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AbstractRailway nationalization, the anvil on which national public enterprise was hammered together between 1917 and 1923, forms a misunderstood episode in the development of the Canadian state. This article examines the convergence of domestic politics and international economics that facilitated an unprecedented transformation of Canada's capacity to control its economy. State autonomy was used to create public enterprise as an instrument by which the gains of industrial restructuring could be distributed to favoured domestic financiers while its costs were imposed upon foreign investors. This power to manage the gains and losses arising from industrial change formed a new expression of economic sovereignty, one that ought to be viewed as an important step in the transition from imperial to national governance.

This article compares the finance of transportation infrastructure in France and the United States in order to test the concept of institutional durability as an intervening variable that can account for different patterns of industrial development. Institutional durability is defined as the degree to which the fiscal norms and principles established in agreements between government, industry, and financial investors go on to exert influence over subsequent attempts to reorder the allocation of collective economic burdens and benefits. Two historical episodes of infrastructure development, mid‐19th century railroad construction and the creation of inter‐city highways between the First and Second World Wars, will be evaluated to identify and differentiate the effect of institutional durability upon American and French transportation policy.French infrastructure finance is shown to exhibit a limited institutional durability which has facilitated the historical adjustment of both rail and road infrastructure along convergent fiscal terms. US infrastructure development is seen to possess a much greater institutional durability which has encouraged the divergence of fiscal arrangements set up at different periods of time. The resulting accumulation of incompatible and often competitive arrangements appears to have locked the US into conflicting means of transport development that make a fiscally coherent transportation policy very difficult to achieve. No such institutional obstacle emerges in French transport policy where the terms of macroeconomic decision‐making are seen to be integrated.

This paper examines the interaction between
transportation policy and climate change policy in two Canadian
provinces, British Columbia and Ontario. The concept
of policy capacity is used to qualitatively measure the
effectiveness of instruments in advancing goals in an area
where established policy paradigms may not be congruent
with new initiatives. A review of official policy documents
and budgetary information on policy-related spending, as
well as primary interviews with policy managers in relevant
provincial ministries, reveals that overlapping policy goals
and instruments may have created a situation of institutionalized
policy inhibition, in which conflicting layers of policy
goals and instruments constrain the available policy capacity.

Travel by automobile is manifestly the most dangerous activity that most citizens of developed economies routinely engage in, highlighting the value of trying to explain why some governments address this risk quite differently than do others. This article compares the ways in which Canada sets objectives for managing risk on its roads with alternative European and American targets. The manuscript tests the hypothesis that countries selecting concrete policy goals, which identify specific targets in terms of specific numbers of road deaths and injuries, will pursue more ambitious outcomes than countries that adopt goals stated in relation to another reference point, such as the number of vehicle-kilometres traveled, or the incidence of particular behaviour such as impaired driving or seat belt use. Relative policy goals are shown to translate into less ambitious anticipated results, thus reducing public officials' exposure to future criticism for having fallen short of their commitments. Public officials who set concrete policy goals may be motivated by a combination of greater perceived political legitimacy and administrative capacity compared to counterparts who embrace relative policy goals, raising implications that are worthy of further exploration.