This article examines the criticism of the activist Supreme Court of Canada in Canadian political science, as exemplified by the work of F. L. Morton and Rainer Knopff. It compares the debate over the legitimacy of judicial review with a previous generation's debates over the same question with reference to the role and impact of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on the development of Canadian federalism. The article argues that, particularly in examining the role of groups in the litigation process, we need to return to the lessons of the previous debate on the JCPC by emphasizing the ways in which group politics and litigation are connected to power relations in Canadian society. In the conclusion, the article offers an alternative approach to exploring the theoretical and empirical relationships between collective actors and litigation based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Relatively recent contributions to the policy literature have called into question the utility of the "network" approach to the study of public policy making, including a challenge to long-held views concerning the impact of the structure of policy subsystems on policy change. This article uses empirical evidence accumulated from case studies of four prominent Canadian federal policy sectors over the period 1990-2000 to address this issue. It sets out a model that explains policy change as dependent upon the effects of the articulation of ideas and interests in public policy processes, and generates several hypotheses relating different subsystem configurations to propensities for paradigmatic and intra-paradigmatic policy dynamics. It suggests that the identification of the nature of the policy subsystem in a given policy sector reveals a great deal about its propensity to respond to changes in ideas and interests.

Canadian political parties are charged with aggregating the interests of a diverse and changing electorate in order to balance particularistic local demands with general national interests. This article asks what kind of organizations have they adopted to do this? How does their organizational character shape their capacities and their practices? The argument outlines a franchise organization model and explores the extent to which it can be used to explain Canadian party behaviour. The article exploits this model to analyze questions of party membership, the place of incumbents, leadership and electoral organization as they are played out in Canadian politics.

The term ''blood activism'' describes the range of collective challenges that arose among victims of Canada's tainted-blood scandal in the 1990s. This article examines the emergence of blood activism in Canada from the perspective of social movement theory, paying particular attention to the tensions between victims who contracted HIV through tainted blood and those who contracted Hepatitis C, the so-called ''forgotten victims'' of the tragedy. This study discusses how changes in the ''political opportunity structure''—loosely defined in the literature as aspects of the movement's external environment—influenced the nature of political action pursued by victims of tainted blood, the negotiation of the movement's collective identity and policy outcomes.

This article examines Hegel's view of love in his ''early theological writing,'' ''The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,'' where he saw love as a basis of autonomy in the modern self which could overcome the divisions between reason and emotion, self and other and finite and infinite. The article also examines Hegel's attempt in the essay to come to grips with why a community of love cannot be sustained by modern individuals. Consideration of this essay is seen to be valuable because of the insight it offers into the nature of the modern subjectivity. Even more importantly, it throws a different perspective on the mature Hegel. Contrary to the feminist view of Hegel as basing his political community on a reason that is exclusive of love and intuition, and the Marxist view of him as building the political community upon the abstract labouring will, this article argues for the ongoing importance of love in Hegel's mature political philosophy. Furthermore, it suggests that the need to protect and preserve the knowledge of love from the eclipsing effects of a narrow instrumental reasoning was an essential motive in the development of Hegel's mature philosophical system.

Police, as agents of the state, affect its legitimacy by their acts and the way they carry them out. They enjoy considerable powers and autonomy, in comparison with most public employees. Oddly, public administration studies almost ignore them. During the 1990s, the Sûreté du Québec experienced a number of problems of control and responsibility, not because of corruption but because of excess zeal, irresponsibility and sometimes incompetence. Several inquiries and studies, culminating with the massive Poitras Commission report of 1998, revealed a variety of problems, but many points in common. These studies show that while the SQ has known familiar problems rooted in police culture and the power of the police union, a whole range of measures could be pursued by the Department of Public Security and by the SQ to make it more open, more effective and more responsible. Several reforms now taking place could change the orgnizational culture of the Sûreté.

