Reading "Kim" Right

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph and author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

Kim who? Kim Campbell? Is this person destined to assume a place in
Canadian trivia with the likes of Canada’s least-known (but equally
shortlived) prime minister, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, who flitted in and out
of office briefly in the 1890s?

Frank Davey’s searching but seriously flawed analysis of Kim Campbell
was the best of the pre-1993 election books to appear on its subject.
Davey, a poet, writer, and literature professor, attempts to place his
study within the discourse analysis fashionable among literary
academics. Along the way, he enjoyably meditates on the media
representations that were accorded an individual for whom style assumed
precedence over substance. In the end, however, Davey’s own lack of
rigorous analysis obfuscates his original purpose.

Davey tackles in thought-provoking fashion the cultural meaning of
media images and reporting/commentary, but he adds two additional
strains: (i) a fascination with Kim Campbell the individual, and (ii) a
tendency to place her to the right of the ideological spectrum. The
first perspective leads him to assert that Campbell merely adopted the
vocabulary of authoritarianism and intolerance; the latter leads him to
accuse her of adopting a classic ploy in totalitarian thought. Most
readers will likely be confused.

Despite these drawbacks, Davey writes from a refreshingly new male
perspective that takes women’s problems seriously, particularly as
they relate to politics. He is thus able to provide some of the
ideological and intellectual reasons for the massive rejection of Kim
Campbell and her Conservatives at the polls in 1993. Given Campbell’s
likely marginalization in Canadian history, Davey’s thoughtful book is
likely to assume a place that will outweigh its inconsistencies.