“Who Does What” in Ontario: The process of provincial-municipal disentanglement

Abstract: Since the election of the Mike Harris Conservative government in 1995, Ontario has been the site of some of the most turbulent provincial-local relations ever experienced in a Canadian province. The province's agenda has included restructuring and realigning the responsibilities and resources of municipal governments and asserting control over the financing and governance of Ontario's education system. The sheer size of this agenda and the interconnections between its two main elements have made the quest to simplify or disentangle provincial-local relations impossible to achieve. This article documents events as the Conservatives moved from their “Common Sense Revolution” election manifesto to develop and implement a plan for disentanglement of provincial and local government services. It also identifies themes and potential lessons that emerge for government agenda setting and intergovernmental relations. Sommaire: Depuis que le gouvernment conservateur de Mike Harris fut élu au pouvoir en 1995, 1'Ontario a été aux prises avec des relations provinciales-locales qui sont parmi les plus turbulentes qu'une province canadienne n'ait jamais subies. La province a entrepris de restructurer et réaligner les responsabilités et les ressources des gouvernements municipaux et d'établir son contrôle sur le financement et la gérance du système d'éducation de l'Ontario. L'envergure même de cet agenda et les liens qui relient ses deux principaux éléments ont rendu impossible l'idée de simplifier ou de démêler les relations provinciales-locales. Cet article examine le déroulement des événements, lorsque les Conservateurs, partant de leur déclaration électorale concemant la eAvolution du bon sens, ont élaborté et mis en oeuvre un plan visant à démêler les services gouvemementaux provinciaux et locaux. II définit également des thèmes et des lecons qui pourraient être utiles lorsqu'un gouvernement veut formuler un plan d'action, ou lorsqu'il s'agit de relations intergouvernementales.     

Targeting Federal Assistance to Local Governments in Rural and Low-Income Areas, 1972-1983

Two questions have predominated policy discussions about theallocation of federal aid to rural local governments duringthe last two decades: whether rural areas were getting their"fair share" and whether the aid was appropriately targetedto deserving communities. An analysis of data for 1972–1983shows that although the position of rural governments apparentlyimproved during the 1970s, the gains were principally due tosharply increased loans to rural areas, while urban areas benefitedfrom increases in grants-in-aid. Conversely, the aid reductionsof the early 1980s, by cutting into loans, which are less valuablethan grants, appear to have hurt rural areas less than urbanareas. A modest amount of income-targeting in federal developmentfunds was evident in the early 1970s, but it deteriorated duringthe following decade. By 1983 counties with higher incomes andmore satisfactory levels of public services received higherlevels of aid than places that might have been considered moreneedy. While the reasons for the generally diminished targetingare not clear, several possibilities, including the increasingimportance of loans as a federal aid mechanism, are considered.     

Reviews

Timothy J. Colton & Robert C. Tucker (eds), Patterns in Post‐Soviet Leadership. Boulder, San Francisco & Oxford: Westview Press, 1995, ix + 245 pp., £40.95 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Jeremy Lester, Modern Tsars and Princes: The Struggle for Hegemony in Russia. London & New York: Verso, 1995, xiii + 307 pp., £34.95 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Robert W. Orttung, From Leningrad to St Petersburg: Democratisation in a Russian City. Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Press, xiii + 332 pp., £33.50 h/b.

Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr & Jeffrey Paul (eds), Liberalism and the Economic Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, xv + 319 pp., £16.95.

Mario I. Blejer & Fabrizio Coricelli, The Making of Economic Reform in Eastern Europe: Conversations with Leading Reformers in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, v + 156 pp., £35.00.

George Blazyca & Janusz Dabrowski (eds), Monitoring Economic Transition: The Polish Case. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, xiii + 175 pp., £30.00.

Laszlo Csaba, The Capitalist Revolution in Eastern Europe: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Systemic Change. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, x + 342 pp., £49.95

Robert V. Daniels, Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse. Lexington Mass., Toronto: D.C. Heath, 1995, xxviii + 387 pp., No price.

David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb, London: Penguin Books, 1994, xii + 586 pp., £7.99.

Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime. London: Macmillan, 1995, xiv + 277 pp., £40.00.

Janusz Bugajski, Nations in Turmoil: Conflict and Cooperation in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Westview Press, 1995, xiv + 265 pp., £44.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Dennis P. Hupchick, Culture and History in Eastern Europe. London: Macmillan, 1994, xvii + 226 pp., £24.00.

