The scarcity of reviews of “gender and politics” books in disciplinary journals limits opportunities for “mainstream” political scientists to learn about the field. As chair of the jury to select the 2015 winner of APSA's Victoria Schuck prize for “the best book … on women and politics,” I realized that the field's size and diversity makes it hard to identify central themes, especially since feminist scholars are also active across the discipline's many fields and in the multidisciplinary enterprise of gender studies. In my CPSA presidential address (Vickers, 2015), I argued that although the “gender and politics” field has expanded greatly in its four-decade history, its impact on the discipline generally hasn't been transformative, since gender isn't being used as a key category of analysis in the discipline and the field's key theme that “the personal is political” isn't reflected in the discipline's main approaches, especially its dependence on a liberal conception of the private/public divide. This essay explores how the books reviewed use gender and this key theme in explaining contemporary political issues.

Canada's recent return to a pegged exchange rate marks the end of a highly interesting experiment in international economic policy and the end of an era in the history of the Canadian balance of payments. It is now appropriate, therefore, to look backwards and to examine the effects of changes in the balance of payments on the Canadian economy during the period in which the value of the Canadian dollar was allowed to fluctuate freely. Only a very narrow aspect of the problem is examined in this paper, namely, the effect of the large long-term capital inflow of the 1950s on the Canadian business cycle. This problem is interesting not only for its own sake, but also because the cyclical effect of a capital inflow is extremely important in determining whether the borrowing country achieves its potential or required growth rate.

If, for our purposes, we define the potential supply of goods and services available to an economy as domestic production at full employment plus imports minus exports, a capital inflow increases that supply by bidding up the value of the Canadian dollar until sufficient upward pressure on imports and downward pressure on exports is imposed to transfer the capital inflow in real terms. This increase in supply implies that planned aggregate expenditures in Canada can increase without exerting inflationary pressures on the economy. A capital inflow allows a higher level of investment expenditure and this raises the potential rate of growth of the productive capacity of the economy.

Protection as an economic creed has been largely an expression of industrial capitalism in Canada. It is true that Ministers of Finance have endorsed the tariff as a means of providing revenue independently of the interests of manufacturers, that such groups as farmers at various times have favoured the imposition of duties on particular commodities, and that certain newspapers, political parties, and organizations of a reform or patriotic character have advanced the general philosophy of protection. But in none of these cases has the support of tariff increases grown out of any broad economic movement. The tariff system developed with the growth of manufacturing industries, and it was pressed upon the Government as a necessary policy by organizations formed to advance the interests of manufacturers.

The first organized attempt of Canadian manufacturers to secure protection of which we have knowledge was made at a meeting in Toronto, April 14, 1858, called “for the purpose of recommending such a readjustment of the tariff as would place the manufacturers of Canada on a footing of greater equality with those of the United States.” Previous to the meeting, consultations had taken place between a committee in Toronto, the Tariff Reform Association of Montreal, and manufacturers scattered throughout the country, and, as a result of these deliberations, a detailed draft of the necessary tariff changes was drawn up.

No one can delineate the precise state of affairs likely to prevail at the conclusion of the present world conflict. The drama is too kaleidoscopic, too much is hidden in the wings, and the number of acts is uncertain. The best that one can hope for is to distinguish the main threads of the unfolding mystery and to guess the probable position of the dramatis personae at the final curtain. Yet a few things are becoming increasingly apparent.

From facts already before our eyes it is clear that economic rehabilitation and reconstruction on a grand scale will be necessary before life can begin to function again in many parts of the world. Moreover economic reconstruction will be something more than the distribution of “K” rations and bowls of soup to the undernourished peoples of Europe and Asia. The physical destruction of factories, industrial plants, railways, harbours, gas and electric works, and all the rest of the means of production by which civilized peoples provide themselves a living, of course will have to be made good. Yet this is not all. Much of the world's population—in south-eastern Europe, in China, in India—subsisted at an almost unbelievably low standard of living even before the war began. To tender these peoples no better prospect than a return to the miserable pittance that was theirs before the war would not augur well for world peace and order, nor make more than a hollow mockery of the solemn promises of the United Nations. Their standards of living cannot be raised by driblets of charity and pious good wishes, but only by making available to them the capital instruments by which they themselves can raise their per capita productivity and hence their material welfare. The task of relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction, and development that will confront the world at the war's end promises to exceed anything of a similar nature that has ever been undertaken. Yet it is a task which lies inevitably before the world and one for which the penalties of inept handling are certainly severe and possibly disastrous.

