Reforming the electoral system of Metropolitan Toronto: doing away with dual representation

Abstract: Since its creation in the mid-1950s, the elected council of Metropolitan Toronto was composed of politicians who had first been directly elected in their home municipalities (Scarborough, North York, etc.)- Over the years, various observers had noted the representational weaknesses of this arrangement, but little had changed by the mid-1980s. Metro concerns often appeared to be overlooked in the interest of local concerns, and lines of accountability from Metro to the public were weak. During the period 1986–88 a provincial government initiative led to a joint review of Metro's electoral arrangements and to enactment of major procedural reforms. By the 1988 Ontario municipal elections a system for direct election of the Metro council was in place. The provincial government's approach to reform, a provincial-municipal task force, merits examination, for the municipal affairs ministry was able to bring reforms forward despite opposition from certain local government leaders. Reviewing this experience sheds light on some of the complexities involved in analysing representational options as well as in assessing the provincial relationship with Metro issues. Study of the reform process utilized here illustrates the ability of a committed provincial government to place discussion of Metro change firmly on the political agenda. Reflection on the procedures and representation issues of the mid-1980s is now timely as the Ontario government is developing a yet larger entity, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), which encompasses about 40 per cent of the province's population. Sommaire: Depuis son etablissement vers le milieu des annees 1950, le conseil elu du Toronto metropolitain etait compose de politiciens qui avaient d'abord ete elus directement dans leur propre municipality (Scarborough, North York, etc.). Au fil des annees, divers observateurs ont note les faiblesses de ce systeme de representation, mais tres peu changea jusqu'au milieu des annees 1980. Les preoccupations de     

The Voice of the Community in Private Law Discourse

Formalist private lawyers, with their view of law as an autonomous sphere and their emphasis upon allocative rules, tend to approach the issue of the harmonisation of private law in Europe with the following question: are the substantive rights and remedies of private individual actors sufficiently similar within each of the Member States to allow for the unification of autonomous private legal systems. Here the issue is essentially one of terminology. While sceptical voices maintain that formal private law is also a more complex matter of interrelated procedures and practices, many formalists conclude that whilst the terms of rights and remedies may differ slightly throughout Europe, there is sufficient substantive convergence to allow for harmonisation. However, lawyers of a sociological persuasion who see private law as being contingent upon society Ð a process reflexively and recursively facilitating economic activities and responding to social change Ð consider harmonisation to be dependent upon the harmonisation of market practices themselves. This paper, one of the most subtle of sociological contributions, tackles this issue with an innovative eye to the increasing blurring of the distinction between public and private concerns. The voice of Europe is the voice of a political collective and theoretically, under the once sacrosanct paradigm of the public/private divide, should not be heard within the 'individualistic' sphere of private law. However, just as national private law judges are generally responding to social concerns and are seeking to integrate collective voices within a once 'atomised' realm, so too are they taking note of the political voice of Europe: attempting to respond to the desire for integration and harmonisation within their jurisprudence.     

High time for high tech? China’s program for an indigenous high technology capability

Chinese policymakers have increasingly turned their attention to developing high technology. The state has, through a number of central directives, attempted to promote the production and commercialization of high tech products. Yet, the level of Chinese high technology products remains fairly low. This article argues that the state, especially in trying to recrease Silicon Valley in China, has learned the wrong lessons from the West’s experience. In order to promote the development of high tech, the state needs to build up a more adequate science and technology infrastructure and to define and protect property rights.     

Indexing civil commitment in psychiatric emergency rooms.

A reliable prototype index, Three Ratings of Involuntary Admissibility (TRIAD), was developed to reflect the way psychiatric emergency room clinicians apply legal criteria for involuntary commitment. The interrater reliability coefficients--Pearson's r--of the TRIAD system for rating patients are 0.94, danger-to-self score; 0.89, danger-to-other score; 0.77, grave-disability score; and 0.89, total-admissibility score. TRIAD scores accounted for 82 percent of 89 disposition decisions in two metropolitan county hospital psychiatric emergency rooms. Study results indicate that (1) psychiatric emergency room clinicians shared constructs of danger to self, danger to others, and grave disability; (2) these constructs are reliably applied in actual cases; (3) TRIAD is a valid reflection of these constructs; and (4) case disposition is predictable from the severity of the patient's status with regard to these criteria.