Readers of Miriam Smith's article1 who have not also read our recent book, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party, may conclude that she is critical of everything in that book. This would be a mistake, since nowhere in her article does she challenge the two central claims of the book: (1) that there has been a “Charter revolution,” and (2) that this revolution can be explained only in terms of a supporting constituency. Smith accepts these central claims, which are made also by Charles Epp in his fine book, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective, a book Smith praises (9, n. 12; 11). Smith disagrees primarily with our characterization of the Charter revolution as undemocratic. She prefers Epp's view that the rights revolution is democratic because it rests “on a support structure that has a broad base in civil society” (11; quoting Epp, Rights, 199) precisely, that is, because it is supported by what we call a Court Party and Epp calls a “support structure for legal mobilization.”

This article re-evaluates Graham Allison's approach to bureaucratic politics in the second edition of his Essence of Decision, authored with Philip Zelikow. Although the renewed analytical framework still appears to be an excellent tool for describing policy decision-making processes, the numerous criticisms it received in the past with respect to its difficult operationalization is a problem left unsolved. To respond to this major difficulty, the author of this article combines Vincent Lemieux's structuration of power with Allison's approach. In order to validate the ensuing model, an empirical test is then conducted using the case study of the 1987 Canadian White Paper on Defence. This original proposition opens up avenues of research in the fields of foreign as well as public policy making.

This article compares public service reform in Canada, France and the United Kingdom from the perspective of the extent and mode of incorporation of neoliberal policy ideas into reform agendas and programmes. It does so with a view to advancing discussion of the role of ideas as an explanatory category in ''historical institutionalist'' accounts of policy realignment. Resilience or permeability to change is linked to the pattern of interaction between ideas and institutions embedded in national and provincial public service regimes, and particularly to constitutive ideals of citizenship and public authority. The article highlights the respective roles of political, administrative and judicial elites in filtering the reception of new reform ideas in the three countries in an era of neoliberal globalization.

One of the main points of “Ghosts of the JCPC” is that the study of Charter politics is currently dominated by a sterile and well-worn debate over the legitimacy of judicial review. Rainer Knopff and F. L. Morton return to these issues in their reply. They frequently refer to their own position or to my putative positions in their reply to my work. But, they do not engage in a discussion of what is, or in making arguments about how we might understand or explain what is, rather than on constantly judging what is according to our own personal and partisan political prejudices.

The article examines how political ideas of environmentalists support as well as impede relations between the environmental movement and other progressive movements. This requires examination of the role and meaning of social justice and democracy in the discourse of environmentalism. This study focuses such an examination on a sample of environmental activists in British Columbia. Q methodology is used to discern patterns of association between particular sets of environmental ideas, and beliefs and values related to democracy and social justice. The authors identify four environmental/political perspectives: alienated ecocentrism, civic communitarianism, insider preservationism and green egalitarianism. These perspectives share a perception of justice focused on fair democratic procedures. Fairness is linked to inclusion and equal treatment.

Rebuilding of the welfare state in post-industrialized societies is no longer organized around the male worker but around the parent-producer figure. This shift in the focus of social policies results in a greater mix between employment policies and policies towards families and children. In Quebec, this change appears as a fundamental one; the core of social public action is redefined by federal and provincial governments. By comparison, in France the fight against unemployment is still dominant.

Following the Quebec referendum on sovereignty-association in 1995, many political observers assumed that immigrant voters would support the federalist option, and that only a minority among them would vote for the Parti Québécois option. However, in view of the considerable changes in the linguistic integration of immigrants over the last 20 years, their electoral behaviour might vary. Focusing on a survey in Spring 1996, the authors confirm the existence of a greater pluralism among immigrant voters. Moreover, the data emphasize factors in favour of a social vote among those citizens, especially in the Montreal region. Diversification of electoral choice is supported by the percentage of those who learned French and who identified themselves as Quebeckers.

