This book is part of the Towards the New Millennium Series, featuring the works of thoughtful Canadians who are profoundly interested in the future of Canada and the world.Most democracies do not use Canada’s "first past the post" voting system. To give a party more seats than its share of the popular vote warrants is deemed undemocratic by most. Such democracies use proportional representation to ensure a party’s seat-share does not exceed its vote-share.Former MLA, Nick L...

To face the future, Canada needs more Canadians. But why and how many?Canada’s population has always grown slowly, when it has grown at all. That wasn’t by accident. For centuries before Confederation and a century after, colonial economic policies and an inward-facing world view isolated this country, attracting few of the people and building few of the institutions needed to sustain a sovereign nation. In fact, during most years before 1967, a greater number of p...

The age of party democracy has passed, argues Peter Mair in Ruling the Void. The major parties have become so disconnected from society that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.First published in 2013, Ruling the Void presciently observed that the widening gap between citizens and their political leaders posed a crisis of legitimacy for the governing class, and was fuelling populist mobilizations against it. Europe's political e...

A manifesto for a new world order.Having made a hugely significant contribution to the increasingly irrefutable, if alarming, diagnosis of the ills of early 21st century consumerist culture and its free-market myths, George Monbiot sets out now with this book to offer something more constructive, a set of proposals – political, democratic, economic, environmental – that might affect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking i...

Federalism - particularly in Canada - involves an ongoing contestation of interests, ideas, and identities. It is a contestation that sometimes clarifies but often obscures the nature of conflicts and the manner in which they are resolved. Recognizing the great degree of ambivalence associated with federalism, the authors provide students with the conceptual tools and basic knowledge of various governmental processes that will allow them to analyze and, if necessary, critique intergovernmenta...

In November 2008, as the economic decline was being fully realized, Canada's newly elected minority government, led by Conservative Stephen Harper, presented a highly divisive fiscal update in advance of a proposed budget. Unable to support the motion, the Liberal and New Democratic Parties, with the backing of the Bloc Québécois, formed a coalition in order to seek a no-confidence vote and to form a new government. In response, Conservative cabinet ministers launched a media blitz, inform...

Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different from what occurred in Europe. In States and Power in Africa, Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Herbst's bold contention—that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the cont...

From one of this country’s best and most controversial political writers, a searing blueprint for the Next Canada.Five years into the twenty-first century, Canada is viewed as one of the most desirable nations in the world in which to live. Despite the worries of many Canadians — our country’s regional and linguistic divisions, our frequent identity crises — Canada, it seems, has a lot of good things going for it.The federal election of 2004, however, revealed new cracks in...

International Relations and International Law have developed in parallel but distinctly throughout the 20th Century. However in recent years there has been recognition that their shared concerns in areas as diverse as the environment, transnational crime and terrorism, human rights and conflict resolution outweigh their disciplinary and methodological divergences.This concise and accessible volume focuses on collaborative work within the disciplines of international law and interna...

Forty years ago, as the United States became increasingly involved in Vietnam, questions were raised in Canada about the relationship between its foreign policy agenda and that of its southern neighbour. Now, with the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is time to raise the same questions: does Canada need an independent foreign policy? Does Canada have the capacity and will to chart its own course?Divided into sections about the history of Canadian foreign policy, diplomacy, s...

European Labour Law explores how individual European national legal systems, in symbiosis with the European Union, produce a transnational labour law system that is distinct and genuinely European in character. Professor Brian Bercusson describes the evolution of this system, its national, transnational and global contexts and its institutional and substantive structures. The collective industrial-relations dimension of employment is examined, and the labour law of the EU as manifested in,...

The Canadian Federal Election of 2008 is a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of the campaign and election outcome. The chapters are written by leading professors of political science, journalism, and communications. They examine the strategies, successes, and failures of the major political parties – the Conservatives (Faron Ellis and Peter Woolstencroft), Liberals (Brooke Jeffrey), New Democrats (Lynda Erickson and David Laycock), Bloc Québécois (Eric Belanger and Richard Nad...