Martin Buber's diagnosis of modern politics points to the disengagement of citizens from direct and personal encounters as a central contributing factor to the increasing politicization afflicting human life. Buber sees meaning situated in actual life with the world, with others, and with God. The living reality is encounter; living truth, hence, cannot be possessed, only actualized in mutual encounter. The importance of Buber's work to political problems lies in his ability to negotiate paradoxes in three cases: between being and becoming, between individualism and collectivism, between personal relationships and the real demands of an existent condition. In the first case, a radical openness to relation exposes human interlocutors to the surprising mutuality of genuine dialogue, hence allowing them to be changed by the encounter. Existential being is made present through encounter, but in doing so, interlocutors set towards a path to human becoming in dialogue. Social education, the embrace of social spontaneity through mutual encounter, resists the grip of propaganda over interhuman life by challenging and testing the "ready-made truths" often peddled in modern politics. In the second case, he contends that actual life cannot be found in the individual simply as individual, or the individual who surrenders himself to a collective. Human life,for Buber, is actualized in partnership. Hence, there is no presentness for the individual or the collective. This alienation leads to a situation where political illusion dominates - where real conflicts that invariably do arise between groups of people are obscured by "political surplus conflicts", conflicts that are exaggerated and possibly fabricated for the sake of politics. In the third case, people work towards transforming a shared existent condition by providing honest and direct address to persons - to confront the world in its presentness, rather than continuing to live under political illusions. Buber provides us a rebellious spirit who knows he cannot act alone. Buber's rebellious spirit understands that the most effective form action is immediate human togetherness, when genuine address is responded in kind. It is in the direct and immediate encounter, the genuine word between persons, that interhuman trust can weaken the presumed vice grip of distrust on human existence. Once people can dare to trust, they can once again renew actual life - a life of partnership.

Recent changes to campaign finance laws in Canada and the United States provide researchers with a unique opportunity for comparative studies on the effects of reform on fundraising at the grassroots level. In an effort to contribute to the understanding of these recent reforms the following comparative case study examines the effects of Bill C-24 (2003) and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 on the campaigns of one Canadian Member of Parliament and one American Congressional Representative. The study suggests that while the impact of the most recent American reforms has been somewhat exaggerated by scholars, changes to campaign finance laws in Canada have caused substantial change at both the national and grassroots level.

The federal government ethics regime is built on the premise that public service values emerge spontaneously from reflection, and in particular that democratic and ethical values are among these a priori values. This thesis is an examination of this premise. It includes as part of this examination an analysis of the modern emergence of an identifiable and bureaucratized ethics practice in the Canadian federal government, starting with a privy-council led initiative in 1995. Three areas of tension engendered by this premise are also explored - empowerment, loyalty and transparency. To further explore the claim about a priori public service values and the practical impact of the discourse on values, the RCMP Inquiry into events at the 1997 APEC meeting in Vancouver is also reviewed. The APEC meeting took place at a time when ethics was becoming central to public administration in Canada but before the formalized code and its supporting regime had been developed. Some issues explored by the inquiry into APEC will be reviewed as a window to how public service values are used in debate and to what extent democratic and ethical values, which are said to exist but had not yet been formally promulgated, were reflected in actions of public servants or drawn upon for guidance. The tensions evident in the ethics regime will be explored with respect to the APEC inquiry.

This thesis examines the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada (Romanow commission), in particular the ways in which the commission deviates from previous public inquiries. The paper surveys the literature on royal commissions to identify common attributes of commissions and explore the dimensions along which public inquiries vary. By identifying the dimensions of variation, it becomes possible to conduct an assessment of the Romanow commission according to each dimension. The thesis is framed by an assessment of each dimension. The product of this analysis is a clear understanding of the ways in which the Romanow commission differs from its predecessors. The thesis identifies three dimensions in which the Romanow commission is unique: it is the first national commission in nearly forty years with a major social policy as its focus; its emphasis on public consultation exceeds recent commissions: and the long-term advocacy role assumed by its chair.

Does a radical democratic pluralization of power seriously confront the problem posed to contemporary political thought by the current purchase of Carl Schmitt's political theory? Arguably not, given that the force of his approach lies not in the fascistic or dictatorial concentration of power but in his definition of sovereignty as consisting in exceptionalism, the practice whereby some agency, whether an individual or a group, decides the limits of the polity or decides what or who is fitting and appropriate to the polity and what or who is not, an inherently exclusivist act. While radical democrats attempt to overcome this problem of exclusion by being more inclusive and pluralist, they ultimately affirm this idea that the properly constituted polity, the condition of possibility of progress, emancipation, and pluralism, must be limited, excluding some forms of life while including others. They ultimately oscillate around this issue, arguing for more and more freedom and pluralization, while maintaining the need for limits. The nature of this problem stems from the ontology of the autonomous subject of modernity. In modernity, after nominalism removed God from creation, the human being came to assume disproportionate emphasis as meaning-giving subject, assuming the capacity to unilaterally determine what qualifies for existence and what does not. Just as the subject was conceived as self-sufficient in its own right, the modern polity was also so conceived. Thus, both modem subjectivity and sovereignty assume a solipsistic and monistic ontological form, in addition to being exclusive. Michel Foucault makes a concerted and sustained effort to comprehend and thus stop himself from replicating this problem, an approach far more promising than that of radical democracy, but is limited to the extent that he remains committed to freedom and human creativity and fails to see the onto-theological basis of the problem of modern subjectivity. The failure of his endeavor and that of radical democracy give a powerful indication of the persuasive force of Schmitt's theorization of sovereignty as consisting in the decision on the exception. The violently monistic and exclusive nature of this form of action indicates the need for a serious interrogation of the problem of the modern subject that continues to constitute the modern Western mode of inhabiting this world, limiting all transformations that fail to appreciate its ontological novelty and significance.

