canadian political history and ideas: intersections and influences

History Compass 12/5 (2014): 444–454, 10.1111/hic3.12161

Canadian Political History and Ideas: Intersections andInfluences

Kevin Anderson*McMaster University

AbstractOver the last two decades, traditionally minded historians have argued that the rise of social andcultural history has fragmented Canadian history and caused the decline of Canadian political history.Despite these claims, current Canadian political history is proving to be a dynamic field that embracesthe methodological and theoretical innovations of social and cultural history by incorporating gender,class, race and ethnicity as categories of analysis to create a “new political history.”However, the “newpolitical history” in Canada has neglected to integrate the history of ideas. Studying the history of ideasin Canadian political history could expand the discipline beyond the current trends that include highlyindividualised political biography and studies emphasising politics, the state and ideology within IanMcKay’s potentially reductive liberal order framework. Supplementing the “new political history”with the history of ideas, influenced by the work of Michael Freeden, would allow innovative analysesof institutional and popular politics to accompany the voices of elite political figures.

The current state of Canadian political historiography demonstrates that political historyis a flourishing and exciting field1 despite some traditionalist historians’ insistence that ithas been overtaken by social and cultural history.2 Indeed, contemporary Canadian po-litical historians often employ novel theoretical and methodological frameworks thathave expanded the purview of political history beyond the study of ‘great men’, ‘greatevents’ and formal politics. The ‘new political history’3 integrates studies of gender, statesurveillance, Britishness and the ideological motivations behind such quotidian topics astaxation into a more inclusive framework that treats politics as reflective of structural re-alities endemic to a liberal democratic society, as an everyday phenomenon and as partof the constant negotiations inherent to government policy and state power. That beingsaid, much of the political historiography is made up of either political biographies orapplications of Ian McKay’s liberal order framework, which tends towards a reductiveanalysis that evaluates political actions and ideas in opposition to an all-encompassingliberalism.4 One of the major gaps in the ‘new political history’ in Canada is a thoroughengagement with the history of ideas that examines the content of ideologies, ratherthan their presumed coherence, and how these manifest at the institutional level, for ex-ample, within political parties, organisations and civic associations. An approach to po-litical history that acknowledges the importance of ideas as historical subjects,constantly shifting and organising the world for historical actors in their context, couldserve to nuance what have become normative political and ideological categories, suchas liberalism or conservatism. Supported by an analysis of current scholarship, I contendthat this ‘history of ideas approach’, applied to the diverse field of Canadian political his-tory, will help to counter potential ahistoricism, as when one political tradition is putforth as more ‘historically Canadian’ than others, or when political institutions and heg-emonic ideologies are essentialised.

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Michael Freeden’s work on ideology may be a good place to start, allowing historians toengage with the diffuse world of ideas. Freeden wants to understand the purpose of ideolo-gies, not in order to reveal what they ‘mask’ but to track the ‘universe of meanings’ createdby the conceptual configurations of a particular set of political ideas. He is concerned notwith the abstract coherence of ideas but in locating them within the patterns they appear;these ideological patterns are used to make sense of the political world that actors inhabit,consciously or not.5

British historian E.H.H. Green has also pointed out the importance of ideology, specifi-cally within party politics, because the analysis of the processes of idea selection and formu-lation involves the agency of party leaders, intellectuals and a popular audience.6 A politicalhistory that embraces the history of ideas can therefore move political history beyond theconfines of ‘great men’. Studying ideology as a historical phenomenon will also createavenues to flesh out gaps in the historiography, including ideational constellations such asconservatism and Social Credit. Jon Lawrence’s call for an integrated political history, wherethe ‘unhelpful dichotomies’ of high and low politics are understood as historically contestablein order to engage in a ‘systematic exploration of the interconnectedness of politics’7 may alsobe valuable for future research, as demonstrated by Gary Kinsman’s and Patrizia Gentile’sinnovative work. These avenues will add further nuance to the excellent current literaturewithout limiting the scholarship to the narrow realm of ‘what matters’.8

