This article discusses the ideological origins of Canadian Confederation. As such it directly challenges a belief commonly held by Canadian political scientists and historians that Canadian Confederation was the product of a purely pragmatic exercise. The author argues instead that the ideological origins of the Canadian federal state may be traced to the debate that divided eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, America and France—a debate between the defenders of classical republican values and the proponents of a rising commercial ideology formulated during the Enlightenment. Only by understanding how this debate unfolded in nineteenth-century Canada can we understand the particular configuration of the Canadian state that emerged triumphant in the 1860s. Furthermore, an understanding of this debate also offers political scientists a broader context for interpreting long-held Canadian attitudes toward authority, the uses of political patronage, the public debt, capitalism, and the state and economic development.

This article assesses the impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the Canadian political system. Unlike some commentators who have minimized the effect of the Charter, the author finds that the Charter is inducing significant and permanent changes in the conduct of Canadian politics. Canadian judges have shed their pre-Charter style of deference and self-restraint, and are playing a bolder and more influential role in the governing process. Charter decisions are remolding the Canadian criminal law process along the lines of the “due process” model and away from the “crime control” model of the pre-Charter era. The Charter has also begun to change the way the Canadian political system operates. Interest groups have responded by making greater use of Charter constitutional litigation as a tactic to pursue policy objectives. Law-making areas once solely the prerogative of provincial governments are now being threatened with uniform national standards laid down by the Supreme Court in the course of Charter decisions. Political executives are using the reference procedure to pass Charter issues on to the courts in order to avoid dealing with political “hot potatoes” such as abortion and minority language education. In sum, the predicted “judicialization of politics” is well under way.

This article discusses the relationship between marxism and feminism, a most controversial issue among marxists. A Canadian publication is analyzed to document how the woman question has been used to draw women into the bosom of a communist group opposed to feminism. The apparent contradiction is shown to stem from the fear that feminism may divide the working class on the basis of men-women relations, an opposition far less significant than the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

The article compares the Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard Hooker with Thomas Hobbes's Christian Commonwealth focussing primarily on the political dimension of religious life. The comparison serves to undermine the position—still surprisingly widespread—which sees Hobbes as sacrificing religion to political stability by displaying the extent to which and the way in which Hooker takes religious practice (since Constantine) to be a matter of public policy requiring authoritative determination. Also, a somewhat novel suggestion is elaborated regarding the relationship between the “rational” and “religious” parts of Leviathan. It is suggested that the first part of Leviathan is a kind of conceptual primer—a guide to Scriptural exegesis—and that the parts of Leviathan thus form an integrated whole.

Montesquieu may be a better guide to understanding the nature of the Canadian state, past and present, than Hobbes or Locke of any of the other political philosophers of the past. This article argues that Montesquieu's doctrine has two major components–a discussion of the mixed constitution, blending monarchical, aristocratic and democratic features, and the separation of powers that distinguishes among executive, legislative and judicial. Each of these components can be used to illuminate the operation of state power at the central level in this country, the first the long period between 1867 and the Second World War, the second the post-Second World War period, and more especially the situation that has arisen with the passage of the Constitution Act, 1982.

Philip Resnick argues that Montesquieu is seminal for an understanding of Canadian institutions. We find in nineteenth-century Canada, he says, not Montesquieu's separation of powers doctrine, so influential in the United States, but his teaching about the mixed constitution, that is, government by a combination of monarchic, aristocratic and democratic institutions. He argues that this influence shows in such typical features of our political culture as acceptance of hierarchical patterns, deference to authority and so on; these are reflections of the “disdain for democratic excesses” inherent in the mixed constitution. He then goes on to suggest that we have grown out of the mixed constitution in the twentieth century, but that as a result of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms relations between the political and judicial powers in Canada have so come to resemble the American that we are justified in saying that Canada in this one respect is now characterized by the separation of powers. We have moved from the Montesquieu of the mixed constitution to the Montesquieu of the separation of powers.

It is the merit of Professor Resnick's essay that it will stimulate intellectual discussion of the underlying principles of the Canadian polity at a deeper level than heretofore. What distinguishes Professor Resnick's article from much previous work on Canada's philosophical heritage is that it is based on a profound knowledge and detailed analysis of the European tradition which Canada inherited.

Both Janet Ajzenstat's and Rod Preece's comments on my article are welcome, not least in allowing me to further develop, by way of reply, some of the implications of the type of theorizing I have been engaged in. For quite aside from the particulars of my interpretation of Montesquieu's doctrines, of Professor Preece's reading of the wisdom of the Canadian founding fathers, or of Professor Ajzenstat's “Blackstonean” reading of the British North America Act, there is the larger question of the uses of classical political theory in the understanding of Canadian politics and the state that we need to address.

This article investigates the motives behind policy-making at the municipal level. More specifically, it argues that local governments are guided in the formulation of their policies by a need to reconcile fiscal and electoral considerations. On the one hand, by focussing on urban renewal initiatives it shows that an important proportion of municipal policies are primarily devoted to the maintenance or the bolstering of the taxation base. On the other hand, a description of the different guises taken by urban renewal over a 20-year period highlights the influence electoral circumstances have on the configuration of renewal strategies. Urban renewal efforts undertaken by Québec City's municipal administration provides the case study for this article. It identifies the impetus for launching these efforts and identifies the economic and electoral factors that produced a transition from a form of urban renewal involving a redevelopment of the core area, to one assuring the preservation of the built environment of central neighbourhoods.

This study explores two conceptions of justice and their radically different implications for mandatory retirement. The author argues that the case against mandatory retirement rests on a conception of justice which ignores the fact that a society is composed of different generations. Yet the neglect of this seemingly trivial fact leads to serious problems of intergenerational justice; and the note considers both how these problems can be accommodated within a theory of liberal justice, and the implications of that theory for mandatory retirement. The note then considers which of these two conceptions of justice is embodied in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It argues that to ignore considerations of intergenerational justice in mandatory retirement cases amounts to a denial of the equal protection and the equal benefit of the law guaranteed by the Charter.