Policy and Politics in Canada: Institutionalized Ambivalence

At a time when Canadian political institutions are being fundamentally questioned, this book provides a comparative perspective on the distinctive features of the Canadian policy process which have enabled conflict to be resolved in the past. In comparison with other Western industrial nations, Canada’s policies in some arenas appear as models of workable compromise; in others, they stand out as marked by continuing irresolution. In this first book-length treatment of Canadian public policy in comparative perspective, Carolyn Tuohy focuses on constitutional change, health care delivery, industrial relations and labor market policy, economic development and adjustment, oil and gas policy, and minority language rights. What distinguishes Canada’s characteristic policy process is its quintessential ambivalence: ambivalence about the appropriate role of the state, about definitions of political community, and about individual and collective values and conceptions of rights. Embedded in the country’s political institutions, it has deep roots in Canada’s relationship to the United States, its history of English-French tensions, and its regional diversity. Examining, in particular, the delicate federal-provincial division of power and the legislative-judicial relationship, Tuohy discusses how the constitutional debates of the 1980s and 1990s are testing Canada’s institutions to resolve conflict. Author note: Carolyn J. Tuohy is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.