In recent years, political biographies have once again become prominent in Canadianhistory.9 As John English and Carman Miller have noted, the relevance of the individualand subjectivity have become paramount after calls for a ‘history from below’.10 Miller arguesthat biography is not a return to the discarded ‘great man theory’ of the past; instead, it is thehistory of what it means to be human in particular contexts. Biography can, in this sense, be aform of social history that examines what he terms the ‘marriage’ of macro and microdynamics in history.11 This is a thoroughly optimistic vision of political biography,attempting to integrate the high politics approach with the great advances made in socialand cultural history. In his biography of Frederick Borden, Miller locates Borden withinthe fluid world of region, nation and empire, and his public negotiations therein whichsuccessfully links Borden to wider national and international currents.12 Yet he neglectsthe discussion of ideas in favour of demonstrating Borden’s pragmatism and brokeragepolitics, implicitly suggesting that pragmatism and compromise were not influenced by anyideology beyond a vague sense of liberal imperialism.13 Freeden has posited that theimportance of ideologies is how they operate as a means to organise social reality and tounderstand the complex linkages between seemingly endless arrays of political concepts incomparison to one another.14 Within this framework, ideologies are always at work inpolitical history, underlying decisions and visions of the world, no matter how mundane.The centrality of ideas, no matter their explicit coherence or ‘truth’, therefore needs to beexplored more fully in Canadian political history.Nevertheless, one of the most impressive accomplishments of these new political biogra-

phies is that many of them do pay consistent attention to the importance of political ideas.John Boyko’s biography of R. B. Bennett attempts to locate Bennett within the Red Torytradition of the Conservative Party, traceable back to John A. Macdonald. According toBoyko, Bennett’s New Deal of the mid-1930s was thus not an aberration but a consistentreflection of his vision of conservatism and of the nation. Boyko positions Bennett’s ‘middleground’ between the free market wing and the left-populist wing of the Tories as reflectingCanadians in general.15 Paul Litt’s biography of John Turner also emphasises ideas andTurner’s commitment to the political centre, positioning Turner as embodying the ‘true’ his-torical Canadian Liberalism as opposed to the Trudeauvian vision of a centralised federalism

History Compass 12/5 (2014): 444–454, 10.1111/hic3.12161© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

446 Canadian Political History and Ideas

based on strict principles. For Litt, Turner’s dedication to brokerage politics, designed totranscend Canadian regional, ethnic and linguistic divides through elite accommodation,made him the heir to ‘a long-standing Canadian Liberal tradition’.16

Angus Macdonald, Liberal premier of Nova Scotia, has been the subject of two recentstudies: a full-length political biography by T. Stephen Henderson and a chapter in IanMcKay and Robin Bates’ analysis of the tourist industry in Nova Scotia, In the Province ofHistory. Although these scholars are fundamentally interested in Macdonald’s liberalism, thelatter work examines Macdonald’s role as catalyst for the state-sponsored myth-symbol com-plex of tartanism. McKay and Bates paint a unique portrait of Macdonald’s attempt to wedhis devotion to the liberal order of individualism and accumulation to something transcen-dent, coveted by all involved in the liberal order and represented in this case by an essentialistScottish Myth.17 Henderson focuses on Macdonald’s vision of Canada, taking regional andprovincial voices seriously in his analysis of federalism. For Henderson, Macdonald encapsu-lated the shifting liberalism of the mid-20th century, as opposed to the ‘orthodox liberal’presented by McKay and Bates, arguing that Macdonald believed individual rights had tobe balanced with the potential of a positive liberal state. Macdonald was convinced that thiscould be accomplished by a renewed federalism where provincial autonomy was secured bylogical divisions of constitutional power. Thus, Henderson accepts McKay and Bates’premise that Macdonald was a devoted liberal,18 but he also acknowledges that Macdonaldwas a liberal of his times and that ‘liberalism’ cannot be separated from its specific historicallocation and employed as an explanatory framework, as McKay has done throughout hiswork.19

