If we are to live we must act; action necessitates making choices; our choices, in turn, reflect philosophical outlooks and a multitude of competing pressures from the material world. In the politics of democracy choices are continually being made at many levels, under varying conditions, with the expectation that there is sufficient consensus within the community to produce or support decisions regarded by the members as comprehensible and tolerable.

In recent years political scientists have been directing their investigations to elections, probably the most conspicuous example of a formal choosing process in which most members of the community are entitled to participate. Resourceful manipulation of the cold figures in which these choices are recorded is now beginning to yield conclusions that can be expressed in qualitative as well as in the more customary quantitative terms. We are learning more and more about why voters make the political choices they do and we can confidently look to the “psephologists,” hovering over their wired boards, to give us more illuminating insights into this area of making decisions.

No book, least of all an edited one, speaks with a single voice. A text is disguised counterpoint, punk plus Mozart, a riff that cuts across discordant harmonies. Considered this way, a book can no more be judged as simply good or bad than a symphony can be adequately described by its key signature. Nevertheless, The New Canadian Political Economy is a good book in every conventional sense. It meets, for example, all of the challenges of an edited collection: the essays are thematically coherent, uniformly well-written, rigorous and integrated around roughly similar questions. Together, they aim at nothing less than the “first publication of a comprehensive and systematic review of the new Canadian political economy” (4). Moreover, the editors have helpfully organized this review along two axes.

Although the doctrines of Social Credit have been systematically and extensively promoted throughout many parts of the British Commonwealth and the United States for nearly thirty years, it is only in Alberta that there has emerged a Social Credit movement sufficiently strong to win and maintain political power. It is proposed, in the present paper, to trace the historical development of this movement with specific reference to those data that are essential for its interpretation as a phenomenon of mass psychology. Such an approach must be restrictive and selective: data of primary importance to the economist, the political scientist, and even the sociologist must necessarily be omitted.

The Social Credit upsurge in Alberta was essentially a people's movement which sought to reform, but not to revolutionize, the existing social order by changing the pattern of certain existing institutions. It has passed through the four stages which constitute the natural history of a social movement—social unrest, popular excitement, formalization, and institutionalization; and it has exhibited, in the course of its evolution, the five mechanisms of reform movements—agitation, esprit de corps, morale, ideology, and operating tactics. From the perspective of social psychology, the movement may best be understood if, taking its more general sociological aspects for granted we consider its appeal to the people of Alberta in terms of its leadership, its philosophy, and its techniques of organization and promotion. In analysing this particular social movement, the social psychologist is faced with two serious methodological difficulties: he must be careful not to confuse the evolution of the movement with the political history of Alberta, especially after 1935; and he must, as far as possible, present the movement as a dynamic rather than a static social phenomenon.

Environment and heredity affect the development of the nation as much as they affect the development of the individual; and Canadian history is written, for the most part, around the conflicting forces of British inheritance and American propinquity. An excellent example of the latter is found in the low condition of Canadian political morality which was most conspicuous during the first fifty years of responsible government. While this was unmistakably national in many of its manifestations, its rise and continuance were due in no small measure to the proximity of the United States; and the temptation for the Canadian politician to emulate in a modest way the methods of a Tweed, a Croker, or a Philadelphia Gas Ring, proved in a deplorable number of instances to be irresistible. The prevalence of bribery at elections (particularly before the introduction of the ballot in 1874), the strengthening of the party position by the award of contracts and the appointment of supporters to office, the series of questionable “deals” and practices of which the Pacific Scandal was the most notorious—these were evidences of native sins which had received American inspiration and encouragement and which corrupted extensively Canadian political life.

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.) movement in Saskatchewan is the first avowedly socialist group to win an electoral majority in any province or state of Canada or the United States. Many have expressed surprise that a socialist party should have won office in the most rural province in Canada. This paper is an attempt to throw some light on this question through a study of the leadership of the C.C.F. as compared with that of other community groups and political parties in that province.

