A curious thing about Canadian political science is that, compared to its American or British counterparts, it offers very little analysis of collective action outside of political parties. Even the interest groups in Canada don't call themselves interest groups any more. So, when a book on collective actors by a respected scholar like Miriam Smith—who has made significant contributions to the study of Canadian institutionalism and whose book on the lesbian and gay movement is a gem—comes along, it is an event for the field. Because Smith starts the book with a quote from my 1996 article with Jane Jenson on regime shift, I was well invested from the first line and had high expectations that Smith would not only set the macro institutional context that she always does so well, but would provide an insightful analysis of developments in collective action over the past decade that would build on where Jenson and I left off.

Smith goes some way to making the curious gap in the study of Canadian interest groups and social movements less curious. Her central argument is that “the terrain of group politics in Canada has been restructured by the transition from the Keynesian welfare state era to the era of neoliberal globalization” (14). In particular, she argues that the traditional spaces of access, legislatures and parties, have closed, and the courts have taken on new significance for collective actors. With neoliberalism came a focus on individuals, to be consulted and engaged as individuals rather than as leaders and members of organizations. Governments have tried to depoliticize citizen groups, turning them into delivery agents for services rather than allowing them to function as democratic or activist organizations.

The book begins with a good overview of theoretical approaches to the study of collective action, providing a survey of pluralism, Marxism, political economy, historical institutionalism, social movement, and rational choice theory. However, Smith strangely misses the literatures on civil society and the nonprofit/voluntary sector that attempt to explain, somewhat problematically, the rise of voluntary associations in relation to the welfare state. Vaguely reminiscent of Paul Pross' 1992 book, A Civil Society? provides a good historical context as a platform for the next three chapters that analyze the contemporary opportunities for influence in Parliament and parties, the public service and the courts respectively.

Although Smith provides a very solid assessment of both the conceptual approaches and institutional spaces for collective action, the book is ultimately less than satisfying for several reasons. What surprises me is that the analysis is quite conventional, something I would not have anticipated from Smith. The discussions of theoretical frameworks and of institutional opportunity structures are certainly competent, but they reminded me of my (now very dated) lectures from graduate school or of a reading of the classic book by Pross. Second, although Smith argues that we need more of a macro-historical approach to understanding interest groups because most analyses are too presentist, the problem is that her analysis is not presentist enough. It essentially ends with cuts of the mid-1990s and says little of how groups have coped with, caved under, or devised new strategies for a neoliberal environment over the past decade. Consequently, we never really get a deep assessment of exactly how neoliberalism has the effects it has on interest groups and social movements. For instance, the book entirely misses any serious discussion of the “advocacy chill” that has been created by regulatory and project-based funding regimes. There is nothing of the dynamic, which Laforest analyzes so insightfully, that has forced advocacy organizations to get into the business of service provision in order to survive and traditional service agencies to desire more space for participation in policy development. In other places, too much detail is simply left out. I suspect, for example, that most readers would probably find the discussion of the Voluntary Sector Initiative confused and confusing.

One of the reasons that the interest group literature had faded and that more attention is being paid to the voluntary (nonprofit or third) sector is not simply that groups have been co-opted by governments into service delivery, as Smith suggests, or that scholars have lost interest in the democratic aspects of associational life. Some co-optation has undoubtedly occurred, but the story is more complex than this. The new dynamic is that key roles and relationships—around advocacy, research, consultation, democratic practices, and services—have become much more complicated, causing new challenges for collective actors and for governments. If we are going to really understand the ongoing impact of neoliberalism, scholarship needs to grapple with this complexity.

This is a book that I would certainly assign to my students as required background reading because it provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of collective actors in Canadian political life. But, we would need to look elsewhere to fully appreciate the current reality. Unfortunately, it is not clear that elsewhere exists in Canadian scholarship on collective action. Smith is to be congratulated on taking us some distance in addressing this serious gap in Canadian political science, even if she does not take us as far as I would like.