Recent works on economic voting have shown that the economy's impact on electoral behaviour could sometimes be mediated by differences in political conditions. This article specifies and tests the mediating role of one such factor, namely regionalism, on economic voting in Canada. The potential effect of two structural factors is tested: the regional configuration of the federal party system (clarity of available alternatives), and the regional structure of the economy. The data used come from the last four Canadian Election Studies (1988 to 2000). The results show that economic voting slightly differs among regions according to the presence or not of strong regional political parties, Quebec being the region where the relationship between the economy and the vote is the weakest. Even more significant differences in economic voting behaviour can be observed between ''have'' and ''have not'' regions, the shape of economic voting in the Atlantic provinces being distinct from the one in Ontario and the West.

The meaning of reconciliation in South Africa remains ambiguous and contested. A distinction is drawn between moral and political approaches to reconciliation that invoke thick and thin accounts of solidarity. The discourses of forgiveness and healing are "too thick" because they demand public coherence at the cost of private difference. The promotion of deliberative democracy protects difference, but is "too thin" to enable a substantial basis for reconciliation. Apology, as the fullest expression of "shared history," furnishes the moral transformation necessary for the democratic culture to take root. In this model, reconciliation strikes a balance between solidarity and plurality.

Both Harold Laski and C. B. Macpherson attempted to reconcile elements of liberalism and Marxism in their work. Macpherson offered a clearer and more precise argument about the ways in which capitalist market relations frustrate freedom, equality and the development of the individual. Laski provided a clearer and more consistent account of human nature, which is necessary to sustain such an argument. Macpherson, in turn, reformulated the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which had remained an unresolved problem in Laski's account of human nature. The respective strengths of Laski and Macpherson may be combined to provide a coherent and cogent ideological position.

New techniques of ecological inference are utilized to estimate with confidence intervals francophone support in each federal electoral district in Quebec for the pro-sovereignty side in the 1993 and 1997 Canadian general elections and the 1992 and 1995 referenda. Analyzing the link between demographic and political contextual variables and support for the sovereignty of Quebec suggests that demographic factors, such as the proportion of farmers and government workers, influence francophone voting behaviour more often than political factors such as incumbency. Unlike in many other countries with ethnically based movements, francophone support for sovereignty actually rises as the francophone portion of the population rises. This finding indicates that the contact hypothesis probably applies to the Quebec sovereignty movement.

The fortunes of local, regional and provincial economies have often been linked to geographical variation in electoral outcomes, and nowhere more so than in Canada. This article examines economic localism in Canadian voting behaviour by estimating a model of voters' decisions in the 1993 and 1997 federal elections. Individual-specific determinants of the vote measured in the Canadian Election Study are supplemented by measures of voters' local economies and of the local impacts of policy changes. Voters punish the federal government for bad times in their locale and for policy changes that hurt the local economy. This effect is independent of what voters think about their own finances and about the provincial and national economies. The electoral impact of the local economy does not depend on whether government is acknowledged as a potent economic actor, or on the voter's level of political information. However, the relevance of the local economy for national-level electoral behaviour can be "primed" by campaign events, just like any other criterion of voting choice. The response to local economic conditions is part of a broader explanation for geographic patterns of electoral support in Canada.

The expanding public policy role of high courts heightens concerns over whether societal and political inequalities affect the outcomes of litigation. However, comparative research on this question is limited. This article assesses whether status inequalities between parties and differences in the experience and resources of attorneys influence the selection of cases for judicial review in the Supreme Court of Canada. A series of statistical models reveal that governments are more likely than other parties to influence whether leave is granted but that the experience and resources of lawyers, unlike in the United States, have little impact. The decentralized, low volume and high access features of the Canadian process may explain this finding.

This study makes use of ministerial portfolios to analyze the scope of government activity. It shows that in comparison with expenditure and employment measures, portfolios have a number of advantages in terms of stability, absoluteness, and in identifying when new activities attract sustained government attention. Portfolios are used to investigate whether there has been any convergence in the scope of government activity across state governments in Australia over the century since 1890, and, also, whether partisanship has had any consistent impact on government activity. Neither hypothesis is confirmed. Rather, long-term patterns of activity are complex and appear to be driven by a wide range of forces.