Canada, like most other western industrial nations, faces major policy challenges in the late twentieth century. It must manage conflict among domestic interests over the distribution of wealth while responding to international economic pressures affecting the ability of the economy to generate wealth. It must maintain a sense of political community in a context of demographic diversity. And it must develop mechanisms of mediation between individual citizens and the state in the face of a rising “rights consciousness,” out of which rights are asserted not only to demand protection from the state but also, and increasingly, to make claims upon...

Until 1982 Canada presented, in cross-national perspective, a constitutional anomaly. If it is true that “legal ‘sovereignty’ resides in that combination of bodies with power to effect changes in the fundamental law” (Dellinger 1984: 284), then for the first 115 years of its existence Canada was not, in formal terms, a sovereign nation. Because Canadian federal and provincial governments could not agree how the “power to effect changes in the fundamental law” should be allocated among themselves, they lived by default under a regime in which the written components of the Canadian constitution could formally be amended only by the...

Health care is Canada’s social policy success story. The Canadian national health insurance program enjoys broad popular support and, increasingly, international acclaim. It provides universal, comprehensive first-dollar coverage of medical and hospital services, while incurring a rate of cost escalation that is moderate in international perspective (Table 3-1). Canadian health care expenditures (public and private) increased 70 percent faster than GDP from 1960 to 1985, while such expenditures increased 90 percent faster than GDP in OECD nations on average, 120 percent faster in Britain, 130 percent faster in the United States, and 200 percent faster in Sweden (Schieber and Poullier...

One of the most remarkable phenomena of North American industrial relations is the divergence between the Canadian and the American experience in the past twenty-five years. Despite the considerable integration of the two economies, the significance in Canada of U.S. -based firms and unions, and the early emulation of U.S. industrial-relations models in Canadian public policy, the Canadian labour movement has maintained its organizational strength during a period in which organized labour in the United States has been in precipitous decline. In 1961 union density (union membership as a percentage of all wage and salary earners) stood at 30 percent...

Like all other western industrial nations, Canada faced major challenges of economic adjustment in the late twentieth century. The globalization of markets, the rise of regional trading blocs, the increasing competitiveness of the Asia-Pacific region, the wide fluctuations of commodity prices of which the oil price shocks of the 1970s are the starkest examples, and the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates all conspired to shift international market shares and to increase economic uncertainty. In comparative perspective, Canadian economic performance since the 1960s, at least on some indicators, has been impressive. The growth of real GDP...

In the 1970s all western industrialized nations were confronted with the necessity of dealing with the economic shocks of two rapid escalations in international oil prices. In countries such as Canada and the United States, which were producers as well as importers of oil, the effects of these price shocks were twofold. On the one hand, they disrupted the energy infrastructures of national economies, compounding the problems of economic adjustment discussed in the preceding chapter. They also, however, presented opportunities for domestic oil producers and issues of redistribution.

In Canada the effects of the oil price shocks within the energy...

The issue of minority language rights has roots deep in Canadian history. It was the subject of an ambiguous compromise between anglophones and francophones at the time of confederation, flared into conflict in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and lay smouldering in Canadian policy and politics until the 1960s. Since then, it has been a matter of ongoing conflict in the legislatures and the courts, and occasionally in the streets. In this most recent period of conflict the historic compromise, which has come under increasing pressure as a result of demographic and cultural change, has been revisited and...

The Canadian tolerance of ambivalence and genuis for moderation were severely tested in the 1970s and 1980s. Conflict erupted along the traditional fault lines of English-French relations (regarding constitutional change and minority language rights), regionalism (regarding oil and gas policy), and Canada-U.S. relations (regarding the Free Trade Agreement). And new tensions emerged. The political system struggled to meld a constitutional charter of rights with the principle of parliamentary supremacy—a combination that, though nobly creative, could only have the effect of raising and at least occasionally frustrating the “rights consciousness” of its citizens. The labour movement struggled to reconcile the...