Through the use of oral and written history, this thesis examines forces and factors contributing to key events and defining phases in the history of regional planning in British Columbia. Regional planning, which emerged in BC in the late 1940s in response to the need to address problems related to urban growth in the Lower Mainland, has taken on a number of forms over the past half-century. During this time the regional approach to planning has been introduced as a means of addressing land-use questions and servicing challenges in rural and urban areas, addressing conflicts over resource use and implementing sustainability objectives. This thesis divides regional planning in the province into three main phases. The first phase (1940s to 1970s) is characterized by the introduction of regional planning legislation, regional planning bodies and processes in response to rapid growth and development. The second phase (late 1970s to 1980s) is marked by the rescinding of regional district planning powers and other setbacks to the regional planning system imposed by the government of the day. The third phase (1990s) is a time of rebirth and redefinition of regional planning priorities and processes in the face of increasing challenges related to urban growth and resource management. While some links to exogenous influences are identified, analysis of key themes and trends in BC's regional planning history reveals the major roles the province's geography, economy, system of governance, politics, and the people involved in regional planning processes have played in shaping regional planning policy, process, and practice. Based on this historical review a number of recommendations for future research and direction are proposed.

Sexuality education is a contested arena in which multiple sexual discourses compete for dominance. These discourses have the potential to empower or marginalize students (and teachers) based on constructed social identity categories. The purpose of this study was twofold: to determine which sexual discourses are reflected in British Columbia's secondary-level instructional resource packages (IRPs) that address sexuality issues, and a selection of their recommended learning resources; and to explore how the sexual discourses inherent in these documents construct or perpetuate social inequalities through the positioning of sexual subjects according to gender, sexual orientation, age, race, class and physical (dis)ability. The selected IRPs were Career and Personal Planning, 8-12; Science 8- 10; Biology, 11-12; Home Economics, 8-10; and Home Economics 11-12. The selected recommended learning resources were AIDS: Allie's Story (video); Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life, Eighth Edition (textbook); and The Living Family: A Canadian Perspective (textbook). The relevant curricula were subjected to a critical discourse analysis informed by both critical feminism and a pragmatic, Foucauldian theory of discourse. This analysis was carried out using sexual discourse categories developed by Alexander McKay (1998) and a set of open-ended questions derived from several sources. The results of the analysis suggest that the selected curricula and recommended learning resources adhere for the most part to Romanticist and/or Progressive sexual discourses, employing sub-discourses of danger, control and individual responsibility. Related to these discourses is the texts' marginalization of the reader or viewer, primarily on the basis of sexual orientation and gender, but also significantly on the basis of age, race, class and physical disability. It is argued that the documents examined have the potential for perpetuating stereotypical identity constructions and social inequalities through the lens of sexuality. Recommendations for future curriculum development are included.

This article examines early twentieth-century British "Uranian" same-sex sexualities as a distinct entity from other labels for homosexuality. British sexologists, feminists, and other radical socialist/anarchist reformers invoked scientized versions of mysticism and Asian religions to conceptualize different, though intersecting, meanings for the Uranian. Historians of sexuality, however, tend to conflate the term "Uranian" with the other various and conflicting medico-scientific concepts circulating at the time, such as "homosexual," "sexual invert," and "intermediate sex." Overstating the slippage between terms, however, obscures the significance of Uranianism in the history of same-sex eroticism, and reinforces a dichotomy between spirituality and modernity. The Uranian discourses examined here epitomize a "progressive" historical moment that elaborated the scientific origins for the spirit, soul, and a divine will in the constitution of modern sexual/spiritual subjects. In many ways, Uranianism challenged the late nineteenth-century medical-sexological discourses that demarcated the homosexual as a pathological "type" by creating a more fluid understanding of sexuality through the interplay of Edwardian critiques of scientific materialism with New Age ideas about the mind, psyche, and spirituality. That is not to suggest that Uranianism offered an "alternative" (homo)sexuality that was disentangled from pathological discourses; on the contrary, the Uranian discourses implicitly consolidated the "homosexual type." Tracing the genealogy of Uranian sexuality through three case studies illuminates a modern moment when reformers attempted to create fluid sexualities. We find that Uranianism complicates our understandings about the supposedly dominant role of medical-scientific discourses in the construction of early twentieth-century British (homo)sexuality.

