"... some very serious critiques of French existential phenomenology and post-structuralism... the contributors offer some refreshingly new insights into some tried and 'true' philosophical texts and more recent works of literary theory." -- Philosophy and Literature "By bridging the gap between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy, the authors of The Thinking Muse: Feminism and the Modern French Philosophy largely overcome the cultural polarity between 'male thinker' and 'female muse'." -- Ethics "These engaging essays by American Feminists bring toether feminist philosophy, existential (...) phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. The editors provide an excellent introductory overview, making this an ideal book for courses in feminist theory and philosophy and modern French thought." -- Philosopher's Index "The concerns raised in this volume are substantial.... a solid addition to the canon of American feminist philosophy." -- Philosophy and Literature "... a forum for feminist appropriations of existential and post-structuralist philosophy." -- Canadian Philosophical Reviews Marking a radical shift in the traditional philosophical separation between muse (female) and thinker (male), The Thinking Muse revises the scope and methods of philosophical reflection. These engaging essays by American feminists bring together feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. (shrink)

Canadian theorists and philosophers are recognized internationally for their contributions to normative debates about citizenship, multiculturalism, and nationalism. The superb essays collected here reflect a broad range of contemporary political and philosophical issues: liberalism and citizenship; equality, justice, and gender; minority rights and identity; nationalism and self-determination; and the history of political philosophy.

In the 1990s a rise of populist or regionalist parties in Western democracies has challenged the ruling centrist consensus.1 There are, however, only a few similarities between them. Thus it is impossible to equate, e.g., Austria's Jörg Haider or France's Jean-Marie Le Pen with Canada's Preston Manning. Diverse political cultures produce different political figures, programs and ideologies. When all is said and done, Manning's Reform Party remains idiosyncratically Canadian, and it is necessary to examine the Canadian context within (...) which it arose in order to understand it. Generally speaking, the Reform Party offers little to traditionalists, while its “populism” often…. (shrink)

The contributions of George Grant, Harold Innis, André Laurendeau, Marcel Rioux, Charles Taylor, and Pierre Trudeau to the political traditions of French and English Canada.

This volume contains ten chapters, each of which takes up a different question in contemporary moral or political philosophy. The volume has three parts: meta-ethics, issues in freedom and autonomy, and contemporary political philosophy. In the meta-ethical section, the chapters address issues concerning acts and their value, the plausibility of aggregation and counting with respect to the value of human lives, and the role of moral character in causing and explaining moral behavior. In the second section, the chapters take up (...) questions about the connection between moral imagination and a plausible account of integrity, the connection between autonomy and rights to property, and the difficulties facing internalist accounts of autonomy. In the final section, the chapters address issues concerning feminist critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, the limits of liberalism and communitarianism, the importance of understanding Rawls's social contract as a contract for institutions, and the morality of nationalist movements. These chapters reflect a cross-section of the issues concerning value that are of contemporary scholarly interest in Canada and the United States. (shrink)

An intriguing work that considers the shared tradition of Canadian political philosophy.

This is a collection of Canadian legal decisions, primarily from the Supreme Court of Canada, along with international cases that have bearing on Canadian law. The selected cases raise and respond to current and controversial issues in political and legal philosophy. Cases have been edited to present key legal principles and methods of judicial reasoning in action, showing not only what was decided but also how the decisions were made. Topics include: constitutional law, fundamental freedoms, equality rights, civil (...) and criminal responsibility, and sovereignty. This new fifth edition adds over two dozen new cases, including new sections on Indigenous issues and international law. A helpful glossary of common legal terms has also been added as an appendix. (shrink)

