The stability of divided societies is an important and recurring concern in political science research. It has been suggested that distinctive socialization processes in the different regions of divided societies will lead to diverging trends in public opinion. Therefore, we investigate trends in public opinion on key political issues and attitudes in three divided societies: Canada (Quebec), the United Kingdom (Scotland) and Spain (Catalonia). Using over two decades of survey data, we show that these distinct communities indeed have a particular ideological profile but also that there is no indication these differences become larger over time. In other words, we do not observe any evidence for an increasing lack of public opinion coherence in these divided societies. We conclude with some observations on why divergence could not be observed at the level of public opinion but might still be present at the level of party elites.

Abstract. This article aims to describe a forward-looking approach to the problem of property rights in transitional justice contexts. Undemocratic regimes violate property rights in various ways, from simple theft to violations of opportunities to appropriate. Therefore, post-transition situations entail an obligation to correct such injustices. However, returning to the status quo ante is complex, costly and requires information that is often not available. An alternative is the suggested FCR: forward looking, commensurable and redistributive. Such an approach emphasizes the creation of a baseline of ownership and welfare rather than an attempt to return to the status quo ante.

Résumé. Cet article tente de décrire un argument tourné vers l'avenir au sujet du problème des droits de propriété en contexte de justice transitionnelle. Les régimes non démocratiques violent les droits de propriété de multiple façons, de la simple usurpation à la violation des opportunités d'appropriation. Par conséquent, les situations post transitionnelles impliquent une obligation de corriger de telles injustices. Cependant, le retour au status quo ante s'avère complexe, coûteux et requiert de l'information qui, souvent, n'est plus disponible. Une alternative est l'argument suggéré FCR : prospectif, commensurable et redistributif. Une telle approche met l'emphase sur la création des conditions de base du droit à la propriété et du bien-être, plutôt que sur la tentative de restituer le status quo antérieur.

This article offers an examination of the discursive significance of the “victim” in the Conservative Party of Canada through a critical discourse analysis of two key pieces of legislation (Bill C-10 and Bill C-36) tabled by the Harper Conservative government. The central argument contends that while all populist arguments may be a form of victim argument, not all conservative victim arguments are populist—particularly ones directed at issues related to women and gender equality. The article finds that, perhaps due to the reactive nature of conservative ideology, conservative politicians in Canada adopt an “ambidextrous” approach to victims—mobilizing two distinct and, at times, contrasting sets of arguments. The article concludes by proposing two possible explanations for this ambidexterity, one stemming from the literature on organizational management and the other from theorizations of the reactive nature of conservative ideology.

Despite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

This article addresses the historical justice dilemma: although critical memory is indispensable for accountability, efforts to use it are often hampered by the unjust relations and systems that caused the wrongs to which historical justice is compelled to respond in the first place. Contemporary authors tackle this problem by focusing on collective responsibility for structural injustice. This article takes a different tack. Studying closely the 2009–2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report, it argues that the structural turn may come at the expense of a focus on agency and may thus provide unwitting anonymity for wrongdoers while crimping our thinking about leadership and responsibility. Although this article strongly criticizes the TRC report, it tries to work constructively with it, developing an analysis that compensates for the report's unwitting invisibilization of perpetrators. Distilling portraits and analyses of wrongdoer agency that are latent in the TRC's postwar history volume, this article shows how we can develop the report as a resource of what I call retributive social accountability.

This article looks at the evolution of the Régie de l'énergie du Québec's participatory tools and analyzes, through semi-structured interviews with key actors, the operation and effects of these tools. Guided by the policy-tools approach developed by Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès, the study shows that the Régie de l'énergie's participatory tools are both robust and malleable, and that they have developed, as a result of both their own effects and the strategies of actors, an increasingly confined, regulated form of governance that follows its own logic.

This article is about Indigenous territorial title and land rights, and specifically those of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation. In 1983, the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn, residing in the province of Ontario, petitioned the Crown to recognize Algonquin territorial title and rights to 36,000 square kilometres of their natal homelands in the Ottawa River watershed. With negotiations beginning in the early 1990s, an Agreement-in-Principle was developed and ratified in 2016, the penultimate step to the largest modern treaty in Ontario's history. In this article, we examine the argument for moral rights to territory, not in terms of the Canadian or international legal order, nor even through examining the documents and voice of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg, but through the lens of an argument that has been advanced as the basis of the international territorial rights of states. We argue that the justifications for state rights territory—grounded in the considerations that ensue from an analysis of occupancy groups—provides a stronger claim to territorial jurisdiction and title in the case of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation than the competing claim by the Canadian state.

Abstract. Canadian political parties have been using the Internet as a campaign tool since the 1997 election. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics by Carty, Cross and Young (2000) presents one of the first analyses of Internet-based communications during a Canadian election. It is also one of the most important assessments of Canadian party systems. The book outlines the components that characterize the fourth party system, which they argue, began after the 1993 election. Regionalization is the defining characteristic of this emerging system. The book argues that the Internet, like other communication technologies, is important in this latest party system. Consistent with the notion of regionalized campaign communications, the authors suggest that Canadian political parties use the Internet to target campaign messages to different regional and sociodemographic groups and enter into private conversations with voters. Using original data collected from the 2004 federal election, this paper reflects on these claims. The paper builds the case that the use of the Internet as a campaign tool is not consistent with their argument. Internet-based campaign communications in Canada by the major parties is neither regionalized nor targeted. Rather, this technology makes campaign communication more transparent and centralized.

