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The Governments and Societies of Canadian Federalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Alan C. Cairns
Alan C. Cairns
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Type
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Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 695 - 726
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1977

References

1 Federalism and Constitutional Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 4.

2 The title of a famous 1939 article by Harold J. Laski, reprinted in Christensen, A. N. and Kirkpatrick, E. M. (eds.), The People, Politics, and the Politician (New York: Holt, 1941).Google Scholar

3 “Constitutional Trends and Federalism,” in Lower, A. R. M., et al., Evolving Canadian Federalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1958), 97.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 108.

5 The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 380.

6 My intellectual debt to Professors E. R. Black, Richard Simeon, D. V. Smiley, and others will be readily evident in the following pages, and is gratefully acknowledged. The new text by Hockin, T. A.. Government in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976)Google Scholar, emphasizes “the dynamic of government in Canada” (xi), and thus overlaps considerably with the argument presented below.

7 Smiley, D. V., Canada in Question: Federalism in the Seventies (2nd ed.; Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976), 10–11Google Scholar, and chap. 2.

8 See Patenaude, Luce, Le Labrador à l'heure de la contestation (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1972)Google Scholar, and Brossard, Jacques, et al., Le Territoire Québécois (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1970), 17–19Google Scholar, for materials and analysis from a Quebec perspective on the Labrador dispute.

9 For an excellent technical description of boundary changes see Nicholson, Norman L., The Boundaries of Canada, its Provinces and Territories, Canada, Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, Geographical Branch, Memoir no. 2(Ottawa, 1964).Google Scholar

10 February 12, 1972, cited in Gallant, Edgar, “Maritime Cooperation and Integration—A Progress Report,” in Firestone, O. J. (ed.), Regional Economic Development (Ottawa, 1974), 167.Google Scholar

11 This is the combined total of 349,063 wage-earners, full-time and other, excluding BC, but including Yukon and the North-West Territories, for general government services, Statistics Canada, Provincial Government Employment October-December 1976 (Ottawa, 1977), 6Google Scholar; 136,463 salary-earners and wage-earners, full-time and other, for provincial government enterprises, ibid., 28; and 33, 197 employees of the BC government, excluding BC Ferries, Public Service Commission Annual Report (Victoria, 1977), 23Google Scholar, for a total of 518,723.

12 Statistics Canada, Federal Government Employment July-September 1976 (Ottawa, 1977), 11.Google Scholar

13 Based on unadjusted employment figures of 9,688,000 for September 1976. Canadian Statistical Review (February 1977), 49.

14 Statistics Canada, Local Government Employment July-September 1976 (Ottawa, 1977), 5.Google Scholar “If we add to the list of civil servants… [at all three levels] those employed in a vast array of nondepartmental agencies, boards, commissions, enterprises, and teachers and hospital employees, we would find that at least one in every five in the labour force in the country is on a public payroll.” Hodgetts, J. E. and Dwivedi, O. P., Provincial Governments as Employers (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1974), 2.Google Scholar

15 Fairfield, Roy P. (ed.), The Federalist Papers (2nd ed.; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 2.Google Scholar

16 For a relevant case study see Pross, A. Paul, “Input versus Withinput: Pressure Group Demands and Administrative Survival,” in Pross, A. Paul (ed.), Pressure Group Behaviour in Canadian Politics (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975).Google Scholar

17 “A classic case [of the survival capacity of public organizations] is the Halifax Disaster Relief Commission, established to handle claims arising from the Halifax explosion of 1917. In late 1975, the federal government introduced a bill to repeal the act respecting the Commission and to transfer authority for continuation of pensions and allowances to the Canadian Pension Commission. So long-lived was the commission that the bill winding it up had to make pension provisions for employees of the Commission itself.” Gow, Donald, “Rebuilding Canada's Bureaucracy,” edited and revised by Black, Edwin R. and Prince, Michael J. (Kingston, 1976), 40.Google Scholar (Mimeographed.)