This is a collection of Canadian legal decisions, mostly from the highest court of the land, that raise and respond to central issues in political and legal philosophy and social ethics. All the issues raised by these cases are current and controversial. They include: the scope of judicial review and legitimate powers of the courts; separation of powers; the nature and scope of rights of speech, association, Aboriginal rights, and legal protections in criminal prosecution; equality and its pursuit in (...) a free and democratic society; autonomy and its protection; the nature of legal responsibility in criminal and tort law; and legitimate punishment. This edition takes into account the many changes that have occurred in our court's interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Twelve new cases have been added, as has a new section on "Group Self-Determination" that takes into account important changes in Aboriginal rights. Many of the cases from the previous edition have been re-edited and slightly expanded, with "follow up" cases included to reflect how they are now interpreted. (shrink)

This article examines the possibility of establishing a Department of Peace (DOP) as a Department of the Government of Canada. The topic has been introduced in Parliament twice, as Bill C-447 in 2009 and as Bill C-373 in 2011, without any further actions beyond the formal First Reading. The introduction of the bills could only happen on the basis of significant support among Canadians. At present efforts to introduce the DOP continue, although in somewhat muted form. Based largely on oral (...) interviews, this article assesses the potential for establishing a DOP in the context of the Canadian peace tradition as well as global developments. It concludes that a DOP has great potential to move the peace agenda forward but that, in view of the priorities of the current government and the general mood in Canadian society, it is not realistic to expect a DOP to be implemented at present. (shrink)

The author is one of Canada's most respected thinkers on the moral and philosophical foundations of responsible government and Confederation. This book offers a study of political science over the years through the intellectual lens of her career.

Although canon-formation is, as Lecker suggests, a product of rhetoric and textual choices of critics, it is also a product of economic forces, political conflicts, and cultural expectations of coherence, “order,” and unitary explanation. Conditioned by some or all of these, an essay ostensibly skeptical of canons, as this one appears to be, can find itself nevertheless contributing to the thing it questions. In attempting to attribute the formation of a single national canon to a specific period , to a (...) specific and allegedly homogeneous group of actors , and to a specific social phenomenon , Lecker’s essay becomes another constructor of canonical text and theory. Behind its arguments that a canon suddenly came into being are fairly precise assumptions not only about “Canadian critics” but also about what constitutes canonicity, and about the relative legitimacy of canonicity claims. “At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon,” his essay begins . Is a school curriculum the only possible context for the attainment of literary “legitimacy”? Can there be no canon if a literature has no curriculum, education publishers, or “academic critics,” or if it has not been institutionalized as an “independent” subject? Frank Davey, chair of the department of English at York University, is the author of From There to Here: A Guide to English Canadian Literature Since 1960 , Surviving the Paraphrase , Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics , and Reading Canadian Reading . He is also the editor of Open Letter and the on-line magazine Swiftcurrent. He is currently working on a study of nationalist ideologies in Canadian fiction entitled National Arguments. (shrink)

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient (...) for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly. (shrink)

Canada, as one of the three Allied nations collaborating on atomic energy development during the Second World War, had an early start in applying its new knowledge and defining a new profession. Owing to postwar secrecy and distinct national aims for the field, nuclear engineering was shaped uniquely by the Canadian context. Alone among the postwar powers, Canadian exploration of atomic energy eschewed military applications; the occupation emerged within a governmental monopoly; the intellectual content of the discipline was (...) influenced by its early practitioners, administrators, scarce resources, and university niches; and a self-recognized profession coalesced later than did its American and British counterparts. This paper argues that the history of the emergence of Canadian nuclear engineers exemplifies unusually strong shaping of technical expertise by political and cultural context. (shrink)

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to (...) transform relationships between Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. (shrink)

Canadians have relatively few binding national myths, but one of the most pervasive and enduring is the conviction that the country is doomed. In 1965 George Grant passionately defended Canadian identity by asking fundamental questions about the meaning and future of Canada’s political existence. In Lament for a Nation he argued that Canada – immense and underpopulated, defined in part by the border, history, and culture it shares with the United States, and torn by conflicting loyalties to Britain, Quebec, (...) and America – had ceased to exist as a sovereign state. Lament for a Nation became the seminal work in Canadian political thought and Grant became known as the father of Canadian nationalism. This edition includes a major introduction by Andrew Potter that explores Grant’s arguments in the context of changes in ethnic diversity, free trade, globalization, post-modernism, and 9/11. Potter discusses the shifting uses of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” and closes with a look at the current state of Canadian nationalism. (shrink)

