Alan C. Cairns

Citizenship, diversity, and pluralism : Canadian and comparative perspectives

Contributors include Heribert Adam (Simon Fraser), Keith Banting (Queens), Anthony Birch (emeritus, Victoria), John Borrows (UBC), Alan Cairns, Walker Connor (Trinity College), John Erik Fossum (LOS-Senteret, Norway), Virginia Leary (emeritus, SUNY), Denise Reaume (Toronto), Lynn Smith (justice, BC Supreme Court), Charles Taylor (emeritus, McGill), and Jeremy Webber (Sydney, Australia).

An Election to be Remembered: Canada 1993

This paper analyses the 1993 Canadian federal election from three perspectives; (1) the significance of the campaign; (2) the contribution of institutional variables, especially the electoral system, to the outcome; (3) and most important, the election as the vehicle for a paradigm shift with respect to, (i) a new relationship of the party system to the constitutional issue, (ii) a repudiation of several basic constitutional assumptions of the last decade, (iii) the retreat of the interventionist expenditure state, (iv) a strong challenge to elitism in the party system and in parliament, and (v) the overt emergence of lifestyle, cultural issues into partisan politics.

Comment on “Critics of the Judicial Committee: The New Orthodoxy and an Alternative Explanation”

The 1982 Charter gives the contemporary Supreme Court enhanced responsibilities in the overall Canadian constitutional system. These novel responsibilities require a jurisprudence appropriate to the new relations between courts and legislatures for which our past has ill-prepared us. In addition to the Charter and the host of citizen-state relations which are thus placed on the Supreme Court agenda, the 1982 Constitution Act , s. 52(1), establishes the supremacy of the constitution, which further underlines the growing significance of the judicial branch in our constitutional future. Are judges to be the midwives of constitutional evolution, seeking to adapt the constitution as an instrument of government to emerging conditions, or are they largely to eschew such a role by employing varying strategies and philosophies of self-control, such as adhering as closely as possible to a more technical task definition, deferring wherever possible to legislatures, resisting the lure of judicial creativity as inappropriate to their appointed status, and throwing the burden of constitutional adaptation on other more overtly political institutions of government?