This article describes current changes in long established policing structures, ideologies and operational practices and links them to changes in the economy and culture of governing and policing late modern societies like Canada. This transition from modern to postmodern policing is marked by the following core changes: (a) the restructuring and relocation of policing authority and responsibility, (b) the re-conceptualization of public policing, and (c) the rationalization and commodification of public and private policing services. These key shifts in policing structure and ideology suggest the declining importance of modern policing assumptions and the emergence of a distinctive postmodern model of public policing in Canada. The social and political implications of this policing transition for citizens, governments and governance are also discussed.

Legal positivism and lesbian separatism provide very different, yet comparable, approaches to the issue of separation. Legal positivism practices separation as a tool of dominance, while lesbian separatism is based upon the need for identity formation and resistance to dominance. By elaborating upon the justifications advanced for lesbian separatism, this article critiques the separateness defended by legal positivists, and highlights the effects of power and context upon the significance of separation. Thus separatism as a political objective is not rejected or supported, except insofar as it consolidates oppressive practices. However, a critique of the idea that separation is necessarily territorial and pure is also developped, and an alternative vision of separation based upon the work of María Lugones is proposed. It is suggested that a non-oppressive concept of law can only maintain its identity if an alternative understanding of its separateness evolves.

This paper examines the importance of metaphor and media to the ideas of citizenship, nation, and place. In particular, the authors explore the relationship between citizenship and the double metaphor of the “nation-state”. If this double metaphor were to lose its hold on the collective imagination, what metaphor could take its place and be represented through modern media of communication? The authors use the example of deterritorialization, discussing first the emergence of the phenomenon particularly given the role of contemporary media of communication, and noting how it bears upon community, place and citizenship to suggest that such an erosion is taking place. They suggest that the “global market” metaphor is gaining ascendancy, and is represented in simulacrum through contemporary information technologies. The third part of this paper conducts a thought experiment implementing a deterritorialized, global market for citizenship, asking to what degree such a market already characterizes contemporary citizenship and assessing what is attractive and unattractive about it. The paper concludes with a caution against either ignoring or embracing this emerging normative construction.

This paper deals with a crucial problem in feminist theory and in law, namely the issue of the “Woman/Women” category. Does the presence of a single man invalidate the label and remove the issues from the field of equality between the sexes? Moreover, in order to avail oneself successfully of the non-discrimination provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, does one necessarily have to prove prejudice towards all women, or seek a remedy likely to improve the situation of all women? Is the category “Woman” necessarily universal and all-embracing? To answer these questions, the author deals with the relationship between women and men and concludes that this relationship is not one of absolute binary opposition, but rather of secular domination. The author then analyzes the category of Women in relation to society as a whole where women are often subsumed into minorities, absorbed into the family or collapsed into “Universal” Woman. Fully recognizing the arbitrary and artificial character as well as the deceptive and reductionist aspects of categories per se, the author observes nonetheless that the law obliges us to keep the category of “Woman” for as long as women will not have collectively attained an economic, legal, political, symbolic, etc. status equal to that of men collectively.

Metaphorical or figurative expressions often play a significant, though sometimes unacknowledged, role in the law. Their rhetorical power can lead to their being reiterated so that they become “naturalized” or internalized in legal discourse, and they can become a kind of unanalyzed shorthand for complex concepts and processes. One such figurative expression is that of “the Chancellor's foot,” coined by John Selden in the 17th century, and often repeated since then. Examination of its original context reveals that it was at best a superficial and misleading contribution to a serious ongoing debate about the role of equity, and that other, more positive metaphors for equity have been largely lost to the legal imagination. Its continuing prominence may be the result of the “accident” of its having been referred to by so eminent a jurist as Lord Eldon, with the effect that it has become a dismissive aphorism not only for equity, but also for a kind of judicial practice. Contemporary Canadian judges frequently invoke the expression as a pejorative for judicial approaches of which they disapprove, but at the same time they often approve qualities (such as “conscience” and “flexibility”) with which it was originally associated. This paper examines, critically, how a linguistic icon can create and reproduce frameworks of apprehension in the law.