Résumé. Au Canada, les partis politiques utilisent Internet comme outil de campagne depuis l'élection de 1997. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics, par Carty, Cross et Young (2000), présente l'une des premières analyses des communications sur Internet pendant une campagne électorale. Il constitue aussi l'une des plus importantes évaluations des systèmes des partis politiques canadiens. Le livre dégage également les éléments qui caractérisent le système à quatre partis qui est né, selon eux, après l'élection de 1993. La régionalisation est la caractéristique déterminante de ce nouveau système. Le livre soutient qu'Internet, comme les autres technologies de communication, est important pour ce nouveau système à quatre partis. Conformément à la notion de communications de campagne régionalisées, les auteurs suggèrent que les partis politiques canadiens utilisent Internet pour cibler les messages de campagne selon les différents groupes régionaux et sociodémographiques et engager des conversations privées avec les électeurs. Le présent article examine ces affirmations à partir des données recueillies lors de l'élection fédérale de 2004. Il établit que l'utilisation d'Internet comme outil de campagne ne cadre pas avec leur argument. Les campagnes de communication sur Internet menées par les principaux partis au Canada ne sont ni régionalisées ni ciblées. Cette technologie rend plutôt les communications des campagnes électorales plus transparentes et plus centralisées.

A review of contributions to the resource conservation literature shows that sustainability problems are seen as caused by “common property.” This “tragedy of the commons” is understood as the result of the failure to assign fully property rights to individuals. The supporting assumptions and premises to these “privatarian” arguments are explicated and examined. After refuting the main premises, it is argued that the application of neoclassical assumptions and premises overlooks other legitimate forms of ownership as effective solutions to the tragedy of the commons. In revisiting other categories of ownership, the limits of privatarianism are identified and the prospects for solutions to sustainability problems are expanded.

The principle of intra-party democracy underlying the so-called constitutional crisis within the Labour party in Great Britain—a struggle between the party conference and the parliamentary party over the creation of defence policy—has for some time been the subject of widespread discussion in academic journals and the “responsible press.” This paper examines the difficulties within the organization of the United Farmers of Ontario when intra-party democracy resulted in a clash between the parliamentary and mass sections of the party, and attempts to relate the implications of this study to the general question of the distribution of power in parties of extra-parliamentary origin.

The domination of the Legislative Assembly from 1919 to 1923 by an alliance of the United Farmers of Ontario and the Independent Labor party provided Ontario with its unique experience of “third-party” government. The suddenness of the intervention of these parties into the traditional order of Ontario's Conservative-Liberal politics was matched only by their equally rapid exit after less than four years of power. Standing as it did at the forefront of a wave of protesting third parties in the following two decades, the event is of considerable significance both for its contribution to a general understanding of the problems of third parties and for the opportunity it affords as a case study of farmer-labour co-operation. Although intra-party democracy was important for both members of the union, this paper deals with its effects on only one of the parties—the United Farmers.

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century the self-governing colonies of the British Empire and particularly Canada attempted to obtain a broader degree of freedom in developing their commercial policies. The campaign, which may be said to have commenced in 1878, had as its goals the right for the dependencies to conclude preferential tariff agreements with each other, the establishment of tariff preference throughout the Empire, including the United Kingdom, and the denunciation of the mother country's treaties with Belgium and the German Zollverein. Abrogation of the latter two agreements was regarded as vital since they provided that any duty concessions made to the United Kingdom by the colonies had to be accorded to Belgium and Germany. These concessions also had to be extended to all other foreign countries with which London had treaties containing the most-favoured-nation clause that included the colonies.

The movement suffered a considerable set-back in 1895 when the Colonial Secretary, the Marquis of Ripon, issued his famous circular letter to the colonies in which he stoutly defended Britain's free-trade policy and emphasized the value of her commerce with the foreign world. His policy statement rejecting the establishment of tariff preference within the Empire and the abolition of the two treaties was aimed at a series of resolutions emanating from the Colonial Conference of 1894 held in Ottawa. This imperial pronunciamento was not the last word. The entire issue was raised again in 1897 when a new tariff bill was introduced in the Canadian House of Commons by the Finance Minister, W. S. Fielding. The purport of the bill was to grant preference to British goods.

This study examines the problem of achieving linguistic equivalence in Canada-wide surveys that rely, as they must, on two different questionnaires, one in English and one in French. It is argued that this is a crucial problem which needs to be dealt with squarely. Since language does not coincide neatly with territorial boundaries in Canada, there will always be some francophones outside Quebec and some non-francophones within Quebec who are not interviewed in their first language. A comparison of responses given in both languages by members of the same language group enables the investigator to distinguish true cultural differences from mere artifacts of measurement. That methodology is applied to one specific issue, support for electoral democracy.

