Phillip Hansen's book, Reconsidering C.B. Macpherson: From Possessive Individualism to Democratic Theory and Beyond (2015) arrives when revival of the thought of one of Canada's most original and influential political theorists is to be welcomed. Macpherson's critiques of market-dominated society and culture are even more apt in an era of free trade and neo-liberalism than in his own times. More than a summary of Macpherson's views, Hansen's book offers an original reading of him as a philosopher. This review raises questions about the accuracy and usefulness of such a reading.

This article reconsiders George Grant's account of the decision of the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade against legal restrictions on abortion to support his claim that liberal contractualism here raises but cannot resolve the ontological question of what makes justice our due, while questioning his treatment of this crisis as the final triumph of technological reason, and the Biblical idea of will, over the remnants of an ancient justice based on the Platonic notion of contemplation. What provokes liberalism to question equality of right is as much its denial of the Biblical account of family and creation as its denial of classical political philosophy.

Nordlinger's thesis regarding the capacity of state officials to act autonomously is examined by focussing upon the behaviour of elected officials in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island during a debate to reform the potato marketing system. The article argues that Nordlinger overstates the autonomy of elected officials by failing to appreciate that dominant societal groups can deploy many of the same autonomy-enhancing instruments available to state officials. Their relative success in doing so is a function of the political economy of the geographic unit, and in particular the extent to which it is market-oriented, relatively underdeveloped and characterized by a traditional political culture. Federalism and the nature of the policy issue under debate are additional factors which affect elected state officials' steering capacity.

Résumé. Comment expliquer la politique de sécurité nationale américaine, notamment l'évolution de certaines décisions en matière de politique étrangère et de sécurité intérieure ? Quels acteurs et quels facteurs rendent compte des résultats pour le moins controversés de celles-ci ? Au-delà des discours, des institutions et des énoncés, les choix de sécurité ont été l'œuvre de ceux que nous surnommons les « entrepreneurs » de la prise de décision. La question à laquelle cet article veut répondre est précisément de savoir qui sont ces « entrepreneurs » et comment ils ont réalisé cet objectif de transformation des politiques de sécurité des États-Unis. Trois prises de décision de la première administration Bush sont abordées : la guerre préventive en Irak, la redéfinition légale de la notion de torture, et l'institutionnalisation plus grande de la sécurité intérieure.

Abstract. How are we to explain U.S. foreign policy, particularly policymaking on national security and homeland security, under the first administration of G. W. Bush? Who were the actors and what were the factors that produced what were, to say the least, controversial results? Looking beyond the speeches, statements and institutions, the security decisions can be seen as the work of “policy entrepreneurs.” This article considers who those entrepreneurs were and how they achieved their goal of transforming U.S. security policy. Three decisions are discussed: the pre-emptive war in Iraq, the legal redefinition of torture by the Bush administration, and the institutionalization of homeland security, in particular the Patriot Act.

Résumé. Des citoyens peuvent-ils désobéir à la loi, pourtant issue de la volonté majoritaire et de la décision du Parlement légitimement élu, au seul motif qu'elle leur semble injuste ? Face à la pensée conservatrice, tenante de l'ordre établi et réfractaire à la moindre transgression (« mieux vaut une injustice qu'un désordre »), la philosophie libérale contemporaine a fourni une défense de la légitimité démocratique de la désobéissance civile. Cependant, les justifications rawlsienne et habermassienne de la désobéissance civile semblent bien timorées dès qu'on accepte de les comparer à la pensée politique des activistes désobéissants eux-mêmes, à savoir Gandhi, Martin Luther King et Howard Zinn. Cette « pensée désobéissante » méconnue, voire occultée, vient révéler les insuffisances et les présupposés de la conception libérale de la désobéissance civile.

Abstract. Can citizens disobey the law, which comes from the will of the majority and the decision of the legitimately elected Parliament, merely because it seems to them unjust? Opposing conservative thought, which defends the established order and condemns any transgression, contemporary liberal thought has provided a defense of the democratic legitimacy of civil disobedience. However, the Rawlsian and Habermasian justifications of civil disobedience seem rather weak when compared to the political thought of disobedient activists themselves, namely Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Zinn. This overlooked “disobedient thought” reveals the shortcomings and assumptions of the liberal concept of civil disobedience.

