Canadian Annual Review of Politics and Public Affairs, 1990

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is also the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the
Peaceable Kingdom, and the co-author of Invisible and Inaudible in
Washington: American Policies Toward Canada.

David Leyton-Brown and his highly competent team of writers have
produced three superb volumes covering three pivotal years. Such
contributors as Raymond Blake, Dean Oliver, David Smith, Richard Wilbur,
Kathy Brock, and Rand Dyck have immortalized themselves, as historians
will forever have to study their insights into the election of
Ontario’s first NDP government (1990) and its subsequent difficulties,
Canada’s accession to the Organization of American States (1990) and
NAFTA (1992), the annihilation of Social Credit in British Columbia
(1991), the demise of the federal Conservatives, and the rise of the
Bloc Québécois and the Reform Party.

During these critical years, Canadians made several irrevocable
decisions: the rejection of Meech Lake in 1990 and the Charlottetown
Accord in 1992; the introduction of the GST in 1990; the legalization of
Sunday shopping (in Ontario) in 1991; and the withdrawal of the Canadian
Armed Forces from Germany and Cyprus. In 1990, Ontario Conservatives
chose Mike Harris as their leader, and the Mulroney government
privatized Petro-Canada. In 1992, the United Church of Canada approved
the ordination of homosexuals.

Given the perennial Quebec issue, historians may want to examine the
1991 Allaire Report, which would have gutted the federal government, or
Canadian policy toward the disintegration of the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia that same year. The Mulroney government was one of the first
to recognize Ukrainian independence but moved more cautiously with
regard to Yugoslavia. Other aspects of the Mulroney government’s
foreign policy dealt with in these volumes include the hosting of an
international conference on the reunification of Germany (1990); the
termination of Canadian involvement in South West Africa (which became
the independent African nation of Namibia in 1990); the supervision of
Nicaragua’s 1990 elections, which ended the U.S.–Sandinista
confrontation; the dispatch of 100 Canadians as part of a United Nations
force in Cambodia (1992); and Canada’s role in the Gulf War of 1991.

Also examined are such Native issues as the 1990 revolt at Oka, the
controversial attempts by Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay to declare
themselves unilingually English (1990), the renewal of NORAD (1991),
Roberta Bondar’s activities in space, and the disclosure that Parti
Québécois cabinet minister Claude Morin was an RCMP informer (1992).

Each volume begins with a chronological table of the year’s events,
which is followed by a succinct prose summary by the editor. The various
authors have contributed detailed yet readable accounts. Each volume
ends with the year’s obituaries, including biographies.