The significance of the growth of the C.C.F. party can best be expressed in economic class terms. The movement has two important aspects. Essentially, it represents the latest historical phase of the almost continuous conflict of the western grain farmers of the United States and Canada with eastern business interests. Secondly, within the province, success of the movement has resulted in a political transformation in which the representatives of the rural majority supported by the working class of the cities and towns rejected the political control of the urban middle-class business and professional groups which dominated the Liberal and Conservative parties and the government of the province.

Since 1901, the farmers of the West and of Saskatchewan in particular, have been attempting to reduce the hazards of a one-crop wheat economy which is perennially subject to extreme fluctuations in income, as a result of the variability in grain prices and climatic conditions. At the turn of the century, Saskatchewan farmers organized the Territorial Grain Growers' Association (later the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association) to force the Canadian Pacific Railroad to provide loading platforms and freight cars for their wheat.

The development of a form of collective management of hydro power in Ontario must be viewed as a part of the National Policy; Ontario's own positive part; her peculiar sector of the line wherein she attempts through collective action to further the use of her major and almost sole source of power in order to ensure a stable industrialism and a healthy urban life. This development was begun by the municipalities and the government of Ontario in the first quarter of the present century when the federal government was pursuing the main lines of the National Policy—constructing railways, subsidizing the rails of private corporations, providing tariff protection or bonuses to manufacturers.

At the outset the drive for collective action in providing power came from the same class which supported the National Policy of the federal government; viz., the small manufacturers and traders in Toronto and those congregated in the Boards of Trade or represented in the Municipal Councils of Western Ontario. The inland towns were specially interested in power because they paid higher prices for coal than those on the lakes. But all the major municipalities soon became concerned in the collective action, and their initial activity determined in part certain salient features of the Ontario hydro as an administrative system. At first it was assumed, as is reflected in the Ross Act of 1903, that the enterprise might be entirely municipal; an organization whereby any group of municipalities through a Commission, without the financial aid of the government, might generate, transmit, and distribute electrical energy, meeting the cost through the issue of bonds secured by a mortgage on the works. But serious difficulties arose, and the overwhelming advantages of obtaining the financial support of the provincial government led to the scrapping of the scheme. A collective experiment designed to affect greatly the whole economy of Ontario obviously required the backing of provincial credit and provincial supervision. Hence the statute of 1906 which laid the legal foundation for the Ontario Hydro-Electric System.

In a recent paper, J. N. Wolfe has interpreted P. Sraffa as having exposed a logical inconsistency in Marshall's Principles of Economics. According to Wolfe, Sraffa interpreted Marshall as being concerned with perfect competition and yet as allowing his representative firm to possess unexhausted internal economies; he therefore believed that Marshall was inconsistent, for the two phenomena are incompatible. Wolfe himself interprets the Marshallian representative firm as an oligopoly model.

This note discusses the following points. First it will be shown that Marshall's model when discussing increasing returns and the representative firm involved neither perfect competition nor oligopoly but imperfect competition. Second, I shall argue that the representative firm was largely designed to describe the problems which exist when product differentiation is recognized but when the industry is retained as a meaningful concept. That is, Marshall faces the same difficulties as those faced by J. Robinson and E. Chamberlin, but his solution involves a different approach. This is not to suggest that there was no need for the Robinson and Chamberlin volumes; indeed their appearance, together with Sraffa's article, reflected the unsatisfactory state in which Marshall left his analysis on this topic. Third, it follows from our interpretation that for Marshall the representative firm was a structure of the mind, a tool of analysis, and not a real firm. To clarify his views, I reproduce certain passages from which it is clear that he is not guilty of logical inconsistency either in the case of actual firms, or in the case of the representative firm.