This thesis studies the history of the Capital Regional District (C.R.D.), the regional authority for the twelve municipalities and two electoral areas called Greater Victoria on Vancouver Island, from the birth of regional planning in the 1950’s to stagnation in the 1980’s and 90’s. It seeks to understand what happened in the CRD and what lessons we can learn from Victoria that will add to the existing knowledge of regional planning. Was it the structure of the CRD, the enabling legislation, the process followed in creating official regional plans, local politics, or a combination of factors that prevented the CRD from fulfilling its promise? By understanding the CRD history we are able to identify problems and suggest changes that could begin the planning process once again. The CRD is studied through personal interviews, newspaper research, secondary sources, and a custom survey of politicians and planners, to determine the political and professional atmosphere surrounding the CRD over its entire history. Other examples of regional planning or, more specifically, urban-centred regional planning, are studied to set the CRD within the spectrum of types of regional authorities. From the beginning there has been little municipal support, either politically or professionally, for regional planning in the Capital Region. In addition there is the continuing lack of trained professional planning staff in many of the regional municipalities. Thus, the CRD’s calls for planning merely fall upon deaf ears. The final problem has been with the regional authorities themselves. The early CRPB planners may have demonstrated elitism since they were the only planners in the region and worked for what they thought was the ‘higher authority’. This apparent arrogance in pursuit of regional goals may have sown the seeds of the mistrust which the municipalities came to regard the regional planning efforts of the CRD. Municipal support withered and was weak in 1983 when the Province stripped Regional Districts of their regional planning powers; however, Saanich has demonstrated an increase in support for regional planning in recent years. However, the municipalities within the region still lack a proper forum and process to resolve regional land issues. Only the Province of BC can restore this through legislation.

The successful implementation of the Canada/British Columbia Agreement to Enhance the Employability of Social Assistance Recipients (the “SAR”, or Four Corner” Agreement) can be explained by a revised version of Mazmanian and Sabatier’s 1983 theory of implementation. This framework is also able to account for some of the limitations that the initiative faced. The analysis of the SAR Agreement is placed in the context of the on-going dilemma of work and welfare and in the evolving ideological climate in the B.C. welfare system from an ideology of redistribution, to one of liberal developmentalism, emphasizing opportunity before work. The case-study provides a history of the implementation of the SAR Agreement in B.C. at both the policy-formulation and field levels of government, and gives an overview of the agreement and its results. This information is gained through reports, government documents and interviews with officials involved in the SAR Agreement. Application of the revised theory of implementation to the agreement illuminates the ingredients critical to the success of the SAR initiative in British Columbia. Among the most important determinants of success were the intensive cooperation between federal and provincial agencies, the amount of discretion given to local officials when combined with the expertise and resources of those officials, the correct causal theory underlying most project designs, and the flexibility of the agreement respond to past successes and failures. The agreement was limited by the lack of general guidelines to provide officials with a sense of direction, by the possibility of conflicting goals of outside agencies, and by problems with the invalid causal theory underlying a few programs.

This thesis examines how one might evaluate the justice of educational resource distribution. It focusses on the criteria of institutional justice formulated by John Rawls: according to these criteria inequality in the distribution of resources is only allowed if it can be shown to benefit all groups, including 'the least favoured'. The thesis also demonstrates how qualitative and quantitative research methods can be combined in order to reach a more accurate and 'just' evaluation. The research, which was conducted at a private post-secondary English - language liberal arts institution in British Columbia for Japanese students, compares annual student growth in English, both before and after the implementation of a three-to-ten-month leveled, modular, mastery-learning program for entry-level students. The research also includes interviews to determine teacher attitudes about the previous and present programs and their effect on students. In both the qualitative and quantitative studies, program effects on high-, medium-, and low-entry ability students are looked at separately (in order to use Rawls' criteria). The context of the research is clarified with short summaries of issues around mastery learning, leveling versus tracking, and Japanese versus western education. The quantitative research finds that, contrary to teacher impressions, the mean improvement for students in the present program is not significantly different from that in the previous program. The qualitative research however, points out important justice implications not revealed by the other study. The thesis concludes that (1) there are some problems with using Rawls' criteria in an educational setting; (2) looking at program effects on three separate ability groupings can reveal trends having justice implications; and (3) assessments of the justice of educational resource distribution should attempt to triangulate with both qualitative and quantitative studies which attempt to answer the same question.

Underemployment is a much discussed but little researched topic. The thesis begins with a broad discussion of the theory and methodology underlying the recent research on underemployment. It then proceeds to a quantitative analysis of underemployment using data from the 1995 follow-up of B.C. college leavers from vocational, technical and two-year academic university transfer programs. The study finds that, overall, one third of B.C. college leavers were employed in jobs that did not require the level of education that they had attained. As expected, there were significant differences by field of study and subsequent occupation. The rate of underemployment among students from academic programs was eight times the rate of underemployment for students from vocational programs and twice that of students from career/technical programs. Additionally, almost a third of all college leavers were employed in Sales and Service occupations and roughly two-thirds of those were underemployed. Labour market segmentation theory provides the most useful theoretical explanation for these findings. The markedly uneven rates of underemployment experienced by college leavers in the core and peripheral sectors support the labour market segmentation perspective. In conclusion, underemployment is a useful, though limited construct. Such a measure should only be used in conjunction with other measures of employment outcomes like unemployment, salary and full/part-time employment status.