In this traditional genre, the relationship between gender and politics has been largelyomitted, despite the glut of works on the intersections of gender, women and politics.20

For example, Nancy Christie has provided a study of the relationship between religion,family, gender and state formation. Christie contends that support for the welfare state waspredicated on the desire to preserve the male-breadwinner model of society, based on aspecifically Protestant conception of the family as the central social institution.21 JenniferStephen has added to this important scholarship by pursuing a gendered analysis of thecreation of the welfare state, including her more radical claim that markets too are socialinstitutions and not ‘ontologically distinct’ from government/governance.22 In addition,the sixth edition of Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History contains numerousarticles examining the intersections of gender and politics. It is dedicated to moving women’shistory from a largely self-contained sub-discipline and towards a ‘women’s history as animportant aspect of a gendered history constituted by both women’s and men’s experience.’23

More attention needs to be paid to gender not only when examining the explicit activities ofwomen’s movements or politically active individual women but also when studying the inter-connectedness of assumptions, ideas and actions that are at the core of politics itself. Politics is agendered activity. Gender does not exist outside of the wider processes of history, and thesestudies need to be used as models of how to integrate gender, a foundational social construct,into the ‘new political history’.There is also a lingering tendency within political biography to assume a distinction

between high and low politics or to psychoanalyse the subject.24 McKay and Bates’ accountof Macdonald does the latter by claiming that his direct involvement in thecommercialisation of Nova Scotia is what pushed him to support a romantic, anti-modernideology such as tartanism. In their account, the liberal order, which he helped construct,is what inevitably led to the commercialisation of this beloved myth-symbol complex. Thereis a sense that Macdonald was a tragic figure, beholden to liberal forces that he naively hopedto contain with his support of tartanism, cleverly uncovered by historians studying ideology



only in order to expose the inequalities of capitalism.25 In Boyko’s and Litt’s studies, on theother hand, they periodically advocate for their subjects’ beliefs. Boyko emphasises Bennett’scourage in leadership, pointing to his efforts to protect his principles, descended fromMacdonald, while Litt is clear that Turner was central to maintaining national unity and fiscalresponsibility in an era of Trudeauvian excess and ideological rigidity. They valorise certaintraditions as if some traditions were more legitimate than others. In both of these cases, theauthors are upholding the politics of the centre as the true Canadian way, potentially sulliedby opportunism or ideological excess.26 The concentration of study on a single individual,even while demonstrating the importance of contingency and ideas, tends to separate themfrom the society and allow for broad generalisations.The use of political history to construct normative categories of Canadian political tradi-

tions and culture – the search for origins castigated by Foucault in the recent past27 – is alsoevident in Andrew Smith’s recent study of Confederation. Smith disagrees with McKay thatConfederation involved the imposition of a liberal order.28 Instead, he draws attention todebates from 1864–1867 about taxation and the size of government. Smith concludes thatclassical liberalism was not dominant, nor was it the victor. Rather, it was the triumph ofTory interventionism.29 Smith is interested in assigning authenticity and intrinsic value tothese traditions for present society. Smith represents a tendency amongst some current histo-rians of Canadian political thought to valorise certain aspects of Canada’s British-laden leg-acy, to reveal it as the ‘truth’ underlying Canadian political history and culture.30

