Administrative Supervision of Local Government: the Canadian Experience

1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winston W. Crouch

Canadian local-government institutions have been influenced by those of both Great Britain and the United States, yet they retain a distinctly Canadian character. Few residents of the United States have been acquainted with Canada's internal governmental problems, because there has been relatively little information available. Canada's top political leaders have been pre-occupied with making Canada a nation, one prepared to take its place in world affairs. But what of the governments within the Dominion? The Rowell-Sirois Commission hearings and its reports in 1939 brought to the attention of many people the problems of dominion-provincial relations. More recently, the Goldenberg report in British Columbia brought attention to certain provincial-local relationships. During the 1930's, many persons in the United States became interested in the Canadian provincial boards of municipal affairs because those boards seemed to offer a means for disciplining improvident municipalities and maintaining good fiscal standards. Viewed in their full perspective, however, these boards and the departments of municipal affairs in Canadian provinces illustrate vital developments in central-local relations. Within the past forty-five years, Canadians have moved rapidly in developing the vast natural resources of the country and in building cities, towns, and villages.

Author(s):  
Pierre Rosanvallon

It's a commonplace occurrence that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But this book argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. The book makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, the book notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what the book calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. This book is an original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy.


Author(s):  
Pamela Bromley

As writing centres in Canada face challenges to their existence, funding, and stature, it may be helpful to situate the Canadian experience empirically. This project investigates the number of, geographical, institutional, and physical locations of, and longevity of Canadian writing centres using information from an original database and survey examining writing centres located outside the United States. In the study, findings from Canada are compared to those from the United States, where the only other comprehensive investigations of writing centres have taken place. Results demonstrate that 123 writing centres in Canada are located in all 10 Canadian provinces as well as the Yukon territory, almost half of centres operate under the academic affairs umbrella of their university and are physically located in the library, and that while writing centres in Canada are newer, on average, than their U.S. peers, they may be located in proportionally more universities. Unfortunately, the changes Canadian writing centres are experiencing are not new, as writing centres have previously faced challenges to their existence and place in the university. However, information about the number, institutional and physical location, and longevity of Canadian writing centres may be useful to administrators as they advocate for and further develop their writing centres.


1986 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. W. Arthurs ◽  
R. Weisman ◽  
F. H. Zemans

This article seeks to weave together the limited information available on the legal professions of the Canadian provinces. Following the same general format as the other comparative studies in this series, it also offers several critical observations of special interest to readers in the United States, whose experience the Canadian bar so closely tracks. The phenomenon of stratification—familiar to American observers—is clearly visible in the Canadian legal profession. Combined with other centrifugal forces, it threatens the unity of a profession which, until recently, has managed to preserve a high degree of cohesion in training, ideology, and institutional structures. On the other hand, in certain respects, the Canadian experience seems to differ from that of the United States, especially in the strength and peculiar structure of publicly funded legal aid schemes, in the profession's continuing formal autonomy and relative immunity from public regulation, and in its long-lasting attachment to apprenticeship as a necessary stage in professional formation. These and other convergences and divergences between the two countries raise questions of general significance: To what extent do the similarities between Canada and the United States verify the assumption implicit in the theoretical literature (principally Abel, Freidson, and Larson) that there is an empirical referent for something called legal professionalism? And to what extent do the differences suggest that containing societies contribute distinctive characteristics to their legal professions, whose qualities are therefore highly contingent?


2003 ◽  
Vol 02 (04) ◽  
pp. F02
Author(s):  
Mauro Scanu

A ghost is wandering around the web: it is called open access, a proposal to modify the circulation system of scientific information which has landed on the sacred soil of scientific literature. The circulation system of scientific magazines has recently started faltering, not because this instrument is no longer a guarantee of quality, but rather for economic reasons. In countries such as Great Britain, as shown in the following chart, the past twenty years have seen a dramatic increase in subscription fees, exceeding by far the prices of other publishing products and the average inflation rate. The same trend applies to the United States.


1941 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Orent ◽  
Pauline Reinsch

Recently, certain small uninhabited islands in the central Pacific Ocean have assumedsudden importance for the British Empire and the United States. Their value as landing places for commercial aviation and as strategic bases for air and naval forces is being increasingly recognized. Acquired during the past century by Great Britain and the UnitedStates, many of these islands have been the object of conflicting claims to sovereignty by the two nations. To clarify their status, it has been found desirable to review the past practice of these states and to examine those factors which were considered adequateto create sovereign rights over uninhabited islands in the Pacific.


