The Fight of My Life: Confessions of an Unrepentant Canadian

Margaret Conrad is a professor of history at Acadia University. She is
the author of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800, and Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in
Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 and the co

Despite the subtitle, there are not many startling confessions, either
public or private, in this memoir. It is instead the kind of mid-life
reflection that might be expected of one of Canada’s best-known social
activists. After a brief and insightful survey of her early years
growing up in Nova Scotia and Ontario, Barlow focuses on the issues that
honed her political consciousness and the battles that she has fought in
the war against market liberalism, sexism, and oppression. Like the
author, the prose in this volume is “fit and feisty,” making this
book a highly readable entry into what the chairperson of the Council of
Canadians (COC) is all about.

Barlow was raised in a middle-class family and her life followed a
common course for women of the boomer generation: early marriage, two
children, feminism, divorce. Where she parts company with most of the
rest of her cohorts is in her increasing involvement in public life,
first as a consultant on women’s issues, then as a would-be Liberal
MP, and ultimately as a vigorous opponent of policies championed by
global corporate interests such as the Free Trade Agreement and the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Barlow’s courage and stamina,
reflected early on in her teaching experience at the Canadian Police
College, are legendary and well documented here. So too is her sense of
humor, displayed in telling anecdotes spoofing such articulate opponents
as John Crosbie and Conrad Black.

Barlow goes to some length to make sense of her shifting political
allegiances and her parting of the ways with her COC colleague Mel
Hurtig. Although she sticks by her principles, in an afterword she
explains how her views on feminism and politics generally have changed
over the years. Notwithstanding her shift from partisan to citizen
politics, the tone of this memoir suggests that Barlow may still have
hopes for electoral success. Whatever the final chapter in her
remarkable career, she has a good grasp of the forces bringing her to
this point in her life and her ambitious agenda for the new
millennium—fighting against environmental degradation, neo-Fascism,
and oppression—is an eminently worthy one.