This paper presents an analysis of access to social and health services of elderly people at three community and social service centres (CLSCs) in Montreal. Workers at the CLSCs were interviewed about service accessibility for elderly people in their neighbourhood. The elderly clientele of one CLSC, located in the centre of Montreal, primarily consists of French-Canadians and English-Canadians; the second CLSC is in a neighbourhood with many elderly Portuguese and the third CLSC is in a neighbourhood where a large concentration of elderly Chinese people live. No problems of access to services were perceived for elderly French-Canadian, English-Canadian or Portuguese people while serious problems of access were perceived for elderly Chinese people. Services provided for elderly people of the dominant cultures and elderly Portuguese are limited or unavailable to elderly Chinese people of Montreal. This suggests institutional racism against elderly Chinese people.

I so appreciate Professor Mack's generous comments on Freedom Is Not Enough—and even more his critical engagement with it. It's an author's dream to have a leading scholar in a related field read with such care and insight, and I am very grateful for this opportunity to converse about the intriguing issues he has raised. I first encountered some of Ken's articles about civil rights lawyering before Brown after Freedom Is Not Enough was in press, and I thought then that my discussion of the earlier history would have been enhanced by them because his portrayal was so rich while our perspectives on the relationship between law and activism were so congruent. Now, reading his comments on the work as published, I wish I had studied law with him! His challenges would have made it a better book.

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have written an ambitious and provocative essay. Ranging across more than a hundred years of history in less than half as many manuscript pages, it seeks to unlock deep secrets of the American past. The New Deal, Cowie and Salvatore argue, constitutes a lone “long exception” in a history otherwise determined by “a deep and abiding individualism” so definitive of U.S. political culture that it dooms any radical rupture in advance. Presenting themselves as realists, Cowie and Salvatore claim that their interpretation of the long sweep of national history “can provide a more stable intellectual foundation on which to build discussions of present and future politics.” I disagree, and the reasons why matter.