I am not suggesting that the return to studying Britishness is indicative of a colonialmentality. Indeed, Philip Buckner’s edited volumes have effectively convinced Canadianhistorians that the British connection is important to studying Canadian history withoutidealising British ideals or imperialism.31 Yet Smith’s articles and C. P. Champion’s bookThe Strange Demise of British Canada express an admiration for British political values andinstitutions. Champion’s book adroitly deconstructs the transformation of Canadian civicculture in the 1960s under the Pearson Liberals as itself part of the mental universe ofBritishness; the reforms were not emptied of British content but embodied the liberal impe-rialism that was ‘dominant’ at the time. Champion, however, takes the assumption thatBritish values were inherently liberal at face value, confusing liberal imperialist claims touniversality with reality, not reflective of a contingent understanding and construction of acertain time and place.32 Champion is responding to José Igartua’s claim that in the 1960s,a sudden shift occurred in English Canada in which the dominant ethnic nationalism ofthe past was replaced by civic nationalism. While Champion’s point that Igartua is too strictin his delineation of the collapse of Britishness in Canada is salient, it is clearly based onChampion’s own vision of ‘liberal’ British values.33

In addition, many of the aforementioned sources are dedicated to analysing high politics,as distinct from wider Canadian society, which is one of the major criticisms of traditionalpolitical histories. Furthermore, such limited studies can undermine claims that a particularset of ideas was ‘dominant’ if it is only studied within elite circles.34 Gary Kinsman’s andPatrizia Gentile’s The Canadian War on Queers attempts to integrate popular and high politicsand provide an innovative analysis of Canadian political history. Kinsman and Gentile weavea neo-Marxist investigation of national security and state formation into the oral histories of‘queer’ Canadians.35 This allows the voices of those affected to be included in order toprevent the replication of oppressive ideological practices, by placing lived experience atthe forefront in an effort to encourage radical queer activism in the present.36 Kinsman’sand Gentile’s blending of oral history with discourse analysis of official texts and the literatureof the movement is an effective way to explore Canadian political history that should be builtupon.37 There are obvious similarities to McKay’s work, which also addresses political history



from a Marxist perspective; however, Kinsman and Gentile are limited because they envisionideology and politics as merely oppressive, in need of exposure.38 Viewing ideology, stateformation and politics as a whole only in the context of oppression/rebellion can be reduc-tive. Ideological practices are often oppressive and construct ‘others’ through which the dom-inant society is able to comfortably exert its privilege. Yet is it the only function of ideologies,political parties and the entire apparatus of the state to promote an atomising liberalism as itseems some of these studies are claiming? Political history is much more complex than thisapproach allows.Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey and Andrew Parnaby also discuss national security cam-

paigns, specifically from Confederation until the present war on terror. The authors arguethat political policing is always problematic within liberal democracies. Political policinghas been used to maintain the status quo; the protection of society against perceived threatscreates means to pursue actions that would be impossible under the light of democratic scru-tiny.39 The constant involvement of political masters makes political policing even more im-portant for Canadian political history; according to the authors, Canada is a land that prizesdeference to authority and Crown privilege. Thus, pursuit of subversion has been carriedout not by the ‘freelance paranoiacs’ of the United States but by the established institutionsof power.40 Yet Whitaker, Kealey and Parnaby, along with this sweeping generalisation ofCanada’s political culture, periodically perpetuate ideological uncertainty by referring tothe records of the security services as evidence of a ‘secret history’ of conservatism inCanada.41 The term conservatism, however, seems to mean only the defence of wealthand power, not any particular ideational constellation of conservative thought. Is this abroader ideological argument that the state security apparatus has operated in Canada as anupholder of conservatism within an alleged liberal order? If not, has conservatism only beenthe drive to conserve wealth and power? While this magisterial study is an important additionto Canadian political history, the elision between descriptions of ‘liberal democracies’ and‘conservative’ strongholds can create confusion.42

