Policing disorder: Calgary Transit peace officers and the Alberta law enforcement framework

An analysis of current trends suggests that the delivery of policing services in Canada is fundamentally shifting. In 2011, the Province of Alberta established the Law Enforcement Framework, which includes Calgary Transit peace officers who are responsible for the safety and security needs of transit customers and employees. This article examines the role of Calgary Transit peace officers and makes recommendations for their incorporation into a broader model of nodal governance in order to ensure that the Calgary Police Service maintains a legitimate, coordinating role for the provision of public safety in the City of Calgary.     

W.B. Gallie,T.H. Marshall and the contested concepts of fairness and citizenship: examining the parameters of debate in Newport City Council’s Fairness Commission and citizens’ views on fairness

The paper examines Newport City Council’s Fairness Commission’s (NFC) understanding of fairness, alongside a survey of Newport citizens’ views on fairness. These views focus on two parameters of debate identified by the NFC – equality versus differential treatment, and the accountability and transparency of decision-making – reflecting competing interpretations of the political concept of fairness, and as explored by W.B. Gallie. Moreover, these contested interpretations also have a profound bearing on post-1945 debates about citizenship instigated by T.H. Marshall. While many contemporary policy-recommenders and politicians reject Marshallesque social rights to citizenship, dismissing these rights as encouraging so-called passive conceptions of citizenship emphasising unconditional individual entitlements to local services, the views of Newport citizens tend to broadly support these rights. These rights are distinct from ‘active’ conceptions, emphasising the values of interdependency and reciprocity, and citizens’ obligations to positively participate in community life which then underpin conditions for receiving entitlements.     

The Challenge of Strengthening Nonprofits and Civil Society

The Winter Commission Report was centrally concerned with improving the performance of state and local governments. Since the issuance of the commission’s report in 1993, the delivery of services by state and local government has been substantially changed by the growing role of nonprofit organizations in providing public services and representing citizen interests. As a result, state and local governments and nonprofit agencies are faced with complex governance challenges. The central argument of this paper is that despite the dramatic changes in the relationship between government and nonprofit organizations in recent years, the key tenets of the Winter Commission report—the need for improved training and education, greater transparency and accountability, more emphasis on performance, and improved citizen engagement—remain deeply relevant in improving the governance of the public services in an increasingly complex policy process and service delivery system at the state and local levels.     

Salience,Food Security,and SNAP Receipt

Household food insecurity status in the United States is ascertained by a battery of close‐ended questions. We posit that the monthly nature of benefit receipt from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) creates experiences of food hardship, which become salient in the context of SNAP receipt, and in turn exert influence on the response to food security questions. We test this hypothesis by examining answers to a 30‐day food security module in relation to when SNAP benefits are received. We find that for SNAP households near the end of or at the beginning of the benefit month, the probability of being classified as food insecure increases by 11 percentage points, over a baseline of 42 percent. We also find that the probability of responding affirmatively to any of the first five items in the module increases during this time. We discuss the importance of these findings for the estimation of food security and its implication on program evaluation.