Les instruments auxquels un État peut avoir recours pour atténuer les risques que font peser les inégalités économiques sur la démocratie sont nombreux et peuvent prendre différentes formes. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à mettre en lumière la dimension normative des trois principaux instruments auxquels on a généralement recours pour mitiger l'influence de l'argent dans la compétition électorale, ainsi que le contexte dans lequel ils furent institués, remodelés – et parfois démantelés – au Canada. Ces trois mécanismes sont la limitation des dépenses électorales, le plafonnement des contributions privées et le financement public des partis. Il ne s'agit toutefois pas uniquement de décrire ces instruments, mais de réfléchir aux justifications normatives spécifiques à chacun, et d'en comprendre leur complémentarité. Plus largement, il s'agit d'offrir un cadre pour penser les enjeux de financement électoral en philosophie politique, un sujet trop souvent laissé dans l'ombre par la théorie démocratique.

Cet article porte sur les effets et les contraintes posés par la pandémie de COVID-19 sur les mécanismes de la gouvernance dans le système fédéral canadien. Pour ce faire, nous empruntons un cadre analytique bien spécifique, que nous faisons découler expressément des réflexions de la Cour suprême du Canada dans son Renvoi relatif à la sécession du Québec. Nous nous intéressons ainsi aux quatre principes sous-jacents à la Constitution canadienne identifiés par la Cour – soit le fédéralisme, la démocratie, le constitutionnalisme et la primauté du droit, de même que la protection des minorités – et à leur respect (ou non-respect) en temps de crise. Nous posons la question suivante : dans quelle mesure l’esprit de ces quatre principes constitutionnels fondamentaux a-t-il été respecté par les acteurs clés du système de gouvernance au Canada alors qu’ils étaient confrontés à la pandémie de COVID-19?

With the patriation of the Constitution in 1982, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) inherited extraordinary political powers. In response to the Court's expanded power of judicial review, there was a sizeable increase in the number of political actors “intervening” in SCC cases. Scholars of Canadian law and politics are deeply divided on whether civil society participation in the courts—particularly as intervenors—is democratically legitimate. This important debate cannot be settled without an empirical evaluation of who intervenes. This research note provides an analysis of all the Charter cases heard by the SCC between 2013 and 2021. In contrast to the field's dominant theory on interest-group legal mobilization—the Court Party thesis—the findings reveal that equity-deserving interest groups, such as those representing women, have an irregular presence in Court. Instead, powerful actors such as governments and legal associations make up a majority of the “repeat player” intervenors. While further research is warranted, the research note concludes that without the maintenance of sufficient support structures, intervention may be unable to perform a democratizing function.

The Supreme Court's recent invocation of the “constitutional architecture” in the Senate Reform Reference has led a number of scholars to question the status of constitutional conventions in the legal, as opposed to political, constitution. Has the Court, without expressly saying so, transformed at least some conventions into constitutional law? This would be a serious rupture, not only from existing precedent on the justiciability of conventions but also from the traditional understanding of conventions as binding political rules. In light of this recent scholarly debate, an exploration of the profound consequences of entrenching conventions in the legal constitution is warranted, as it implicates the meaning of constitutional conventions, their creation, their relation to law, and their enforcement. Judicial entrenchment of conventions would be a dangerous violation of the separation of powers and would have negative consequences for the functioning of Canada's system of government and for the future of constitutional change.

This article examines the Wet'suwet’en people's struggle for territorial control over their traditional homeland from the normative perspective of collective self-determination. I focus on two interlocking philosophical questions that arise in examination of the case: the justification for a group's right to control territory and the justification for the right of political institutions and officials within those institutions to make and enforce law for the occupants of the territory. I argue that, pursuant to the collective self-determination theory of territorial rights, the legitimate representatives of the Wet'suwet’en people must reflect the people's shared will. After describing the traditional governance system of the Wet'suwet’en people, I argue that there is nothing in principle preventing the hereditary chiefs from reflecting the shared will of the Wet'suwet’en people (as I argue electoral democracy is not always necessary for collective self-determination). I illustrate several reasons why hereditary leaders could reflect the shared will of Wet'suwet’en people better than alternative political authorities, while demonstrating that the political authority of any Wet'suwet’en governance system depends upon the actual endorsement of Wet'suwet’en people themselves.

Sous son aspect positif, la marge d’appréciation que la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme reconnaît aux États permet à ceux-ci d’enrichir le socle des droits fondamentaux établi par la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme. Elle met en avant la responsabilité de chaque État dans la concrétisation de la Convention. Elle contribue alors au développement de la démocratie qui croît avec le renforcement des droits de l’homme. Sous son aspect négatif, l’invocation de la marge d’appréciation permet à la Cour d’absoudre certains États alors que ceux-ci sapent le socle des droits fondamentaux. Elle s’y sent contrainte pour amadouer les États qui contestent son autorité au nom de leur autonomie. Question de survie donc ou à tout le moins de préservation de son rôle unificateur. Le réalisme politique l’emporte alors sur les exigences démocratiques.