The Service Profit Chain is a simple conceptual framework linking employee satisfaction and loyalty, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and financial performance. Although widely used by practitioners, the Service Profit Chain's series of hypothesized relationships between employee, customer, and financial outcomes has seldom been tested using data that span all components of the model. Using a modified version of the Service Profit Chain, this study explores service design in the ER. In essence, the Service Outcome Chain asserts that certain structural elements. through their impact on process, have the potential to positively influence outcomes in the ER. The Service Outcome Chain proposes that for quality service to be delivered to the end-user (patients). service providers (nurses. physicians) must receive the support of those who serve them (management, training, the design of jobs and the design of the physical setting). Organizations that create the proper set of structural conditions for employee work also provide a basis for the development of a positive service climate. A positive service climate influences service quality and the end results of patient satisfaction with service and patient empowerment. In this study, using data from frontline service providers and service recipients in the ER, principle chain relationships are explored. A mixed methods approach is applied to examine the relationships identified in the Service Outcome Chain. A survey of emergency nurses is conducted followed by case studies of two ERs where survey, interview and photographic methods arc applied. Insights into the relationship between the structural, process and outcome elements of service design are gained. In addition. findings about the how managerial practices and physical design significantly influence service climate and service quality are revealed. Some of the strongest results of this study point to the role of physical design and service climate in setting the stage for a quality service strategy in the ER. In sum, this research provides the first theoretical and empirical examination of the Service Profit Chain or a modified version of it. applied to public sector health care in general and ERs in particular. It also provides the first empirical examination of physical design, service climate and patient empowerment in the ER. The importance of these three elements has been highlighted by this research.

This thesis begins by presenting a case study of Vancouver’s Yaletown neighbourhood, and the implementation there of a crime prevention program utilizing the built environment. This case study is then analyzed theoretically to make the argument that the city is a valid site for engaging with politics. This argument is made through the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, particularly his idea of a visual logic that is privileged in architecture and urbanism. I argue that if this is the case, then how the city is imagined is privileged over how it is experienced. This way of conceiving and experiencing the city, when combined with modern technology, has important consequences for how interactions occur in built environments that are designed to control. Finally, I contend that disrupting dominant ways of producing and imagining the city allows us to recognize and appreciate the diversity that is politically and socially important in cities.

This thesis seeks to offer a particular perspective from which to understand and approach the claims of some social collectivities. By making use of the concept of the habitus as employed by Talal Asad, I introduce the category of communities of the good life, whose members dedicate their lives to ends achievable only by a conscious shaping of their subjectivity. I argue that in light of the exigencies for sustaining a commitment to such a life, current legal rights are insufficient to make these communities feel that they can fully fulfill their aspirations in liberal societies. This in turn makes the basis of social and political solidarity tenuous. Perhaps worse, I argue, the accommodation of groups can only be placated by establishing structures of domination through the creation of assimilative mechanisms. I therefore contend that modern liberal democratic societies should understand their political union not as one based on liberal rights but on a union for the fulfillment of the concrete ends sought by citizens. In arguing for this position, I also seek to respond to two objections. The first is that the heterogeneous nature of all groups makes any accommodation either impossible without privileging some over others or perhaps placing dissenters in a precarious situation. The second is that accommodations will result in the subversion of citizens' freedoms.

Female genital mutilation, or FGM, is a harmful traditional practice that was brought to Europe by immigrants from practising regions in Africa. Despite numerous approaches to the eradication of FGM, the tradition perpetuates within the immigrant communities in several European countries. Drawing on the available literature, film and interviews, this thesis presents a comparison of the French and Dutch strategies to tackling the problem of FGM. The thesis argues that the Dutch preventative approach could benefit from adopting particular features of the French punitive approach. The thesis concludes by proposing that strong legislative measures that apply to the discovery, investigation and prosecution of FGM cases have contributed significantly to the decline of FGM among practising communities in France, and as such, would have similar results if incorporated into the Dutch strategy for the eradication of FGM.

John Rawls' Political Liberalism is addressed to the problem of stability in democratic societies in light of the fact of religious diversity. In this thesis I argue that Political Liberalism in fact establishes the conditions for the sorts of instability with which it is concerned. It does so in at least two ways: First, it encapsulates the need for a regulative political conception of justice within the bounds of the territorially-defined state, a move seemingly at odds with the transnational character of religious identity, as expressed by transnational practices of legitimacy and dialogue. Second, it does not consider the ways in which the terms of citizenship in a liberal society are transformative for religious groups, and specifically the implications of this transformative character for Rawls' account of stability, as minority groups tend to be concerned with the integrity of their particular religious traditions.