This thesis examines four communities in the Lower Fraser Basin (Burnaby, Richmond, Langley and Abbotsford), as a case study for examining the "ecology of environmentalism". I have compared two "low environmentalism" communities (Richmond and Abbotsford), and two which have a significantly larger field of environmental groups (Burnaby and Langley). The research included 43 interviews (37 with leaders of grassroots environmental groups and a mailout questionnaire which was sent to one leader of each of the 71 groups in the four municipalities (64% response rate). Together this research amounts to 82% coverage of all the environmental groups in the four municipalities. Using this data, I argue that the differences between the municipal areas are not very well explained either in terms of the themes in Resource Mobilisation Theory, in either of the major theories of social movements and the State, or in terms of standard demographic variables associated with environmentalism (community size, gender, income, education, ethnicity, or occupation). I have therefore used the themes of "civil society" and "public spheres" (Allario 1995; Calhoun 1996; Cohen and Arato; Fraser 1992; Habermas 1989; Walzer 1991) to compare the four municipalities. I suggest that the more holistic approach especially as proposed by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992), provides a better way of analyzing both the actions and the ecology of environmental groups in the Lower Fraser Basin.

This dissertation is an ethnography of the cultural politics of Indian/white relations in a small, interior British Columbia resource city at the height of land claims conflict and tensions. Drawing on the theoretical approaches of Nicholas Thomas (1994) and Raymond Williams (1977, 1980), I show how the power that reinforces the subordination of aboriginal peoples in Canada is exercised by 'ordinary' rural Euro-Canadians whose cultural attitudes and activities are forces in an ongoing, contemporary system of colonial domination. In approaching these issues through in-depth ethnographic research with both the Native and Euro- Canadian populations and in exploring the dynamics of cultural domination and resistance at the level of a local, rural community, this dissertation stands as a unique contribution to the ethnographic study of colonialism and Native/non- Native relations in Canada. The dominant Euro-Canadian culture of the region is defined by a complex of understandings about history, society and identity that is thematically integrated through the idea of the frontier. At its heart, the frontier complex consists of an historical epistemology - a Canadian version of the American frontier myth (Slotkin 1992) - that celebrates the processes through which European explorers 'discovered' and 'conquered' North America and its aboriginal inhabitants, . Central to this complex is the Indian/white dichotomy, a founding archetype in Euro-Canadians' symbolic ordering of regional social relations and in their private and public constructions of collective identity. Also central is the Euro-Canadians' self-image of benevolent paternalism, an identity that appears repeatedly in discourses of national history and Native/non-Native relations. Facets of the frontier complex are expressed in diverse settings: casual conversations among Euro-Canadians, popular histories, museum displays, political discourse, public debates about aboriginal land claims, and the town's annual summer festival. In each setting, these practices contribute to the perpetuation of relations of inequality between Euro-Canadians and area Shuswap, Tsilhqot'in and Carrier peoples, and in each setting area Natives are engaging in diverse forms of resistance. The plurality of these strategies of resistance, rooted in different cultural identities, biographical experiences and political philosophies, reflects the creativity in which new forms of resistance are forged and tested in public contexts of Native/Euro-Canadian interaction.

This thesis contains three empirical essays on the economics of house price dynamics. The first essay derives a forward-looking rational expectations house price model and empirically tests its ability to explain short-run fluctuations in real house prices. A novel approach to proxying imputed rents of owner-occupied housing, as a function of housing market fundamentals, is derived and combined with a housing market arbitrage relation to derive a present value model for real house prices. Tests of the rational expectations, nonlinear cross-equation restrictions reject the joint null hypothesis of rational expectations and the asset-based housing price model for quarterly, single-detached house prices in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, over the 1979-1991 sample period. The model fails to fully capture observed house price dynamics in two real estate booms but tracks real house prices well in less volatile times, suggesting that prices may temporarily deviate from fundamental values in real estate market upswings. The second essay develops and applies a test of the joint null hypothesis of rational expectations, and no risk premium in the Vancouver condominium apartment market. The results show that, on average, ex post house price changes move in the opposite direction than their rational expectation under risk neutrality. This essay also documents the predictability of excess annual condominium returns using lags of annual returns and the rent/price ratio, and quarterly returns with short-term nominal interest rates. It further shows that deviations of house price changes from their (risk neutral) rational expectation are both stationary and related to the stage of the real estate price cycle. The third essay examines whether a time-varying housing market risk premium can explain deviations in house price fluctuations from those predicted by the rational expectations hypothesis under risk neutrality. If homeowners are risk averse and housing price risk is not completely diversifiable then housing market efficiency implies that re turns to housing investment should be positively correlated with a premium for bearing risk. The first part of the essay shows that, in theory, the finding of negative slope co-efficients in tests of unbiased house price expectations under risk neutrality (in chapter 3) is attributable to omitted risk considerations if two conditions are satisfied: (1) the covariance between the risk premium and expected house price appreciation under risk neutrality is negative, and; (2) the variance of the risk premium is considerably larger than the variance of expected appreciation under risk neutrality. The second part of the essay uses a conditional capital asset pricing model to investigate whether predictable returns in the Vancouver housing market are time-varying risk premia. The empirical results are inconclusive.