science adopts market concepts in a search for theoretical elegance. In this curious double process of transvestism I do not think political science has been the gainer. Economists may object that they have not abandoned marginal equilibrium analysis, and I would not insist that they have. Certainly they have not abandoned the search for elegance, and if their elegance is getting a little lumpier they are to be applauded for their greater realism. But the political scientists' use of market concepts is clear enough to be a matter of some concern.

For most of the first half of this century the dominant figure in Canadian statistics was Robert Coats. The principal facts of his life and career are given in an obituary written for this Journal (August, 1960, pp. 482–3) by Mr. Herbert Marshall. It now seems appropriate to make a first attempt to sum up his effort and achievement. We hope that this brief article will encourage a more detailed account of Coats's work and a more penetrating statement of its enduring effects.

For twenty-five years Coats was Dominion Statistician, a post created for him, whose potential importance he perceived early and whose strategic role he firmly established. He not only shaped Canadian statistical organization; he shaped it in a characteristically self-conscious way, adding to the effectiveness of a practical administrator a sense of the long-range implications of his actions. He has left a number of papers in which some of his philosophy is made explicit in the phrases of a master of essay writing. He had a clear notion of the kind of theory that would help to collect and interpret practical data, in contrast to the many curiosities that were then included in statistical courses. In his presidential address to the American Statistical Association in 1938, he asked for a book that would elucidate statistical theory for the practising statistician, a call that has since been answered in several volumes.

The tradition of presidential addresses before this Association is a varied and extremely democratic one, offering no set pattern for the guidance of a president-elect. My immediate predecessor in the presidency, who has honoured me by agreeing to take the chair tonight, last year offered us his reflections on one of the fundamental concepts in his field of sociology, the myth. His predecessor applied the tools of his trade as a political theorist to a dissection of the political assumptions of contemporary economics—not entirely, it must be confessed, to the comfort and satisfaction of the economists present in the audience. Previous presidents have frequently employed the occasion to collect in one intellectual basket the fruits of a lifetime of serious scholarship in their own particular vineyard. For my own address tonight, I have chosen to speak on the contemporary position, prospects, and problems of the social sciences. This choice reflects in part a feeling that an address on the kind of professional subject to which I have been devoting my attention in recent years—a topic in the pure theory of international trade—would be of such limited general interest as to strain even the tolerance of this audience. My main reason, however, for choosing to talk about our profession, rather than to exemplify its work in one specific area of economics, is that I think that I can contribute most usefully to fulfilling the purposes of this Association by attempting to place the manifold problems with which its members are currently confronted in a broader historical perspective.

To question the principle of administrative secrecy is to question a long-cherished tradition of the British parliamentary system. Yet when one explores the full range of its adverse effects one cannot help but ask whether it conforms with the requirements of modern democracy. The Cold War and the need for military security have led to certain areas of administrative activity being walled off entirely from the public. During the post-war era of McCarthyism and hysteria in the United States, the need for military secrecy and personnel security was greatly exaggerated by the administration, and the press in that country complained loudly about the dangers and evils resulting from this over-extension of secrecy. Readers will perhaps recall Herblock's biting cartoon late in 1956 in which John Q. Citizen is sitting before a stage, and all he can see is a paper curtain with the official words stamped on it in huge letters: “SECRET, CLASSIFIED, SHH!” At the side of the stage is the master of ceremonies, Mr. Government Secrecy, saying, “It's a great performance going on—take my word for it!” It is easy for Canadians to be under the comfortable impression that this passion for secrecy was one of the excesses of American society. But in fact the United States has always had a much more open system of administration than our own, and the pinch of secrecy was felt much more acutely by the public and press in that country than in Canada. Moreover, if one compares the American personnel screening system with our own, one sees that the secrecy of our system has not only obvious virtues but subtle vices.

Every well-bred economist knows that a man named Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy in 1723, published a somewhat notable book in 1759 entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and in 1776, when he was fifty-three years old, produced an extraordinary pair of volumes called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Most young economists nowadays, I fear, do not read either work of the great Scotsman as we all once did—in the days when one could still take time to enjoy also the leisurely pace of Thackeray and Dickens, even Scott. Students who just skim the Wealth of Nations, or parts of it, would surely miss what has attracted my attention; and even scholars interested in Smith's economic principles would hardly perceive what I have in mind, namely, that he was noteworthy for his “unbounded benevolence,” as one near-contemporary described him, and that he was “slow to think evil” as a recent biographer alleges.

Apparently it was out of this abounding good nature that Smith alluded to “the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects”; that he took opportunity to mention “the conveyances of a verbose attorney”; and that, with a more sweeping serenity, he recorded an observation of “the over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities.”

Biographers of Smith have been led to state that perhaps he was not as obviously religious as some of his contemporaries. He was perhaps a deist, even if he was a philosopher and a friend of Hume. John Rae reported that Smiths “opening prayers” at Glasgow were thought to “savour strongly of natural religion,” and occasioned no little shaking of heads. Perhaps, then, one might expect Smith to have been somewhat less charitable toward wearers of the cloth than he was toward other groups.

