What strategies will states pursue in managing their relations with more powerful neighbours? International Relations scholarship identifies a wide range of policy options open to “secondary states,” including soft balancing, bandwagoning and institutional binding. We provide a conceptual framework to distinguish between these similar and often conflated institutional strategies on the basis of two dimensions: threat perception and inclusiveness. We then apply this framework to the inter-American system. Analyzing original data on treaty action between 1946 and 2015, we find that secondary states’ adherence to multilateral agreements increases when the United States participates and when states do not perceive the hegemon to be a threat. These findings suggest that institutional binding captures the dynamics of inter-American cooperation more adequately than either soft balancing or bandwagoning: states balance against perceived threats but bind their friends.

Abstract. Effectively managing the Canada–US border has emerged as a major security challenge post-9/11. Burden-sharing theories suggest that the United States would take the lead on border security due to its hegemonic role in ensuring North American security, while smaller nations such as Canada enjoy a free ride. We refute the free-rider hypothesis and propose an approach which accounts for the differentiated concerns held by contiguous states. By dedicating sizeable resources to the issue of border security and by appealing to advantageous negotiation strategies, Ottawa has leveraged its position as a secondary state vis-à-vis the United States. Efforts employed by the province of Quebec have bolstered Canada's relative influence in this issue area. We argue that Quebec and Ottawa perceived and acted on complementary interests which empowered the Canadian government to respond more forcefully to US-driven border security measures after 9/11. We conclude with alternative models to border security management, as well the practical implications of our argument.

Résumé. Un des défis majeurs depuis le 11 septembre 2001 concerne la gestion de la frontière entre le Canada et les États-Unis. Les théories sur le partage du fardeau supposent que les États-Unis sont l'acteur dominant dans l'élaboration des politiques frontalières, assurant la sécurité du continent nord-américain. En contrepartie, les états secondaires, comme le Canada, se voient souvent attribuer le rôle du passager clandestin dans ces interactions. Cet article porte sur le partage du fardeau entre le Canada et les États-Unis en ce qui a trait à la sécurité frontalière. Nous réfutons l'hypothèse du passager clandestin en proposant une approche qui prend compte des préoccupations distinctes des deux états voisins. En investissant d'importantes ressources pour la gestion de la frontière et en appliquant des stratégies de négociations avantageuses, Ottawa a su surmonter son statut de puissance moyenne face aux États-Unis. Le Québec a contribué au renforcement de la position canadienne en agissant de concert avec Ottawa, puisque les deux paliers poursuivaient des intérêts complémentaires. Le résultat de cette coopération est une riposte cohérente et soutenue démontrée par le gouvernement canadien face aux mesures de sécurité initiées par les États-Unis après le 11 septembre. Enfin, nous discutons également des implications pratiques de notre argument en comparant les différents modèles dans la litérature portant sur la gestion de la sécurité frontalière.

This article offers an examination of the discursive significance of the “victim” in the Conservative Party of Canada through a critical discourse analysis of two key pieces of legislation (Bill C-10 and Bill C-36) tabled by the Harper Conservative government. The central argument contends that while all populist arguments may be a form of victim argument, not all conservative victim arguments are populist—particularly ones directed at issues related to women and gender equality. The article finds that, perhaps due to the reactive nature of conservative ideology, conservative politicians in Canada adopt an “ambidextrous” approach to victims—mobilizing two distinct and, at times, contrasting sets of arguments. The article concludes by proposing two possible explanations for this ambidexterity, one stemming from the literature on organizational management and the other from theorizations of the reactive nature of conservative ideology.

This article addresses the historical justice dilemma: although critical memory is indispensable for accountability, efforts to use it are often hampered by the unjust relations and systems that caused the wrongs to which historical justice is compelled to respond in the first place. Contemporary authors tackle this problem by focusing on collective responsibility for structural injustice. This article takes a different tack. Studying closely the 2009–2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report, it argues that the structural turn may come at the expense of a focus on agency and may thus provide unwitting anonymity for wrongdoers while crimping our thinking about leadership and responsibility. Although this article strongly criticizes the TRC report, it tries to work constructively with it, developing an analysis that compensates for the report's unwitting invisibilization of perpetrators. Distilling portraits and analyses of wrongdoer agency that are latent in the TRC's postwar history volume, this article shows how we can develop the report as a resource of what I call retributive social accountability.

Résumé. En décembre 1977, le gouvernement du Québec, formé par le parti québécois (PQ), modifiait la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne pour y ajouter l'orientation sexuelle comme motif illicite de discrimination, devenant ainsi le premièr gouvernement en Amérique du Nord à interdire la discrimination pour cause d'orientation sexuelle. Le présent texte analyse les raisons pour lesquelles le gouvernement du PQ a agi avec autant d'avant-gardisme en cette matière. Il repose sur l'argument suivant lequel le mouvement des lesbiennes et des gais au Québec a bénéficié d'une conjoncture favorable, tissée d'opportunités de nature politique et culturelle, afin de décrocher une protection de l'État contre la discrimination.