1913 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Holladay Latané

The Panama Canal project has its roots deep in the past. The diplomatic complications presented by the enterprise have been as difficult to overcome as the engineering obstacles. Now that the dream of ages is about to become a reality, certain of our newspapers, impressed with the magnitude of the task which the United States has undertaken and carried well-nigh to completion, are asking impatiently, what rights has Great Britain in the canal, why should she venture to dictate what use we shall make of our own property? Merely to say that England has rights under the Hay-Pauncefote treaty does not appear to satisfy these critics. They ask again, why did the United States ever give England any voice at all in the matter? In order to answer this question we have to go back to the middle of the last century when the Clayton-Bulwer treaty was negotiated and see what the relative positions of the United States and England with respect to the isthmus were at that time.


1912 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-600
Author(s):  
Richard Olney

It is undoubtedly desirable, in the interest of the arbitration of international controversies, that at the next Hague Conference a form of treaty should be presented which, while covering all differences between states, shall steer clear of the difficulties which in the past have wrecked important treaties of that character. It is a matter in which the United States may be expected to lead, having by precept and example so often distinguished itself as a pioneer in movements tending to do away with war between nations. Facts must be looked in the face, however, and it is apparent that the present position of the United States with reference to this subject is not so advantageous as could be wished. No two countries of the world are so favorably situated for the purposes of an arbitration treaty between them inclusive of all differences as are Great Britain and the United States. Through racial, social, and commercial ties ever knitting them closely together, war between them has become almost unthinkable. Yet two trials for such a comprehensive treaty have failed and the official position of the United States to-day seems to be that there is a class of questions which is necessarily to be excluded from any general arbitration treaty. The class covers controversies described as affecting “the vital interests, the independence, or the honor” of the parties. In the English-American treaty of 1897 such controversies were disposed of by sending them to arbitration but so constituting the arbitral court that an award must have the assent of the representatives of the losing party or of a majority of them. In the treaty of 1911 it was sought to meet the difficulty by a joint commission of inquiry empowered to investigate and decide whether a question was or was not arbitrable and should or should not be arbitrated. But neither plan proved to be acceptable to the United States acting under the treaty-making power vested jointly in the President and Senate.


1875 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55
Author(s):  
A. Emminghaus ◽  
D. A. Bumsted

The progress of life insurance in Germany in the year 1873 was far greater than could have been anticipated from the course of events during the year. For at a time of violent reaction, such as Germany and Austria experienced in the past year, succeeding a period during which mercantile speculations had been engaged in with such frantic eagerness by all classes of the community, we should not have expected to find men either willing or able to give that calm and self-denying consideration to the future, upon which life insurance depends. With the necessaries of life at exorbitant prices, it was natural to suppose that there would be a considerable diminution in the number of those who, after meeting the claims of the day, would be able to provide for the future. While the general state of society thus led to the conclusion that there would be a diminution in the number of insurances, there was also reason to fear that the mortality would be greatly increased through the recent outbreak of cholera, which extended over a large district, and held its ground very firmly for some time. In both respects, the returns for 1873 were more favourable than we expected; and this furnishes another proof of the fact that, in those parts of central Europe from which our returns are derived, life insurance has not yet become so general, that all the occurrences of domestic and social life, or even events involving important changes, have any distinct influence upon its development. It cannot be denied that in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, life insurance is not nearly so well understood as in Great Britain and the United States.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Ladwig

Providing aid and advice to local governments’ counterinsurgency campaigns, rather than directly intervening with American forces, has recently been identified as a more cost-effective way to counter irregular threats to U.S. interests. The challenge that such undertakings have repeatedly faced in the past is that partner governments often have their own interests and priorities which can diverge significantly from those of Washington. Consequently, a host of observers have pointed out that while the United States has provided its partners with extensive assistance to combat insurgents and terrorist groups, an inability to convince them to adopt its counterinsurgency prescriptions or address what Washington sees as the political and economic “root causes” of a conflict has repeatedly emerged as a major impediment to success. In the absence of sufficient influence to convince a local government to address these shortcomings, critics suggest that significant American aid and support can actually reduce its incentives to address domestic discontent or govern inclusively, which can render a supported regime less stable than it would have been without U.S. assistance


1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
BERNADETTE C. HAYES ◽  
IAN McALLISTER

Election outcomes are now, more than at any time in the past, determined by voters' assessments of party leaders. However, despite its potential importance, little is known about the differences in how men and women view political leaders. This article uses recent Australian, British, and U.S. survey data to examine gender differences in the evaluations that voters make of party leaders. The results show that there are comparatively few gender differences in the personal qualities that voters rate as important, with the exception of British Labour's Neil Kinnock, who was rated more highly by men, and Bill Clinton, who was rated more highly by women. However, what gender differences in leader evaluations that do exist are mediated by partisanship and views on economic performance. In both Australia and the United States, gender significantly affects the vote, but in opposite directions. The results suggest that gender may have a more important future role in elections in these three countries.


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