This study addresses three questions: to what extent lobbying efforts undertaken by associations vary across different types of associations; what are the different lobbying instruments used by Canadian associations; what factors explain the intensity of the lobbying efforts deployed by the Canadian associations? These questions are dealt with through a sample of 438 associations operating in 12 different policy domains and at three possible levels of government (Canadian, provincial and municipal). The results show that leisure associations deploy less intense efforts in lobbying than public and private goods associations. Likewise, public and private goods associations do not appear to differ significantly with respect to efforts deployed in lobbying. Furthermore, the results show that the lobbying instruments used by associations differ across the different types of associations. Finally, the results indicate that competition between associations, participation in coalitions of associations and the number of policy domains in which associations have intense interests are significantly related to efforts deployed in lobbying by associations in many different policy domains. However, the variables related to the material resources of the associations have been shown to exert no significant impact on the lobbying efforts of Canadian associations.

Abstract. This paper seeks to explain the origins of Quebec's system of compensation for workplace accidents, which was established in 1909 and functioned as the first component of Quebec's welfare state. Besides being an important example of early social policy, workers' compensation was also part of a transformation of liberalism that embodied a significant change in liberal jurisprudence, from a system of employer liability based on individual fault and responsibility to a system of compensation regardless of fault. This paper argues that Quebec's first Workmen's Compensation Act can only be understood in terms of the interaction of three factors that are more commonly seen as alternatives in the theoretical literature on policy development. The first is the differential power resources of capital and labour, where the interests of the former predominated over those of the latter in shaping the provisions of the act. The second involves a structural dimension, where the institutional autonomy of the legal process and jury system in employer liability cases started to cause problems for capital accumulation and provided a stimulus for change. And third, the acceptance of the new idea of workers' compensation depended on a widespread process of policy learning by both state and societal actors. Theoretically, the paper tries to go beyond one-dimensional explanations of policy development and to integrate analyses of interests, institutions and ideas into a wider framework.

Résumé. Dans ce texte, l'auteur s'intéresse à l'origine du régime québécois d'indemnisation en cas d'accident du travail instauré en 1909. Premier jalon de ce qu'on appellera plus tard l'État-providence, le régime d'indemnisation s'inscrivait dans une transformation du libéralisme et allait marquer un tournant dans la jurisprudence : on passait en effet d'un système où la responsabilité de l'employeur se limitait à la faute patronale à un régime d'indemnisation sans égard à la faute. Cet article postule que l'analyse de la Loi concernant les responsabilités des accidents dont les ouvriers sont victimes dans leur travail et la réparation des dommages qui en résultent doit s'appuyer sur la corrélation de trois facteurs, que la théorie de l'élaboration des politiques tend plutôt à considérer comme distincts. Le premier facteur a trait au rapport de force inégal entre la main-d'œuvre et le capital, l'intérêt de ce dernier ayant prédominé dans la formulation des dispositions de la loi. Le second facteur est, quant à lui, d'ordre structurel, car l'autonomie du processus judiciaire et la présence d'un jury dans les causes portant sur la responsabilité de l'employeur compromettaient l'accumulation du capital et incitaient par le fait même au changement. Enfin, le troisième facteur souligne que le principe d'indemnisation des travailleurs était à l'époque tributaire d'une nouvelle conception tant sociale que gouvernementale de l'élaboration des politiques. Pour s'éloigner d'une compréhension unidimensionnelle de l'élaboration des politiques, l'auteur entend utiliser un cadre théorique qui tienne compte de l'analyse des intérêts, des institutions et des idées.

The recent decline in electoral turnout in Canada has attracted the concern of scholars and public officials, but the partisan consequences of this decline have received only scant attention. We begin to address that question with a simulation based on the 1997 Canadian Election Study. Based on estimated probabilities of individual behaviour derived from multinomial logit models of voter choice, we find that higher turnout would have likely hurt the Liberal party in Quebec, but slightly helped the Liberals outside of Quebec. We interpret this pattern as evidence that generational politics plays a role in shaping the relationship between electoral turnout and partisan support.

In the past year there has developed a strong campaign for a devaluation of all currencies in terms of gold, a campaign in which the narrowly self-interested arguments of the gold producers have been augmented by the arguments of those who see a rise in the world price of gold as a painless way of solving the present international monetary disequilibrium. The obvious special pleading of the former, and the ignorance or naiveté of the monetary opinions of the latter, should have been sufficient to reveal the weaknesses of the case; but surprisingly enough the arguments for a higher price of gold have been allowed to pass practically unchallenged, with the consequent danger that by sheer reiteration the advocates of the scheme will secure an unthinking acceptance of their proposals.

The writer does not deny that a rise in the world price of gold would be of some benefit not only to the gold producers, but also to the non-American world generally; obviously any measure which increases the price which America is willing to pay for imports will provide more dollars for the rest of the world economy. But it is his contention that the arguments which have so far been advanced in support of the measure are of a dubious or fallacious nature, in large part attributable to a lack of understanding of the problems involved; that the arguments over-estimate the gains and under-estimate the difficulties that would follow a rise in the price of gold; and that consequently it would be a major error of policy for the British and other European authorities to commit themselves to a request for a higher price of gold as a substitute for more fundamental international economic reforms. These contentions are substantiated by an examination of the case for increasing the world price of gold, to which the remainder of this article is devoted.