Good Government? Good Citizens?
Good Government? Good Citizens?
Courts, Politics, and Markets in a Changing Canada
Good Government? Good Citizens? explores the evolving concept of the citizen in Canada at the beginning of this century. Three forces are at work in reconstituting the citizen in this society: courts, politics, and markets. Many see these forces as intersecting and colliding in ways that are fundamentally reshaping the relationship of individuals to the state and to each other.
How has Canadian society actually been transformed? Is the state truly in retreat? Do individuals, in fact, have a fundamentally altered sense of their relationship to government and to each other? Have courts and markets supplanted representative politics regarding the expression of basic values? Must judicialized protection of human rights and minority interests necessarily mean a diminished concern for the common good on the part of representative politics? To what extent should markets and representative politics maintain a role in the protection of human rights and minority interests? Will representative politics ever hold the public trust again?
Good Government? Good Citizens? responds to these questions. It does so by examining the altered roles of courts, politics, and markets over the last two decades. It then examines a number of areas to gauge the extent of the evidence regarding transformations that have occurred because of these changing roles. There are chapters on the First Peoples, cyberspace, education, and on an ageing Canada. The book concludes with reflections on the “good citizen” at the dawning of the new century.
Of particular interest to professors and students of law and political science, Good Government? Good Citizens? will appeal to anyone interested in the changing face of Canada and its citizens.
Of particular interest to professors and students of law and political science, Good Government? Good Citizens? will appeal to anyone interested in the changing face of Canada and its citizens.
In Good Government? Good Citizens? W.A. Bogart provides a thoughtful analysis of the drama of social and political change in Canada over the last several decades.
Bogart offers an important thesis about the power of judges and rights that demands further inquiry both in Canada and elsewhere in the West.
Any reader who would cares about the future of democracy in Canada would do well to read this broad-ranging and thought-provoking book.
This book is a timely, thoughtful, and provocative exploration of many of the important issues facing contemporary Canadian society. It is a useful and vibrant contribution to our continuing dialogue regarding law, politics, and the marketplace. Whatever the reader's perspective, it will not disappoint.
Bogart’s well-written and important book, drawing on a diverse body of scholarship and evidence, traces the transformations in Canadian law and politics over the past twenty years. His analysis of the rise of judicial power, the disarray of electoral politics, ‘the market abounding,’ the place of First Nations, our treatment of children, and prospects for cyber-citizenship is ambitious, insightful, provocative, and timely.
This remarkably thorough and wide-ranging book charts, frequently in exquisite detail, an array of important changes in Canada’s society, economy and polity. Notwithstanding this breadth, it has a clear central concern: Canadians’ loss of trust and confidence in representative government and the related rise of courts and markets as the institutions in which fundamental choices are made ... For Bogart, this message is ethically and politically troubling ...
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: The Society that Was
1 Before the Transformation
Part 2: Courts, Politics, and Markets in a Society in Transition
2 The Ascendance of Courts
3 Representative Politics in Disarray
4 Chasing Choice: The Market Abounding
Part 3: Some Examples of a Changing Canada
5 Aboriginals: Two Row Wampum, Second Thoughts, and Citizens Plus
6 Citizens in Cyberspace: The Internet and Canadian Democracy
7 The Youngest Citizens and Education as a Public Good?
8 Evermore Citizens Who Are Senior: An Ageing Canada Conclusion: "The Dance of Adjustment"
Notes
Index
