Laurie E. Adkin

The Challenge of Care: Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada and Quebec

In “The Challenge of Care: Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada and Quebec,” Laurie Adkin and Yasmeen Abu-Laban address the debate in Canada regarding the relative merits of existing child care programs and policies in which those in Quebec are typically taken as the most desirable. Drawing on and extending Nancy Fraser’s universal caregiver model, they develop a critique that brings out the neoliberal, Third Way, and social conservative elements of the debate. They go on to argue that, in different ways, all of the existing policies and services, including those in Quebec, fail to adequately recognize and reorganize care work and child care services.

Can public engagement democratize environmental policymaking in a resource-dependent state? Comparative case studies from Alberta, Canada

ABSTRACT What factors shape the democratic potential of public consultation in environmental policymaking? Here, the motivations, purposes, designs, and outcomes of recent public engagement on land use planning, climate change policy, and water resource management in Alberta, Canada are reviewed in order to show how the power dynamics of the political and economic context shape the democratic potential of public and stakeholder consultations, especially where dominant resource interests are at stake. At the same time, political leadership, interactions between civil society actors and key design elements are shown to be important to democratization.

Ecology and Labour: Towards a New Societal Paradigm

A radical critique of past socialist theory and practice is now widely recognized to be a necessary precondition for a convergence between socialists and the new social movements [NSMs]. But the ‘ideal revision’ required is really so profound that it amounts to the construction of a new societal paradigm. What is called for is a new synthesis of the insights of socialism’s critique of capitalism and those of the new social movements and their theorists. ‘Socialism’ has not succeeded in encompassing diverse forms of domination and oppression, which have become increasingly ‘politicized’, or conflictualized, in the post-World War II era. Moreover, the term has such deeply rooted associations with the anti-democratic, environmentally disastrous, and other negative aspects of ‘formerly existing socialism’, that it may be a politically bankrupt label.