AS LONG AS FRANCO LIVED, ALL MILITARY, LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE powers centred on his person. Regional autonomies were suppressed, unions outlawed and political parties banned on the metaphorically medical grounds that ‘Spain’ was historically addictive to the ‘demoliberal system of inorganic democracy’. But Admiral Carrero Blanco, Franco’s éminence grise, was assassinated on 20 December 1973. His death marked the burial of Franco’s plans to perpetuate the regime beyond his grave. Juan Carlos, son of Don Juan - the heir to Alfonso XIII’s throne - pledged at his inauguration in November 1975 to create ‘a real consensus of national concord’. Spain was to become a full member of Europe, ‘with all that this implies’. Neither pledge was attainable without at least a major reform, or at most a dismantling of the regime’s characteristic institutions: the National Movement and the state syndicates. Both were eventually accomplished by a de facto alliance between the monarch and all political forces in the country opposed to a maintenance of the status quo.

MANY COMMENTATORS HAVE DESCRIBED AND ANALYSED POLITICAL opositions in both democratic and authoritarian political systems. Scholars like Dahl, Lipset and Rokkan, Ionescu and Madariaga and Linz have advanced abroad taxonomies of oppositions. All seem to suffer from the difficulty in application to the specific political situation. Whether it be Dahl's categories of hegemony, polyarchy , near hegemony and near polyarchy ; Lipset and Rokkan's cleavages between church and state, landed estate and entrepreneur, employers and workers, and central and regional; or Ionescu and Madariaga's models which are based on the reasons an opposition is banned in a particular system, all have proved inadequate in describing the Portuguese opposition under Marcello Caetano. Even Linz's models of semi-opposition, alegal, and illegal opposition have failed to describe an opposition which is a combination of a semi-opposition and an alegal oposition. The object of this paper is to add information to the body of literature on oppositions within authoritarian systems and to provide a qualification to the Linz models, the semi-oppositionalegal opposition.

THE CANADIAN POLICE SYSTEM IS VERY MUCH A LAW UNTO ITSELF. It does not have the authoritarian traditions of European countries and their successors in Communist regimes. It does not have the same societal involvement of the Japanese and Chinese arrangements. Since Canadians, unlike their southern neighbours, believe it is possible to be whole without being powerful, it does not have the American style cop. It shares many of the attitudes and disciplines of the British, but in institutional terms they are vastly different from each other.

To some extent these institutional peculiarities are matters of history, although not all of them are. Before Confederation each area had its own specific policing characteristics depending upon the time of settlement, the racial origin of the settlers and the characteristics of the country. In the cast the Maritime provinces (as they were to become) largely relicd upon military and naval patrols with provost marshals in the garrison towns, with some nightwatchmen on the civilian side. The countryside was little policed, although some local militias existed who could be called out if neccssary.