This address examines the relationship of political science and democratic governance by considering changes in both the political world and the discipline in Canada since the 1960s. It argues that the developing dynamics in political life, as significant as they have been, have not fundamentally altered the essential features of democratic governance in Canada. It suggests that a number of factors account for the diminished capacity of the discipline, as a collective scholarly and teaching enterprise, to contribute to democratic political life. On the one hand is the relative paucity of institutional mechanisms in Canada to link political science to democratic governance; on the other is the discipline's own fragmentation that lessens its focus on questions central to democratic governance.

There are many works on decentralization, but few of them have studied in a systematic way the power relations that are associated with the transfer of attributions from a superior level to an inferior level of government. In order to compensate for these shortcomings a conceptual framework and two research proposals are formulated about the different components of decentralization and the power relations pertaining to them. The model is then applied to various decentralization policies which were adopted since the 1980s in different countries. Two main conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, in the power relations between the actors of the different levels of government, those of the superior level are maintaining their domination by controlling the more important resources in the new relationships created by the decentralization policies. Second, the actors of the superior level of government are seeking to present their domination as plausible with reference to some values generally associated with centralization or decentralization.

Employing a rational choice perspective, this article seeks to explain the shift in the trade policy position of the Canadian province of Ontario during negotiations that led to the North American Free Trade Agreement. In doing so it highlights an important, though often overlooked, phenomenon: issue linkage in public policy construction. Early in 1993, Premier Bob Rae's New Democratic party government significantly shifted its position on the proposed agreement. While never actively supportive of the accord prior to 1993, the provincial government maintained close contact with federal trade negotiators as a means of advancing its core trade objectives. By February 1993, however, the government's position hardened perceptibly. Specifically, the government actively undertook to derail the proposed agreement. This article suggests that this shift cannot be understood in terms of growing dissatisfaction with the impending trade agreement, nor solely to a change in Ontario's trade policy preferences. Rather, it suggests that a broader perspective is needed, and argues that Ontario's position on NAFTA was linked to other priorities of the Rae government: namely, those in the fiscal policy arena.

This article criticizes a group of contemporary political theories that describe the virtues appropriate to liberal citizens, the ills that result from a waning of these virtues and the kinds of public policies that would renew the traits of character necessary to the healthy functioning of a liberal polity. While enumerations of broadly liberal virtues can seem relatively uncontroversial, these pieties provide insufficient warrant for the concrete policy recommendations made in their name. Theoretical and practical discussions of citizen virtues need to take seriously the diversity of liberal “citizenship stories,” and to consider how legitimately to conciliate these perspectives in particular cases.

Arguments advancing the merits of Aboriginal Electoral Districts (AEDs) for Canada are informed by the view that the democratic integration of Aboriginal peoples into the institutions of the state ought to occur on the basis of their group-differentiated citizenship. This study advances the thesis that the attempt to fuse the conventional concern for democratic equality with a model of representation based on difference such as that offered by AEDs is to try to harmonize objectives that strain significantly against one another and thus are largely incompatible. AEDs are unsustainable as vehicles for the representation of Aboriginal peoples within Parliament because they are too tightly bound to a representational norm linked to a commitment to voter equality which, when measured against the normative thrust of differentiated representation, imposes a high degree of homogenization upon the citizenship of Aboriginal peoples.

This article illustrates the contours of the continuing debate over Bentham's utilitarianism through an analysis of the secondary literature. It assesses the persuasiveness of the principal contemporary “authoritarian” (despotic, totalitarian, collectivism behaviouralist, constructivist, panopticist and paternalist) and “individualist” (facilitative and liberal) interpretations of Bentham's thought, indicating where they are consistent with his writings and where they are not. Distinctions and conflicts between contending perspectives are found to be rooted in a reliance on different elements of Bentham's vast corpus and emphasis on different components of his utilitarian theory. An examination of the contending perspectives underscores the tensions in Bentham's thought, including the most characteristic tension between, on the one hand, the axiomatic commitment to the individual and, on the other hand, the greatest happiness principle.