Abstract. In December 1977, the Quebec government, formed by the Parti Québécois (PQ), amended the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground for discrimination. Quebec thus became the first jurisdiction in North America to prohibit discrimination on the basis of one's sexual orientation. This paper examines the reasons why the PQ government was ahead of everybody else in this matter. It argues that the Quebec lesbian and gay movement benefited from a coincidence of political and cultural opportunities that played in its favor in order to secure legal protection against discrimination.

Responsible government, as Professor Hodgetts has demonstrated convincingly in his Pioneer Public Service, means more than that the political life of the executive depends on the support of a majority of the members of the elected legislature. Behind the executive, government departments must be so organized that the ministers can exercise a control for which they can be held responsible. The issuance of public money to pay for departmental activities must be under a central authority, and so must a thorough audit of expenditures. The public accounts must be intelligible to the laymen who sit in Parliament, and a system of estimating in advance the needs of government for each ensuing year is indispensable. “Each of these aspects of internal financial control,” in Professor Hodgetts' words, “… had to be satisfactorily developed if Parliament was to become the watchdog of the executive.” They were satisfactorily developed between 1840 and Confederation, some of them as late as the middle sixties.

Partly because several of the political and administrative practices involved were still in their infancy, and partly because Confederation meant the destruction of old lines of authority and the creation of new ones, a severe strain was put on several essential elements in responsible government in 1867. The administrative side of the story, as it concerned governmental financial control, has already been told by Herbert Balls, but the legislative side has hitherto been neglected. The legislative story, not only in its financial aspect but also in the wider context of the whole parliamentary scene, is worth recounting.

Much of the literature on unconditional basic income considers reciprocity to be necessary for its success. From a normative standpoint, receiving without giving is unjust. From a technical standpoint, the absence of mechanisms that promote reciprocation invites free riding which threatens to erode the economic structure upon which the system of distribution depends. As a solution, it has been proposed that communities adopt social norms that encourage basic income recipients to contribute to the productive capacity of society by engaging in volunteer work. This article interrogates whether this alternative to conditionality is consistent with the rationale for implementing unconditional basic income and finds the instillation of stronger norms to be unnecessary for the project's success.

This note examines the way in which newspapers across Canada reported on events affecting political integration in the country during 1976. The year 1976 was significant with respect to Canada's political integration. While there were crises such as the “strike” of air traffic controllers over the introduction of French as a language of air traffic control in the province of Quebec (the incident which prompted us to undertake the study), it was of course the victory of the Parti Québécois in the November 15 election which provided the most direct challenge of all to the future of Canadian political integration. That event meant that what had been a cause for concern had now become a cause for alarm; a “situation” had become a “crisis.” A unique characteristic of this study is, therefore, that it begins in a “noncrisis” atmosphere and runs through the period of initial popular realization that the threat to “national unity” is both real and immediate.

This article argues that constitutional guarantees for francophones and the laws abridging and expanding those rights have been to date largely irrelevant to the linguistic and political welfare of Franco-Manitobans. Rather than stressing the significance of jurisprudence, the article focusses on demography and behaviour. Franco-Manitobans, as defined by mother tongue, increased in relative numbers after their rights were infringed. Although the pattern might reverse itself in the future, francophones are decreasing now that their rights have been reinstated. Manitoba's behaviour has been influenced by and continues to be consistent with Ontario law and practice, a province not bound by similar constitutional obligations.

Because Canada has a labour force composed of more than one language stock, it is of interest to ask what social organization has developed to take account of this pluralism in her work world. Such an interest may take two main forms. First, with respect to a language variable, differences in occupational opportunities may be seen as the sole problem of Canadian Indians and Eskimos, of French Canadians, or of New Canadians. Second, we may wish to find out how our different language groups achieve interdependence in actual work situations and with what consequences for society as a whole. It is the second approach which will be adopted here; in a sense it includes the first, since the problem of any group stems in large part from the ways in which groups act on each other. The groups to which I shall limit my discussion will be the English and the French Canadians, but my remarks will undoubtedly apply, at least in part, to groups who speak other languages.

The view taken in this paper is that in our society, because English is the sole language which has currency in all aspects of social activity, people of different mother tongues have unequal opportunities for work. In a plural society, two consequences follow from the dominance of one language: a limited utilization of the potential skills of those who do not know the dominant language perfectly and a disengagement of the other mother tongues from important aspects of social reality.

The great extensions of government activities in all industrialized countries since the War have not been balanced by an equivalent development of the theory of public finance. The need for analysis of the relation of large government expenditures and taxes to the system of individualist enterprise is urgent.

