Mariana Valverde is the Director and a professor of the Centre of Criminology, at the University of Toronto, and does research mainly in the sociology of law.[1] From the late 1970s, she became involved in feminist and gay liberation politics in the Toronto area, writing for activist publications such as The Body Politic, and publishing Sex, Power and Pleasure with the Toronto Women's Press in 1985. Originally trained in philosophy at York University, in the late 1980s Valverde retrained as a social historian, publishing an influential study of moral regulation, The Age of Light Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto University Press, 1991) before entering the field of sociology. Her recent books include Law's Dream of Common Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2003), an anthology co-edited with Peter Goodrich, Nietzsche and Legal Theory (Routledge, 2005), and an anthology co-edited with Markus Dubber, The New Police Science (Stanford, 2006).
In 2000 Mariana Valverde won the Herbert Jacob book prize from the Law and Society Association for her book Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1998).[2]
Mariana Valverde offers a written critical analysis of the most comprehensive and least comprehended of state powers, the "police-type" powers, broadly understood as the power to maximize public welfare — using its sovereign power of “peace, order, and good government” also known in Canadian political culture as POGG, which can solely be invoked by the head of the executive branch of government, which is the Prime Minister in Canada.
The New Police Science examines the power granted to police as a basic technology of modern government that appears in a vast array of sites of governance, including not only the state, but also the household, the factory, the military, and — most recently — the global realm of war, police actions, and peacekeeping.
Valverde discusses POGG as the historical clause located in section 91 of the BNA Act, 1867. Relating back to Agamben's State of Exception, also known as the State of Emergency, often initiated during the declaration of war, crisis or conflict, on during a period of internal disorder. This POGG power is held exclusively by the federal government and are not enumerated specifically. In this regard, they are comparable to the United States' use of "police power". She discusses various cases throughout Canada's colonial history that made it all the way to the highest Court in Canada. The Courts have understood these so-called POGG powers as covering (1) extraordinary measures to deal with emergencies, such as "apprehended insurrection"; and (2) areas of regulatory activity not specifically allocated to the provinces and territories.
As the case with US police powers, POGG powers are largely residual in nature, which means that their specific content has been determined by a mixture of case law and pertinent federal statutes rather than explicitly by historical constitutional texts. The Canadian version of federalism assigns the federal government all residual powers to the central government. POGG and police power are both rooted in the paternalistic logic of governance most famously outlined by Blackstone. Because POGG powers are also discretionary and residual rather than specified, they can be considered to be police-like.
While POGG's underlying enactment was solely for national emergency powers, this changed somewhat during World War II. While the federal governments have been able to wield most of the regulatory power, the POGG clause has undoubtedly served to first and foremost transfer some of the imperial government's military logics and exceptional emergency powers to Ottawa, centrally located, and only second to exercise what Foucault called biopolitical power, a subform of biopower (p. 80)