David Kirby, The Baltic World 1772–1993. Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London and New York: Longman, 1995, viii + 472 pp., £16.99.

Payam Akhavan & Robert Howse (eds), Yugoslavia, the Former and Future: Reflections by Scholars from the Region. Washington: The Brookings Institution, and Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995, xxviii + 188 pp., £25.75 h/b, £9.95 p/b.

Sabrina Petra Ramet & Ljubi?a S. Adamovich (eds), Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, x + 502 pp., £37.00.

Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945–1990. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995, xvi + 443 pp., £42.50 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995, xvii + 340 pp., £35.00.

Tom J. Winnifrith, Shattered Eagles, Balkan Fragments. London: Duckworth, 1995, 171 pp., £20.00

Milenko Karanovich, The Development of Education in Serbia and Emergence of Its Intelligentsia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, x + 270 pp., £25.00.

James Dingley & Arnold McMillin (eds), Occasional Papers in Belarusian Studies. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1995, viii + 73 pp., No price.

Christopher Smart, The Imagery of Soviet Foreign Policy and the Collapse of the Russian Empire. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995, 180 pp., £47.95.

Hafeez Malik, Soviet‐Pakistan Relations and Post‐Soviet Dynamics. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994, x + 383 pp., £47.50.

Theodore Taranovski (ed. and trans.), with the assistance of Peggy McInerny, Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? Washington, DC, and Cambridge, England: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1995, xiii + 436 pp., £40.00.

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The will theory of rights: A defence

Hart's will theory of rights has been subjected to at least three significant criticisms. First, it is thought unable to account for the full range of legal rights. Second, it is incoherent, for it values freedom while permitting an agent the option of alienating his or her capacity for choice. Third, any attempt to remedy the first two problems renders the theory reducible to the rival benefit theory. My aim is to address these objections. I argue that will theory has been made vulnerable due to misinterpretation. The theory has been characterized as placing great stress on liberty rights (or claim-protected liberties), whereas it is powers that are central, and hence not choice but control. My argument does, however, depend upon appealing to an extra-legal notion — the hypothetical contract — but I argue that this is consistent with the main aim of a theory of rights.     

Building Social Capital in City Politics: Scope and Limitations at the Inter-organisational Level

This article explores the relations between voluntary organisations and the city administration in two British cities through an analysis of the impact of social capital. It provides a corrective to the dominant individual-level approach by offering an organisational-level analysis of social capital. The evidence suggests that inter-organisational social capital is not distributed equitably within cities. Voluntary organisations that regularly engage with a city administration can build networks of trust and information flows that outstrip those available to other voluntary organisations. Although it is easier to build social capital within a sector, such as the voluntary sector, building it in tight networks with voluntary organisations would appear to be an achievable goal for a city administration – but such networks do not guarantee an enhanced overall confidence in the local political system.     

Australia and the Emergence of the Modern Two-Party System

Although the Australian party system is accepted in some literature as a "classic" example of a two-party system, information about how this system came about does not feature prominently in international studies on political parties. It is here argued that Australia indeed blazed the trail for the two-party model by being the first to link parliamentary organisation directly to a mass electorate.     

Social divisions in caring

This article is concerned with the perspectives on caring developed by academic feminist researchers in Britain over the last decade. It notes how these perspectives defined caring in terms of the unpaid domestic and personal services provided through the social relations of marriage and kinship to those who found it hard to meet their own care needs. The article draws on Black feminist and disabled feminist perspectives, together with recent autocritical work by academic feminist researchers, to unpack this concept of care. It focuses on what the concept obscures about the social divisions that mediate women's experiences of care. It examines what is eclipsed and who is excluded from feminist perspectives on caring which are grounded in the experience of giving care on an unpaid basis within kinship networks based on marriage.     

Revitalizing public management training in the Americas

The decade of the 1980s signalled major changes within public administration and development-oriented activities. As a consequence of the internationalization of the agendas of practitioners and academics working in these areas, there is today a growing convergence among public policy, public management, public administration and political science. Given the complexity of the public sector cross-nationally, what has become necessary in public management education is the design of programmes that meet specific needs and priorities and which are responsive to very different national settings. This particular case study is centred around one endeavour to achieve more effective interfacing between theory and practice, in the teaching of public management and the design of development programmes in the United States (US). It is based on an assessment of a 10-year co-operative endeavour between the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and the US Agency for International Development. The outcomes of this project provided not only leverage for important changes in the teaching programmes of schools concerned with international management education but also built a new relationship between government and a non-governmental organization through the contacting out of management development work.