Do we have a genuinely Canadian bioethics – and not only a practice of bioethics in Canada? This question, and this paper, are about the connection between bioethics and the actual healthcare, research, and public health experiences of Canadians. In addressing it, I am inspired by the philosophy of pragmatism that stresses the importance of everyday experience as a starting point for ethics, and of human flourishing as a goal for ethics. Through this lens, an ideal Canadian bioethics (...) is one that is rooted in the lived experiences of Canadians; it reflects the ideal of flourishing projected by Canadian individuals, including their views on their political communities. However, it is unclear if a full-fledged Canadian bioethics has taken shape given increasingly uniform scholarship worldwide that sets expectations about the kinds of moral problems worth investigating and the kinds of solutions to be adopted. In the spirit of thinking about this question, I discuss aspects of Canadian society that could shape the development of a Canadian bioethics: the existence of competing Canadian political narratives, the distinctiveness of Canadian healthcare systems and healthcare experiences, the commitment of Canadians to certain values and aspirations, the institutional and procedural aspects of the Canadian public sphere, the challenges of increasingly uniform scholarship across geographic and national contexts, and the practical obstacles to developing a Canadian bioethics. These challenges that Canadian bioethics faces are likely relevant internationally for all contexts in which socially shaped moral problems are discussed and solutions envisioned. (shrink)

It is startling to realize that Canadian literature was canonized in fewer than twenty years. Here is how it happened.At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon. In 1957, the publishing firm McClelland and Stewart introduced its mass-market paperback reprint series entitled the New Canadian Library. It allowed teachers to discuss the work of many Canadian authors who had never been (...) the subject of formal academic study. This New Canadian Library was truly “new”: prior to its conception, there was no “library” in use. There were no Canadian classics. Northrop Frye recalls that at that time the notion of finding a classic Canadian writer remained but “a gleam in a paternal critic’s eye.”1Frye’s comment must be placed in context: he was remembering the efforts that produced the first Literary History of Canada in 1965. In T. D. MacLulich’s words, its publication “gave a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of Canadian writing.”2 It made a Canadian canon seem possible; to many, it made the canon seem real. With the advent of this history, the institution called Canadian literature was born.3 1. Northrop Frye, “Conclusion,” in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2d ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck et al., 3 vols. , 3:319.2. T. D. MacLulich, “What Was Canadian Literature? Taking Stock of the Canlit Industry,” Essays on Canadian Writing 30 : 19; hereafter abbreviated “WWCL.”3. My use of the term “Canadian literature” applies to English-Canadian literature; the canonization of French-Canadian, or Québecois literature, invokes another story and another set of political imperatives that cannot be adequately treated within the scope of this discussion.4. John Guillory, “Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate,” ELH 54 : 483. Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of several critical studies, including On the Line , Robert Kroetsch , and An Other I , and coeditor of Essays on Canadian Writing, the multi-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works , and the eight-volume Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors . Lecker is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian canon. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples encounter restrictions on their modes of reasoning and account-giving within democratic sites of negotiation and deliberation. Political theorists understand these restrictions as forms of exclusion related to what theorist Iris Young has called the ‘internal exclusion’ of subordinated perspectives and theorist James Bohman has referred to as the ‘asymmetrical inclusion’ of such perspectives. ‘Internal exclusion’ refers to ways in which actors are formally accepted into decision-making processes, only to find their perspectives disqualified due to informal but no less (...) pervasive criteria of exclusion. ‘Asymmetrical inclusion’ refers to the undue burdens placed on marginalized peoples to persuade dominant communities. It is argued in light of these problems that more inclusive institutions as well as the cultivation of an ethos of receptivity will be necessary for genuine inclusion. I argue that this focus on enriching dialogue can mischaracterize the nature of disagreement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.Disagreement does not only arise between opinions or discourses that can be articulated and judged, but also at a deeper level, between the background assumptions against which practices of articulation and judgment are understood. Territorial state sovereignty, I argue, is a background understanding that can render sites of democratic negotiation inhospitable to Indigenous claims. I conclude that when thinking through Indigenous equality and autonomy, theorists should be attuned to the sites and conditions of dialogue that might serve to reinscribe relations of domination and exclusion. (shrink)