L'orientation culturelle des Canadiens-français est devenue une des questions les plus importantes de l'analyse sociologique de ce groupe ethnique. Ainsi une des tâches principales des sociologues qui se sont intéressés à la question a été le développement d'une définition de la culture canadienne-française. Cependant, malgré l'ampleur et le nombre des travaux publiés, il n'existe pas de synthèse permettant une vue d'ensemble de la question. Notre but dans cet article est de formuler les étapes nécessaires à une présentation synthétique de la culture canadienne-française du point de vue de ses fondements sociologiques. Ce que nous allons dire ne prétend pas être une analyse complète de la question. Nous avons voulu retenir dans notre présentation, et de l'ensemble des situations et des problèmes susceptibles d'être examinés, seulement ceux qui nous semblent soit particulièrement importants, soit nettement révélateurs. Nous avons donc conscience d'être incomplet, mais nous pensons pouvoir présenter l'essentiel de la question.

Pour les fins de la présentation nous avons divisé notre article en trois parties que nous jugeons d'égale importance. Les deux premières parties consistent en une analyse: premièrement, de la tradition culturelle de la Nouvelle-France; et deuxièmement, des traditions culturelles nées après la Conquête de 1760. La troisième partie consiste en une analyse de la conjoncture culturelle actuelle. Il existe une raison fondamentale à faire précéder l‘analyse « synchronique » par une analyse « diachronique »: sans l'analyse des traditions culturelles il est pratiquement impossible de saisir la conjoncture sociologique actuelle, et ceci en raison des ambiguités qui existent aussitôt que l'on veut définir ce qu'est le Canada français du point de vue politique ou géographique, ou même purement sociologique. Mais, en partant de l'analyse des traditions culturelles il est possible d'établir les grandes lignes de ce qu'est présentement le Canada français du point de vue de la culture canadienne-française. Nous procéderons de la même manière dans l'analyse de chacune des parties de la présentation. Nous essaierons de faire le point sur la documentation en existence et nous émettrons des conclusions.

St. Justin occupies a special place in the social study of French Canada. It was there that Léon Gérin began, in 1886, his pioneer study of the rural communities of the province of Quebec. It was on the basis of the data he collected there that he formulated his analysis of rural French Canada as a close causal cycle in which the dominant factors were the family, the land, and religion. The basis of his argument is the proposition that the people of St. Justin lead a life which “presents itself here as a simple juxtaposition of families which are very nearly all equal; nearly all occupied in agriculture; nearly all self-sufficient; but none of which has a higher ambition than to transmit intact the family property to one of the children, although favouring, within the limits of its resources, the settlement of the other children outside the family home.”

He elaborated this proposition into a complex of interlocking institutions which gave to the inhabitants of St. Justin a definite form of social organization, as well as a definite culture. In fact, he built a model which has remained unequalled in the analysis of French Canada. Presented as a functional entity, St. Justin was made to represent a stage in the historical, as well as the geographical, development of Quebec. According to Gérin, St. Justin had reached a balanced relationship among its various institutions. The family unit was said by him to be stable and well-integrated. The size of the farm was in direct relation to the size of the family, and the work on the land, carried out by the members of the family, was limited to their needs. The total output thus depended on the quantity of labour each family could supply for a given unit of land, and on the natural fertility of the soil. The general expectation of the members of a family was limited to the creation and maintenance of a unit of property large enough to supply their daily needs, maintain the aged, and provide for the settlement of those who would have to leave the household to go elsewhere. Such an aim demanded a high degree of personal sacrifice from all the members of a family, and tended to turn family property into a communal possession. While the stability of the family was obtained in this manner, the stability of the community had been achieved through the creation of a single broad social class.

Résumé. Avec une méthodologie double, nous portons notre attention sur un groupe très peu étudié : les jeunes non-engagés. Grâce à des entrevues, nous distinguons quatre types de non-engagés: les critiques, ceux qui manquent de ressources politiques, les occupés, et ceux en attente de mobilisation. Les critiques ne représentent qu'une minorité des non-engagés, alors que les jeunes manquant de ressources sont plus nombreux. Cette étude démontre qu'une grande proportion de jeunes présente un potentiel d'engagement futur et que c'est principalement des barrières temporaires qui réduisent leur niveau d'engagement. L'analyse quantitative dévoile des variations d'attitudes, de profils démographiques et de volontés d'engagement entre types de non-engagés. Les non-engagés ne sont donc pas un groupe homogène.