Strangely, amidst these excellent studies of Canadian politics, there is a dearth of studies ofpolitical parties. I believe that this reflects a recent tendency to focus on either individual po-litical actors or how political actions, ideologies and developments fit within McKay’s liberalorder framework.43 In the former, there are useful discussions of how the individual fits intoa particular party, but there is often a lack of analysis of the party as a whole. In the latter, thetotalising force of liberalism consumes all parties, outside of perhaps the Communist Party ofCanada or other leftist alternatives, thus marginalising the importance of specific parties withpotentially distinct ideas and policies. McKay’s own study of the early left in Canada beginsto flesh this out by examining the network of beliefs that characterised the ‘first formationleftists’ in Canada, in particular the importance of the concepts of evolution and the triuneformula of Marx. His study is a landmark achievement in the history of the left in Canada,countering the idea that early leftists were inconsequential by arguing that first formationleftists’ importance lay in their formulation of an alternative worldview from the liberal cap-italist hegemony. Yet in attempting to escape from a study of a political party, which assumesa certain unity of purpose, McKay posits his own unity on a diverse movement. The left inthis period becomes a site for reconnaissance cohered against the machinations of liberalismand fighting for equality, no matter how problematic, and once again, his study becomes ameans to reveal the oppression inherent within the dominant ideological framework of theday and of contemporary Canada.44 While certainly relations of power are an importanthistorical subject in its own right and the previous authors have indeed detailed these withgreat skill, there is a tendency to paint a stark portrait of ‘resisters’ (Marxists, marginalisedpeoples) and ‘oppressors’ (Liberals/liberal and Conservatives/conservatives).



But does this mean that institutional representations of interests and ideas are unimportant? Ifone peruses the recent literature in Canadian history, it would appear so. It seems as if the ‘returnof the individual’ to Canadian history proclaimed by English and Miller has not led to a similarreturn to analysing formal political institutions. The history of the Conservative Party has beenalmost completely ignored since the 1970s,45 as has the Co-operative CommonwealthFederation and New Democratic Party (CCF/NDP), once the subject of numerous studies.46

Even the Liberal Party is often only mentioned in biographies of its main protagonists or injournalistic accounts.47 Penny Bryden and Robert Wardhaugh are exceptions. Bryden hascontributed a study on the shifting ideas and policies of the Liberal Party during the Pearsonleadership, integrating an analysis of the grassroots of the Liberals, the conflicting demands withinthe Party and the impediments of Canadian federalism.48 Wardhaugh examines how the Liberalelite conceptualised ‘the West’, particularly the role of King’s changing mindset in the eventualcollapse of the Party in the region.49 The Social Credit Party, once the subject of an entire series,has essentially been treated as a right-wing aberration in Canadian history. Janine Stingel’s damningindictment of the Party’s virulent anti-Semitism, which is a rare study of the federal Party, confirmsthe view that Social Credit was simply racist.50 Social Credit, along with other Canadian politicalparties, need more sustained studies into their structure and their dominant ideas.In addition, a discussion of the overall place of parties in Canadian history is necessary,

informed by the recent work of British historians such as Green and Geraint Thomas who,along with McKay, have moved beyond simply describing a party’s ‘importance’ in electoralpolitics. Instead, they examine how different levels of the party interacted with one another,with the wider public through reading clubs, the use of mass media in an age of ‘politicalmodernity’, and examine idea selection as a historical process, not an assumed reality or justcrass opportunism.51 Constituency studies through these frameworks would be a fruitfulavenue for Canadian historians, integrating popular politics with national interests and betterunderstanding the constant negotiations that occur in political parties due to their function,structure and ideology.52

Political history is very much alive in Canada, and this author, for one, is glad that it is nolonger a narrow, descriptive account of ‘what mattered’. Political history has benefitted fromthe changes brought on by historians interested in gender, religion, the state-as-process,ethnicity, race and postmodernist concepts of meaning. These perspectives open the disci-pline to a more robust discussion not trapped within the confines of elites and power politics.It allows for the study of the minute negotiations that go on throughout our interconnectedsociety without forgetting that ideologies of some form are behind them, constantly shiftingand being adapted. The field is indeed better for it.