This book explores the ways that international politics is a form of interspecies politics, one that involves the interactions, ideas, and practices of multiple species, both human and nonhuman, to generate differences and create commonalities. While we frequently think of having an international politics "of" the environment, a deep and thoroughgoing anthropocentrism guides our idea of what political life can be, which prevents us from thinking about a politics "with" the environment. This anthropocentric assumption about (...) class='Hi'>politics drives both ecological degradation and deep forms of interhuman injustice and hierarchy. Interspecies Politics challenges that assumption, arguing that a truly ecological account of interstate life requires us to think about politics as an activity that crosses species lines. It therefore explores a postanthropocentric account of international politics, focusing on a series of cases and interspecies practices in the American borderlands, ranging from the US-Mexico border in southern Texas, to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, to Isle Royale, near the US-Canadian border. The book draws on international relations, environmental political theory, anthropology, and animal studies, to show how key international dimensions of states-sovereignty, territory, security, rights-are better understood as forms of interspecies assemblage that both generate new forms of multispecies inclusion, and structure forms of violence and hierarchy against human and nonhuman alike. (shrink)

This paper takes what has been termed the “epidemic of obesity” as the point of departure to examine the way in which political economic factors intersect with diet and nutrition to determine adverse health outcomes. The paper proposes several concepts to better understand the dynamics of the “foodscape” – institutional sites for the merchandising and consumption of food. These include the concepts of “spatial colonization” and “pseudo foods.” With a focus on critical dimensions of the contemporary “foodscape,” principally supermarket merchandising (...) practices, as well as trends in other food vending operations, the paper explores incentives that motivate capital to “spatially colonize” the foodscape with aggressively promoted high fat/high sugar “pseudo foods.” The paper reports on extensive research on trade industry publications as well as data collected through onsite investigations of supermarket practices of the three largest Canadian retail supermarket operations. In addition, current merchandising practices of convenience chain store operations and some non-traditional food vending sites are examined. In concluding, it is argued that the rapidly evolving interdisciplinary debate around the obesity crisis would benefit considerably from the insights to be gained from political economic analysis of retail food industry practices and trends. (shrink)

A growing number of political and legal theorists deny that there is a widespread duty to obey the law. This has lent a sense of urgency to recent disagreements about whether a state’s legitimacy depends upon its ‘subjects” having a duty to obey the law. On one side of the disagreement, John Simmons, Robert Paul Wolff, David Copp, Hannah Pitkin, Leslie Green, George Klosko, and Joseph Raz hold that a state could only be legitimate if the vast majority of its (...) subjects have a duty to obey the law. On the other side, M.B.E. Smith, Jeffrey Reiman, Kent Greenawalt. (shrink)

The university is situated within white colonial projects that underpin the nation in the UK, US and Canada. While the institutional whiteness of universities reflects these structural conditions of whiteness in society, it is also more flexible and dynamic in the present, reflecting both national and transnational racial politics. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 and student movements calling on universities to be accountable for their ties to slavery and colonialism have made this connection visible. (...) In this context, this paper examines how racial politics affects postracial whiteness in the university, using two cases from a British and Canadian university, respectively, and drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2007;, 2019) work on whiteness and the university and David Theo Goldberg’s (2015) theorization of the postracial. (shrink)

