The Canadian Political Tradition

This volume examines 150 years of Canadian political life in light if one of the country's most intractable problems, its cultural identity. Although many thoughtful Canadians remain dubious about the existence of a truly Canadian way of life, Douglas Verney argues that in fact Canada's political traditions embody and reflect a unique culture; and that although the Canadian government has been the primary instrument for nurturing this culture, it has been at the same time the entity most guilty of obscuring and ignoring it.

What do we really mean by phrases such as "western Canadian political culture," "the centrist political culture of Ontario," "Red Toryism in the Maritimes," or "Prairie socialism"? What historical, geographical, and sociological factors came into play as these cultures were forged? In this book, Nelson Wiseman addresses many such questions, offering new ways of conceiving Canadian political culture. The most thorough review of the national political ethos written in a generation, In Search of Canadian Political Culture offers a bottom-up, regional analysis that challenges how we think and write about Canada.

This timely revision of one of the classic books in Canadian political studies, originally published in 1979, examines two questions: Will the Canadian federal system fall apart little more than a century after Confederation? Or can its problems of disunity be solved by good intentions with skillful diplomacy? In light of the swelling militancy in Quebec, and key events of the 1980s, Bell has updated his acclaimed reading of Canada's unique political culture by examining some of the important issues involved, including immigration, multiculturalism, the "two nations" concept, the growing sense of independence of Canada's western provinces, and the incursion of American industry and culture into Canada.

Ajzenstat and Smith challenge the idea of Canada as a country whose liberal individualism, unlike that of the United States, is redeemed by a tradition of government intervention in economic and social life: the so-called "tory touch." This ground-breaking book begins with the now classic article in which the red tory view was formulated. It then presents a new and illuminating picture of Canadian political life, in which liberal individualism confronts not toryism but the participatory tradition of civic republicanism. In the final section the two editors, one a liberal, the other a civic republican, debate the crucial questions dominating Canadian politics today-including Quebec's search for recognition-from the perspective of their shared understanding of Canada's founding.

The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now. In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions that underpin the system. For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.

To revitalize politics we need to abandon the idea that ideologies evolve from "right" to "left", from conservatism to socialism, and look at our political differences in terms of the distinction, more familiar in the arts, between classicism and romanticism. She argues that by abandoning our current modes of debate and rediscovering the Enlightenment liberalism that is an enduring part of our political tradition we will help to recreate Canada as a place of debate on fundamentals, not one in which a monolithic definition of identity answers all questions in advance.