The Canadian Revolution 1985-1995: From Deference to Defiance

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

This is not Peter Newman’s best book. Much of it reads like a
collection of essays that roam widely over the last 10 years of Canadian
history. The author’s thesis is that in the years from 1985 onward,
Canadians abandoned their deferential attitudes and became more than a
little Bolshie. The old institutions fell apart. The monarchy became a
joke, a staple of the supermarket tabloids; the church lost influence;
and the nation began to disintegrate as businesses moved out or failed,
as new parties sprang up and old ones disappeared, and as Quebec moved
closer to independence. There is a good story here but, his occasionally
pyrotechnic prose notwithstanding, Newman doesn’t really tell it.

Two of his pieces stand out, however. Originally intending to write a
biography of Mulroney, Newman had extraordinary access to the Tory
leader in power, and the material he saw, as well as the interviews he
had, make his chapter on the man who brought it all crashing down the
best in the book. To Newman, correctly, Mulroney was a radical, someone
who (despite having no fixed ideology) set Canada en route to
fundamental change. The Free Trade Agreement was one such irreversible
change; another was his attempt to make the Conservative Party the
natural governing party by welding Quebec to it. This sparked
Mulroney’s failed attempts to get Quebec willingly under the
Constitution—a failure that brought us to our present pass. Newman’s
account of Lucien Bouchard, the man who capitalized on Mulroney’s
failure, is similarly well done, for again he has had amazing access to
key players and their journals. These two sections alone make the book
worthwhile, but it is a pity that the remainder is often so pallid.