This article examines Canada-US relations through their shared membership in a pluralistic security community (PSC). While the bilateral relationship has been turbulent for decades, the Trump presidency has damaged the Canada-US PSC by (1) exacerbating a decades-long trend of weakened shared identity and mutual trust between Canadians and Americans, and (2) undermining the democratic norms and institutions that uphold American domestic stability and Canadians’ expectations of peaceful change. Assessing the combined implications of the decline in shared identity, mutual trust and democratic stability, I argue that the Canada-US PSC cannot endure if the United States does not also consider Canada's national and security interests or if the United States itself poses a threat to those interests. Given current trends, the future absence of war in North America may reflect American domination over a weaker and dependent Canada rather than their continued membership in a bilateral PSC.

This article analyzes the corporate citizenship (CC) practices by which multinational corporations (MNCs), which have invaded the public arena, impose new standards, forcing the collectives to retire from democratic spaces. In order to verify whether this new relationship to the law fosters the emergence of a citizenship regime for everyone, the research studies its configurations based on a MNC, hailed as a role model, in a plant in Canada and a mine in Ghana. The results, which reveal a fragile autonomy in one case and a heteronomy in the other, raise the question of effectiveness of the CC torn between economic liberalism and industrial democracy. The article concludes that, under its neoliberal posture, the CC is far from conciliating its workers’ individual aspirations for equality in their difference and their collective tendency towards homogeneity; both principles articulate liberalism and democracy but do not solve the opposition between liberal individualism and collective action, including union actions, in a flexible business in the era of economic globalization.

Power in sociological studies of memory is commonly understood as a function of political interests that are successfully framed as an inclusive and convincing story about selected elements of the past. By showing how negotiations of memory are driven by dynamics of symbolic exchange and by distinguishing techniques of narration emerging from this process, I develop a theoretical model that helps to better understand the locus of symbolic power in mnemonic agency. I consider the case of the plans surrounding a European history museum to show how persistent notions of cultural unity can be drafted in democratic societies.

Since the 1960s, public consultation has emerged as an important democratic tool, allowing governments to inform, debate, and learn from the general public. Since the 1980s, international trade agreements have wielded significant influence over domestic law making, as an ever more ‘comprehensive’ set of topics is regulated via treaty. In Canada, these two trends have yet to meet. Neither the public nor Parliament is involved in trade policy making, raising concerns about the democratic legitimacy of expansive trade agreements. Through the lens of the recent Canada and European Union (EU) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), this article examines whether trade law’s consultation practices can be aligned with those of other federal government departments. We identify five key values that make consultations successful—diversity, education, commitment, accountability, and transparency—and consider the viability of their inclusion in trade consultations.

Conventional wisdom about civil litigation, both among scholars and political actors, holds that abuse of the legal process is common, that there is too much litigation, that it is “all about the money”, and that “a bad settlement is better than a good trial”. This constellation of attitudes that emphasize the economic function of law suggests that courts are an expensive conflict resolution mechanism of last resort and that their use would be minimized in a healthy market-based democracy. In this paper we apply a new sociological framework to understand the meaning and function of civil litigation in a democratic society. We focus in particular on the democratic function of the informational characteristics of litigation that require substantial disclosure and engagement between plaintiff, defendant and third parties. Instead we examine the role courts play in the maintenance and attainment of a social information order – norms and legal rules governing the sharing and withholding of information that depend on and constitute particular status relationships between actors (Ryan 2006). Using interviews and surveys of family members of victims of 9/11 we develop a theory of the lived experience of entitlement to information in Anglo-American legal settings with suggestions of how these ideas might translate to civil law systems.

In 1998, the three major government funding councils put in place the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS) to regulate all research involving humans in Canada conducted at institutions funded by the councils. This article examines the process of developing the TCPS, a historic and very important document in Canada's research ethics landscape, and the application of the democratic values of legitimacy, transparency, representation, accountability, and community engagement in that process. The authors argue that efforts were made to ensure basic democratic values in the process but that these attempts should have been taken farther. This examination is a timely exercise in light of the new draft now being prepared to replace the current version of the TCPS. The authors also consider this ongoing process of establishing a new edition and reflect on lessons to be learned.

Achieving consensus on a definition of “democracy” has proven elusive. Institutions that have been taken to be essential to democracy have changed radically since the word “democrat” began to be widely used toward the end of the eighteenth century. Democratic ideas and democratic practice engender conflict that transforms institutions rather than just reproduces them. Its transformative character rests on a half-dozen key attributes of democracy: it is an actor’s concept, as well as an analyst’s; it can arouse strong feelings; it combines not always compatible ideas; it empowers dissent; it involves a dynamic mixture of inclusion and exclusion; and the democratic histories of national states have been intertwined with global domination. Two processes combine to generate much social dynamism. First, democracy’s stirring inclusionary claims have been contradicted by a complex structure of exclusions, including distinctions in rights of full participation among citizens, distinctions in rights between citizens and non-citizens, and distinctions in resources among legally equal citizens. And second, democratic practice has been fertile soil for the development of social movements. Taken together, democracy is an invitation for movements to try to shift the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and in so doing to expand or constrict democracy itself.