Inroads: A Journal of Opinion articles from January 1 1998

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion archives from January 1 1998

From Stephane Dion to Claude Ryan, from Daniel Johnson to Jean Charest, from Plan B to Plan A.
January 1, 1998... As we go to press (in April), citizens of Quebec and Ontario are coping with spring floods. They mark the end of a winter marked by a spectacularly awful ice storm. Spring has also brought an end to the spectacularly awful tactics pursued by...

Excerpts from Claude Ryan's note to the "Friend of the Court".
January 1, 1998... January 31, 1998 The following notes reflect the point of view of a man of action whose public career has been identified with promotion of a renewed Canadian federalism within which Quebec could develop in solidarity with the other...

Diagnosing the (Jean) Charest effect.
January 1, 1998... Jean Charest's takeover of the Quebec Liberals will have certain effects that tend to be overlooked. One, I think, will be a quite healthy one. Charest's Eastern Township roots should serve him well on the language issue. These roots include an...

Letter from Dhaka.
January 1, 1998... John Richards is an editor of Inroads and regularly teaches in a small university in Bangladesh. This "letter" was started in Dhaka and completed in Vancouver just in time for publication. I. Observations of a Foreigner This city holds...

English Canadian media and Quebec: a one-sided verbal civil war.
January 1, 1998... Gerald Leblanc is a journalist at La Presse. He is an Acadian who, after completing his studies in New Brunswick, taught in Quebec City, Buffalo and Halifax until he took up journalism in 1970. In recent years he has specialized in writing...

Excerpts from the Inroads-L discussion group.
January 1, 1998... From the moment the Calgary Accord was announced last fall, the just-established Inroads-L discussion group on the Internet has reverberated with vigorous exchange on constitutional and language issues. With about 500 postings so far, it has...

Does Canada need a new electoral system: among the political institutions inherited from our British past is the system by which we elect people to office.
January 1, 1998... Among the political institutions inherited from our British past is the system by which we elect people to office. This electoral system... is still commonly referred to by a metaphor whose origins lie in the British passion for horse racing:...

Case for proportional representation in Canada.
January 1, 1998... Henry Milner is a political scientist living in Montreal and a co-editor of Inroads. He spent the fall of 1996 in New Zealand studying the implementation and effects of proportional representation. A bit of history The principles of...

Will Canada seriously consider electoral system reform? Women and Aboriginals should.
January 1, 1998... Donley T. Studlar is Eberly Distinguished Professor of Political Science at West Virginia University. He has published extensively on Canadian topics, including gender representation in legislatures and provincial cabinets. For some time,...

MMP (mixed member proportional) is too much of some good things.
January 1, 1998... Kent Weaver is a senior Fellow in the Government Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. His proposal for electoral reform is developed at greater length in the September 1997 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political...

Electoral reform is not as simple as it looks.
January 1, 1998... Richard S. Katz is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He has published widely on electoral systems and on political parties. His most recent book is Democracy and Elections, published by Oxford...

Alternative vote: an electoral system for Canada.
January 1, 1998... Tom Flanagan is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary. He was director of research for the Reform Party of Canada in 1991-1992. I agree with other contributors to this issue of Inroads that changing the federal...

How to renew Canadian democracy: proportional representation for the Commons, a Senate elected from single-member constituencies, and political financing by individuals only.
January 1, 1998... Tom Kent has been deeply involved for many years in Canadian social and economic policies. He is now a Visiting Fellow at the School of Policy Studies of Queen's University. It is now well over six years since the Lortie Royal Commission on...

Electoral system change in New Zealand: from Westminster plurality to Continental proportionality.
January 1, 1998... Peter Aimer recently retired as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies, University of Auckland, where he is now an honourary Research Fellow. He was active in the Electoral Reform Coalition, and has recently co-edited a major...

This time let the voters decide: the proportional representation movement in the United States.
January 1, 1998... Rob Richie and Steven Hill are directors of the Centre for Voting and Democracy (http://www.igc.org/cvd/). Richie is the executive director of the Center in Washington, D.C., while Hill is the west coast director in San Francisco. In...

Electoral system reform in the United Kingdom.
January 1, 1998... 1. I am indebted to Paul Wilder of the Arthur McDougall Fund at the Electoral Reform Society for advice and fact checking, and to David Farrell's book Comparing Electoral Systems (1997) for its excellent historical overview. This article is an...

Anglophones au Quebec: anglophones in Quebec.
January 1, 1998... The popular media is attracted to the extremes. It's not surprising, then, particularly if we have access to only English-language media, that we get a skewed picture of Quebec. While it's true that only some 7 percent of Quebec anglophones and...

Between a rock and a hard place: anglophone members in the Quebec National Assembly.
January 1, 1998... Garth Stevenson teaches political science at Brock University. He has just completed a book on the anglophone minority in Quebec politics, which will be published by McGill-Queen's University Press. Canadian experience with linguistic...

Quebec writers in translation: the key issue is and always will be language.
January 1, 1998... Stephane Dion (1) In a world in which we all were fluently bilingual, this section would be superfluous. Inroads readers would be familiar with Pierre Foglia, Fernand Dumont and Leon Dion. However, in the world as it is I fear the great...

Breakfast in bed.
January 1, 1998... "Le petit dejeuner au lit," La Presse, August 12, 1995; translated by John Richards. He didn't want me to go to his place in Kanesatake... "Are you crazy? They're going to kill me if they learn that I had a journalist over to my...

Semi-balcony, semi-happiness.
January 1, 1998... "Demi-balcon, demi-bonheur," La Presse, September 13, 1997; translated by John Richards. The wallet was there on a box. Melissa picked it up furtively, looking around her. Had someone seen her? Now that she had it in her hand, she didn't...

Due to ignorance and convenience.
January 1, 1998... "Par ignorance et commodite" La Presse, October 25, 1997; translated by John Richards. In France, at the moment, they're trying a man for a crime against humanity. What's different this time is they're trying neither a monster, nor a...

French, a language in exile.
January 1, 1998... "Le francais, une langue en exil," Raisons communes. (Montreal: Boreal, 1995); translated by John Richards. Making French the language of daily use in North America presents a paradox; one cannot sustain the use of French based simply on...

Defence of French, defence of a society.
January 1, 1998... "Defense du francais, defense d'une societe," Le Devoir. May 26-27, 1988; translated by John Richards. How did causes and effects get so tangled up? Our brothers, francophones outside Quebec, have lost confidence in us to the point that...

Decay of civil society in contemporary Quebec: causes and consequences.
January 1, 1998... Gary Caldwell is a sociologist and farmer living in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Is there a healthy civil society in Quebec, and if so, how is it faring? The question is important because social development occurs where civil society...