Political History Of Canada Research Articles

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 by Elsbeth Heaman

<i>Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917</i> by Elsbeth Heaman

Elsbeth In Taxland, or Through the Change Purse: An Appreciation

This reflection on E. A. Heaman’s Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 suggests that the innovative “taxationist” interpretation of Canada the author offers bears some striking similarities to other upside-down worlds. Like Alice’s Wonderland, Bryden shows that this new view of Canada has all manner of interesting characters, new ways of looking at old subjects, and new vantage points from which to observe the familiar.

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 by E. A. Heaman

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 by E. A. Heaman

E. A. Heaman. Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917.

E. A. Heaman. Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917.

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 by E.A. Heaman

"Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 by E.A. Heaman." Canadian Historical Review, 99(2), pp. 300–301

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 E.A. Heaman McGill-Queens University Press, 2017. 582 pp.

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 E.A. Heaman McGill-Queens University Press, 2017. 582 pp.

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 by E.A. Heaman

Reviewed by: Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 by E.A. Heaman Peter Campbell E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 ( Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2017) Those of us who keenly feel our inadequacies as economic historians are reassured by Elsbeth Heaman's claim that her latest book is a cultural history of taxation. In this way, those of us grown used to the idea that the history of Canada can be written without dealing with the history of taxation at all are brought face to face with the race, class, and gender dimensions of a question we have been quite happy to leave to our colleagues in the economics department. The publication of Tax, Order, and Good Government marks a turning point in our understanding of the first half-century of the country because Elsbeth Heaman has created a coat of many social, cultural, and economic colours stitched together by the history of taxation. The book is characterized by the complexity of its simplicity. The author begins with a deceptively simple point that is on the money: John A. Macdonald's National Policy – that is, the tariff – was a tax. She then complicates the simplicity by pointing out that the National Policy was not just about revenue; it was politically intended to provide enough revenue for the federal government to stay clear of taxpayer anger and protest. The acquiring of that revenue was based on the tariff, a clientelist indirect tax that involved the blatant transfer of money from the poor to the rich. At the heart of book, therefore, is how and why of what Heaman calls Macdonald's quasi-imperialist project broke down in the first half century of Confederation. In the decades following Confederation, Macdonald's government was able to hide behind the tariff by making fairness in taxation a local issue that focused on the inability or refusal of the poor to pay their taxes. In this way attention was diverted from the clientelism and corruption of the rich and redirected squarely on racialized minorities who were perceived as not paying their fair share. In her chapter on British Columbia, Heaman reveals that taxes were collected at gunpoint, the Chinese engaged in tax riots, and the attempt to collect poll taxes from [End Page 275] Aborginal People living off reserve ultimately failed. Living up to her promise to deliver a cultural history of taxation, Heaman powerfully evokes the ways in which Chinese evasion of tax paying provided the pretext for racist whites in BC to deny the Chinese rights of citizenship. The chapter on Montréal most powerfully evokes Heaman's claim that it is the "desperate pleas of the poor for relief" that give the book "its moral centre." (17) Heaman chronicles, in French and English, the anguish of desperate Montrealers unable to pay even a meager water tax. The figures are astonishing; in 1903 alone, 31,270 households were in arrears on their water taxes. (229) Warrants for seizure were issued in astonishing numbers, into the tens of thousands in some years. This was the municipal government, the level of government charged with keeping the poor from starving: a responsibility of which the federal government had washed its hands. The genius of Heaman's analysis is that it takes an issue, taxation, that many of us had dismissed as a bourgeois concern, and uses it as a vehicle to bring us face to face with brutal poverty and dispossession. But the story does not end there. In taxing directly everything from dogs to water, municipal authorities had to engage taxpayer anger and, in the process, demonstrate fairness. In Montréal, the works of progressive businessman H.B. Ames (author of The City Below the Hill) and journalist Jules Helbronner made major contributions to a fiscal reform movement that led to the creation of "a widespread popular movement for social and economic reform." (330) Fiscal reformers insisted that a tax system must be based on moral and social considerations, and these considerations increasingly worked their way upwards into the federal realm. The...

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 by E.A. Heaman

Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 by E.A. Heaman

A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization (review)