Short Biography

Kevin Anderson’s research focuses on the intersections of ideas, religion and politics, in thelate 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically the nature of Canadian nationalism, represen-tations of Canadian national identity and the place of religion and political parties withinthese processes. He has recently completed his doctoral thesis that examined anti-Catholicismin 20th century Canada. His thesis, “ ‘This typical old Canadian form of racial and religioushate’: Anti-Catholicism and English Canadian Nationalism, 1905–1965,” investigates thedynamic nature of anti-Catholicism in 20th century Canada. This strand of intellectualhistory provides insight into current discussions of Canadian national identity, challengingthe rigid divide that some scholars have posited between civic nationalism and conservativeethnic nationalism. His extensive research into nationalism piqued his interest into the natureof Canadian identity and the roots of conservatism. He is engaged in a critical study of the



influence of the federal Social Credit Party on Canadian conservatism and its unique naturewithin the North Atlantic Triangle. He is currently a sessional instructor at McMasterUniversity, where he received his PhD, teaching the course Poverty, Privilege and Protestin Canadian History. He holds a BA in History and a MA in History from York University.

Notes

* Correspondence: McMaster University, 41 Grant Avenue, Hamilton, Ontario, L8N 2X4, Canada. Email:[email protected]

1 I will limit myself to an analysis of studies of post-Confederation political history for reasons of space. In addition, I willlimit myself to studies of English Canada, believing that the literature on recent French Canadian political history would ne-cessitate another article. I take seriously Magda Fahrni’s claim that Quebec has been left out of recent analyses of ‘Canada’due to historians not being as interested in pan-Canadian research. Fahrni posits that Quebec needs to be integrated intoCanadian history in order to further the understanding of Quebec’s often contested place within Canada. Given the con-straints of space, I will focus on English Canadian political history in order to not caricature work discussing French Canada.This is why I am not discussing such important work as that byMatthewHayday regarding federal language policies and thetensions inherent within Canadian federalism. Fahrni, ‘Reflections on the Place of Quebec’, in Christopher Dummitt andMichael Dawson (eds.), Contesting Clio’s Craft, 1–5, and Hayday, Bilingual Today, United Tomorrow.2 For the most well-known defences of traditional political history, see Michael Bliss, ‘Privatizing the Mind’, Journal ofCanadian Studies, 26 (1991–2): 5–17, and J. L., Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? For responses to Blissand Granatstein, see Gregory S. Kealey, ‘Class in English-Canadian Historical Writing’, Journal of Canadian Studies,27 (1992): 123–9; A.B. McKillop, ‘Who Killed Canadian History?’, Canadian Historical Review, 80 (1999): 269–99.3 I am borrowing this term from Jeffrey Vacante’s H-Net review of Contesting Clio’s Craft. Vacante, ‘The New PoliticalHistory in Canada’, Sept. 2010, <http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31169>, accessed 7 Oct. 2013.4 Ian McKay, ‘The Liberal Order Framework’, Canadian Historical Review, 81 (2000): 617–45, reprinted in Jean-FrancoisConstant and Michel Ducharme (eds.), Liberalism and Hegemony. For critiques of McKay, Jeffrey L. McNairn, ‘In Hopeand Fear’, in Liberalism and Hegemony, 64–97, and Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, ‘Modalities of Social Author-ity’, Social History/Histoire Sociale, 36 (2003): 18–29.5 Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, 1–3.6 E.H.H. Green, ‘Introduction’, in E.H.H. Green (ed.), Ideologies of Conservatism, 14–15.7 Jon Lawrence, ‘Political History’, in Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds.), Writing History, 197–9.8 Ibid, 185–7, 193–4.9 John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau;Robert Wardhaugh,Mackenzie King and the Prairie West; Raymond Blake (ed.), Transforming the Nation: Canada and BrianMulroney; Barry Ferguson and Robert Wardhaugh (eds.), Manitoba Premiers of the 19th and 20th Centuries; BradfordRennie (ed.), Alberta Premiers of the 20th Century; Gordon L. Barnhart (ed.), Saskatchewan Premiers of the 20th Century.10 Foreword, English, vii–viii, in Paul Litt, Elusive Destiny; Carman Miller, A Knight in Politics, 8–9.11 Miller, Knight, 8–9.12 To conserve space, I will also not be examining works that deal with Canadian international relations. This is asubgenre of history unto itself and deserves its own article. For recent works, Robert Bothwell, Alliance and Illusion;David Meren, With Friends Like These.13 Miller, Knight, 7–9, 52, 61–3, 151–2, 242–4. This vision of Canadian politicians as lacking in original ideas or anystrong political philosophy was expressed decades ago in G. P. de T. Glazebrook’s classic A History of Canadian PoliticalThought, 156–163.14 Freeden, Ideologies, 1–6.15 Boyko, Bennett, 159–61, 371, 410–3.16 Litt, Elusive Destiny, 398–401. Robert Wardhaugh has also placed Clifford Clark firmly within the political and ideo-logical centre, balancing demands for state intervention with dedication to free enterprise. Wardhaugh, Behind the Scenes,105–6, 379–82. The clearest example of confusing and equating ‘middle-ground’ politics with a non-ideological bodypolitic in general comes in a brief analysis of Robert Stanfield’s political career: ‘His was the “big tent” conservatism thathas always served Canadian Conservatives best because it reflects the profoundly non-ideological nature of the Canadiansensibility writ large.’ Foreword, Hugh Segal, in Richard Clippingdale, Robert Stanfield’s Canada, viii.17 Ian McKay and Robin Bates, Province of History, 278–80.18 T. Stephen Henderson, Angus L. Macdonald, 4–9, 213–6.19 McKay, ‘Liberal Order Framework’, 624–5. Here, McKay seems to suggest that liberalism can be teased out fromhistory: ‘Conceptualized in this way, liberalism as a hierarchical ensemble of ideological principles can be distinguished


