Abstract: "The management of post-secondary education has over the past two decades converged across the larger anglophone provinces around a ‘systematisation’ paradigm. Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario have all decisively moved towards the establishment of more formally structured and coordinated systems of post-secondary education encompassing all of the institutions within the jurisdiction. In all three cases, the framing of the policy choice has also followed broadly similar lines, pointing to the competing demands of the ‘knowledge economy’. This may be seen as both demanding a greater institutional differentiation in the name of competitiveness, while simultaneously increasing pressure for system integration so as to ensure inclusiveness. Implicit in the paradigm is also the underlying presumption that individual post-secondary institutions will not necessarily follow agendas that contribute appropriately to this system design, particularly reflecting a strong sectoral tendency towards institutional isomorphism and attendant ‘mission creep’. The emergence of this broadly convergent policy agenda opens up a series of research questions, thus far little addressed in the relevant literatures. Persisting provincial differences need to be accounted for in terms that probe both institutional path dependencies and patterns of stakeholder representation. The relative effectiveness and cohesiveness of the different systems also correspondingly demands attention. Reflecting wider trends in provincial public sectors, questions of policy capacity further arise in all three systems – i.e. is there sufficient capacity in the system to steer the system? The present paper examines these developments, drawing on extensive documentary research and interviews with governmental and stakeholder representatives."

Abstract: "In 2011, the British Columbia government was forced to repeal its HST, implemented just a year before. Although praised by tax experts and most businesses, it was highly unpopular among many groups of voters. One important factor that contributed to the failure of the government tax reform was the province’s Initiative and Recall Law, which allows citizens to force the government to hold binding popular consultations and/or to launch recall procedures targeting individual MLAs. The Initiative and Recall Law contributed significantly to the defeat of the HST (Tellier 2014). This outcome suggests that tax reform proposals are difficult to adopt by any government when citizens are allowed to participate more actively in the decision-making process. Yet, the same BC government successfully implemented its carbon tax a few years earlier, in 2008. This tax was equally unpopular among voters. It was also unpopular within the business community (Harrison, 2012). Why, then, opponents for the carbon tax initiative, contrary to the HST, did not launch initiative and recall procedures? This paper seeks to provide answers to this question by examining and comparing the circumstances that lead to the adoption (and revocation) of these two tax reforms in BC. It will also look at Canadian provinces that were successful in passing their HST in recent years (Ontario and PEI). One of the objectives of this paper will be to assess the impact of popular initiatives and recall procedures, as these mechanisms are discussed more and more elsewhere in the country."

Abstract: In recent years, we have seen an explosion of research on the determinants of credit ratings, risk premiums and other indicators of sovereign default risk. However, very little work examines the relationship between sovereign risk and fiscal federal variables. This gap is surprising given the large and growing literature linking these variables to national debts, deficits and other indicators of sovereign risk. This paper seeks to fill this gap. It theorizes that subnational debt increases sovereign default risk, but that the effects are conditional on (1) the extent to which national authorities can manage or limit these debts and (2) the expected probability and size of bailouts for distressed subnational units. This paper examines the role of federal variables (including federal transfers, local responsibility for social services and national party systems) in shaping these expectations and tests these hypotheses on a panel of sovereign credit ratings for the euro area from 2002 (the advent of the Euro) to the present.