In this article, I make the case for—and begin the task of—examining the role of nation branding in the philanthropic sector. Using a series of cases drawn from Canadian organized philanthropy, I explore the ideological work that philanthropic nation branding does, as well as the social and political implications of this phenomenon. I bring critical theories of nation and national identity together with Marxian-inspired theories of capitalism—particularly those that foreground the racial and colonial dimensions of capital accumulation—to illuminate the (...) nationally embedded contradictions at the core of organized philanthropy in Canada. Specifically, I focus on how racialized and colonial discourses of the nation are mobilized in philanthropic nation branding in ways that elevate and legitimize organized philanthropy as a contradiction-free mechanism for addressing racial and colonial inequities in Canada. In doing so, philanthropic nation branding obscures the explicitly racial and colonial processes of accumulation that produce the philanthropic wealth powering much of the sector, thereby reinforcing an ahistorical Canadian nation brand. Through this analysis, I illustrate the importance of centering race and national identity in critical work on the political economy of philanthropy, organizational branding, and the ethics of philanthropy as a social policy mechanism in Canada, as well as other national contexts. (shrink)

Three Canadian institutional animal care and use committees were observed over a 1-year period to investigate animal ethical evaluation. While each protocol was evaluated, the observer collected information about the final decision, the type of protocol, and the category of invasiveness. The observer also wrote down verbatim all verbal interventions, which were coded according to the following categories: scientific, technical, politics, human analog, reduction, refinement, and replacement. The data revealed that only 16% of the comments were devoted to (...) the 3 explicit ethical categories and that most of the comments were technical. However, the analysis revealed that ethical concerns were implicit in both scientific and technical comments; either ethical norms had been translated into scientific and technical language, or some of the scientific and technical comments had an impact on the ethical treatment of animals. The results are discussed in relation to previous nonobservational research that identified potential pitfalls and bias in animal ethical evaluation. (shrink)

This paper examines evidence regarding neoliberalization of the social organization of Canadian food safety from a series of documents produced in response to the Canadian listeriosis outbreak in 2008. The outbreak is described, then interpreted within a neoliberal context, where: (1) neoliberalism operates as an ideology (2) that enables a socio-political and economic strategy within (3) a project pursued by coalitions seeking to consolidate power through (4) a process of neoliberalization. Following Gramsci’s work on power, it is argued (...) that food safety serves as an attractor, organizing consent within a neoliberal context. Testimony before a parliamentary subcommittee, official reviews, an independent investigation, food inspection records, and media reports have been examined to identify the key factors associated with the outbreak and the process of neoliberalization. The events associated with the outbreak are described first, as activities and practices in organizational settings (governance, sanitation, and production), and secondly, as components in a food production network where consent is organized around food safety. (shrink)

This work examines the development and performance of federal independent regulatory bodies in Canada in the period up to 1979, with particular attention to the operation of legislative schemes that include executive review and appeal powers. The author assesses the impact of the exercise of these powers on the administrative law process, and proposes new models for the generation, interpretation, implementation, review, and enforcement of regulatory policy. The study includes a series of representative case studies based on documentation and extensive (...) interviews with individuals drawn from government, agencies, and other parties, including counsel for public interest groups. This enables author, writing from her experience as a participant-observer embedded in the public interest legal sector, to draw on the experiences and perspectives of a broad range of participants in the regulatory process, including but not limited to those dealing with the regulated energy, transportation, communications, and foreign investment sectors. Legal principles identified as emergent in leading judicial decisions in administrative law are used to assess the powers and practices used in executive reviews and appeals. The author finds those powers and practices to be flawed and proposes changes. The proposed models are designed to accord with emerging legal principles and avoid flaws of the types identified in the review and appeal provisions. This work, written under contract with the Administrative Law Project of the Law Reform Commission of Canada, formed one part of a comprehensive study of administrative law at the federal level in Canada. (shrink)

