Public Notices - Niagara Region collection

This is a collection of public notices posted by various villages, towns and townships in the Niagara Region. The notices alert residents to various civic events and initiatives.

Canadian Federation of University Women--St. Catharines fonds, 1921-2013

The University Women’s Club of St. Catharines was founded in 1921, two years after the formation of its national affiliate, the Canadian Federation of University Women. Membership was limited to women with university degrees. In early 2000 the constitution was expanded to include professions that now require university or college degrees. Associate members (non-voting) and student members were also accepted in 2007 by our local club. The purposes of the club are to assist in maintaining high standards of education in Canada, to stimulate members’ interest and participation in public affairs, to provide an opportunity for collective action, and to facilitate intellectual and social pursuits among members. The club takes an active interest in the status of women, provides scholarships at the university and high school levels, encourages reading in the formative years, makes charitable donations to support women and children’s services. In 1988 our club changed its name to Canadian Federation of University Women – St. Catharines at the direction of the National Office of CFUW.

Letter - Dominion Alliance to Mr. Harry Cowan

A letter from the president of the Dominion Alliance for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic, Joseph Gibson. The letter is dated November 18th, 1910 and requests "subscription". The request is to add to the campaign fund and the "new fight...voting upon the question of bar-room abolition". The voting is stated to take place in "January next" for about one hundred municipalities in Ontario.

The Canada Not For Profit Corporations Act: Perceived impact on the governance of federal sport organizations

This thesis examined the impact of the Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act (2009) on the governance of national sport organizations (NSO). The impact of the legislation was explored through the perceptions of NSO executive leaders and by analyzing the by-laws in effect before the legislation. The legislation was perceived to have the greatest impact on enhancing accountability, specifically affecting membership categories and director selection. The interview data showed that the legislation was necessary to enhance accountability in many NSOs. The Respondents also demonstrated that they understood the goals sought through the legislation. The data also showed that the boards of NSOs were already in alignment with the goals of the legislation. With respect to governance, the data indicated that NSOs rely almost exclusively on their regional sport associations as voting stakeholders. An emerging issue that came out of the results was the role of athletes in the governance of sport organizations.

On the Political Economy of Sequential Reforms

This paper proposes an explanation for why efficient reforms are not carried out when losers have the power to block their implementation, even though compensating them is feasible. We construct a signaling model with two-sided incomplete information in which a government faces the task of sequentially implementing two reforms by bargaining with interest groups. The organization of interest groups is endogenous. Compensations are distortionary and government types differ in the concern about distortions. We show that, when compensations are allowed to be informative about the government’s type, there is a bias against the payment of compensations and the implementation of reforms. This is because paying high compensations today provides incentives for some interest groups to organize and oppose subsequent reforms with the only purpose of receiving a transfer. By paying lower compensations, governments attempt to prevent such interest groups from organizing. However, this comes at the cost of reforms being blocked by interest groups with relatively high losses.

Arrow's Theorem in Spatial Environments

In spatial environments, we consider social welfare functions satisfying Arrow's requirements. i.e., weak Pareto and independence of irrelevant alternatives. When the policy space os a one-dimensional continuum, such a welfare function is determined by a collection of 2n strictly quasi-concave preferences and a tie-breaking rule. As a corrollary, we obtain that when the number of voters is odd, simple majority voting is transitive if and only if each voter's preference is strictly quasi-concave. When the policy space is multi-dimensional, we establish Arrow's impossibility theorem. Among others, we show that weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and non-dictatorship are inconsistent if the set of alternatives has a non-empty interior and it is compact and convex.

Candidate Stability and Nonbinary Social Choice

A desirable property of a voting procedure is that it be immune to the strategic withdrawal of a candidate for election. Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton (Econometrica, 2001) have established a number of theorems that demonstrate that this condition is incompatible with some other desirable properties of voting procedures. This article shows that Grether and Plott's nonbinary generalization of Arrow's Theorem can be used to provide simple proofs of two of these impossibility theorems.

Political Influence, Economic Interests and Endogenous Tax Structure in a Computable Equilibrium Framework: with Applicatioon to the United States, 1973 and 1983

A full understanding of public affairs requires the ability to distinguish between the policies that voters would like the government to adopt, and the influence that different voters or group of voters actually exert in the democratic process. We consider the properties of a computable equilibrium model of a competitive political economy in which the economic interests of groups of voters and their effective influence on equilibrium policy outcomes can be explicitly distinguished and computed. The model incorporates an amended version of the GEMTAP tax model, and is calibrated to data for the United States for 1973 and 1983. Emphasis is placed on how the aggregation of GEMTAP households into groups within which economic and political behaviour is assumed homogeneous affects the numerical representation of interests and influence for representative members of each group. Experiments with the model suggest that the changes in both interests and influence are important parts of the story behind the evolution of U.S. tax policy in the decade after 1973.

The Dynamic (In)efficiency of Monetary Policy by Committee

This paper develops a model where the value of the monetary policy instrument is selected by a heterogenous committee engaged in a dynamic voting game. Committee members differ in their institutional power and, in certain states of nature, they also differ in their preferred instrument value. Preference heterogeneity and concern for the future interact to generate decisions that are dynamically ineffcient and inertial around the previously-agreed instrument value. This model endogenously generates autocorrelation in the policy variable and provides an explanation for the empirical observation that the nominal interest rate under the central bank’s control is infrequently adjusted.

