Canadian prime ministers in the house of commons: Patterns of intervention

This paper explores the parliamentary activity of six Canadian prime ministers from St Laurent to Mulroney. Employing Hansard, each parliamentary utterance by a prime minister from 1949 to 1993 has been coded into one of four categories: answers to questions, speeches delivered, statements made and other interventions. Voting records have also been coded. Employing this database, the analysis compares and contrasts the prime ministers in terms of their political personalities and explores the overall scope and character of prime‐ministerial activism in the House throughout the past 40 years. Canadian profiles are compared with already existing British data in order to test generalisations concerning the diminishing presence of prime ministers in parliaments in Canada and Britain.     

The Public Trust as an Evolutionary Doctrine: How the Trust can be Used to Allege an Injury Under Standing

The public trust doctrine provides protection of public access to resources, such as navigable waterways, protected under the public trust. The doctrine has evolved over time to protect natural resources such as tidelands, submerged waterbeds, wildlife, and climate change. Juliana v. United States is a groundbreaking trust case that moves the application of the trust to the management of climate-change regimes. Although the doctrine has been criticized as a façade, forestalling real recourse for change, it can be used to show standing for current and future generations. Accordingly, Juliana outlines how this doctrine is not just evolutionary it is also revolutionary.     

Thoreau in the 21<Superscript>st</Superscript> Century

Laura Dassow Walls’s superb biography of Henry David Thoreau is the most important study of this author thus far in the twenty-first century. Beautifully written, and packed with rich detail and subtle interpretation, Walls’s book teaches us much that is new about Thoreau and, furthermore, prompts us to think more deeply about and reassess this complex person and challenging writer—a writer whose range and mass of published and unpublished work, produced during his all too brief life (he died at age 44), is astounding. Thoreau is an inspiring radical voice for personal change and social reform, yet he is, at the same time, extremely self-centered and highly skeptical about the capacity of readers and audiences to bring about the transformations that he advocates.     

Industrial Policies and Development Cooperation for a Learning Society

In the countries that have been most successful in development over the past half century, government played a central role (the development state), especially through industrial policies that promoted manufacturing exports. But changes in the global economy mean that African countries won’t be able to rely on the manufacturing export-led growth model. This paper analyzes the reasons for the success of that model, and shows how the same outcomes can be achieved through a multipronged strategy, a comprehensive development plan that pays particular attention to learning and employment.