One central objection to philosophical defences of liberal neutrality is that many neutrally justified laws and policies are nonetheless discriminatory as they unilaterally impose costs or confer unearned privileges on the bearers of a particular conception of the good. Call this the false neutrality objection. While liberal neutralists seldom consider this objection to be a serious allegation, and often claim that it rests on a misunderstanding, I argue that it is a serious challenge for proponents of justificatory neutrality. Indeed, a (...) careful examination of recent French and Canadian laws which impede the members of cultural minorities from freely practising their religion reveals that the state can hide its discriminatory aims by cloaking the policies it enacts in neutral language. In order to avoid the problem of false neutrality, I contend, liberal neutralists should defend a combination of neutrality of justification and neutrality of aim and operationalize neutrality of aim through a practical test that has been a defining feature of American jurisprudence on religious freedom in the last thirty years: the general applicability requirement. (shrink)

Whether the food movement is most likely to transform the food system through ‘alternative’ or ‘oppositional’ initiatives has been the focus of considerable scholarly debate. Alternative initiatives are widespread but risk reinforcing the conventional food system by supporting neoliberal discourse and governance mechanisms, including localism, consumer choice, entrepreneurialism and self-help. While oppositional initiatives such as political advocacy have the potential for system-wide change, the current neoliberal political and ideological context dominant in Canada poses difficulties for initiatives that explicitly oppose the (...) conventional food system. As such, some argue that the food movement requires convergence between alternative and oppositional initiatives. In this paper, we investigate convergence using survey results from 143 food movement organizations in four Canadian provinces. Results based on cluster analysis and descriptive statistics on organizational discourse, activities and visions of sustainable food systems demonstrate convergence around neoliberal discourse and governance mechanisms. Localism and consumer education characteristics are particularly prominent, with a majority of respondents describing their organizations as ‘local’, engaging in consumer education activities, and stating the importance of consumer education activities, indicating convergence around alternative, rather than oppositional, initiatives. While convergence around these discourse and strategies may limit the transformative potential of the food system when interpreted as neoliberalisation of the movement, such a reading does not demonstrate their full potential, as survey results also indicate trends of transformative visions of change and political engagement, particularly at the municipal level. This research demonstrates that the movement can work simultaneously within, and opposed to, the conventional food system, and provides understanding of both neoliberal leanings and the politics of the possible of the food movement. (shrink)

According to Stephen Macedo, ‘[liberal], democratic politics is not only about individual rights and limited government, it is also about justification … political justification … understood politically.’ ‘Political justification,’ he asserts, ‘is a core liberal goal.’ Gerald Gaus, similarly, writes that the ‘idea of public justification is at the heart of a contractual liberalism.’ Very many other contemporary political philosophers believe that the politics of a liberal polity must be justifiable to its citizens. In what follows I shall (...) seek to understand the basis for such a belief and, in particular, to expose two possible sources in the views of Locke and Kant. Neither source, I shall argue, provides any warrant for the demand in question. First the bald claim—that the politics of a polity needs justifying—must be unpacked. By way of initial clarification I shall say something about, respectively, ‘justification’ and ‘politics.’. (shrink)

What happens when the world changes in ways that make Canada's physical capital, natural resources, and geography - once the ultimate competitive advantages - less important than knowledge, information, technological know-how, and human capital? What happens to Canadians? In A State of Minds Thomas Courchene examines the political structures that link local, provincial, and federal governments and challenges many longstanding beliefs about how society should be organized and financed. While focusing on Canadian competitiveness in a global economy, Courchene shows (...) us how an open federal state like Canada can achieve both economic prosperity and social justice. Always provocative, Courchene blends compelling analysis and reasoned insight with a prescription for change: To stay ahead of the competitive curve and protect the Canadian way of life, Canada must become a "state of minds.". (shrink)