John C. Courtney

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).

Parliament and Representation: The Unfinished Agenda of Electoral Redistributions

Since 1964, federal electoral boundary readjustments have been the responsibility of independent commissions—one for each province and one for the Northwest Territories. The three redistributions completed to date under the new arrangements suggest that the commissions have increasingly accepted a substantial measure of intraprovincial population equality as the standard by which to define electoral boundaries. At the same time Parliament, in its debates and amendments to the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act , has urged commissions to move in the opposite direction by creating more, rather than fewer, electoral districts of unequal populations. These contrary positions derive from different views of what counts in determining electoral boundaries—territory or population. Drawing on American experience since Baker v. Carr (1962), Canadian courts may eventually be called upon to resolve the issue.

Voting in a Provincial General Election and a Federal By-Election: A Constituency Study of Saskatoon City

Previous studies have noted that Canadians tend to support one political party at the provincial level of government and another party at the federal level, yet no attempt has been made to discover which voters switch their electoral support. This study is concerned with an examination of one electoral district as both a federal and a provincial constituency in two 1964 elections to determine ( a ) the nature and degree of vote switching from one election at one level of government to a second election at another level and ( b ) the characteristics of the people who switched their votes. The city of Saskatoon was selected for the study for two closely interrelated reasons. First, two elections were held remarkably close together in time: a provincial general election on April 22, 1964, followed by a federal by-election on June 22, 1964. Second, Saskatoon had returned CCF members to the provincial legislature since 1944, but had elected as its member of parliament the Progressive-Conservative candidate since 1957. The Conservative candidates had a poor record in provincial elections, generally running a modest third, while in federal elections the partys candidate polled more votes than his combined opposition in 1958, 1962, and 1963. As Table I indicates the voters of Saskatoon had on six occasions in the period from 1956 to 1963 consistently supported the CCF provincially and the Progressive-Conservatives federally. The 1964 elections followed basically the same pattern The main differences were that provincially the Liberals and Progressive-Conservatives improved their position considerably in comparison with past elections (with the Liberals electing one member in the five-member district), while federally the Progressive-Conservative vote dropped substantially with a lower voter turn-out than had been the case in recent federal elections (see Table II).

Life in Print: Citation of Articles Published in Volumes 1–10 of the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique

The Social Sciences Citation Index was canvassed for citations of all articles, notes, review articles, comments and replies published in volumes 1–10 of the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique . The data show that nearly three-quarters of the 335 items published between 1968 and 1977 were cited at least once, with a greater likelihood of the citation appearing in non-Canadian than in Canadian publications. English-language items were cited four times as frequently as French-language ones, on the average, and those with at least some Canadian content were cited nearly twice as frequently, on the average, as those with no Canadian content.