This study of the meaning given to aboriginal rights from within both judicial and parliamentary sources in Québec reveals, contrary to expectations, a general pattern according to which a more liberal attitude toward rights was taken by the political class than by the judiciary, except perhaps for nuances on criminal law matters. But on the whole, both groups were more insistent, and had a more open position, on legal and political autonomy, although confined within the boundaries of legal monism, than on economic rights linked with aboriginal title. Both also emphasized collective over individual rights. Beyond partisan diversity and rhetoric, there was a consensus on some basic issues, a core of specific elements common to all—or most—Quebec legislators and judges on the aboriginal question.

In 1877, the North-West constitution was amended to provide for the publication of all statutes, or ordinances, in both English and French. In 1905, this provision was carried over into the newly-created provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan; it was not repealed until 1988, shortly after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Mercure case. At the present time, however, there remains only scant evidence that this constitutional guarantee was ever respected: very few French language ordinances are extant. Were the great majority of the ordinances never printed in French? Or, were they printed in French but then destroyed?

This article examines the Canadian North-West's experience with legislative bilingualism from 1870 until 1895, and the circumstances surrounding its rise and subsequent demise. During the early years of territorial government, when responsibility for the publication of the ordinances was vested in a lieutenant-governor appointed by the Canadian government, perfunctory attention was paid to the language guarantees: the French language ordinances were printed, but with a considerable delay, and then they often went undistributed. After 1894, when authority was transferred to an executive committee directly responsible to the legislative assembly, the language guarantees were completely ignored: the French language printings ceased altogether. Minority rights succumbed to majority rule. The North-West experience provides an abject lesson in the failure of a constitution to protect minority language rights, when faced with determined opposition from an unsympathetic majority-controlled government.

In 1929, the British Privy Council reversed an earlier ruling by Canada's Supreme Court that Canadian women did not, under the British North America Act, qualify as persons. Historians have long heralded this so-called ‘Persons Case’ as a turning point in the recognition of Canadian women's rights. However, little attention has been paid to the case's origins, which date back to the trial of an alleged prostitute in Calgary in 1917. That case successfully tested the right of women to hold high public office in Alberta – in this case, Calgary Police Magistrate Alice Jamieson – and began the subsequent twelve-year battle. However, this victory was achieved only at the expense of the rights of another woman: the alleged prostitute Lizzie Cyr. At best, then, the ‘Persons Case’ should be regarded as a tainted victory.

With neo-liberal theories, state regulatory function has been challenged, and notably in the field of technologies. Therefore, a number of questions are raised pertaining to the capacity of persons who have suffered injuries or harm from technoscientific activities to obtain reparation through judicial process. Following an exposé of the main theoretical elements of the debate about the relationship between normativity, democratic values and economy, the authors analyse the perception by judges of science and technoscientific risk through the scrutiny of some Québec and Canadian decisions in respect of the relationship between scientific evidence and legal standard of proof. Hence, they discuss the problem of the weight and importance of scientific evidence within the judicial process and also refer to the terms of the debate already engaged in the United States.

Life in industrial societies is governed by different kinds of “time”: mathematical or monochronic time predominates in the workplace but sociocultural or polychronic time prevails at home, particularly where young children are present. Many women report high levels of “time crunch” as they move between these two spheres and these effects are heightened for women in the professions. In this study, I test four hypotheses: women lawyers have higher time crunch levels than women in the general population. Time crunch is heightened among women who take primary responsibility for the care of young children and those who work in large law firms. As women grow older and shed some of the demands of child care, their time crunch levels drop. This study incorporates both quantitative and qualitative approaches: a regression analysis of “time crunch stress” is used to test the major hypotheses and excerpts from unstructured interviews deal with time management problems in the lives of these women. Findings from the regression analysis reveal heightened time crunch stress for the women in this study, particularly if they assume major responsibility for child care. Neither firm size nor age has a statistically significant effect on time crunch stress. Women lawyers are caught between two kinds of time and, over the long term, their careers assume shapes that differ from those of their male counterparts. These divergent career patterns suggest that current career theories are in need of reassessment and revision.

