Provinces is now established as the most comprehensive yet accessible exploration of Canadian provincial politics and government. The authors of each chapter draw on their particular expertise to examine themes and issues pertaining to all the provinces from a comparative perspective. The book is organized into four major sections - political landscapes, the state of democracy in the provinces, political structures and processes, and provincial public policy. The third edition features eleven new chapters, including: province building, provincial constitutions, provincial judicial systems, plurality voting in the provinces, voting patterns in the provinces, provincial public service, provincial party financing, provincial health policy, social policy, climate change, and labour market policy. All other chapters have been thoroughly revised and updated.

With the increased mobility and interdependence brought on by globalisation, governments can no longer deal effectively with what were traditionally regarded as «domestic issues» unless they cooperate among themselves. International law may once have been a sort of inter-state law concerned mostly with relations between states, but it now looks increasingly inside state borders and has become, to a large degree, a trans-governmental law. While this creates significant challenges even for highly-unified «nation-states», the challenges are even greater for federations in which powers have been divided up between the central government and federated states. What roles should central governments and federated states play in creating and implementing this new form of governance? Using the Canadian federation as its starting point, this case study illustrates a range of factors to be considered in the appropriate distribution of treaty powers within a federation. Professor Cyr also shows how - because it has no specific provisions dealing with the distribution of treaty powers - the Canadian constitution has «organically» developed a tight-knit set of rules and principles responding to these distributional factors. This book is therefore both about the role of federated states in the current world order and an illustration of how organic constitutionalism works.

In Patchworks of Purpose Gerard Boychuk asserts that Canada does not have one social assistance system but rather ten variants that reflect the particular policy goals of each province. He argues that provincial assistance regimes have followed significantly distinct paths in their historical development even though they have been funded under the same federal cost-sharing arrangements.