L'article examine les lacunes de la carte électorale provinciale en Alberta. Dans une première partie, l'auteur discute de la nouvelle carte électorale, adoptée par l'Assemblée législative au cours de la session de 1969, et la controverse qu'elle a soulevée. Cette carte, qui change le rapport du nombre de sièges attribués aux centres urbains et ruraux, traduit l'effort du gouvernement créditiste de donner suite au désir des districts urbains de la province d'accéder à une représentation égalitaire à l'assemblée, tout en maintenant par ailleurs la surreprésentation rurale. La deuxième partie de l'article explore les effets théoriques de la mauvaise distribution électorale sur l'égalité politique: elle désavantage injustement non seulement les électeurs urbains mais aussi les partis dont ils constituent la clientèle. Dans une troisième partie, l'auteur établit un indice de mauvaise distribution, à partir de la carte en vigueur lors des élections provinciales de 1967. Cet indice, qui mesure la qualité de la distribution des sièges d'un district législatif entre les diverses formations électorales, a été proposé par Henry F. Kaiser, sur le principe « un homme, un vote ». Cette distribution de la carte électorale provinciale de l'Alberta est comparée avec celle de la carte fédérale, de meilleure qualité, pour la même province. L'article se termine par la proposition de « critères de tolérance » auxquels devrait se conformer, dans l'avenir, la carte électorale provinciale albertaine afin de répondre aux exigences d'une bonne distribution, telles qu'établies par Kaiser.

The role of political parties in facilitating authoritarian rule has been the subject of extensive research, but parties vary widely in their institutional strength to perform regime-bolstering functions. This article synthesizes existing literature to develop a general theory that explains the sources of ruling party strength in autocracies. We argue that party strength stems from a strategic calculation by political actors who weigh the benefits of building a strong party against its costs. The relative benefits of strong parties depend on the stage of the authoritarian life cycle and factors specific to the strategic environment. The observable implications of the theory are tested using a dataset that includes all autocratic ruling parties that were in power between 1940 and 2015. Consistent with our argument, parties that originated from revolutions tend to be the strongest, whereas those created to support an incumbent dictator tend to be the weakest. A country's resource endowments and external environment also shape the dynamics for party building.

The political underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in Canadian politics is well documented. One political arena that has yet to be examined in this respect, however, is school boards. Using data from a candidate survey conducted during the course of the 2018 Ontario school board elections, as well as demographic data collected on the entire population of school board candidates, we explore the unique characteristics of school board elections. The research note begins by describing the gender and racial composition of candidates and trustees in Canada's most populous province. It then considers the ways in which school board elections may serve as a launchpad to higher office for either of these two traditionally underrepresented groups, as we explore the features of progressive political ambition, recruitment into school board campaigns and the relative electoral success of racialized candidates and women in this local office. While women do very well in school board elections, they are significantly less likely than their male counterparts to have the desire to move up to provincial or federal politics. Meanwhile, racialized candidates contest school board election in significant numbers and report similar levels of progressive ambition relative to their white counterparts, but they fare exceptionally poorly in school board elections.

Gender-based violence is a prevalent and persistent societal problem in Canada that permeates all spaces, including politics. Yet sexual harassment, sexual assault and/or gender-based violence research is rarely found in mainstream political science in Canada or elsewhere. This article argues that this absence is highly problematic for a discipline that purports to centre itself on understanding power—who has it and who doesn't, and how to access it. It further argues for a normative intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, highlighting promising avenues of research in feminist institutionalism and Indigenous feminism to help achieve elusive solutions to gender-based violence in the future.

Résumé. L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.

Abstract. An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.

If Richard Simeon's “Studying Public Policy” sought to inspire a theory of policy making, however tentative or crude, its conceptual cornerstone was no doubt the “funnel of causality.” Yet references to the funnel of causality have all but disappeared from the policy literature. This article traces the evolution of the thinking that underlies the funnel of causality with the aim of demonstrating its lasting relevance to policy studies. Being a method for understanding how inputs from various levels of abstraction impact policy outcomes, the interaction and feedback effects implicit in the funnel metaphor have been maintained in subsequent neo-institutionalist work that takes seriously the institutional and sociological environment in which policy making takes place, particularly that which is interested in the origins and operation of policy subsystems, policy communities or networks, and policy regimes.

Among the few Canadian provinces and American states which have effected major changes in the structure of local government in recent years is the province of Alberta. During the last fifteen years, rural local government in that province has been reorganized extensively. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the main features of the reorganization, to suggest why it took place, and to appraise briefly its effects and implications.

Local Government Units in Alberta. The structure of local government in Alberta finds no counterpart elsewhere except in the other Prairie Provinces of Canada. In Alberta, the municipal district is a rural local government unit which is empowered and required by the provincial government to provide for local public works, public welfare, sanitation and health, and the protection of persons and property. Such a district levies the property taxes required to pay for these services as well as to pay the requisitions of school and hospital districts. Towns and villages within the boundaries of a municipal district are not under its jurisdiction; they are small urban incorporated municipalities operating under a special statute, The Town and Village Act. Cities are self-governing under separate charters. Thus a municipal district is peculiarly rural in character. It is governed by elected councillors, while a secretary-treasurer and office staff appointed by the council administer the district's affairs in accordance with the council's by-laws and the provincial statutes.

