University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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Environmental Organizations and Climate Change Policy Capacity: An Assessment of the Canadian Case
No full textThe term ‘policy analytical capacity’ is used within the policy analysis literature to describe the ability of organizations to produce valuable research and analysis on topics of their choosing. As the scientific evidence becomes more clear, and various actors in society continue to point out that governments around the world will need to play a lead role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, there is good reason to believe that environmental policy makers and civil society stakeholders are going to require a high level of policy analytical capacity in order to create effective policies. This article examines the existing analytical capacity of three representative examples of Canada’s most important environmental policy research organizations - two governmental organizations and one NGO - in order to provide information about the status of each organizations’ research capacity and the effect this has on overall government policy-making capability in the face of climate change challenges
Population Health and Health Reform: Needs-Based Funding in Five Provinces
No full textA key component of provincial health reform plans in the 1990s (and directly linked to the process of health system regionalization) was the attempt to move funding for service delivery to new models based on some notion of ‘population needs’. The intent of these models was to fund newly created regional health authorities relative to the health service needs of the population as determined by demographic, socio-economic and other measures of the population. This was done in the belief that it would facilitate the reorganization of service delivery to focus on ‘upstream’ determinants of health rather than merely treating ‘downstream’ illness and injury. This paper, part of a larger multi-faceted examination of provincial health reform decision makers involving researchers from across the country, summarizes and compares the experiences of five provinces (AB, SK, ON, QC and NF). Drawing on lengthy interviews with policy makers, political actors and stakeholder organizations the paper to the strong institutional and interest-based barriers that have blunted efforts to reform system financing at the regional level. Overcoming these barriers continues to be a key challenge for advocates of reorienting the delivery of health services to upstream determinants of population health
Justice as Economics in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Get PDFThis article explores the role of money in Aristotle’s understanding of justice. In the Politics, Aristotle famously critiques money; a common unit of measurement representing goods for exchange, it is the source of the unlimited pursuit of wealth that is unnatural and an obstacle to the good life. I argue, however, that Aristotle’s discussion in the Politics is not exhaustive of his views on money. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s discussion of distribution, rectification and reciprocity shows that money is crucial to justice. Money initially binds citizens into a single polity, allowing an equality to emerge where none is apparent
Gawain’s Struggle with Ecology: Attitudes toward the Natural World in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Get PDFAs a poem largely dependent on the relationship between humans and the natural world, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides the ecocritic with an excellent case study in medieval attitudes toward the non-human world. The poet presents conflicting attitudes toward the non-human world, with Gawain asserting militaristic dominance and Bertilak acting as steward. The existence of these competing attitudes shows that medieval thought on the place of the non-human world was a complex philosophical issue. As such, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight presents evidence relevant for the on-going debate over Lynn White's "Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.
Mining Westerns: Seeking Sustainable Development in Pale Rider and McCabe and Mrs. Miller
No full textMcCabe and Mrs. Miller illustrates how Western U.S. legal history works for and against community building and the sustainable development ideals behind it. The film inspires an ecocentric postmodern reading for several reasons. First the film rests on a naturalist philosophy and takes a connection between dying men and a dying landscape even further than Ride the High Country, since the film’s hero, McCabe (Warren Beatty), literally dies in the snow, his body buried in a blowing drift while the rest of the town of Presbyterian Church attempts to put out a fire burning down their house of worship. The film also grapples with the same “big guys” versus “little guys” conflict found in other mining films, catalyzing with an altercation between McCabe and a mining corporation from Bear Claw, the town down the mountain from Presbyterian Church, but in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the community nearly fails and is either bought or destroyed by a corporate mining company. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, eco-resistance destroys corporate gunslingers. But McCabe and Mrs. Miller illustrates the cost of that vigilante justice: the death of a hero and the community he attempts to build
Creation Stories: Myth, Oil, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Get PDFEuro-American myths of Eden, the frontier, and the Promised Land continue to inform environmental literature and, therefore, mainstream environmental discourse. Laden with complex and conflicting social values, these myths undermine conservation policy at the expense of human and non-human communities
A Profile of B.C. Provincial Policy Analysts: Troubleshooters or Planners?
