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From the archives

Alberta and Me

From a land of oil, true enough

Amanda Perry

Referendum? What Referendum?

A constitutional expert argues that the federal insistence on clarity has paid off

Sujit Choudhry

The Grey Plateau

When the world stopped five years ago

Stephen Marche
Our Contributors

Philip Resnick

Philip Resnick is a political scientist, long associated with the University of British Columbia. He has published widely on political topics, books such as Letters to a Québécois Friend (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), The Masks of Proteus: Canadian Reflections on the State (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), Twenty-First Century Democracy (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1997), The European Roots of Canadian Identity (Broadview Press, 2005) and The Labyrinth of North American Identities (University of Toronto Press, 2012). As a poet, he authored a number of collections in the 1970s and ’80s, primarily on Greek-rooted themes. His most recent collection of poems, Footsteps of the Past, was published in September 2015 by Ronsdale Press.

Articles by
Philip Resnick

El Café Para Todos

In multiethnic democracies, subtle majority privileges can be just as corrosive as minority nationalism October 2011
Canada’s May 2011 election resulted in the eclipse of the Bloc Québécois as a significant actor on the federal stage, and in the months that have followed the Parti Québécois has experienced severe internecine conflict. It would be tempting to assume, as a number of commentators have been prone to do, that the issue of Quebec sovereignty is a thing of the past and that Canada can now proceed to forge a stronger national unity than…

American or British Liberty?

A new book places Canada’s famous rebellions in a meaningful context March 2010
To shed new light on old events can be no small achievement. The great battles of history, revolutions and civil wars, overseas ventures, religious upheavals, and scientific and technological breakthroughs all lend themselves to telling and retelling, to new interpretations and paradigmatic shifts. One thinks of the feat of intellectual history involved in rethinking the relationship between Christianity and Islam of Henri…

A Happy Marriage of Convenience

The Quebec-Canada relationship works because of luck and pragmatism March 2009
“Quebec is not an island in mid-Atlantic. Its separation from Canada would spell the death of Canada,” wrote André Laurendeau in one of his Le Devoir articles of the early 1960s. A trifle grandiloquent perhaps. But an appropriate point of entry to the two books under review. There is no need to belabour the place that Quebec has occupied in the English Canadian …

A Question of Influence

How deep an impact has Hegel had on three Canadian thinkers? May 2008
Back in the 1940s, the Canadian historian Frank Underhill lamented: “It is a remarkable fact that in the great debate of our generation about the fundamental values of liberalism and democracy we Canadians have taken very little part … Our thinking is still derivative.” That would seem to be much less true today. The writings of Pierre…