A collection of the 18 essays presented at a 1991 conference held in honor of the well-known Canadian political scientist John Meisel. Contributors explore key issues in Canadian politics including governance, Quebec's place in Canada, French-English relations, multiculturalism, the party system, electoral processes, the regulatory function, and aspects of culture and social science. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Topics of widespread concern to Canadians interested in the social sciences and to the general reading public are dealt with in this volume of essays by a group of Canada's leading scholars in political science and history. The book is presented in honour of Henry Forbes Angus, Head of the Department of Economics, Political Science, and Sociology at the University of British Columbia from 1930 to 1956, and the authors are all his former students, colleagues or associates. Included also are a bibliography of publications Dean Angus and, with his consent, a thoughtful and humorous article of his entitled "Administration and Democracy." Henry Forbes Angus was born in Victoria, in 1891. He received his school education in Victoria and subsequently attended the Lycée Descartes at Tours (France) and McGill University from which he received his B.A. in 1911. He proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford where he obtained a B.A., first class, in 1913 and a B.C.L., also first class, in 1914. He won the highly prized Vinerian Law Scholarship at Oxford in 1914, and was called to the Inner Temple Bar in the same year. Henry Angus served throughout the First World War: in India from 1914 to 1916 and in Mesopotamia from 1916 to 1919. He was promoted to the rank of Captain and mentioned in despatches. He returned to British Columbia after the war, and in 1919 was appointed Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia. In the same year he obtained his M.A. from Oxford. He was promoted Head of the Department of Economics, Political Science and Sociology in 1930. From 1949 to 1956 he was also Dean of Graduate Studies. Professor Angus was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1939 and was its President in 1951-1952. He has honorary degrees from McGill University and from the University of British Columbia. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, 1937-40, and a member of the Royal Commission on Transportation, 1949-51. From 1941 to 1945 he was Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for External Affairs. Since 1955, Dean Angus has been Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of British Columbia.

Essential Readings in Canadian Constitutional Politics introduces students, scholars, and practitioners to classic authors and writings on the principles of the Canadian Constitution as well as to select contemporary material. To complement rather than duplicate the state of the field, it deals with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and with Canadian mega-constitutional politics in passing only, focusing instead on institutions, federalism, intergovernmental relations, bilingualism and binationalism, the judiciary, minority rights, and constitutional renewal. Many of the selections reverberate well beyond Canada's borders, making this volume an unrivalled resource for anyone interested in constitutional governance and democratic politics in diverse societies.

This comprehensive study is concerned primarily with the fundamental problem of the role of the judiciary in the federal system of Canadian government. The author criticizes previous accounts of the Judicial Committee’s interpretative scheme for the British North American Act because of their neglect of underlying jurisprudential assumptions and their readiness to accept the textual criticisms levelled in the O’Connor Report of 1939; they fail to note the relationship between the jurisprudential and the textual aspects. Professor Browne is convinced that O’Connor’s criticism is as ill founded as the alternative interpretive scheme he proposed, and that the “three-compartment” view represents the most convincing construction of sections 91 and 92 of the Act. He considers debatable the “organic statute” argument widely accepted in the United States and becoming more and more popular in Canada; and supports the premium which English courts have traditionally placed on certainty and stability in the law. Professor Browne concludes that the almost universal criticism in Canada of the Judicial Committee’s construction of the BNA Act is basically misconceived: Canadian jurists should think carefully before following trends set by American courts, for American purposes, in the context of American law, particularly when the repercussions of those trends are not as yet fully appreciated. This discussion will be of special interest for legal, political, and historical studies in this country, the United States, and other Commonwealth countries, especially those which have federal systems and consequently share the same basic problems of the judiciary in such a system.

On 18 October 1929, John Sankey, England's reform-minded Lord Chancellor, ruled in the Persons case that women were eligible for appointment to Canada's Senate. Initiated by Edmonton judge Emily Murphy and four other activist women, the Persons case challenged the exclusion of women from Canada's upper house and the idea that the meaning of the constitution could not change with time. The Persons Case considers the case in its political and social context and examines the lives of the key players: Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, and the other members of the "famous five," the politicians who opposed the appointment of women, the lawyers who argued the case, and the judges who decided it. Robert J. Sharpe and Patricia I. McMahon examine the Persons case as a pivotal moment in the struggle for women's rights and as one of the most important constitutional decisions in Canadian history. Lord Sankey's decision overruled the Supreme Court of Canada's judgment that the courts could not depart from the original intent of the framers of Canada's constitution in 1867. Describing the constitution as a "living tree," the decision led to a reassessment of the nature of the constitution itself. After the Persons case, it could no longer be viewed as fixed and unalterable, but had to be treated as a document that, in the words of Sankey, was in "a continuous process of evolution." The Persons Case is a comprehensive study of this important event, examining the case itself, the ruling of the Privy Council, and the profound affect that it had on women's rights and the constitutional history of Canada.

This book shines a light of devastating clarity on French-Canadian society in the 1930s and 1940s, when young elites were raised to be pro-fascist, and democratic and liberal were terms of criticism. The model leaders to be admired were good Catholic dictators like Mussolini, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, and especially Pétain, collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France. There were even demonstrations against Jews who were demonstrating against the Nazis' actions in Germany. Trudeau, far from being the rebel that other biographers have claimed, embraced this ideology. At his elite school, Brébeuf, he was a model student, the editor of the school magazine, and admired by the staff and his fellow students. But the fascist ideas and the people he admired—even when the war was going on, as late as 1944—included extremists so terrible that at the war’s end they were shot. And then there’s his manifesto and his plan to stage a revolution against les Anglais. This is astonishing material—and it’s all demonstrably true—based on Trudeau's personal papers that the authors were allowed to access after his death. What they have found has astounded and distressed them, but they both agree that the truth must be published. Translated by William Johnson, this explosive book is a key part of Canadian political history.