Arguments for tolerance, and criticisms of it, regularly produce paradoxes and other kinds of conceptual difficulty. We seek to show that these paradoxes are unnecessary, and that they arise from misconceptions of what a theory of tolerance is required to justify. Imagined as a “virtue,” tolerance is simply confused with other concepts; understood in the framework of a theory of “rights,” the element of choice essential to the concept is wholly neglected; explaining the concept in terms of some theory of fallibilism leads to a confusion of pragmatic with cognitive standards. Moreover, such mistaken approaches often arise from an equation of tolerance with liberalism or pluralism: the authors maintain, however, that justifications of tolerance do not rest on a commitment to any political theory or ideology, but imply only a recognition of the political situation itself.

The aim of this study is to provide an empirical basis for theories about political coalitions formed to apply economic sanctions against a target country. An excellent example is the economic blockade of Cuba by the United States, during which successive Republican and Democratic administrations have pursued economic measures to achieve a political objective. This study investigates the degree of cooperation and cleavage among Washington's capitalist-bloc allies with this effort to establish multilateral economic pressures against the Cuban Revolution. The analysis suggests that, despite the growth of economic competition during the 1960s and 1970s, such strains were not reflected at the level of political relationships.

Searching for the meaning of politics is time lost. Introduced by the Ancient Greeks, the concept of politics came to be understood by subsequent authors as the most meaningful of the social sciences. It has been reduced to a secondary status, however, with the growth of sociology. The term has become loaded with meaning, to the level of the inexpressible. Attempts at delimiting it have been fruitless except for nominalist definitions which are evaluated for their heuristic character within a given theoretical discourse. The analyst should look for social relations instead of given social objects.

Robert Nozick seeks to extract a substantive theory of distributive justice (“the entitlement theory”) from what he takes to be the formal properties of natural rights (or rights-based) theory. The unsoundness of his arguments supports the longstanding suspicion that all such theories are conceptually confused and ideological biased. Yet upon examination, the classical (chiefly Lockean) views that Nozick regards as a prototype of natural rights theory withstand that suspicion precisely in so far as they lack the formal properties of his own theory. I conclude that theories of the classical form are better equipped to resolve political arguments.

Provincial constitutional documents have not usually been the subject of scrutiny by those concerned with the governmental process at the provincial level. It has been assumed that the major characteristics of provincial government have been shaped by constitutional rules derived from the British North America Act and from the conventions of British-style parliamentary government. A case study of the British Columbia Constitution Act shows that such assumptions are only partially true. The powers of the provinces to shape their governmental structures through constitutional adaptation are extensive and have been used in the case of British Columbia to make broad modifications to the style of constitutionalism in the province since its entry to Confederation in 1871. It is not that the term provincial constitution should become a household word but that the investigation of the operation and potential of provincial constitutions should be seen as an essential component to an understanding of the provincial governmental process.

According to the central city exploitation thesis, commuting suburban workers, students and shoppers do not adequately compensate the central city for the public sector benefits they enjoy daily. Assessment of the actual cost of the provision of public services to commuters versus their revenue contribution shows that, in the years 1969 to 1980, suburbanites generated more gains than were required to finance the additional operating costs they imposed on the city of Montreal and nearly offset the part of capital expenditures for which they were responsible. However, in terms of the social costs, commuting results in a deficit for the central city due to the predominant use of the automobile as the mode of transport.

This note derives hypotheses about the intergenerational transfer of Canadian partisanships from a social learning model, which posits that the adoption of attitudes is affected by the homogeneity of cues in the environment. As hypothesized, data from the 1974 Canadian national election study show that the rate of adoption of parental partisanships is affected by the consistency of each parent's federal and provincial party identifications. The second hypothesis, which posits that transfer rates are affected by provincial-federal party system correspondence, is also supported in three of four regression equations.

In 1944, two civil servants' associations formed the General Council of Employees of the Province of Quebec for the collective defence of the interests of their members. This movement met with the opposition of Premier Duplessis, who disarmed it by a strategy in which formal recognition and consideration disguised the absence of any real concession. The Council soon gave up its attempts at collective action and its member associations continued to function as social and recreational organizations. After 1960, the Council, although first in the field, was unable to resist the rise of the Syndicat des fonctionnaires provinciaux, a more militant group sponsored by the Confédération des syndicats nationaux.

In a recent number of this Journal, D. Marc Kilgour describes a formal analysis of the power of provinces and citizens to effect a constitutional amendment, given the requirements specified by paragraph 38(l)(b) of the Constitution Act, 1982. He concludes that the amending formula—essentially the Fulton-Favreau formula proposed in 1964—distributes power more equitably among provinces than it does among citizens when power measures the capacity of provinces and citizens to change the outcome of the amending process by changing their positions on the issue.