18 Ibid., 40.

19 Bernard, André, “The Quebec Perspective on Canada: The Last Quarter Century—Language Strife,” a paper prepared for the University of Saskatchewan Conference on Political Change in Canada, March 17, 1977, 1.Google Scholar This leadership role is a response to the social and political fact that “No power in the world can prevent francophone Quebeckers from perceiving themselves as a society and as a nation, original and distinct from the Canadian whole.” Dion, Léon, Québec: The Unfinished Revolution (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976), 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Smiley, Canada in Question, 108.

21 Corry, “Constitutional Trends and Federalism,” 101.

22 Quebec versus Ottawa: The Struggle for Self-government 1960–1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 95.

23 Ibid., chap. 13.

24 Québec: The Unfinished Revolution, 86.

25 For an extremely helpful general discussion of institutionalization see Huntington, Samuel P., “Political Development and Political Decay,” in Vig, Norman J. and Stiefbold, Rodney P. (eds.), Politics in Advanced Nations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974).Google Scholar “Institutionalization is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability. The level of institutionalization of any political system can be defined by the adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence of its organizations and procedures” (115). In comparative terms, the Canadian political system is highly institutionalized.

26 Simeon, Richard, “The ‘Overload Thesis’ and Canadian Government,” Canadian Public Policy 2 (1976), 550Google Scholar, italics in original. Similar statements abound in the literature. “For today's citizens,” states Dion, “as for their fathers, the State is still a distant ‘they,’ alien and almost inimical…” (Québec: The Unfinished Revolution, 87). Smiley speculates that “elites are somewhat unresponsive to popular attitudes and that the citizenry for whatever reasons has a considerable tolerance for this unresponsiveness” (Canada in Question, 201). Mallory, J. R. observes that “the mass of citizenry is perhaps as far away from the real decisions of government as they were two hundred years ago, and the cabinet system provides strong institutional barriers to the development of more democratic ways of doing things” (“Responsive and Responsible Government,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Fourth Series, XII [1974], 208).Google Scholar A recent volume on pressure groups documents instances in which government agencies withstood “considerable input pressure from the external environment, and that they may significantly influence that environment, if not dominate it” (A. Paul Pross, “Pressure Groups: Adaptive Instruments of Political Communication,” in Pross [ed.], Pressure Group Behaviour in Canadian Politics, 21). Anderson, J. E. suggests “that in Canada the relations between civil servants and pressure groups are usually dominated by civil servants” (“Pressure Groups and the Canadian Bureaucracy,” in Kernaghan, W. D. K. [ed.], Bureaucracy in Canadian Government [2nd ed.; Toronto: Methuen. 1973], 99).Google Scholar

27 Quebec versus Ottawa, 43.

28 Dion, Québec; The Unfinished Revolution, 138.

29 Meisel, John, “Citizen Demands and Government Response.” Canadian Public Policy 2 (1976), 568.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Simeon, “The ‘Overload Thesis’ and Canadian Government,” 546.

31 Bernard, “Quebec Perspective on Canada,” 1.

32 Dion, Québec: The Unfinished Revolution, 156.

33 Ibid., 124, 169–70.

34 Ibid., 156.

35 Quebec versus Ottawa, 130.

36 “I am deeply concerned that, on the evidence of the two-year examination carried out by the Audit Office. Parliament—and indeed the Government—has lost or is close to losing effective control of the public purse” (Conspectus of the Report of the Auditor General of Canada to the House of Commons [Ottawa, 1976], 3).

37 Ontario Economic Council, The Process of Public Decision-Making (Toronto. 1977), 48.Google Scholar

38 Ontario Economic Council, The Ontario Economy to 1987 (Toronto, 1977), 38.Google Scholar

39 Young, Geoffrey, “Federal-Provincial Grants and Equalization,” in Ontario Economic Council, Intergovernmental Relations (Toronto, 1977), 43–44.Google Scholar

40 Donald R. Huggett, “Tax Base Harmonization,” in Ontario Economic Council, Intergovernmental Relations, 56.

41 The appropriately cautious statement of Paul Pross should be kept in mind as a salutary check on some of the more speculative suggestions in the following paragraphs: “we know only enough to suggest that federalism is both an important influence on pressure group behaviour and that group manipulation of intergovernmental relations may have a significant effect on the policy process” (“Pressure Groups: Adaptive Instruments of Political Communication,” 23).

