Persuaders: Influence Peddling, Lobbying and Political Corruption in Canada

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

Canadians would be well served by a book on the topics covered in Persuaders. Unfortunately, Malvern’s attempt to expose the seamier side of the Canadian political process is not the book that Canadians need. While he damns both left and right, French and English, Jews and Gentiles, the author’s own biases intrude throughout the piece, making the final result both disappointing and misleading.

The perceptive reader will be put on guard by the introduction, in which the author suggests that he speaks for small-town Canadians who lack the political cynicism so au courant in the major cities. The town that I grew up in was as small as one could imagine and yet I have met few people anywhere who had a more cynical sense of how the system really works. One wonders what rare Camelot prompted the author’s curious political posture. The chapter on the roots of lobbying, influence peddling, and corruption in Canada is particularly thin. A more penetrating discussion of the origins of modern interest groups and their methods is surely in order, especially in a book that casts such a wide net. Alas, no such analysis is ever attempted. The same lack of depth mars much of the book. The discussion of the shopping centre controversy in Fredericton, for example, leaves the reader with the mistaken impression that Westcliffe Management, Ltd., won their battle, while the treatment of the role of business in shaping public opinion is surprisingly facile.

One gets the impression that the real object of the author’s venom is not the unholy alliance between business and bureaucrats or even the criminal corruption funded by underworld crime. Rather, it is the collaboration of the government-funded media, feminists, and ethnic minorities, the darlings of the Trudeau era, that inspire the author’s closest attention and his most righteous indignation. To a degree, the analysis reflects a neo-conservative perspective that has been gaining popularity in the 1980s, but Persuaders is sufficiently unfocused to offend even this potential readership. The best that can be said for the book is that the author has covered most of the “persuaders” who upset one group or another and that those who stay with the fast-paced prose long enough are certain to find a topic to feed their prejudices and justify their cynicism.