How much effort by politicians and public administrators is needed to create awareness of proposed new policies or policy changes? Is broad newspaper coverage of proposed legislation and the high visibility of a minister enough to spread a significant amount of information? This note reports a study of the effectiveness of communication by one federal department, especially of a significant bill proposed by it.

The establishment of well-accepted and useful public policy depends on an adequate flow of information. A careful assessment of the wants and needs of society is required. The best policies are established when interested parties exchange opinions and ideas. If adequate communication about proposed plans does not occur, this exchange cannot take place. Perhaps policy-makers too readily assume that communication with other significant persons is occurring.

The primary purpose of this study was to explore the degree of knowledge evinced by a group which would be significantly affected by an apparently widely publicized piece of proposed federal legislation relating to business activity. The amount of knowledge demonstrated by the group is one indication of the effectiveness of the communication efforts of the minister and the department.

In autumn 1971 and early January 1972, the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs was perhaps more visible than at any other time in its history. The minister, Ronald Basford, had spent several years building and strengthening the department, as well as actively informing the public of a highly intensified orientation towards consumer protection and scrutiny of business activities.

For institutions as well as for people, turning 50 invites reflection on what's gone before and what's to come. This special 50th anniversary issue looks at Canadian political science and the profession—past and present—from a number of perspectives and explores ways in which they might or should change.

This paper aims to contribute to discussions around alliances and collaborations between feminisms. It analyses relations between movements in the development of indigenous women's organizational autonomy in Mexico. It seeks to understand how the struggle for autonomy involved a redefinition of the forms of collaboration by indigenous women in the consolidation of their movement. An intersectional perspective is proposed to better understand how power relations affect the organizing processes of social movements, as well as how organizations and individuals respond to and challenge them. I argue here that the redefinition of collaborations and alliances has been a key determinant in the organizing capacity of indigenous women to position themselves as autonomous political actors. From the analysis of two specific cases, this paper poses broader questions regarding representation and autonomy that may be applied towards a reflection of our feminist practices and discourses of solidarity.

The second part of my journey in north-west Canada began when I left Tuktuk on July 25 for Aklavik and Norman Wells. I had hoped to fly from Aklavik to Norman Wells, and so save a week's delay, but the planes are very irregular to the north of Norman Wells and it did not seem advisable to leave the Distributor until I was back in the regular “flying area.” We left the flying field at Norman Wells at 4 p.m. on August 1, and flew across the river to Canol. Here, after a short stop to pick up passengers, the plane proceeded south to Fort Simpson, which we reached in about two hours. We flew at a height of about 10,000 feet at about three miles a minute, so that it was impossible to make detailed notes. There was, of course, no settlement, and the only variations in scenery were in the character of the streams and sloughs. Occasionally outcrops of rock were visible, reminding one of whitish rounded scales in a green hide.

We waited only twenty minutes at Fort Simpson Airport, which is some distance from the settlement, and then flew south-west over unoccupied country to Fort Nelson on the Alaska Highway. We could make out the “winter road,” at times crossing from lake to lake, with one group of huts near Petitot River about sixty miles from Nelson. We landed at the huge airport of Muskwa (Fort Nelson) about 8 p.m. I stayed a day at Fort Nelson, and made a survey of the old fur-trading settlement, but it will be more convenient to consider this district after the Yukon area has been described. The distance from Nelson to Whitehorse is about five hundred miles, and we flew this between 8.30 p.m. and midnight.

As I use the term, philosophy is critical thinking about fundamental matters, where “critical” includes identifying and evaluating justifications for beliefs about fundamental matters or proposing and defending such justifications. Like the notion of philosophy itself, what counts as fundamental is also contestable, but Phillip Hansen's characterization of its being “about how humans ought to live, about what is good for them” is an apt example. Macpherson certainly does attend to this and similar topics and he castigates his contemporary political scientists for neglecting them.

In the winter of 1970–1, about 1000 questionnaires were sent to members of the Canadian Political Science Association and la Société canadienne de science politique and to known political scientists outside the two associations with a view to procuring information about political scientists and the state of research, publication, and funding in Canada.

The present status of Dominion-provincial arrangements is the consequence of the constitutional and administrative decisions made in 1867 as developed over subsequent decades and the course of economic, social, and political developments and the correlative budgetary changes in both federal and provincial fields. The purpose of this paper is to set out the historical objectives of Dominion-provincial financial policies, to examine the shifts which have occurred in these objectives from time to time, and to attempt a statement of the appropriate objectives in the Canadian system. Much of the subsequent argument has to do with the fiscal consequences of federalism in Canada and with the fact that changing circumstances have imposed on the junior levels of government, and to some extent on the federal Government also, financial responsibilities which it was not originally contemplated they would have to bear.