Même si la plupart des manuels de science politique parlent du déclin des chambres hautes à notre époque, elles n'en continuent pas moins à poser un problème « classique » et «crucial». Ce sont les deux épithètes qu'emploie Georges Burdeau dans son volumineux et inégal Traité de science politique en précisant qu’ « il n'est guère de problèmes d'organisation constitutionnelle qui n'aient donné lieu, dans les milieux politiques, à des discussions plus âpres, et dans la doctrine, à une littérature plus abondante que celui de savoir si l'organe législatif doit être constitué par une assemblée unique ou par deux chambres». Dès l'antiquité, sous forme de ce qu'on appelait alors le régime mixte-la combinaison de la royauté, l'aristocratie, et la démocratie-le problème a passionné les esprits et Platon en a esquissé la théorie dans Les Lois. Aristote a précisé les idées de son maître dans sa Politique et a inspiré au Moyen Age Thomas d'Aquin qui, dans son régime politique idéal, veut combiner royauté, aristocratie, et démocratie. On ne possédait tout de même pas une idée très précise de la chambre haute qui ne s'incarna vraiment qu'avec la naissance et le développement de la Chambre des Lords en Angleterre. Mais ce n'est évidemment qu'avec l'avènement des idées démocratiques au dix-huitième siècle et surtout leur mise en pratique au dix-neuvième que se posa vraiment la question de la dualité des chambres. Après un débat fameux, en septembre, 1789, la Révolution française fut d'abord favorable à une assemblée unique mais dans la constitution de l'an III, le bicaméralisme triompha comme il devait triompher dans la plupart des constitutions pour servir de frein aux assemblées populaires. Il fut cependant, en 1830, l'objet d'une brillante attaque de la part de Jeremy Bentham dans sa lettre «to his fellow citizens of France on Houses of Peers and Senates».

In the Spring of 1951, after more than three years of planning, the organized leadership of the Canadian co-operative movement made a determined effort to persuade the Government of Canada to support before Parliament a bill to incorporate a national co-operative credit society–a national co-operative central bank. While this attempt did not succeed, the co-operative leaders, far from abandoning the proposal, intensified their efforts to secure this incorporation, and a campaign is being conducted throughout the country. In this article an examination will be made of the central co-operative credit societies now existing in the different provinces of Canada; their economic function will be considered and elements of strength and weakness found in them will be analysed. While the emphasis will centre on the provincial units, certain observations on the proposed national co-operative credit society will also be made.

The principles of co-operative banking can be derived from observation of existing institutions. During the 1930's well-developed systems of co-operative credit were operating in almost every civilized country in the world. While these banking systems professed a certain similarity of purpose, embracing such characteristics as non-profit operation, low interest rates to borrowers, the accumulation of funds for the development of co-operatives, and the like, they exhibited a wide variety of organizational structures. Some of these societies served only co-operatives, while others dealt with the general public; some served only credit societies, others all types of co-operatives; some were primarily systems of agricultural credit, while others served urban tradesmen and producers; some operated under the aegis of the state while others were independent of state aid; some practised open membership, while others accepted as members only certain racial or religious segments of the population. Thus the problem of classification of co-operative banking systems is a difficult one.

Whatever may be regarded as the immediate motives which impelled the Price Spreads investigation it will be generally agreed that a careful examination of the Canadian economy as a whole is long overdue, and that present conditions and current trends require the formulation of intelligent and co-ordinated economic policies. We are now in the sixth year of a major industrial depression and, while there has been a substantial measure of recovery from the low points of 1933, there is no clear indication of continued improvement and there is at least a possibility of the crumbling of the statistical ledge to which we have been rather precariously and nervously clinging for the past twelve months. Canada, with its large measure of dependence on the exports of two or three staple products, has always been in a vulnerable position, but this has been greatly accentuated by the widespread trend towards economic nationalism and self-sufficiency. Our professional optimists to the contrary, Canada has been one of the heaviest sufferers during the past five years and the outlook for the future is still uncertain and still threatening.

It is not necessary to elaborate the familiar problems of the Canadian economy: an income that fluctuates violently with the volume and value of our exports, and expenses that are made highly rigid by the dominating factors of heavy overhead costs; the wide differences in the technological problems of the several major industries; the concentration of staple industries in specialized geographical areas and the growing political and cultural domination of metropolitan centres which accentuate political and economic sectionalism, and at the same time a high degree of concentration of the control of finance, commerce, and manufacturing on a national scale—a concentration to which it is difficult to apply social regulation and control within the present framework of the British North America Act.