Abstract. With a two-pronged methodology, this article takes a closer look at an understudied group: the disengaged youth. Using interviews, we discern four different types within this disengaged group: the criticals, those lacking political resources, the busy and those waiting for mobilization. The ‘criticals’ constitute only a minority of the disengaged group, while the young people who lack political resources are more common. Most importantly, a great proportion of young people show a certain potential for engagement. The quantitative analysis reveals that these types resemble distinct attitudinal and demographic profiles, and differ in their future willingness to participate. Thus the non-engaged are not a monolithic group.

Hobbes is as renowned a name in political science as is Adam Smith in economics. Accordingly, prevailing notions of what Hobbes meant to say have varied from time to time. While his materialist utilitarianism has been a strong current since he propounded it, Hobbes's modern reputation dates from the re-emphasis on sovereignty and utilitarian morals by the Benthamists. The reaction against Benthamism led to strong criticism of Hobbes by English idealists such as T. H. Green. Their criticism of his materialist metaphysics and of his behaviourist ethics set the tone of the standard treatment of Hobbes, and seemed to have rendered his political views harmless. As long as Hobbes was regarded as primarily a materialist and his political doctrines were seen as consistent deductions from his materialist position, it was relatively easy to dispose of his unpleasant theory of the state, for materialism has had little standing in English political thinking since the eighteenth century when the historical materialism of Millar, Ferguson, and Robertson enjoyed some prestige.

Hobbes's stature, however, was too great for his political ideas to be tidied away in this fashion. Later generations of scholars set out to detach Hobbes's political theory from his materialism. Croom Robertson in 1886, John Laird in 1934, and Leo Strauss in 1936 have taken the position that Hobbes's political philosophy was not derived from his materialism or decisively influenced by his concept of science. While it is possible to show that Hobbes might have reached his political conclusions from certain moral attitudes and preconceptions unrelated to materialism or science, this position raises other difficulties. In view of the emphasis which Hobbes placed on his materialism and in view of his insistence on the scientific nature of his method it seems unsatisfactory to dismiss these attributes of his thought as merely his share in the current intellectual fashion, especially when the result is to say, as does John Laird, that his thought is mediaeval, or, as with some current text-book writers, to leave his theory rootless and unexplained except as the reaction of a timid man to the disturbed political conditions of his time.

As a recent instance of transnational cooperation and governance, encompassing a novel combination of international and supranational legal properties, the International Criminal Court provides an instructive forum for considering increasingly complex sovereignty. This paper considers why Canada and the United States have pursued such divergent policies toward the Court. I argue that these postures are informed by their subjective conceptions of state sovereignty, a reflection of varying interests, values and capacities. As such, this case study illuminates factors that may influence patterns and limitations of transnational cooperation by states.

Le français en Amérique du Nord: état présent, Sous la direction de Albert Valdman, Julie Auger et Deborah Piston-Hatlen, Québec : Presses de l'Université Laval, 2005, 583 p.

Ce volume est le résultat du colloque “ Le français aux États-Unis ”, organisé à la suite de plusieurs initiatives du Programme de linguistique française d'Indiana University dans le domaine de l'étude du français hors de France et des créoles à base lexicale française.

Major energy policy decisions are usually based in part upon forecasts of energy supply and demand. However an examination of the Canadian National Energy Board's forecasts of natural gas supply and demand over the last decade indicates that these forecasts were not a reliable basis for policy decisions. An analysis of the policy context underlying those forecasts reveals that they were not neutral “best guess” estimates of future supply and demand, but instead closely reflected the policy context and major project proposals of the time. The reasons for this are rooted in the nature of forecasting techniques and the way that they are used by decision-makers. This, it is argued, has important implications for the use of energy forecasting in policy planning.