Making Good: Law and Moral Regulation in Canada, 1867-1939

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

Intended for an audience of undergraduates, this study focuses on “the
changing scope and subjects of regulation, the administration of moral
laws, and the ideological interests which underlay the imposition of
legislation” in the period 1867–1939. The morality is that of
“wealthy Anglo-Celtic Protestants and ... bourgeois French
Catholics” who with varying degrees of success sought to criminalize
prostitution, alcohol consumption, drug use, homosexuality, and
gambling. The translation of private beliefs into government policy had
its most negative impact on women, working-class men, immigrants, and
Natives.

The ideological interests were those of the private sector and
government, which promoted capital accumulation as a moral imperative,
and the path to progress and Canadian nationhood. Their agenda
emphasized the centrality of the heterosexual family—bread-winning
husband and homemaking wife—in achieving these national goals.
However, the link between family and these goals is not made explicit,
and undergraduates may have difficulty in seeing how the two were
necessarily or strategically connected.

The survey is presented in a straightforward manner, with the argument
of each chapter signaled at the outset and diligently recapped at the
end. Anecdotal evidence is generally sacrificed to comprehensive
coverage. Students may prefer a little less enlightenment in favor of a
more lively narrative.

The authors have interesting things to say about why and how private
interests dominated public policy on moral behavior at the national,
provincial, and local levels. Enforcement of such policy was another
matter. Regional concerns and values, and police forces who could do no
more than regulate the vice trade, often rendered the law ineffectual.
It may interest students, many of whom are ignorant of their own
history, to know that the moral crusade had a particular historical
context and that until quite recently it informed both public policy and
the values that succeeding generations were raised and educated to
endorse.