Social Sciences

The insulation of Canada's healthcare system from trade treaty obligations is crucial to the legitimacy of Canada's trade policy. Legal analysis has suggested, however, that competitive and for-profit delivery of the kind contemplated by the Kirby Report and some provinces may make healthcare more vulnerable to challenges under NAFTA and GATS. The Government of Canada has tried to counter this interpretation by stressing the importance of public financing as the principal criterion for exemption of healthcare from trade treaties, but now the potential for private financing of essential medical services indicated by the Supreme Court's decision in Chaoulli v. Quebec has made that line of argument look risky as well. It is apparent that Canada failed to anticipate the possible interactions of domestic, international and constitutional law when it made commitments in the area of private health insurance at the WTO in 1997. Accordingly, the time has come to acknowledge the f...

The article examines theories of B.C. politics from the perspective of New Institutionalism. It argues that the contributions of Martin Robin's class-based theory, Ed Black's "politics of exploitation" theory and Mark Sproule-Jones's theory of sponsored conceptual ideology to explaining the distinctiveness of B.C.'s political culture and its ideologically polarized party system can best be understood in terms of their insights into temporal processes, especially path-dependent sequences of development. Although growing social and institutional pluralism are limiting the explanatory value of these theories today, paying close attention to the dynamics of institutional development at work in contemporary BC can help us to identify new reasons for thinking that the province's unique politics will continue into the future.

Debates over the legal interpretationof trade treaty (WTO and NAFTA) exemption clauses for public services display a common pattern. Critics of trade agreements argue that these clause sare likely to be narrowly interpreted, providing scant protection from international trade rules to public health care. Defenders usually argue that they will be given a reasonably expansive deinition and that trade obligations (atleast the more onerous WTO national treatment obligations) will generally not apply to public health care services. This paper argues that although the optimism of trade agreement defenders may be well-founded when viewed from a static perspective, the protection afforded by exemption clauses shrinks with the expansion of market elements in healthcare. Hence, the major implication of such “carve-outs” for health policy makers will not be the liberty to engage in “business as usual”, but rather the need to assess the trade-related risks associated with market-based reform in...

What is money? What is an economy? Why is money so addictive?  What is accumulation? What is capitalism? What are the problems caused by capitalist accumulation. These are all question examined in this introductory overview of money, the economy, and the global financial system.

This work is suitable for introductory and even advanced courses where clarity and precision vis a vis the economic realities of this planet are a pedagogical goal.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opwUrGVc8dA

Version 1.11
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Since Marx first declared religion to be the opiate of the masses, institutions of religion and spirituality have been preemptively rejected from serious consideration by most scholars, critical sociologists included. The assumption seems to always be that religion is either a reactionary response to difficult realities or a mere illusion, delusion, or epiphenomenon of brain/social function. This paper looks at the “authentic core” of religious institutions, religious experience, and, using biographical examples from the literature, argues that far from being a reactionary holdout of our primitive past, religion and spirituality are, in fact, essentially revolutionary in content. It is suggested that, in the context of a growing global ecological, political, and economic crises, the revolutionary core of religion and spirituality has to be examined, recovered, and even embraced as part of any local or global strategy of transformation.

This article attempts to establish a sociology of the occult in general, and a sociology of the Western tarot in particular. The tarot is a deck of 78 cards invented in Italy in the fifteenth century. From humble beginnings as a device for gaming or gambling, the tarot became invested with occult, mystical, divine, spiritual, and even psychological significance. This investing became part of a larger strategy of discipline and indoctrination to ease the transition from pre-industrial structures of power and authority to industrial and bureaucratic structures. That tarot, associated as it was with the emergence of elite Freemasonry, helped provide new ideologies of power and ways of existing within new tightly structured, bureaucratic organizations.

Résumé. Cet article vise à établir une sociologie des sciences occultes en général et une sociologie du tarot en particulier. Le tarot comprend 78 cartes et a été inventé en Italie au XVe siècle. De ses débuts modestes en tant que jeu, le tarot s'est vu associé aux sciences occultes, mystiques, divines et spirituelles, prenant même une signification psychologique. Cette dimension s'est inscrite dans une plus grande stratégie de discipline et d'endoctrinement dans le but de faciliter la transition des structures préindustrielles du pouvoir et de l'autorité à des structures industrielles et bureaucratiques. Ce tarot, associé à l'émergence de la franc-maçonnerie d'élite, a contribué aux nouvelles idéologies du pouvoir et des moy-ens d'exister dans les confins d'organisations très structurées et bureaucratiques.