This paper chronicles the role of British Columbian provincial authorities and medical practitioners in engineering the deportation of psychiatrically disordered and cognitively disabled immigrants out of the province between Confederation and 1939. Approximately 750 mental patients were removed from BC during the 1920s and 1930s alone, and more than 5000 had been deported from the country as a whole by the outbreak of World War II. With the use of provincial and federal government records and correspondence, institutional documents, print media clippings and patient files, I probe the professional practices and discourses that fuelled this movement to banish asylum inmates. Across these seven decades, medical authorities, in alliance with bureaucrats and various anti-immigration forces, succeeded in assembling a powerful and efficient system for screening out and expelling those new Canadians who ostensibly failed to meet the mental standards for Canadian citizenship. Bolstered by theories of eugenics and race betterment, and drawing on public fears about the unregulated influx of aliens and the associated scourge of madness, officials turned to deportation as an expedient means for ridding hospitals of their least desirable denizens. I argue more generally that the deportation of ‘insane’ and other ‘unfit’ immigrants was nourished by the flood ofnativist, rac(ial)ist, exclusionist, eugenist, and mental hygienist thinking that dominated British Columbian and Canadian political and public culture throughout this ‘golden age’ of deportation.

Mediation and other forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution as conflict resolution mechanisms are being embraced widely by legal regimes in criminal law, family law, labour law, administrative law, and civil law areas. In this way, frustration with inadequacies of the legal system and an incipient crisis in legitimacy due to delay, expense and impersonality are contained, and control over dispute resolution is reasserted by the legal system. But in the process, these community-based practices also undergo an institutionalising transformation or “rationalisation” which removes them from their social framework and makes them into technical forms of conflict dispute resolution. This article uses an Habermasian analysis to contend that policymakers, legislators, professional and quasi-professional practitioners are thus systemically colonizing potentially liberatory social practices and transforming them into a “technique” where practices are formalised and strategies are imposed on conflict to produce determinable outcomes.

Significant changes in the refugee determination domain during the 1980s are made intelligible by deploying the concepts of programme, rationality, and technology drawn from the recent governmentality literature. Following a crisis of governability in the mid-1980s, refugee determination continued to move farther from the reach of political authorities. By 1989 it was reassembled in a manner involving a greater reliance on law, on the regular production of medical and psychiatric knowledge in new sites outside the state and a documentation centre, all of which is consistent with the onset of advanced liberal government. Closer examination of the documentation centre shows it permits scrutiny of information destined for use in legal oral hearings; is a form of political subjectification; and serves as a panoptic device that targets non-Western nations and populations consistent with advanced liberalism. In this way the documentation centre also illustrates the overlap of Canadian and international refugee regimes.

This paper examines a regulative shift in Canadian pesticide legislation which directs attention away from the agrichemical companies to individual farmers as the focus for preventing pesticide pollution. There are three parts to the analysis, each of which makes a particular connection between the globalization of agriculture and the development of the new regulative approach and discourse. The shift is first understood as a way in which agribusiness was able to resist environmentalist demands for increased control over the corporate promotion and development of pesticides. The link between the ideologies of globalization and agriculture's strategic responses to the environmentalist pressures are examined. The second part of the analysis looks at the broader restructuring of Canadian agricultural production and market relations to show how the intensification of agriculture within globalization helped to create significant political-economic crises within agriculture. It is argued that the policy and regulative focus on pesticide use practices and pesticide users was partly an effort to deal with these crises and the pressures to accumulate. Finally, the analysis looks at the link between globalization and the strategies and ideologies of the environmental and health movements.

Many earlier studies of Canadian child custody determinations have been written from ideological and feminist viewpoints. This study attempts to look at this subject from an empirical and sociological stance, within its historical context. Several related issues are considered, including the central issue of sexism, and the effects of legislation and case law on these determinations. Models of how custody cases settled by trial affect those negotiated outside the courtroom are explored. This study analyzes decades of Canadian child custody orders and other evidence to shed light on trends in judicial decision making and their causes.