There was a dirt road through our village. A few weeks before an election the government party's poll captain, who was ex officio the local road superintendent, would announce that the boys down in Halifax had instructed him to get her ready for pavin'. Men were hired to spread gravel, cut bushes and widen ditches…. The Saturday before election day the work stopped, and three or four years later (sooner if there was a by-election) they got her ready for pavin' again.

The general election of 1911 was one of the most significant in Canadian history. Not only did it bring crushing defeat to the long-triumphant forces of Laurier Liberalism but it was also a decisive expression of Canadian sentiment on the subject of commercial relations with the United States. Success in this, his third electoral contest, saved Robert Borden from political oblivion and opened for him new vistas of opportunity and new avenues of achievement. The true measure of his ability as a party chieftain was revealed in the great struggle over reciprocity which shook the usually apathetic Canadian electorate during the summer of 1911. It is one of the ironies of history that the issue which brought down the Liberals in this election was one of their own choosing. The Conservatives who had at first feared the reciprocity issue eventually found it to contain potent emotional ingredients making for their own triumph. In his handling of reciprocity, the one decisive issue, Borden showed a masterly finesse which had not been apparent in his earlier attempts to win the support of his fellow Canadians.

1965 was one of the worst years for the United Nations. Its prestige was low; its critics were vocal. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, few world leaders were ready to say that the organization was useless or even in real danger of dissolution. President Johnson's appointment of Mr. Justice Goldberg as UN ambassador- and Mr. Goldberg's acceptance of the position-were among many indications of agreement that the United Nations has something more than ceremonial significance. Of course, the mere continuing existence of any international organization, even the most rudimentary and technically oriented kind, may do good and is unlikely to do harm. The more optimistic will see a developing world community, and, if such a thing is emerging, the United Nations surely has some share in the process. This paper would like to suggest that, apart from any hopes for the future, the United Nations performs a unique and important function for the world to today. Such a tough-minded national leader as Lyndon Johnson, concerned before all else with national self-interest, has indicated his awareness that the organization has a real contribution to make for his nation.

Abstract. In this paper I examine some of the allegorical connections Machiavelli made in his unfinished poem L'Asino (The Ass) and make the case that they shed new light on the historical embeddedness of the more overtly political works, especially The Prince. When read alongside The Prince, L'Asino indicates what led Machiavelli to involve himself in politics in the first place, what he hoped to gain by his role as advisor and, afterwards, what his reaction was to his apparent failure to make his case effectively. It also offers us clues as to how Machiavelli conceived of his role as advisor to the Medici and highlights the anger he felt at having allowed himself to believe that his suggestions would be accepted without question and acted upon in the spirit in which they were intended. Some of the most important aspects of the poem I deal with focus on political metamorphoses, especially the prince's apotheosis into a successful Icarus and Machiavelli's less successful transition into Chiron the centaur. I also examine the allegorical significance of Diana and Circe, the message of the Abbot of Gaeta, and the implications of the Dantean allusions in the poem and perhaps most importantly the historical implications of the opening passage for Machiavelli's early entry into the political life of his patria.

Résumé. Dans cet essai, je montre J'indique comment certains liens allégoriques, établis par Machiavel etablit dans son poème inachevé, l'asino L'Âne (l'ane), font la lumière sur l'imbriquement historique des oeuvres machiavéliques de nature plus explicitement politique, surtout L e Prince. La lecture de l'asino L'Âne en parallèl avec Le Prince, indique indique à la fois ce qui d'abord porta Machiavel à se mêler de politique, ce qu'il espérait gagner en tant que conseiller et, par suite, ce que fut sa réaction face devant son incapacité dea son inabilite a soutenir sa cause. Une telle lecture offre également des indices sur sa façon de concevoir son rôle de conseiller aux Médicis et met en relief la rage qu'il éprouva pour s'être permis de croire que ses conseils seraient accueiqueillis sans questions et qu'on leur donnerait suite dans l'esprit même dans lequel ils furent avaient ét proférés. D'importants aspects aspects du poème traitent de métamorphoses politiques, telles l'apothéose du prince en Icare vainqueur et la moins heureuse transition de Machiavel en Chiron le centaure. J'examine également la légende de Ninus et Sardanapalus, le sens allégorique de Diane et de Circé, le message de l'abbé de Gaëte, le sens des allusions dantesques et boéthiennes et, ce qui est peut-être le plus important,, peut etre plus important, les implications historiques de la première partie du poème pour l'entré de Machiavel dans la vie politique de sa patrie.

Pierre Bédard, leader of the French Canadian party in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada from 1792 until 1812, and a staunch defender of British political institutions, is compared with two of his compatriots whose opinion of the British system is less admiring. To understand the dilemma of colonial politics Bédard attempts to reconcile the idea of tolerance and freedom that he finds in British constitutional authorities like Locke and Blackstone with his perception, illuminated by those same authorities, that British rule in Lower Canada was intolerant. What emerges is an unmatched description of the constitutional principle enabling free criticism of government in Parliament and in the press. Blanchet and Taschereau, in contrast, provide an argument that promotes reflection on the limits of political dissent even in an essentially tolerant polity.