42 Social Credit and the Federal Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 32, 37.

43 Trudeau, P. E., Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 138.Google Scholar

44 Pross, “Pressure Groups: Adaptive Instruments of Political Communication,” 22–23, and David Kwavnick, “Interest Group Demands and the Federal Political System: Two Canadian Case Studies,” esp. 71–72, both from Pross (ed.), Pressure Group Behaviour in Canadian Politics.

45 Kwavnick, “Interest Group Demands,” 81.

46 Ibid., 82.

47 M. W. Bucovetsky, “The Mining Industry and the Great Tax Reform Debate,” in Pross (ed.), Pressure Group Behaviour in Canadian Politics, 106.

48 Ibid., 108–09.

49 “Interest Groups in Comparative Analysis,” The Journal of Politics 23 (1961), 38. He speculates that “this parallelism between the political system and the interest configuration is true everywhere.” Compare Kwavnick's hypothesis: “the distribution of power between the central and provincial governments influences the structure, cohesion and even the existence of interest groups; that is, that the strength and cohesion of interest groups will tend to mirror the strength, in their particular area of concern, of the government to which they enjoy access. Interest groups which are provincially based and which enjoy access to the provincial governments will be strong compared with nationally-based groups enjoying access to the national government when the provincial governments enjoy a stronger position than the national government in the areas of concern to those interest groups, and vice versa,” and, “In short, the pressure goes where the power is—and takes its organization with it” (“Interest Group Demands,” 72, 77). See in general Truman, David, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (2nd ed.; New York: Knopf, 1971).Google Scholar

50 Helen Jones Dawson, “National Pressure Groups and the Federal Government,” 30–35, in Pross (ed.), Pressure Group Behaviour in Canadian Politics.

51 Ibid., 31. In summary, Professor Dawson states: “Clearly Canadian federalism has had, and continues to have, a formidable impact upon the organization and behaviour of the pressure groups. It has complicated and confused their tasks while increasing their expenses and policy formulation problems” (35).

52 The next few pages are heavily dependent on Smiley, Canada in Question, chap. 4, and Black, Edwin R., “Federal Strains within a Canadian Party,” in Thorburn, Hugh G. (ed.), Parly Politics in Canada (2nd ed.; Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1967).Google Scholar Black summarizes his interpretation with the statement: “Both the structure and the internal operation of a major party resemble that of the Canadian system of government. The sovereignty of provincial party units is as real and extensive as that of the provinces with respect to Ottawa” (139).

53 Friedrich, Carl J., Limited Government: A Comparison (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 55.Google Scholar

54 See Black, “Federal Strains within a Canadian Party” for an instructive case study of the impact of federalism on federal-provincial party relationships.

55 Smiley, Canada in Question, 108–09.

56 Ibid., 109–10.

57 Ibid., 110.

58 See Whitaker, Reginald, “The Liberal Party and the Canadian State: A Report on Research and a Speculation” (January 1977), esp. 37.Google Scholar (Mimeographed.)

59 Kwavnick, “Interest Group Demands,” 71. Twenty years ago Corry identified the development of national associations and mammoth nation-wide corporations “compelled to think in nation-wide… terms,” as crucial to the centralization of power in Ottawa (“Constitutional Trends and Federalism,” 109, 111, 114).

60 Pross, “Pressure Groups: Adaptive Instruments of Political Communication,” 6–9.

61 See Hodgetts, J. E., “Regional Interests and Policy in a Federal Structure,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32 (1966), 13–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the creation of regions for policy purposes by governments, and the attempts to generate regional demands from these artificially-created administrative units.

62 See my “The Electoral System and the Party System in Canada, 1921–1965,” this Journal I (1968), 55–80, for the contribution of the electoral system to the regionalization of the party system.

63 John Meisel, “Recent Changes in Canadian Parties,” in Thorburn (ed.), Party Politics in Canada, 34.

64 See Connolly, William E., The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1974)Google Scholar, for a stimulating discussion of political language highly relevant for the following few pages.

65 Black, Edwin R., Divided Loyalties: Canadian Concepts of Federalism (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 This is particularly evident in Trudeau who, although committed to federalism, is basically an advocate of liberal individualism and a ferocious opponent of any move in the direction of basing political systems on nationalist criteria of ethnicity (Black, Divided Loyalties, 209–10; Smiley, Canada in Question, 175).