The allocation of functions between the Dominion and the provinces by the Act of 1867 was clearly intended to place on the Dominion those which financially were the most onerous. The heavy costs of development, including the public debt, national defence, and national government were to be borne by the Dominion, while the supposedly lighter costs of public welfare, education, provincial development, and provincial administration were given to the provinces. On the revenue side, the lucrative taxes—customs and excise—were given exclusively to the Dominion and the direct taxes also were given to the Dominion, though not exclusively, to use if it so desired. The provinces were limited to direct taxes, which, with the exception of real property taxes, it was supposed they would be reluctant to use, and to the relatively unproductive licences, fees, and fines. While the federal Government was to pay annual grants to the provinces, the Act of 1867 stipulated that “such grants shall be in full settlement of all future demands on Canada.” This interpretation of intention at Confederation is accepted generally by the historians of the period and is supported by many statements of participants in the Confederation debates. In the period immediately following Confederation these objectives were realized.

Résumé. Se situant à mi-chemin entre l'exégèse rousseauiste et la théorie démocratique, cet article vise à éclairer l'analogie mathématique mobilisée par Rousseau pour illustrer la distinction entre volonté de tous et volonté générale et à réévaluer, à la lumière de cette analogie, les débats contemporains autour de la démocratie (libérale, épistémique, délibérative). Il s'agit de régler trois problèmes qui subsistent après la restitution par Philonenko de cet argument mathématique jugé irrécupérable et de montrer que la distinction rousseauiste ainsi reconstruite peut impulser significativement les tentatives actuelles de dépasser la volonté de tous libérale pour retrouver une volonté générale épistémique ou/et délibérative.

Abstract. Halfway between Rousseauian exegesis and democratic theory, this article aims at clarifying the mathematical analogy that Rousseau used to illustrate the distinction between will of all and general will, and at reassessing in the light of this analogy the contemporary debates on democracy (liberal, epistemic, deliberative). Three problems that remain after Philonenko's restitution of this mathematical argument considered unrecoverable are solved herein. It is argued that the Rousseauian distinction thus reconstructed can give significant new impetus to current attempts to go beyond the liberal will of all in order to reach an epistemic or/and deliberative general will.

En matière de règle électorale, la recherche, d'approche « institutionaliste », s'est longtemps attardée sur les effets des différentes règles électorales sur les systèmes de partis, négligeant peut-être un peu les modes de confection et de modification de ces règles ainsi que leur usage politique.

In the new states of Southeast Asia the idea of parliamentary government has usually been closely linked with the struggle for national independence, yet with the latter a reality in most of the area, there has come a curious disillusionment with the actual values of the former. Thus, during the 1920's and 1930's in what was then called the Netherlands East Indies, nationalists agitated on behalf of “Indonesia berparlemèn” (a parliament for Indonesia), but today we find leading Indonesian public figures, such as President Sukarno, declaring that Western-style parliamentary government has failed in Indonesia, and that what the country needs is a governmental system “in harmony with the Indonesian soul,” that is, a “democracy with leadership,” or a “guided democracy.” The following pages will seek to suggest some of the causes of this disenchantment with the principle of representative government in Indonesia, by focusing on its historic origins and functions during these, Indonesia's first, years of national independence.

When on August 17, 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, acting on behalf of “the people of Indonesia,” formally proclaimed the independence of their nation, they confronted a condition of widespread popular inexperience in the art of representative government. It was not until 1918 that a rudimentary parliamentary body for all of Indonesia (the so-called Volksraad, or People's Council) had been established, in line with the plans, in great variety and often confusingly contradictory, of the Dutch colonial policy-makers to give their East Indian possessions a greater degree of autonomy.

The analysis of political leadership is an enterprise often handicapped by the lack of an adequate conceptual framework. Mr Courtney has selected James Barber's model of presidential character as a means of overcoming this problem and has presented an interesting examination of Mackenzie King's political leadership based on this approach. There are, however, a number of aspects both of the Barber model and of Mackenzie King's leadership that Courtney has been unable to develop. It is proposed in this brief rejoinder to discuss some of these issues and to indicate the main lines of an alternative interpretation of Mr King's character.

In all popular discussions of death rates or of the probable duration of human life one finds the phrase “according to the mortality table.” Sometimes it even appears that a writer is assuming that a definite law of mortality has been discovered from which deviations are not to be expected and which has been embodied in the mortality table. Every serious student of the subject knows that this is far from the truth and that there are many mortality tables, each representing the mortality which was experienced by a specified group of lives during a specified time.

To the actuary, any mortality table is simply a mathematical tool with which to study such problems as population growth or change, or to calculate the monetary values of benefits dependent on life contingencies. It is a tool in the same sense that a gauge is a tool for a machinist. In some parts of a machinist's work only the most accurate precision gauges are acceptable, and similarly in calculating premiums for non-participating insurance or rates for life annuities, the actuary must use the most accurate and up-to-date mortality table available. On the other hand, a machinist may use a less exact gauge for other types of work where conditions are suitable. For certain purposes such as calculating policy liabilities, the actuary has a corresponding choice, for, as will appear later in the paper, reserves by all mortality tables are remarkably similar.