Straight Through the Heart: How the Liberals Abandoned the Just Society

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.

The Chrétien Liberal government has been a huge disappointment to
Canadians who hoped against hope that it might turn away from the
deficit-fighting agenda of the Mulroney Tories long enough to try to
preserve the welfare state. Instead Paul Martin and his bureaucrats have
dominated the stage, continuing the Tories’ agenda in spades. This
book, with its title devastatingly parodying the title of Chrétien’s
memoirs, is a cry of rage and betrayal. Barlow and Campbell have little
new information, no secrets unearthed to present, but they collect
everything in one place and they fix blame. The guilty? Business gets
the rap—most notably, the Business Council on National Issues, which
brings together the country’s largest corporations, and the variety of
right-wing think tanks that have created the deficit hysteria and the
country’s free-trade agenda. The business plan, the authors say, has
been in the making for two decades, and there can be little doubt that
the right wing has won a stranglehold on government, whichever party is
in power. Barlow and Campbell propose no real way of fighting back. The
best they can suggest is that Canadians organize for the long struggle.
Well and good, but there may be nothing left to take back if the
corporations successfully “harmonize” Canada and make it look even
more like the United States.