Regionalism and Political Consciousness of Local Leaders: The Quebec Urban Community

This study focuses on the experimentation of regional government in the province of Quebec. The creation of the Québec Urban Community (QUC) in December 1969 serves as a starting point to analyse the effects of regionalism on the interest and the will to participate of the local political and socio-economic leaders.

Two attitudinal dimensions are studied because of their impact on the possibility of action and participation on the part of the municipalities to the decision-making process of the QUC: first the relative weight allocated to each municipality within the council, and secondly the changes to the municipal boundary lines which are considered necessary by the leaders. Significant correlations appear with the locality of residence of the leaders, their preferences as to the modes of urban development, their general attitude towards the QUC, and finally their subjective evaluation of the homogeneity of the local populations.

In The End of Liberalism, T. Lowi argues that interest-group liberalism, the public philosophy of the United States since the New Deal, is the result of the pluralist theory of political science. Lowi is against the new liberalism, which, according to him, is a system of “legalized privilege,” “shuts out the public,” and “impairs legitimacy.” In his efforts to eliminate this “neo-liberalism,” he has severely attacked the theory itself with a view to discredit it. But this article points out that some ideology which (a) glorifies organized groups while ignoring the unorganized ones, (b) believes in a natural harmony of their claims, and (c) invokes the public interest, has very little in common with the group theory of politics.

Lowi's anathema also ignores the fact that the New Deal, in “parceling out” political power to minorities, has just followed an old pattern of American politics. Coming from a liberal, his suggestions of restoring the sovereignty of the majority, a moralistic rule of law, and the abstractions of citizenship are politically naïve today.

A persistent peculiarity of Canadian politics is the variation in patterns of party support between federal and provincial elections. This variation is manifest in both numbers of seats won and lost and proportions of the popular vote. Its effect is best illustrated by the first indicator. In the eight federal elections between 1949 and 1968 there were always at least five provinces in which the party that won the largest number of seats did not hold the largest number of seats in the provincial legislature.

The impact of the local candidate in Canadian federal elections has received scant theoretical or empirical attention. Voting in Canada is usually accounted for in terms of party identification, party leader attraction, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. Possible local candidate influence on electoral outcomes is rarely considered systematically. An observer of British elections placed the average influence of the local candidate at about 10 per cent of the total vote. Morris Davis, in a study of a Halifax two-member constituency, states that the local candidate is responsible for at least 6 per cent of the vote