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Attitudes about sovereignty among Quebec youth are well known, particularly in light of the movement's appeal to idealistic values and as an affirmation of the Québécois identity. It is assumed that those who support sovereignty must hold some negative opinion about the federalist structure; after all, they do aspire to break away from Canada. But that has not been adequately validated. The paper explores attitudes about federalism by reporting results from a survey of Quebec youth (18 to 34 years old) conducted in early 2006. The paper shows that when asked to indicate federalism's main disadvantage, respondents provided a wide range of answers with no structured or coherent pattern. The main reason for this attitudinal dispersion is a lack of need to consider attributes of federalism. This explains why the highest level of dispersion is found among: those least attached to Canada, who may regard the Canadian federalism system as remote to their personal lives; francophones, for whom sovereignty is a semi-default position that requires little justification and little thought; and those least exposed to news media, who are least susceptible to any mainstreaming effects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches the issue of the role of urbanization in American political development from a comparative-historical perspective. By comparing the role of urbanization in Canadian political development with that of the United States, we gain valuable new insight into the different roles cities can and do play in the erection of jurisdictional power between national and sub-national political domains. As centers of economic and political activity, cities play a crucial - but variable - role in national networks of prominence and power. Historically, this resulted in a disproportionate role for urban elites in Canadian and American national development. Given the incremental, local nature of 19th century American state formation, the current provincial-federal relationship in Canada might at first appear surprising, for example. The origins, and ultimate failure of, the American "states' rights" movement is equally surprising. The United States is both a less "urban" and more politically centralized society than Canada. Its origins, too, lie in the past. When Congress "nationalized" the near-west (trans-Appalachia), federal government took jurisdictional reign over what would be the majority of the nation's new state governments. American municipal governments were similarly subjugated to state jurisdiction, often via the Army and state guards. In Canada, city dwellers were both more powerful and their city governments were more autonomous in the scope and size of programs under their purview. In America, in sum, rural constituents exert inordinate power at the federal level via Congress, and particularly the Senate; Canadian federal government is more beholden to the provincial governments, which serve largely at the behest of their urban constituents. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the causes of declining political trust have been investigated extensively in the literature, much less empirical effort has been devoted to the study of its political consequences. This paper focuses on the decline of trust in Canada during the period 1984-1993, and on its effect on Canadian voting behavior. We build upon Hetherington’s (1999) work to explore the impact of political trust on the vote and on abstention in a multiparty electoral context. Multinominal logit estimations are performed using individual-level survey data from three Canadian federal elections. While distrust is shown to significantly affect electoral participation, thus acting as an alienating factor, the results indicate that decreasing trust acts more as a motivation to support third-party alternatives. The study further demonstrates that in a multiple party setting, "old-line" major parties electorally suffer from declining political trust, but some third parties benefit more from this phenomenon than others. In particular, the transition from a three- to a five-party system in the 1993 Canadian election and the Reform Party’s efforts to attract support from distrustful voters seem to have eroded the New Democrats? role as a vehicle of distrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the policy agenda's greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive countries in Canada and the U.S. It mentions that federal government focused on the risks of climate change. It states that sub-federal jurisdictions focused on enacting policies from emissions trading and carbon taxes to efficiency standards and renewable electricity fuel.

The article examines the theory and practice of federalism in Canada and compares it with American federalism. It states that Canada's decision to adopt the Charter of Rights influenced federalism in the same fashion as the U.S.' incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the 14th amendment. It examines the functions of the Canadian Charter and how it transformed unpopular policies to the minority claims.

Due to universal health care coverage, it is hypothesized that Canada will have less of a rural/urban disparity in health outcomes compared to the United States. It is also hypothesized that Canada's decentralized, executive federalism offers more opportunity for public action to address rural health if the political will is present. The evidence reveals that the rural/urban disparity on many health outcomes is just as significant in Canada as in the United States. Regarding public action, Canada has not had a significant federal presence in rural health issues due to the lack of executive will at the federal level. The United States has more public action at the federal level but the policy is fragmented. Subnational governments play an important role in shaping rural health, but more so in the Canadian provinces. It is concluded that the similarities in rural health outcomes and public reaction between the two countries is largely a function of the rural social and economic environment in which the respective federal systems operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the study of federalism and citizenship in Canada. It presents the normative and impirical implications to study the federalism. It further discusses re-introduction of administrative asymmetry in Canadian federal practice, assessment of democratic governance in federal systems and federalism in a multination context.

The article examines how federal principles, structures and practices affected the efforts of the two majority women's movements to make Canada a more women-friendly democracy. It surveys accounts of the effects of federalism on women's politics by practitioners and gender scholars. It also introduces several hypotheses derived from the literature outlining the possible gender consequences of federalism.

The article examines the process of state formation in Canada and Germany. It explains why the process of state formation should be perceived as a critical juncture during which the range of possible outcomes is extended for a comparatively limited amount of time. It explores the causal mechanisms that may account for the translation of contingency into federalism in Canada and Germany. It discusses the three layers of state formation.

One of the unintended but inevitable consequences of federal constitutions is the creation of transboundary waters, river basins that are shared among multiple states/provinces, and, in some cases, other countries, as well. The existence of transboundary waters creates difficulties for the riparian governments sharing them because they are locked in a common pool situation in which each government faces simultaneous and contradictory incentives: in their own interests, they are motivated to secure access to resource flows, but, in the collective interest, they must also conserve the resource stock. Managing such a situation requires collective action, and much has been written about the factors that are important in facilitating such collective action, such as the importance of shared interests, mutual trust, and the enforceability of intergovernmental commitments. However, in many basins there is a long history of intergovernmental cooperation in water management, and this history, in itself, has become an important factor shaping more recent water management efforts. Early efforts at transboundary water management focused mostly on either water apportionment or dispute resolution, and these early water management regimes have proven strongly path dependent, shaping more recent management efforts that have focused on water conservation. In other words, early institutional choices in transboundary water management, when water conservation was not a priority, have shaped transboundary conservation regimes now that water conservation is a priority, pointing to the importance of institutional path dependency as a factor in shaping intergovernmental cooperation. This argument is explored through a comparison of four distinct transboundary river basins in Australia, the United States and Canada. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How national governments interface with the IT industry can have an important influence upon the delivery of government IT projects, which in most advanced industrial countries will account for at least 1 per cent of GDP. Looking across seven countries (the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands and Japan) we characterize the power of the IT industry in terms of three variables: patterns of contractual relations, the largest firms? market and technical dominance, and the extent to which government retains IT expertise or ?intelligent customer? capabilities. We assess the performance of government IT in terms of three factors: the extent of catastrophic project failures or cancellations, indications of the price competitiveness of government IT contracts, and the relative modernization of government IT compared with the private sector nationally. Using a ?fuzzy-set social science? approach we argue that an overall index of corporate power viz a viz central governments shows a clear negative association with government IT performance. Where governments are weakly placed in relation to powerful IT corporations, long-run performance outcomes are less satisfactory. Our cases also illuminate the different ways in which governments can ensure and maintain more balanced relationships with the IT industry, which in turn will foster better long-run results in the design and operations of government IT systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]