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AbstractMuch of the historiography of British Columbia's 1871 entry into Confederation has concentrated on the motives of British Columbians in seeking union with Canada. This article examines the discussion of the province's Terms of Union in the Canadian parliament and in the eastern Canadian press, and recasts the debate as a conflict between two competing visions of Canada's economic future. Proponents of the admission of British Columbia believed access to the Pacific would transform the new Dominion into a commercial superpower. Opponents of the Terms looked upon distant, mountainous, and sparsely populated British Columbia as a liability, a region and a community that, unlike the Prairie West, could never conform to the agrarian ideal that underpinned their conception of Canada. A reconsideration of the Terms of Union debate in eastern Canada suggests a broader conception of what constitutes Canada's founding debates, and supports the work of other scholars who have identified an agrarian-commercial cleavage as a defining feature of nineteenth-century Canadian politics.

AbstractIn 1857 the Province of Canada passed the Civil Service Act which made a first attempt to define uniform personnel policies for the emerging bureaucracy. Analysis of applications, examination results and appointments to the inside service between September 1857, when applicants first sat for examination, and the end of 1861, when the government undertook an internal survey of public employees, demonstrates that the reform potential of the Act was only partially realized. The introduction of the examination system strongly favoured applicants who resided in the provincial capital. Applicants were most frequently urban middle-class men born either in the United Kingdom or in Canada East. Many were young, although a significant number were over 30 years of age and had extensive labour market experience. Analysis of the employment histories of applicants shows that middle-class careers commonly involved frequent job changes in which workers moved from one employer to another and often back and forth between salaried employment and independence. The Civil Service examination proved elementary, yet it tested basic skills appropriate for the work of most public employees. Although examination results were sufficiently discrete to be used as a competitive examination, decision-makers treated the exercise as a qualifying examination and paid little attention to examination results. Very few successful candidates found employment in the Civil Service; those few were employed at all ranks within the service. Analysis of public employees in 1861 also demonstrates that, although experience was an important factor, seniority did not govern hiring, promotion or salary decisions. The evidence also suggests that patronage played at best a limited role in hiring decisions within the inside service while nepotism continued to exist. In the end The Civil Service Act proved a modest attempt to reform the bureaucracy by creating uniformity in ranks, procedures for appointment and promotion, and, most importantly, salary structures. Its successes proved even more modest.

This paper focusses on the relationship between technological change and the labour relations system circumscribed by the Québec Labour Code. While a teleological interpretation of bargaining rights of certified associations by labour jurisdictions seems to have dealt adequately with the impact of such changes on certification, the doctrine of residual management rights, in the context of fixed-term agreements entrenched in the Québec Labour Code, appears to be, in the opinion of the author, unduly rigid and restrictive. The Freedman Report on Railway run-through and the subsequent discussions surrounding the Woods Commission Report in the 1960's, resulted in the inclusion in the Canada Labour Code of provisions pertaining to the possible adjustment, through collective bargaining, of collective agreements in the context of such technological changes. Various provisions to the same effect have subsequently been inserted in the Labour Codes of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British-Columbia. The Report of the Beaudry Commission recently proposed that the Québec Labour Code be similary modified by the inclusion of analoguous provisions. The author suggests that a reform along the lines thus suggested is, in principle, desirable to ensure a more equitable adaptability of our legal categories to the imperatives of technological change.

In postulating, on the one hand, that the textual construction of the figure of the artist—whether the artist be a writer, a painter or a musician—necessarily involves elements of the autofictional and, on the other hand, that relationships between the artist and instances of legitimization are illustrated via metaphoric treatment at the level of spatialization, this article discusses the ways in which the short story depicts the artist as well as the practice and reception of his art. The article's central premise is that the conditions of real production inflect the construction of fictional conditions to the extent that the more the artist perceives legitimacy, the more the imaginary artist tends to circulate within defined spaces and of institutional order. The selection of writers included in this study allow for the testing of this premise given that each of the authors writes or wrote as a resident of western Canada while maintaining an individual relationship with a different Francophonie and, as a result, with different literary institutions. The writers in question are Marguerite-A. Primeau, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Gisèle Villeneuve and Claudine Potvin.

