Volume 4, No. 2 Abstracts

Contributing to Democracy
Carole Pateman
Download PDF

A popular claim in the 1990s is that citizens? standing and rights require a contribution on their part. Little attention has been given to the question of what should count as a ?contribution.? The prevailing assumption is that only employment is what counts, and this assumption is linked to attacks on dependence, and a shift to an economic view of democracy and citizenship. Self-governing citizens are being reconceptualized as consumers and owners, especially owners of property in their persons. When democratization is linked to universal employment, some long-standing problems about democracy are obscured. For example, the problems of the refusal to count women?s unpaid work as a contribution, even as structural adjustment is increasing its value, and the structure of authority in workplaces become marginalized. At a time when economic policies are eroding the conditions for democracy, the political question must be asked whether citizens? standing should be contingent upon a contribution.

Human Rights and Ethnocultural Justice
Will Kymlicka
Download PDF

Liberal theorists have typically assumed that the protection of individual human rights is sufficient to ensure justice between ethnocultural groups in a multiethnic state. Will Kymlicka discusses three areas where traditional human rights principles are unable to protect national minorities from injustice: (a) internal migration and settlement policies; (b) redrawing the boundaries, or reducing the powers, of internal political subunits controlled by the national minority; and (c) language policies. In each of these areas, a state can effectively disempower a minority without abridging any of the individual civil and political rights of the group's members. To prevent these injustices, traditional human rights principles need to be supplemented with group-specific minority rights. Indeed, in the absence of these minority rights, the enforcement of human rights principles may exacerbate ethnocultural injustice. Kymlicka suggests that debates about the universality of human rights would be improved if they paid greater attention to these issues of ethnocultural justice.

Reassessing the Paradigm of Domestication
Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff
Download PDF

The struggle of Indigenous peoples to gain recognition for their view of treaties is frequently a source of conflict between Indigenous and state parties, both in Canada and abroad. In this article, the author challenges the primitivist assumptions which continue to inform modern treaty jurisprudence, perpetuating the supremacy of state interpretation. The article begins by questioning the orthodox approach to relations between European powers and Indigenous peoples. Emphasis is placed on the process of domestication through which states aimed to subvert the position of Indigenous peoples as peoples, often ignoring or unilaterally amending treaties. This process resulted not only in the absorption of vast territories traditionally held by Indigenous peoples into the legal and political systems of the colonizers, but also in the emergence of a paradigm by virtue of which the factor of domestication was endowed with absolute explanatory value. The article also explores the views held by Indigenous peoples themselves on the treaty issue. It is argued that these views rely on a perspective recalling that of the Law of Nations era. Finally, the author addresses the relationship between law and culture in the treaty context. She argues that by defining the rights of Indigenous peoples in culturalist terms, one tends to blur the differences between Indigenous peoples and minorities. In contrast, when recognition of rights is derived from a relationship involving sovereign entities, the question of Indigenous peoples? rights is placed on another plane. The significance of this dichotomy clearly appears from a comparison of domestic efforts, such as the activities of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, with international ones, especially the UN Study on treaties between Indigenous peoples and states.

Persons/Peoples/Polity:Interrogating Neonationalism In Quebec
F.C. DeCoste
Download PDF

A Review of Joseph H. Carens, ed., Is Quebec Nationalism Just? Perspectives from Anglophone Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995).

Giving Real Effect To Equality:"Eldridge v. British Columbia (AttorneyGeneral) and Vriend v. Alberta
Martha Jackman
Download PDF

The Supreme Court, The Environment, and The Construction Of a National Identity: R. v. Hydro-Québec
Jean Leclair
Download PDF

After a very brief analysis of the Hydro-Québec decision (the only important decision rendered this past year by the Supreme Court on a division of powers issue), this paper will address the following three questions. First, from an internal perspective – that is, from a strictly legal point of view – is the decision reconcilable with the case law relating to the federal criminal law power? Second, will the extensive federal power recognized by the Court enhance the quality of environmental protection in Canada, in other words, what will be the practical effect of the decision? Third, from an external perspective – that is, from a social policy point of view – what purposes are served by the decision?