Constitutionalists and political scientists often claim that federal high courts are neutral and impartial arbiters of federalism disputes. However, analysis of the political impact of nine federal high courts on the division of powers clearly indicates that such courts are best characterized as centralist and nationalist. This is largely the result of the strong institutional factors that link the federal high court to the political institutions of the central government, notably the process by which federal judges are appointed. The political theory of federalism must thus be modified to take into account the centralist function of judicial review.

Over a decade ago, the federal Liberal government announced one of the most controversial policy initiatives in Canadian history, the National Energy Program (NEP). The bargaining that followed the NEP's announcement on October 28, 1980 is easily recalled; intense disagreements focussed on economic, partisan and, ultimately, constitutional issues. While these events have stimulated a wide range of investigations, a prominent gap exists in the scholarship: very few studies adopt a game-theoretic perspective. In seeking to explain strategic interaction over energy policy, such an approach might increase understanding of the difficult political processes surrounding the NEP in a wider context.

These are five stages to the game-theoretic investigation that follows. First, a brief history of the phase of confrontation is provided. Second, the game-theoretic interpretation is presented in general terms, including participants, strategies and potential outcomes. Relevant measurements are derived in the third phase. In the fourth stage, the process of a sequential game is analyzed, in both abstract and operational terms. Fifth, and finally, policy-related implications of the analysis are discussed, along with possible directions for further research.

The Constitution Act, 1982 recognized certain rights for aboriginal peoples. These rights were to be identified and defined subsequently. Ten years later, after several rounds of negotiations, the question of the recognition and definition of an aboriginal right to self-government remains unresolved. Many specialists claim that the problems faced during these negotiations result from the incompatibility between the main philosophical traditions guiding the actors. Through an analysis of the relationship between the cosmology underlying the aboriginal demands on the one hand and three of the main trends in contemporary Canadian liberal political philosophy on the other hand, this article tries to shed some light on the philosophical incompatibility thesis. While a strictly individualist liberalism rejects outright the notion of collective rights and Will Kymlicka's revisionist liberal individualism limits considerably the scope of an aboriginal right to self-government, communitarian liberalism, like that of Charles Taylor, seems to provide a favourable framework for the integration of cultural co-existence with the First Nations, without repudiating its attachment to fundamental individual rights and freedoms.

This article explores neo-conservative ideology in the industrialized West through a comparative analysis of the arguments advanced against a strong role for the federal government in regulating child care services in the United States and Canada. Existing analyses of neo-conservatism suggest that it is composed of many different elements which may lead to contradictory policy prescriptions; this literature also downplays the presence of a “pro-family” component in the Canadian context. The article illustrates the presence of an “anti-statist,” a “pro-market” and a “pro-family” strand of neo-conservatism in each country, and shows that they converge in opposing federal regulation of child care services. It also suggests that, while there appears to be a shared neo-conservative vision of the appropriate relationship between families and the state across national contexts, discussions of the state and its relationship to the market take on a distinctive tone in each country.

Max Weber's writings convey a tension between a commitment to Enlightenment rationalism and a romanticism that was largely shaped under the influence of the “Sturm und Drang.” The tension is represented in the claims that modernity unleashes forces that erode the spontaneous, creative elements of human life. This study argues that Weber has correctly identified some of the problematic substance of modernism, but that he failed to explore alternative sets of assumptions by which the modernist paradigm could be critiqued. As a result, Weber was forced to see the world as a place full of bifurcated conflicts between such elements as: reason/emotion, modern/traditional, science/mysticism. This epistemological framework led Weber to the pessimistic conclusions about the fate of humanity in the modern world.