To make his arguments about Canadian political history, Richard Johnston in this important book focuses on broad trends in the fortunes, strategies and existence of political parties from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Any reader, from those with little knowledge of the topic to experts in Canadian politics, will learn a tremendous amount. Most of the book's analysis relies on aggregated election data, though individual-level survey data occasionally show up to build on a point. The pages are packed full of facts, figures and tables summarizing quantitative data in service of a variety of historical arguments.
If there is one overarching historical theme, it is that there are patterns to Canadian politics, yet those patterns are various. Disruptions are many. Among the major factors explaining Canada's electoral politics, he informs us of the following: it was mostly about the Liberals; at times it was about the left (the CCF or later, the NDP); or sometimes about the right's penchant for disintegration and occasional consolidation. Meanwhile, religion played a large role, though the divides between Catholics and others were not really religious. Sectionalism, including in Quebec but also in other places, also played a role, but that again was mostly about the Liberals.
The argument about the Liberals stands out as central, pun fully intended. Johnston claims that to understand Canadian politics throughout the twentieth century, one must understand how the Liberals were simultaneously the centrist party and also the party that could appeal to Quebec and to the rest of Canada (ROC) on questions about federalism and national integrity. The Liberals were not traditional leftists with ties to socialism, and they were certainly not rightists. To Quebeckers, the Liberals were also not the English-loving and centralizing Conservatives, and to the ROC, the Liberals were, in Johnston's summary, “‘the party of Canada’…..the chief advocate of the federal government's jurisdictional interests” (85). The Liberals were until the 1980s the default choice for governing when the right did not unite or the left was not much of a threat.
As for other parties, he divides them into the leftists (CCF and NDP) and the insurgents (all the other non-major, non-leftist parties, such as Reform and the Bloc). The ups and downs of these parties, described in detail, form the primary historical disruptions. Johnston shows how these ups and downs synchronize with the varying success of the Conservatives to consolidate support and defeat the Liberals occasionally.
On religion, Johnston makes the credible point that Catholics long supported the Liberals, not because of any specific policies contrasting Liberals with Conservatives or other parties, but rather because of geopolitics. Of particular interest, Johnston links Catholic support for the Liberals to ethnic origin, including English, Irish and French. The Liberals were, of the two main parties, the one more inclined to take stands that were either resistant to, or at least independent of, the British government. This tilted French and Irish Canadians who were Catholic toward the Liberals from the early twentieth century through the 1970s. And furthermore, many Canadian Catholics of English origin were actually mildly anti-Protestant and anti-British Crown. This tendency for Catholics to support the Liberals, Johnston notes, has substantially receded in recent decades.
His arguments about sectionalism are multi-layered. In contrast to many other accounts, he downplays Quebec separatism in driving the dynamics of Canadian party politics, and situates conflicts over Quebec in larger country-level dynamics such as the overall strength of the NDP. He instead focuses due attention to two other aspects of Canadian politics that are often overlooked. The West, as the location of both the origins of true, leftist socialism and hard-right conservatism in Canadian politics, played a large role in flanking the Liberals on either side ideologically depending on the election. And the relationships between provincial party politics and national party politics allow Johnston to pinpoint the origins of leftist and insurgent national upswings. In some of his most innovative and revealing sections of the book (for instance, ch. 9), he focuses on discontinuities between specific provinces and the country in voting support for the key parties.
Such themes, anyway, form the main historical arguments of Johnston's book. The book is more than an analytical history, in spite of its title. Johnston also seeks to make a fundamental, comparative politics argument about the validity of Duverger's Law. He claims that Canadian election results, especially at the riding level, demonstrate that theories about Duverger's Law, promulgated primarily by Gary Cox, which focus attention on the voters’ myopic decision making within constituencies, are misguided. Canadian voters have consistently supported parties that have no chance of winning plurality-rule, riding elections. This is evidence, Johnston claims, that when they make ballot-box decisions, voters are paying attention to provincial and national politics and quite often make choices that have no practical, short-run consequences on election outcomes.
Johnston makes incremental progress on a difficult theoretical and empirical problem in the study of electoral systems and party systems: How to account for repeated and widespread violations of Duverger's Law at the constituency-level? He points out the disparities between the Canadian evidence and theoretical predictions from the literature. He concedes in several places in the book, however, that he and other scholars of electoral systems have yet to explain this behaviour by voters, in Canada or in places like the UK with similar patterns. Johnston summarizes evidence to point out the problem, but he falls short of advancing a new explanation and, fittingly, he calls for more research.
Perhaps no one else could have written this wonderful, if sprawling, book. The book, we hope, is not his capstone because we will benefit from more of Johnston's research in the future. But it does seem a culmination of sorts for Johnston, put into a series of themed chapters. The final product is an octopus, with legs (themes, arguments, conclusions) strewn out in all directions. It is not a beautiful piece of tightly crafted writing (for instance, “It seems to be intuitively reasonable” [148]). We would be poorer if Johnston had worked for another year to make it so because he would have had to simplify and we would have lost the richness and complexities of the history, not to mention the quirkiness of certain revealing digressions.
The book contains many factual jewels and more than enough thematic arguments that ring true. It will stand as a definitive account of twentieth-century Canadian politics. But even more, for a deep understanding of the country's twenty-first century politics, this book is a “must read.”
