The Limits of Participation: Members and Leaders in Canada's Reform Party

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Faron Ellis, who teaches history and political science at the University
of Lethbridge, has written a comprehensive history of the Reform Party
of Canada from its inception in 1987 until its transformation into the
Canadian Alliance in 1999. (Many might suggest that the Canadian
Alliance was simply the Reform Party under another name, but that is
another matter.) With 39 tables and 177 pages of rather dull text, Ellis
covers its context in the Canadian political system; its policies; the
sex and age of Reformers; the number of votes and seats that it managed
to capture in the elections of 1988, 1993, and 1997; and its entry into
the House of Commons with Deborah Grey’s by-election victory in 1989,
and into the Senate with a victory by Stan Walters that same year. He
also discusses the Reform Party’s opposition to the Meech Lake and
Charlottetown Accords.

Ellis studied under such ideologues and founders of the Reform Party as
Barry Cooper, Tom Flanagan, and Roger Gibbins, and he shares their
values. Anyone who wants a thorough insider’s account of the Reform
Party, once the political home of current Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
can certainly find it here.

Could the story be told in a more interesting manner? Undoubtedly, if
told by a critic. Ellis makes Reform’s campaign against any and all
Quebec leaders in 1997—lumping Jean Chrétien and Jean Charest with
Lucien Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe—appear humdrum. A critic might have
focused on the pseudo-scientific views of fundamentalist Reformers and
on the general hostility of Reformers toward environmentalists, First
Nations peoples, French Canadians, and almost anyone who lives east of
the Great Lakes. Someone might question Reformers’ professed desire to
sing “O Canada” while seeking to emasculate the federal government.
None of that appears here.

Ellis has provided a detailed, factual insider’s account of the
Reform Party while it retained that name. Someone else should write a
more exciting book about the party’s shortcomings and eccentricities.
Now that erstwhile Reformers have become cabinet ministers, there is a
real need for such a book.