It is true that many specific inquiries have been made into the repercussions of taxes and tariffs, into the inequalities of incidence as between industries and regions, into government financing, government investment in depression, and so on, but a survey of these attacks reveals the lack of a method adequate to cope with the questions. The existent theoretical structure, established by the classical writers, was evolved to handle a system of public finance and a system of individualist enterprise, which have been greatly modified in the twentieth century. Consequently many of the modern questions confronting economists are really outside the assumptions of classical theory, and are therefore unable to be grasped by the weapons of the classical analysis. Apart from this practical difficulty, it is to be expected that the post-war developments in economic science itself—the new knowledge of monetary systems, of business cycles, of imperfect competition, and of short-time analysis—necessitate a reconsideration of the theory of public finance. In the future the subject-matter of public finance will probably be systematized along these lines, but meanwhile the need is for a sifting of the materials.

Résumé. Après plus de deux décennies, un tribunal manitobain a fixé une date pour entendre l'affaire FMM qui touche à la concession des terres aux Métis selon l'art. 31 de la Loi de 1870 sur le Manitoba. Le politologue Thomas Flanagan répète inlassablement que les Métis ne se sont jamais décrits comme peuple aborigène ayant des droits fonciers spéciaux pendant la résistance de 1869–70. Puisqu'il est fort probable que la Couronne se serve encore une fois de la recherche de Flanagan dans l'affaire FMM, le moment est opportun pour réexaminer les arguments de Flanagan. Dans ce but, l'auteur examine ici de plus près certaines des prétentions de Flanagan, notamment celles qui veulent que : 1) les Métis n'aient jamais revendiqué le statut de peuple autochtone ou des droits autochtones pendant les événements de 1869–70; 2) les listes de droits ne contiennent aucune référence aux droits aborigènes des Métis; et 3) l'abbé Ritchot i) n'ait eu aucun mandat de négocier l'extinction du titre aborigène des Métis et une concession de terres; ii) n'ait été qu'un délégué parmi trois.

Abstract. After more than two decades, a Manitoban court has set a date to hear of the MMF case which touches on the Métis land grant in s. 31 of the Manitoba Act, 1870. Political scientist Thomas Flanagan has continually repeated that the Métis never described themselves as an Aboriginal people with special land rights during the resistance of 1869–70. As it is quite probable that the Crown will use Flanagan's research in the MMF case, it is timely to reexamine it. To this end, the author takes a closer look at some of Flanagan's conclusions, most notably those that claim that: 1) the Métis never claimed status as an Aboriginal people during the events of 1869–70; 2) the various Bills of Rights contain no reference to the aboriginal rights of the Métis; 3) the abbot Ritchot : i) had no mandate to negotiate the extinction of Métis aboriginal rights and a land grant; ii) was but one of three delegates.

The evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Banking and Currency in Canada, 1933, is preserved in some three thousand five hundred multigraphed foolscap pages. There are fifty or sixty copies in existence. A number of these are in the possession of those who were attached to the Commission and of the Canadian banks: others are to be found in certain Canadian libraries: and that is about all. There is only one other avenue of access to the material. During the course of the proceedings the Financial Post of Toronto published a weekly summary of the more important submissions; and the daily papers throughout the country printed extracts irregularly. It is, therefore, clear that few people have had, or will ever have, the opportunity to become familiar with the evidence. And even those who have access to the copies available in libraries will be confronted by a vast, undigested, poorly indexed mass of material.

Hence this article. It has two objects. It attempts, in the first place, simply to describe the evidence to those readers who either have not the inclination or the ability to consult it. In the second place, it attempts to guide those who may in the future wish to consult it away from the more arid patches and towards the oases. In what follows, I find myself between two fires. Since I was fortunate enough to be attached to the Commission in a minor capacity, and the only economist so attached, I am tempted to give a critical review from the standpoint of an economist. On the other hand, my connection with it imposes some restraint upon my remarks both regarding the Commission itself and those appearing before it. Indeed, as I write, I feel acutely conscious that I am compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses. To those who, reading this article, feel that I have done them any injustice, I apologize, asking them to bear with me, remembering the magnitude of the task of condensation which I am undertaking.

During the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, the value-of-service basis for railway rates ruled unchallenged. Over the last forty years, and especially the last twenty, that system has been undermined from so many directions that it is rapidly becoming untenable. Willy-nilly, railways are being forced over to a cost-of-service basis by the competition of other carriers and by the relocation of industry. So long as they are expected to be self-supporting (and the logical problems of operating nation-wide utilities on any other basis are daunting), any traffic or service that does not pay its full costs must inevitably come under review. The cross-subsidization between different types of traffic which once took place as a matter of course is no longer possible, and railways are compelled to know their own costs and to sell their services in competition at rates based, to an ever-increasing extent, on cost. In the last fifteen years, for example, competition has converted the old class rate structure, which was the heart of value-of-service rates, into a mere shrunken survival, historically interesting, but no longer worthy of serious consideration.

There are other surviving specimens of value-of-service rates, but the Crow's Nest schedule for grain rates is the only one covering a major traffic. For historic reasons, the rates, in terms of current money, are now at or below those first established at September 1899, despite the change in prices and wages in the intervening period. There are, therefore, compelling reasons to examine them now.