On the Manipulability of Proportional Representation

This paper presents a new model of voter behaviour under methods of proportional representation (PR). We abstract away from rounding, and assume that a party securing k percent of the vote wins exactly k percent of the available seats. Under this assumption PR is not manipulable by any voter aiming at maximisation of the number of seats in the parliament of her most preferred party. However in this paper we assume that voters are concerned, first and foremost, with the distribution of power in the post-election parliament. We show that, irrespective of which positional scoring rule is adopted, there will always exist circumstances where a voter would have an incentive to vote insincerely. We demonstrate that a voter’s attitude toward uncertainty can influence her incentives to make an insincere vote. Finally, we show that the introduction of a threshold - a rule that a party must secure at least a certain percentage of the vote in order to reach parliament - creates new opportunities for strategic voting. We use the model to explain voter behaviour at the most recent New Zealand general election.

Self-Selective Social Choice Functions

It is not uncommon that a society facing a choice problem has also to choose the choice rule itself. In such situation voters’ preferences on alternatives induce preferences over the voting rules. Such a setting immediately gives rise to a natural question concerning consistency between these two levels of choice. If a choice rule employed to resolve the society’s original choice problem does not choose itself when it is also used in choosing the choice rule, then this phenomenon can be regarded as inconsistency of this choice rule as it rejects itself according to its own rationale. Koray (2000) proved that the only neutral, unanimous universally self-selective social choice functions are the dictatorial ones. Here we in troduce to our society a constitution, which rules out inefficient social choice rules. When inefficient social choice rules become unavailable for comparison, the property of self-selectivity becomes weaker and we show that some non-trivial self-selective social choice functions do exist. Under certain assumptions on the constitution we describe all of them.

Monetary Policy by Committee:Consensus, Chairman Dominance or Simple Majority?

This paper studies the theoretical and empirical implications of monetary policy making by committee under three different voting protocols. The protocols are a consensus model, where super-majority is required for a policy change; an agenda-setting model, where the chairman controls the agenda; and a simple majority model, where policy is determined by the median member. These protocols give preeminence to different aspects of the actual decision making process and capture the observed heterogeneity in formal procedures across central banks. The models are estimated by Maximum Likehood using interest rate decisions by the committees of five central banks, namely the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Swedish Riksbank, and the U.S. Federal Reserve. For all central banks, results indicate that the consensus model is statically superior to the alternative models. This suggests that despite institutionnal differences, committees share unwritten rules and informal procedures that deliver observationally equivalent policy decisions.

Le vote par internet à distance : est-il conforme aux exigences du droit électoral québécois et canadien?

"Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de LL.M. en droit option droit des technologies de l'information"

La démocratie et la Loi sur la clarté : réflexions sur la règle de la majorité dans le cadre d'un référendum

"Mémoire présenté à la faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de maîtrise en droit (LL.M.)"

Le vote pour le mouvement réformateur iranien est-il un vote pour la démocratie?

Le vote pour le mouvement réformateur est-il un vote pour la démocratie ? Dans ce mémoire, nous avons mis à l’épreuve l’hypothèse selon laquelle le caractère plus démocratique des partis associés au mouvement réformateur tend automatiquement à attirer les électeurs plus démocrates. Pour ce faire, nous avons utilisé des données de sondage qui nous ont aidés à dégager les attitudes et les caractéristiques des électeurs et à les mettre en relation avec leur vote. Ainsi, nous avons dressé le portrait de l’électorat iranien et nous en avons mis en évidence les caractéristiques sociodémographiques déterminant le vote. Nos résultats montrent que, conformément à nos hypothèses et à l’interprétation générale qui est faite des élections iraniennes, l’âge et le niveau d’éducation présentent une corrélation avec le choix électoral dans le sens attendu, qui prévoit qu’un électorat plus jeune et plus éduqué vote pour le mouvement réformateur. En revanche, en ce qui concerne le sexe et le degré d’urbanisation, nos résultats vont à l’encontre de nos hypothèses et des suppositions liées au comportement électoral en Iran. Nous démontrons que les femmes sont en réalité plus nombreuses à voter pour le mouvement conservateur et que les choix électoraux des habitants des villes et de ceux des villages ne diffèrent pas. Nous avons également vérifié la relation entre les attitudes et le vote. Nos résultats révèlent que les électeurs ayant une attitude plus positive envers la démocratie, reconnaissant plus de droits aux femmes, moins religieux et économiquement plus libéraux, sont plus nombreux à voter pour le mouvement réformateur. Nous reconnaissons, en conclusion, l’impact des attitudes envers la démocratie sur le choix électoral en Iran ainsi que l’effet d’autres attitudes liées à l’égalité, à la religion et à l’économie. Nous affirmons surtout que ces attitudes départagent aussi bien, sinon mieux, la population iranienne par rapport à ses choix électoraux que les caractéristiques telles que le sexe ou le degré d’urbanisation.