This article examines the criticism of the activist Supreme Court of Canada in Canadian political science, as exemplified by the work of F. L. Morton and Rainer Knopff. It compares the debate over the legitimacy of judicial review with a previous generation's debates over the same question with reference to the role and impact of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on the development of Canadian federalism. The article argues that, particularly in examining the role of groups in the litigation process, we need to return to the lessons of the previous debate on the JCPC by emphasizing the ways in which group politics and litigation are connected to power relations in Canadian society. In the conclusion, the article offers an alternative approach to exploring the theoretical and empirical relationships between collective actors and litigation based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Readers of Miriam Smith's article1 who have not also read our recent book, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party, may conclude that she is critical of everything in that book. This would be a mistake, since nowhere in her article does she challenge the two central claims of the book: (1) that there has been a “Charter revolution,” and (2) that this revolution can be explained only in terms of a supporting constituency. Smith accepts these central claims, which are made also by Charles Epp in his fine book, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective, a book Smith praises (9, n. 12; 11). Smith disagrees primarily with our characterization of the Charter revolution as undemocratic. She prefers Epp's view that the rights revolution is democratic because it rests “on a support structure that has a broad base in civil society” (11; quoting Epp, Rights, 199) precisely, that is, because it is supported by what we call a Court Party and Epp calls a “support structure for legal mobilization.”

One of the main points of “Ghosts of the JCPC” is that the study of Charter politics is currently dominated by a sterile and well-worn debate over the legitimacy of judicial review. Rainer Knopff and F. L. Morton return to these issues in their reply. They frequently refer to their own position or to my putative positions in their reply to my work. But, they do not engage in a discussion of what is, or in making arguments about how we might understand or explain what is, rather than on constantly judging what is according to our own personal and partisan political prejudices.

Following the Quebec referendum on sovereignty-association in 1995, many political observers assumed that immigrant voters would support the federalist option, and that only a minority among them would vote for the Parti Québécois option. However, in view of the considerable changes in the linguistic integration of immigrants over the last 20 years, their electoral behaviour might vary. Focusing on a survey in Spring 1996, the authors confirm the existence of a greater pluralism among immigrant voters. Moreover, the data emphasize factors in favour of a social vote among those citizens, especially in the Montreal region. Diversification of electoral choice is supported by the percentage of those who learned French and who identified themselves as Quebeckers.

New techniques of ecological inference are utilized to estimate with confidence intervals francophone support in each federal electoral district in Quebec for the pro-sovereignty side in the 1993 and 1997 Canadian general elections and the 1992 and 1995 referenda. Analyzing the link between demographic and political contextual variables and support for the sovereignty of Quebec suggests that demographic factors, such as the proportion of farmers and government workers, influence francophone voting behaviour more often than political factors such as incumbency. Unlike in many other countries with ethnically based movements, francophone support for sovereignty actually rises as the francophone portion of the population rises. This finding indicates that the contact hypothesis probably applies to the Quebec sovereignty movement.

The political importance of rights in liberal democracies, and of universally accessible health care in Canada, are trite observations. However, the increasing use of the language of rights to defend existing patterns of health care in Canada is a curious if not alarming phenomenon. What do citizens mean when they say that they have the right to health care? How can health care rights be defined philosophically and politically? This article examines the increasing popularity of rights claiming for health care, and argues that the ''right to health care'' has a non-possessive, normative nature that is at odds with legalistic individualistic rights claiming. This is a significant philosophical finding, one that informs the political debate over health care by revealing that legal rights claims are not sufficient to defend social entitlements. The conceptual project undertaken in this article illuminates directions of reform and suggests that differentiated citizenship provides a better model than legal rights to guide reform efforts.

This article examines the effect of modern media and communications technology on ethnic nationalist resurgence, using the Kurds as a case example. Television, satellite communications, the Internet and easy access to publishing technology now facilitate ethnic nationalist challenges to state hegemony and monopoly of information. Additionally, modern media and communications technology can turn a humiliating defeat into a catalyst for a more unified, stronger, ethnic nationalist movement. Globally broadcast images of such a defeat arouse the passions and indignation of even those people who only nominally identify themselves with the ethnic group in question. At the same time, communications technology such as telephones, faxes and e-mail facilitate the channeling of such indignation into immediate group protest and action which, in turn, strengthens the ethnic identification of action participants.

The literature on economic sanctions consists of a series of studies assessing whether sanctions ''worked'' or not. Very little has been written on the factors that make economic sanctions more effective at achieving their intended purposes. This article examines the threatened 1979 Arab world boycott of Canada after Prime Minister Joe Clark announced the government's intention to relocate its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. After determining that sanctions played a contributing role in motivating a Canadian policy reversal, it generates hypotheses from this misunderstood case about the political and economic factors that can contribute to the success of economic sanctions.

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