POLI 101 Lecture 1: Introduction to Canadian Government
Document Summary
Why study canadian politics: canada is unique, continent spanning federation, multinational settler society. What is politics: comes from scarcity, competing claims to resources who gets what, study of power, a. einstein: politics is more di cult than physics . Social sciences: still trying to gure out what the laws are. Positive: using police/armed forces to ensure security. Negative: may be abusive: exercise of power occurs within constantly changing social, political, and economic environment. Easy access to information that all humans know. But, there is a saturation of knowledge transfer: actors will rarely have all the information. Subtle form of power through respect, use of institutional media, and education. Individual/group has the right to tell you what to do. Types of this can be a combination of these: charismatic, traditional, rational-legal. Contestation for power takes place within the canadian state but what is a state: taken for granted in a modern world but the end result of a long historical process.