http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31169


from the historical forms it has assumed, and it can also be distinguished from the competing ideological formationsalongside which it evolved[.]’20 For biographies of politically active women, see Faith Johnston, A Great Restlessness; Peter Campbell, Rose Henderson;McKay is the exception, as he often integrates gender into his work.21 Christie, Engendering the State, 2–7.22 Stephen, Pick One Intelligent Girl; also see Stephen’s ‘Balancing Equality for the Post-War Woman’, in Mona Gleason,Adele Perry and Tamara Myers (eds.), Rethinking Canada, 287–96.23 Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers and Adele Perry, ‘Introduction’, Rethinking Canada, 7–8.24 Other attempts to psychoanalyse the subject of a biography can be seen in Johnston, A Great Restlessness, 309–12.Johnston comments on Nielsen’s erratic love life along with her ‘romantic’ dedication to Communism. David A.Wilson, in his superb two-volume biography of D’Arcy McGee, believes that McGee’s career can be explained throughhis constant negotiation between reason and emotionalism and his propensity for paranoia and intensity. Wilson, ThomasD’Arcy McGee: Vol. 1, 10–25. Also see Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee: Vol. 2.25 McKay and Bates, Province of History, 279–87, 310–15; McKay, ‘Liberal Order’, 628–9. This criticism is also presentin McNairn’s response to McKay’s liberal order framework, McNairn, ‘In Hope and Fear’, 68–77; Freeden, Ideologies,1–2; Mathew Humphrey, ‘(De)Contesting Ideology’, in Gayil Talshir, Mathew Humphrey and Michael Freeden(eds.), Taking Ideology Seriously, 122–4.26 Boyko, Bennett, 159–71, 227–8, 268 424–31; Litt, Elusive Destiny, 395–405.27 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice,139–45.28 McKay, ‘The Liberal Order’, 632–3.29 Andrew Smith, ‘Toryism, Classical Liberalism, and Capitalism’, Canadian Historical Review, 89 (2008): 3–5, 19–25.30 For Smith’s Anglophilia, Smith, ‘Canadian Progress and the British Connection’, in Contesting Clio’s Craft,75–97.31 Buckner (ed.), Canada and the British Empire; Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds.), Canada and the British World.32 C. P. Champion, The Strange Demise of British Canada, 7–18. Buckner agrees with Champion’s analysis of the contin-uance and importance of liberal imperialism in Canada, believing that the ignoring of Britishness by Canadian historianshas been due to interpreting Britishness too narrowly. Buckner, however, is clear that examining Britishness in Canada isabout furthering the understanding of Canadian history, not to assume the inherent British nature of all Canadian valuesand history as Champion seems to claim. Buckner, ‘The Long Goodbye’, in Buckner and Francis (eds.), Rediscovering theBritish World, 182–7, 194.33 José Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution, 1–13.34 Lawrence, “Political History,” 183.35 Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, Canadian War on Queers, 1–4.36 Ibid, 5–7, 21–2.37 Ibid, 15–20.38 Indeed, the authors see this book as a “transformative historical sociology that will change Canadian history.” Ibid, 6.39 For example, spying on the Parti Québécois. Whitaker, Kealey and Parnaby, Secret Service, 271–323.40 Whitaker, Kealey and Parnaby, Secret Service, 9–10.41 In fact, the book concludes with the authors stating that because the security forces are overall defenders of wealthand power, ‘they appear as the praetorian guard of conservatism.’ Whitaker, Kealey and Parnaby, Secret Service, 11, 543.42 This confusion is also present within Franca Iacovetta’s Gatekeepers, 18–19, 291–2, when she refers to a ‘fundamen-tally conservative Cold War consensus’ causing the marginalisation of those considered ‘others’. It seems that Iacovetta’sdefinition of conservatism is a government practicing ‘corrupted democracy’.43 For a selection of works commenting on and integrating McKay’s framework, see Liberalism and Hegemony; ChristoAivalis, ‘In the Name of Liberalism’, Canadian Historical Review, 94 (2013): 263–88; David S. Churchill, ‘Draft Resisters,Left Nationalism’, Canadian Historical Review, 93 (2012): 227–60; David Tough, ‘ “The rich … should give to such anextent that it will hurt”: “Conscription of Wealth” ’, Canadian Historical Review, 93 (2012): 382–407.44 McKay, Reasoning Otherwise, 5–11, 29–33, 40–1, 520–4.45 See Granatstein’s The Politics of Survival. For a recent biography that analyses an important Tory, see Patricia Roy’sBoundless Optimism.46 Dan Azoulay, Keeping the Dream Alive; Boyko offers an interesting analysis of the hostility towards the ideologicaltransformation the CCF offered in the postwar era, but does not provide a detailed examination of the Party itself.Boyko, Into the Hurricane.47 Champion does analyse Liberal policies in the 1960s, but his overall desire is to demonstrate that liberal imperialism inthis brief period was the dominant form of identity. Champion, Strange Demise. A recent journalistic examination of theLiberals is Brooke Jeffrey, Divided Loyalties.48 Penny Bryden, Planners and Politicians, 54–72, 122–40, 167–9.49 Wardhaugh, Mackenzie King, 4–5, 14–20, 259–61.



50 Janine Stingel, Social Discredit. Godron Hak has produced a brief article on the BC Social Credit Party, focusing on itsvictory in the 1952 provincial election due to its exploitation of populism. Hak, ‘Populism and 1952’, Canadian HistoricalReview, 85 (2004): 1–11.51 Green, ‘Introduction’, 2–4, 14–5, and ‘The Battle of the Books’, in Green, Ideologies, 133–56; Thomas, ‘PoliticalModernity and “Government” ’, in Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (eds.), Brave New World, 41–3, 63–5.52 Johnston provides a good example by looking at Dorise Nielsen’s importance in the federal constituency of NorthBattleford, Saskatchewan, and her relations with both the federal CCF and her attempts to promote “Unity” of the left.Johnston,Great Restlessness, 59–79. An excellent analysis of the bureaucratization of Canadian governance is Wardhaugh,Behind the Scenes.

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