Students have been waiting over forty years for a new textbook on Manitoba politics. Murray Donnelly's The Government of Manitoba (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963) and W.L. Morton's Manitoba: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967) are long out of print. Just as dated, our understanding of Manitoba party politics has remained virtually unaltered since Tom Peterson's seminal research in the 1970s, notwithstanding the contributions of Paul Thomas, Nelson Wiseman and others in subsequent decades. The persistence of these works has left noticeable gaps for both novel perspectives and contemporary research on political life in Manitoba. Christopher Adams has ably addressed the latter void with his new book, Politics in Manitoba: Parties, Leaders, and Voters.

Adams's approach is predominantly historical, as he traces the development of Manitoba party politics from its roots in the late nineteenth century. In addition to comments surrounding the importance of leadership, organization, media, communications and electoral laws, Adams layers his narrative with a discussion of the three main confluent forces driving party politics in Manitoba: geography, culture and class. Throughout Manitoba history, divisions between rural and urban, north and south, British and non-British, and owners, farmers and workers have constituted the cleavages around which parties have built their support. Adams captures these complexities in a useful matrix (9) and in his discussion of the two competing “formulas” for party success in the province: “north-plus-north” and “south-plus-south”. As Adams explains, since 1969, the Progressive Conservatives have drawn much of their support from the wealthier segments of the population, concentrated in the fertile farming areas of the rural south and the middle-to-upper-income communities of South Winnipeg. Meanwhile, the New Democrats have found success in the rural north and North Winnipeg, based on appeals to workers, small farmers, ethnic minorities and Aboriginals. The Liberal party remains marginalized in this environment; lacking comparable geographic, ethnic or class bases of support, Liberals have won only a handful of seats in Winnipeg. Manitoba's electoral “battleground,” Adams finds, is centred in a number of “new middle-class” constituencies in south-central Winnipeg. The party able to win those seats controls the Manitoba Legislature, as Gary Doer's New Democrats have done since 1999.

Adams does not intend to write a revisionist history. Indeed, his work draws liberally from a wide range of secondary sources, many of which make up the canon of Manitoba politics. Adams acknowledges this debt throughout the book, noting that his discussion of the geography–ethnicity–class nexus expands upon the work of Morton, Peterson, Wiseman and others. This makes his book an important contemporary contribution to our knowledge of Manitoba party politics. Yet, it is one with “no new story to tell.”

This is not to say that Adams's work lacks novelty or innovation. First and foremost, his rigorous collection of election results provides a valuable resource for students of Manitoba politics. Despite the best efforts of election authorities, never before have these statistics been compiled in a single document and never before have the intricacies of the provincial electoral system been examined in such great depth. This makes the book an indispensable guide to the history of elections in Manitoba. Second, Adams reports the results of surveys compiled by Probe Research between 1999 and 2007. Drawing on a total of 30,000 quarterly interviews, he paints an attitudinal and socio-demographic portrait of each major party. Conservative support tends to come from “men, non-urban residents, and from those in upper-income households”—in other words, those groups traditionally drawn to appeals from the political right. By contrast, lower- and middle-income voters, women, and northerners form the New Democrats' base, while the Liberals “tend to draw more strongly from urban areas, women, and younger voters” (167–68). Given public perceptions and the lineage of each party, these findings are hardly groundbreaking. (Notable exceptions include the fact that the Conservatives presently enjoy a lead among youth and that the New Democrats hold an issue advantage in terms of crime and justice.) Nonetheless, these surveys serve an important purpose. Through them, Adams provides crucial empirical evidence to confirm our age-old assumptions about Manitoba politics, notions that, to this point, have relied more on anecdote and authority than data.

That is Adams's key contribution. By blending quantitative and qualitative approaches, linking the past to the present, he retells the history of Manitoba party politics in a detailed and succinct manner. The work is both accessible and essential to observers, students, practitioners and researchers seeking an understanding of the province's political landscape. Grounded firmly in existing accounts, this book provides a much-needed update and validation of what Donnelly, Morton, Peterson and others told us decades ago.

One is left wondering, however, whether the core dynamics of Manitoba politics have really remained unchanged since the birth of the most recent party system in 1969. Or is our understanding limited by a continued reliance on existing literature, theories and perspectives? In either event, as a research community, we must wait to view Manitoba politics through lenses other than geography, culture and class. In the meantime, Adams has provided an important, new capstone on this conventional approach.