Reviewed by: A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization Donald G. Paterson A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization. Michael Hart. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2002. Pp. 576. $29.95 This political history of Canada's trade policy is a well-researched, monumental undertaking covering all of Canada's trade history. Its particular strength, however, lies in the coverage of the more recent past, since the 1950s. Three studies of the history of Canada's trade policy are generally regarded as obligatory reading for new students and are regularly consulted by seasoned researchers: Perry's Taxes, Tariffs and Subsidies; McDairmid's, Commercial Policy in the Canadian Economy; and Young's Commercial Policy. The most recent of these is Young's study published in 1957 as part of the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects. Hart's book is now added to that list both on grounds of coverage and quality of argument. The early part of this book covers the tariff history of the nineteenth century, including that of the colonial period. Since Hart's writing style is lively, the account of these early years is worth the read, even for those familiar with the territory. Even for those who are more interested in [End Page 564] twentieth-century policy it is an essential, and easily digested, precursor to the modern policy era and its issues. This is not to argue that there is nothing new in the early chapters. I was pleased to see Hart's use of economic history research on the Cayley/Galt Tariffs of 1858-9 making the important economic distinction between nominal and effective tariff protection. In some substantial measure these tariffs, imposed during the 'Reciprocity' years, did much to mark out Canada's policy direction and, critically, ingrained US policy makers' suspicions of Canadian motives. When reading, I for one had to keep reminding myself that this is a book about policy and its formation and not a history of Canadian trade - and this can hardly be a criticism. The author ably manages to present the key movements in Canadian trade patterns without inundating us with details to which only an economist could warm, and thus keeps a clear focus. However, it might have been useful to be clearer analytically on the conflicting benefits and costs of policy changes to interests within Canadian society, principally consumers' and producers' welfare. Such a distinction would have helped, for example, in explaining why the Macdonald Commission was such a pivotal event in recent policy making. It was not simply that the commission employed a host of academic economists or that the tenor of the times was emphasizing market outcomes. The Macdonald Commission detailed the welfare costs of trade protection like no other public analysis has ever done. It is not that Hart ignores these issues, but that they could have been more explicitly drawn. One of the strengths of Hart's analysis is his ability to capture the views of those, particularly in the United States, negotiating with, or simply reacting to, the Canadian policy makers. The chapter on negotiations leading up to the Free Trade Agreement ( FTA) of the Mulroney years is a case in point. The sheer play of the events is captivating when viewed from both the Canadian and US perspectives. The unexpected and apparent reversal of the US negotiators that broke the logjam threatening to end the FTA negotiation is still the stuff of high drama. So too, the author manages to incorporate the Canadian regional forces at work and analyse how they mapped into a federal government framework of trade policy. This is a political history, and that is its most fascinating contribution. The text takes us through the high and low politics of the various governments, their cabinets and prime ministers. The theme is pursuit of the answer to the question, Where in the political agenda does trade policy lie, and how does that general agenda determine the policy-making posture? Again, it is the Diefenbaker to Mulroney years that are the most interesting. Hart captures the spirit of Diefenbaker's anti-American, but [End Page 565] inarticulate, attitudes and his bumbling attempts to...

Politics and Constitutional Reform in Canada: A Study in Political Opposition

Political opposition in a federal system is particularly rich and complex, involving not only political parties and pressure groups, but constitutionally sovereign governments as well. This article examines political opposition in a federation through a case study of the mobilization of opposition to the Canadian Constitution Act. Introduced by the federal government in 1980, the Act proposed a series of important changes in the powers of Canada's ten provinces. The resistance offered by a number of provinces, the two opposition parties holding seats in Parliament, and a handful of interest groups were sufficient to secure significant changes in the Act. The analysis presented here demonstrates the key role of provincial governments-and especially of provincial premiers-as oppositional actors, while indicating the importance of the courts and intergovernmental conferences as sites where political opposition expresses itself in a federation. In 1955, Frank Underhill looked back on twenty years of Liberal dominance of Canadian national politics and concluded that the real alternative to the Grits was not to be found in the Progressive Conservatives, the official opposition in Ottawa, but among the few provinces whose citizens had elected non-Liberal governments.' Underhill's observation contains two important insights about political opposition in Canada. First, opposition can, and sometimes must, extend beyond the walls of Parliament. Second, it implies that a federal constitution establishes a basis for an oppositional tension between the national and regional governments created by it. This tension does not have to exist. Underhill claimed to find it only between the Liberal government in Ottawa and the provinces in which other parties held power; but it certainly can exist, and will exist, whenever a provincial ministry feels its goals frustrated by the actions of the national government.2 The political history of Canada since 1960 amply testifies to the oppositional potential of provincial governments, a potential that was most obviously set in motion during the several attempts to secure an amending formula for

Royal Commission on Health Services, 1964. Vol I

A major document in the social and political history of Canada, this report is the first public statement of a commission appointed three years ago to inquire into existing facilities and future needs for health services, and to recommend appropriate measures to ensure the best possible health care for all Canadians. The inquiry has been thorough, including public hearings in 14 cities, and the preparation of 26 special studies. The evidence is carefully marshalled and lucidly presented, and each of the 200 specific recommendations is supported with recent data. The Commissioners recommend that Canada adopt "a comprehensive, universal Health Services Programme, based upon the freedom of choice, and upon free and self-governing professions and institutions, and financed through prepayment arrangements." They discern an "enormous gap between our scientific knowledge and skills on the one hand and our organizational and financial arrangements to apply them to the needs of men, on

&lt;italic&gt;Sir George Étienne Cartier, Bart., his Life and Times: a Political History of Canada from 1814 until 1873&lt;/italic&gt;. By &lt;sc&gt;John Boyd&lt;/sc&gt;. (Toronto and New York: The Macmillan Company. 1914. Pp. xxi, 439)

Journal Article Sir George Étienne Cartier, Bart., his Life and Times: a Political History of Canada from 1814 until 1873. By John Boyd. (Toronto and New York: The Macmillan Company. 1914. Pp. xxi, 439) Get access Sir George Étienne Cartier, Bart., his Life and Times: a Political History of Canada from 1814 until 1873. By Boyd John. (Toronto and New York: The Macmillan Company. 1914. Pp. xxi, 439.) George M. Wrong George M. Wrong Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 21, Issue 1, October 1915, Pages 167–169, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/21.1.167 Published: 01 October 1915

Sir George Etienne Cartier, Bart., his Life and Times: A Political History of Canada from 1814 until 1873

Sir George Etienne Cartier, Bart., his Life and Times: A Political History of Canada from 1814 until 1873