67 The group or community claims of the provinces are for external consumption. Within their own political spheres, provincial politicians speak of the rights of individual British Columbians, Newfoundlanders, etc.

68 Cited in Smiley, Donald V., The Canadian Political Nationality (Toronto: Methuen, 1967), 80.Google Scholar

69 See Black's discussion in Divided Loyalties, chap. 7, of the tortured and confused two-nations controversy of the late sixties.

70 Although resort to the past has lost relevance as a debating technique, the BNA Act remains as an uncertain arbiter of conflicting claims for policy-making authority. In circumstances of political competition, now as in the past, each government tends to attribute amplified meaning to its constitutional assignments of statutory authority, and restrictive definitions to the explicitly-worded law-making authority of the other level of government. See Smiley's fascinating discussion of Quebec-Ottawa differences in interpreting provincial jurisdiction over education (Canada in Question, 30–34).

The contemporary federal strategy of linguistic manipulation, for which there are provincial counterparts, is described by Claude Morin as follows: “Confronting a Quebec government that was sensitive about its constitutional prerogative—more often the case with the Union nationale—Ottawa made sure to avoid the impression of a frontal assault on provincial sectors. ‘Training’ was the word used rather than ‘education,’ ‘problems of urban growth’ replaced ‘municipal affairs,’ the ‘fight against unemployment’ replaced ‘social development,’ ‘community development’ was the new expression for ‘culture.’ Ottawa could speak freely on any subject providing the terms it used did not ring suspiciously of those areas which Quebec, atavistically or otherwise, had come to regard as being within its own jurisdiction” (Quebec versus Ottawa, 78–79).

71 Richard Simeon, “The Federal-Provincial Decision Making Process,” in Ontario Economic Council, Intergovernmental Relations, 26. See also Meisel, John, “Cleavages, Parties, and Values in Canada,” paper presented to the International Political Science Association, IXth World Congress, Montreal, 1973, 3, 6–8Google Scholar (mimeographed), on the significant role of federal and provincial governments as the key protagonists for the expression of the three major political cleavages in Canada—ethnic, regional, and economic/regional.

72 Hodgetts, J. E., The Canadian Public Service: A Physiology of Government 1867–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 42.Google Scholar

73 Long, Norton E., “Power and Administration,” Public Administration Review 9 (1949), 261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74 Morin, Quebec versus Ottawa, 161.

75 Québec: The Unfinished Revolution, 102–03.

76 Cited in Matheson, W. A., The Prime Minister and the Cabinet (Toronto: Methuen, 1976), 150Google Scholar, italics in original. “No strong man in the emotionally satisfying sense has ever ruled this country—none will if it is to survive,” stated Lester Pearson. “Attempting to reconcile what appears to be the irreconcilable will continue to be the task of Prime Ministers and in this task Prime Ministers tend to look uninspiring” (ibid.. 29).

77 Smiley, Donald V., “The Structural Problem of Canadian Federalism,” Canadian Public Administration 14 (1971), 332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

78 See Simeon, “The Federal-Provincial Decision Making Process,” 31–32, for a good brief discussion.

79 “Political scientists attempt to explain political phenomena. They view politics as a dependent variable, and they naturally look for the explanations of politics in other social processes and institutions. This tendency was reinforced by the Marxian and Freudian intellectual atmosphere of the 1930's and 1940's. Political scientists were themselves concerned with the social, psychological, and economic roots of political behavior. Consequently, social change, personality change, and economic change were, in their view, more fundamental than political change. If one could understand and explain the former, one could easily account for the latter” ( Huntington, Samuel P., “The Change to Change,” in Macridis, Roy C. and Brown, Bernard E. [eds.], Comparative Politics: Notes and Readings [4th ed.; Georgetown: Dorsey, 1972], 408).Google Scholar

80 See d'Entrèves, A. P., The Notion of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 33–34, 62–63Google Scholar, on the weakness of the concept of the state in the English-speaking world, and on the hostility of political scientists to its employment.

81 Blondel, Jean, Comparing Political Systems (New York: Praeger, 1972), 111.Google Scholar