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Great Britain, Australia, Israel, and West Germany. Argues that the confrontation of the democratically elected elite's power by the power of other elites is both a danger and a necessity for democracy.

In this article we examine the recent debate over the continued role of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in airing National Hockey League (NHL) games on its iconic television show, Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) . Specifically, we outline the heightened competition between the CBC and private networks for the most desirable sports rights in the context of the explosive growth of subscription television. We then review how the CBC was, in the face of this competition and to the surprise of many commentators, able to secure a new contract with the NHL in 2006. We argue here that, while Canada's public network will never again have the place in Canadian life that it had in the early days of television (Rutherford, 1990), HNIC remains an important investment because it acts as a critical promotional platform for the public network, as well as providing a sizeable revenue stream that subsidizes the network's other programming. We will also argue that providing free-to-air broadcasts of the sport that matters most to Canadians is an issue of cultural citizenship, and thus an important part of the mandate of a public broadcaster, and a matter of national interest.

The economist J. B. Say once wrote that "our duty with regard to errors is not to revive them, but simply to forget them." Complete acceptance of this doctrine would expose the political scientist to ruin, for the study of government is largely the study of errors and man's clumsy efforts to correct them. The history of errors, so far as government control of radio broadcasting in Canada is concerned, centres on the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission which struggled for survival between 1932 and 1936. Our concern, however, is not with this history of errors but rather with the attempt, through the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to correct these errors. In particular, our interest is focussed on the pressing problems of integrating administration and politics in the public interest, through the device of an independent government corporation.In 1900, Professor Frank Goodnow first differentiated between politics and administration by suggesting that all activities involved in expressing the will of the state should be classified as "politics," while all operations necessary to the execution of the will of the state should be termed "administration." The harmonization of these two activities, according to Goodnow, depends on the subordination of one to the other. In a parliamentary system, harmonization in the public interest is presumably obtained by having the agents responsible for the execution of the will of the state dominated by the agents responsible for its expression. This simple bifurcation has been complicated by the fact that the cabinet, the supreme instrument of party government, has become responsible in large measure for both the expression and execution of the will of the state. In certain sectors of governmental activity the party (partisan) character of cabinet supervision has led to the demand for a withdrawal from its hands of the direct responsibility for "politics" and "administration."