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.

Herbert Marcuse owes his notoriety primarily to the loud echoes evoked by his words among American and European student militants; he is in danger of becoming their first victim as is the wont of fashionable men and ideas.

But the real interest of his intellectual approach lies elsewhere, in his unceasing and relentless efforts to criticize advanced industrial societies which he judges to be repressive; to explain the mechanisms through which this repression is internalized, thus blocking any perspective allowing for radical change; and to found a new type of industrial society, compatible with, and favourable to, the “liberation” of man.

This paper retraces the main lines of this intellectual development, stressing particularly its philosophical foundations and its innovations with respect to the sources from which it is derived.

To many Canadians anti-Americanism is not only as old as Canada itself, but it also seems to have been and still is an integral part of the entire Canadian experience. To the historian Baker, anti-Americanism is a recurring theme in Canadian history and exists today as it did a century ago. However, anti-Americanism, to the best knowledge of the authors, has not been investigated through systematic behavioural empirical research. The development of a scale to measure anti-American attitudes is a necessary step in the empirical investigation of Canadian anti-Americanism. The purpose of this research note is to present some data that contribute to the empirical development of a measure of Canadian attitudes towards Americans which may be used as an anti-American scale.

Socialism is often defined in terms of “community,” or, as Professor John Wilson once put it, as a “society of friends.” Thus defined, it is contrasted with the competitive relations of bourgeois society. But in some recent theory and practice, political competition is taken to be a defining feature of a legitimate socialist order. The persistence of political institutions is thus stressed, both by Western socialist theorists and by reformers in Eastern and Central Europe, and the orthodox view that “state” is to be superseded by “community” is sharply rejected. These two critiques differ, however, in one major respect: for Western socialists, the state is to be legitimated by the principles of socialist rationality, while for many reformers of Eastern and Central Europe it is to be legitimated by political life itself. From this second point of view, neither “friendship” nor “rationality” responds to the tensions which a socialist polity, no less than any other, will face: for both these concepts, to the extent that they are taken to set pre-established norms, constrict the “space for political action, ” and thus remove the necessary conditions for legitimacy.

The limitations imposed upon the central and provincial governments by the Canadian federal system have been discussed elsewhere in some detail. But almost no attention has been paid to those difficulties of maintaining an efficient structure of local government which arise from the prior existence of two superior tiers of administration. This does not imply that there has been no interest in local government, but that interest has been partial and spasmodic. Many theories have been formed concerning the role of the provinces, but few have examined the proper role of municipalities. There could be no constitutional argument to focus opinion: local government lies unequivocally within the realm of provincial power, and in an age and a country where legal dispute and politics have gone hand in hand, the affairs of roads and sewers, dog-catchers and relieving officers have seemed prosaic and uninteresting. Education is in a class of its own, for it has been elevated to the arena of constitutional conflict. Outside that arena educational administration has been the concern of only a few interested groups.

Local government has no deep historical roots in Canada. It was discouraged by the French administration, and no counterpart to the New England town meeting appeared. After the Revolution, British policy was hostile to any local demonstrations of independent action. Lord Durham regarded this as a major weakness, and Lord Sydenham set about remedying the deficiency.

The paper delineates the role of reporters in the coverage of governmental activities. The sources of news and their evaluation are emphasized. The paper investigates the mutual dependence of government officials and correspondents, the channels of information preferred by the latter, the manner in which they seek news, and their evaluation of the collaboration of government officials.

After interviewing most of the reporters of the Quebec government “galerie de la presse” during 1968–9, the author indicates that the correspondents prefer informal ways of uncovering news and do not think highly of information officers. In general, they look for partisan information rather than a formal presentation of administrative activities, and controversial subjects particularly are considered to be of special interest. In all, the role of the reporters may be more passive than active, but “their presence serves as a constant guarantee of responsible public information.”

En mars 2020, le premier ministre Legault a fait appel aux influenceur.euses et aux célébrités québécoises dans le cadre de la campagne #Propage l'info, pas le virus afin de sensibiliser les jeunes au respect des consignes sanitaires liées à la COVID-19. Cet article offre un éclairage inédit sur les différentes manières dont ces personnes renommées ont répondu à l'appel ainsi que sur les formes de leurs réponses à l'aide d'une analyse de contenu de leur vidéo partagée sur les réseaux sociaux. Le codage des vidéos s'est fait à partir d'une grille d'analyse qualitative de contenu, inspirée de celle de Fields (1988). Il ressort des analyses que différents moyens ont permis d'accentuer le sentiment de proximité entre la célébrité et son public, dans le but d'augmenter l'adhésion au message. L'utilisation du pronom « On », l'emploi de formules narratives et l'intimité qui se dégage des vidéos informatives vont en ce sens.

This study uses a game-theoretic analysis to suggest that governments can minimize the political risks associated with significant liberalization of trade by employing a multistep process in the reduction of state-supplied rents. The model argues that when governments precede significant reductions in state-supplied rents with a smaller reduction, or with a reduction that can be portrayed credibly as externally imposed, they may be in a position to evaluate, and hence mitigate, costs associated with significant trade liberalization. Substantive implications are explored in the context of United States trade policy and the still-curious ability of the Franklin Roosevelt administration to engage in strategic rent reductions without suffering meaningful political backlash.

Scholarly opinions on the linkages between foreign military interventions and human rights promotions or violations are highly divided across the board. While many scholars see military interventions as effective means to save and promote human lives and rights from the clutches of repressive regimes, others reject such interventions as harmful to domestic reconciliations and rights promotions. The Arab Spring has renewed the debates between the liberal enthusiasts who staunchly supported NATO's military intervention to free up the Libyans from the Gaddafi regime and the critics who saw creeping dangers in this new intervention, ostensibly inspired by the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This paper investigates the issue of Arab Spring-led foreign direct and indirect military interventions in Libya, Bahrain and Syria and critically examines the consequences of interventions for improvements or decline in Arab human rights conditions. Its findings support the position of the anti-intervention scholars that foreign military interventions produce deleterious effects on human rights in the target states.