The less-developed rural areas of the province are divided into improvement districts. These are administrative areas in which the provincial government performs the functions alloted to the elected councils and the administrative staffs in the municipal districts.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of French economic thought. It has, however, definite limitations as to content and scope. First of all, it is restricted to the field of economic theory, because it was simply impossible to cover the other subjects of economic science. It is also limited in its scope, since many economists are not even mentioned. It deals especially with the contributions which, although not widely known, are important in the development of economic theory. Going beyond a simple restatement of the theories as originally expounded by their authors, it seeks to stress points of real interest for us. The following analysis is also purely descriptive; scarcely any criticism will be made of the works reviewed. Finally, in order to avoid subjectivism, which is always possible in essays of this kind, we will use the method of quoting abundantly from the original sources, a method less brilliant, perhaps, than summarizing but certainly more objective, offering, as it does, more direct contact with the authors themselves.

French contributions to modern economic theory may be viewed as a long cycle containing several phases. The first phase, extending from the Physiocrats to Walras, is marked by important developments which are at the origin of all the modern schools of thought. The second phase, which the outbreak of the Second World War brought to a close, is a period of decline; that downward movement can be explained, as we shall see, by several factors. Finally, many signs of revival have appeared in recent years.

It has been my good fortune to be a member of the Canadian public service for approximately twenty years. I hope that the authorities of the Bank of Canada will forgive me if I include in this period my employment with that important institution. I am afraid that the bank cannot escape the responsibility for having brought me here in the first place. It was characteristic of Ottawa and of the significant role of the bank that I felt myself to be a part of the larger public service from the start. Here I should confess that I made an attempt to enter the civil service from the beginning, but jobs were few and I did not make the grade. Upon graduation I made an application to write an examination but the opportunity to do so never arose. Unquestionably I was eliminated by inspection and, I have no doubt, quite rightiy so. It is proper that I should admit my failures from the outset. However, the bank was willing to take a chance. This was the first of many pieces of good luck which I have enjoyed.

The use of the term “territorial waters” herein is that generally applied in international law to the strip of water where the open sea washes the edge of the land territory of a state, within which strip the state has certain jurisdiction over its own nationals and those of other states. It does not include more extensive strips of water over which some states have asserted jurisdiction for certain purposes over their own nationals or in which, by treaty, adjoining states have asserted jurisdiction over the nationals of both.

There is no generally accepted rule of international law which may be regarded as universally applicable with respect to the right of dominion or jurisdiction over a particular belt of ocean adjacent to a country. It may be said at the beginning, however, that most countries have abandoned the old theory of Mare Clausum, under which coastal waters were sometimes fixed at sixty miles, one hundred miles, two days' journey, etc., from the shore, and under which claims were also made by agreement between two or more countries over an ocean common to them. In the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague (1910), a member of the Tribunal referred to Selden's doctrine of Mare Clausum and to certain ancient treaties based upon it as “wild, obsolete claims over the common ocean which all nations have of old abandoned with the progress of an enlightened civilization.” In the early nineteenth century Russia claimed the Behring Sea as Mare Clausum. This was protested by Great Britain and the United States of America, and in treaties in 1824 and 1825 with the United States of America and Great Britain respectively, Russia recognized that “jurisdiction in the said Sea should be regarded as the reach of a cannon shot from the shore.” It may be of interest to note, however, that the theory is not entirely dead, for within even recent years Russia has applied it to the White Sea, with such effect that Norwegian sealing ships can no longer operate in this area.

There is already a good amount of scientific literature on the parish in French Canada. But this literature is almost exclusively concerned with the parish as it existed historically in the rural society of Quebec. Since the parochial structure was the main organizational frame of rural life and since the parish was identified with the local rural community, these studies have inevitably tended to be “community” monographs. The concept of the “parish” itself has been indiscriminately used to mean either an ecclesiastical structure, a type of social organization, an ecological unit, or a local social group.

The main intent of this paper is to offer a sociological clarification of the institutional nature of the parish. Our leading assumption is that the parish as an institution can be adequately understood only if it is, first of all, seen as an organizational element of the larger Catholic Church. Given this, one must start by analysing the essential features of the parish as it is conceived ideally by the Church. Having elucidated its ideal type as well as its written constitution, one can then evaluate more meaningfully the modalities of its functioning in varying concrete situations—its working constitution, as it were—and draw the line between its formal organization and the patterns of informal relationships that crystallize around it. Our analysis of the parish will be restricted to its structural aspects, viz. the established roles and the reciprocal hierarchical statuses which it implies, and this, in three main directions: the relationships of the parish official functionaries with their ecclesiastical superiors, with the members of the group within which they immediately operate, and with the total society. Only through such an approach can one succeed in our secondary purpose which is to compare the changes that the traditional parochial organization of rural French Canada has been undergoing in the new context of swiftly industrialized and socially heterogeneous cities. Since the larger part of the Canadian sociological literature on religion has been concerned with the non-institutional aspects of protest or erratic religious groups, such a study may bring a contribution to our knowledge of the social organizational value of established churches while incidentally also enabling us to re-focuss our theoretical thinking concerning social institutions.