Get PDFDespite the existence of a large body of literature on policy analysis, empirical studies of the work of policy analysts are rare, and in the case of analysts working at the sub-national level in multi-level governance systems, virtually non-existent. This is especially true in many countries, for example, the U.S., Germany, and Canada, all federal systems with extensive sub-national governments but where what little empirical work exists focuses on government at the national level. This research note reports the findings of a 2008-2009 survey aimed specifically at examining the background and training of provincial policy analysts in Canada, the types of techniques they employ in their jobs, and what they do in their work on a day-by-day basis. The profile of sub-national policy analysts working in British Columbia presented here reveals several substantial differences between analysts working for national governments and their sub-national counterparts, with important implications for policy training and practice, and for the ability of nations to improve their policy advice systems in order to better accomplish their long-term policy goals
Fair Opportunity to Participate: The Charter and the Regulation of Electoral Speech
Get PDFIn his 1999 article, Libman v. Quebec (A.G.) and the Administration of the Process of Democracy under the Charter: The Emerging Egalitarian Model, Colin Feasby suggests that the Supreme Court of Canada endorsed an egalitarian approach to democratic participation and the regulation of electoral speech. More specifically, Feasby argues that the Court has adopted a model that draws from the philosophy of John Rawls; in particular, his supposedly egalitarian idea of the fair value of the equal political liberties. In this article, I critically examine this egalitarian thesis in the context of the Court’s more recent 2004 decisions in Harper v. Canada (Attorney General). While I agree that the Court has adopted an approach similar to the philosophy of John Rawls, I nevertheless reject the conclusion that this is an egalitarian model of democratic participation. Instead, I argue that both Rawls and the Court may be more clearly understood as endorsing a liberal fair opportunity model of elections. This liberal model rejects the egalitarian ideal that all citizens are to enjoy equality of influence in political decision making. The focus, instead, is on the liberal ideal of procedural fairness, and ensuring that all citizens have an equal opportunity or chance to influence political outcomes
Beyond Sex and Saxophones: Interviewing Practices and Political Substance on Televised Talk Shows
Get PDFThe goal of this paper is to assess the contribution of infotainment and entertainment television talk shows by comparing political interviews on these TV shows with current affairs programs. Few political scientists have examined political interviews, in general, and political interviews on entertainment outlets, in particular. Moreover, these studies are often focused on the sorts of topic participants talk about in such programs. On the basis of literature developed by scholars in sociolinguistics and journalism, we expand the scope of our study to the assessment of questions asked by the interviewers and answers provided by the politicians. We perform a quantitative content analysis of political interviews to compare the behavior of these speakers on infotainment and entertainment programs with those on current affairs programs. Our results show that hosts on infotainment programs are no less rigorous than their counterparts on information programs, especially when the interview is centered on policy issues. We conclude that scholars interested in these questions should turn to studies in sociolinguistics and journalism to build a relevant analytical frame
Introduction: "Eleven Windows into Post-Pastoral Exploration"
Get PDFConvened by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and held in Brussels from 14 to 17 May 2008, the “Poetic Ecologies” Conference was the first ecocritical/ecopoetic conference to be ever held in Belgium. This four-day international gathering, without privileging any bioregion or poetic tradition in particular, aimed to include poetic voices from all over the Anglophone world, from Canada to Australasia. However, in keeping with its title, the “Poetic Ecologies” forum also resolutely sought to place the genre of poetry―from its more conventional to more experimental forms—at the forefront, be it through the voices of poetry scholars or currently active poets. Within the framework of an ecocritical paradigm that is still very much a work in progress, the Conference thus strove to give as much attention to the “poetry/poetics” component as to the “ecological/ecocritical” one in its exploration of the multiple and changing forms of ecological and ecocritical consciousness in English-language verse. In the process, the participants not only repeatedly interrogated the complex concept of ecology as such, exploring what actually constitutes ecologically-engaged poetic practice; besides, they also engaged with the equally complicated issue of “Text as Nature versus Nature as Text” and sought to shed light on the dynamic, shifting―and therefore also ever elusive—interrelationships between ecological texts and textual ecologies, between the systems of Nature and those of Culture