The New Right and Democracy in Canada: Understanding Reform and the Canadian Alliance

Eric P. Mintz is an associate professor of political science and
environmental studies at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

The stunning impact of the Reform Party (now the Canadian Alliance
Party) on Canadian party politics has been analyzed in a number of
excellent books by academics and journalists. Rather than duplicating
efforts to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Reform Party, David
Laycock, a professor of political science at Simon Fraser University,
focuses on the party’s version of populist democracy. Laycock argues
that Reform’s advocacy of the direct democracy mechanisms of
referendums, initiatives, and recall were part of the ideological New
Right agenda that focused on attacking the welfare state and ensuring
that the results of the private market are not significantly modified by
public policy. Instead of challenging the power of big business, as had
earlier Prairie populist parties, Reform directed its attack on
government-supported equality-seeking “special interests.” These
interests, it claimed, were subverting the will of the people. The
intent of New Right populism is to shrink the scope of democracy by
reducing pursuit of the common good to the aggregate of consumerlike
preferences, to remove questions of social justice from political
discussion, and to undermine the plurality of groups that allows the
representation of differing interests and values. Nevertheless, populism
was an important component of the Reform Party’s appeal. Canadian
Alliance leader Stephen Harper’s focus on pure free-market rhetoric
rather than populism may, in Laycock’s view, reduce the attractiveness
of the Canadian Alliance to activists and voters.

The New Right and Democracy in Canada makes a significant contribution
to our understanding of the Reform Party and contemporary politics.
Although much of the book is analytical, Laycock favors a left-wing
populism that would include some direct democracy mechanisms as part of
a broader concept of deliberative democracy. That alternative is,
however, not thoroughly developed in this book. Overall, the book is
well written and interesting, although there is some repetition as a
result of its structuring as a series of essays.