AbstractDivided into two sections, an exploratory study was carried out in four SMEs of the area of Mauricie in Quebec. Initially, using a conceptual framework based on three concepts : user competence (Munro et al., 1997), computer self-efficacy (Compeau, Higgins et Huff, 1999 ; Compeau and Higgins, 1995) and cognitive absorption (Agarwal and Karahanna, 2000), a data acquisition on 30 end-users of the Internet made it possible to evaluate their use and their appropriation in context of SME. From this point of view of the technological appropriation, the results show that competences and computer self-efficacy can play an important role, while being significantly dependant.Secondly, the realization of semi-directed interviews on the managers responsible for the systems and information technologies, allowed a qualitative analysis of the factors contributing or not to encourage the use and the appropriation of the Internet in SME. It was then noted that the importance of the security measures, the consultation of the future users, the formulation and the diffusion of clear objectives, the support and the encouragement with the use made on behalf of the executive team, the availability of resources as well as the mechanisms of management of problems and crisis inevitably occurring, are as many factors that are not necessarily taken in care by the managers of SME. These are as many elements which are likely to affect the technological level of appropriation of the users, and this by several manners. In particular, by their effects, direct or indirect, on the qualification level of the end-users and their computer self-efficacy.

Keywords: Appropriation technologique, Internet, Compétences de l'utilisateur, Sentiment d'efficacité personnelle, Absorption cognitive, Facteurs critiques de succès, PME

Our research attempts to shed light on a specific set of practices of owner-manager within microfirms (less than five employees) in the area of information systems (IS). In these very small-sized companies, as we know, resources are scarce and IS very little formalized. Also, the owner-manager has a prominent role in setting the IT policy as well as in implementing it. In this respect, recent studies underline the relevance of the concept of bricolage as a pertinent tool for analyzing this kind of environment. Our research tackles these issues by exploring further how owner-managers implement and use information technology through the prism of organizational bricolage. Based on 56 semi-directive interviews with owner-managers, our qualitative analysis shows two types of bricolage : the « necessity bricolage » and the « strategic bricolage ». These categories differ in the way owner-managers perceive the technology, their personal aspirations and strategic goals, and the mode of IT skills acquisition (in-house or outsourced).

Keywords: Microfirmes, Bricolage organisationnel, Systèmes d'information, Dirigeant, Bricolage de nécessité, Bricolage stratégique, Microfirms, Organizational bricolage, Information systems, Manager, Necessity bricolage, Strategic bricolage, Micro-empresas, Bricolaje organizacional, Sistema de información, Dirigente, Bricolaje por necesidad, Bricolaje estratégico

The Charter of Rights has long been criticized for the supposed failure of its processes and outcomes to comply with Canadian federalism. This paper challenges those suppositions. The examination of five Supreme Court cases [Ford (1988); Lavigne (1991); Advance Cutting (2001a); Dunmore (2001b); and Solski (2005a)] through the lens of a "federalist dialogue" reveals a process of Charter interpretation in which provinces, far from being excluded, actually play a central role. Furthermore, this dialogue has the potential to generate an outcome—Charter-federalism—that is consistent with Canada's moral foundations.

This paper summarises a diagnosis of some human resource management (HRM) activities in 12 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of the Canadian consulting engineering industry. Data were collected by means of thorough interviews with the persons assuming the main HRM responsibilities in these SMEs. These interviews were structured by the use of an exhaustive questionnaire covering the main HRM activities. The employment and maintenance activities analysed in this paper are human resource planning, job analysis, recruitment, selection, induction, compensation and performance appraisal. This study has three major objectives. First, it provides descriptive data on the use of these HRM activities in SMEs of the consulting engineering industry. Second, it evaluates the level of development of these activities in light of the normative HRM body of knowledge. Finally, it summarizes the major obstacles faced by the persons assuming these HRM responsibilities. The results underline the adaptive capacities of the SMEs but they also suggest the pertinence of improving some of their HRM activities.

Keywords: Gestion des ressources humaines (GRH), Pratiques de GRH, Petites et moyennes entreprises (PME), Gestion de projets (GP), Diagnostic, Sociétés-conseils, Ingénierie

AbstractThe internationalization and deregulation of banking systems make convergence analysis of their performance essential. In the present article, we focus on the evolution of production performance and costs of banking sectors in major OECD countries. The convergence of these indicator levels is assessed using methods based on distance functions. This approach not only provides a historical perspective of banking system performance but also enables to compare it with the best practices within the sample without imposing too restrictive assumptions such as technical or allocative efficiency or constant returns to scale. The empirical study concerns seventeen countries, eight of which in the Eurozone, over the period 1988-1998. The results show statistical evidence of catching-up with leading countries situated on the frontiers of production and cost efficiency. If our results indicate that the convergence process of banking system performance is a complex phenomenon, it undeniably reveals catching up effects of the national sectors with the leaders located on their production and cost frontiers.