Mike Harcourt: A Measure of Defiance

David E. Smith is a professor of political Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan and the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents and The Invisible Crown.

Mike Harcourt is an angry man, frustrated when in power and resentful in
retirement. The sense of defiance is palpable—in the battles
recounted, the slights received, the names called. And in the manner of
their telling—belligerent, sometimes scatological, sentences: “Do I
need this load of crap?” “A B.S. accusation.” The media are tagged
as “the scrum of the earth”; colleagues he disagreed with on
Vancouver’s city council are “thuggish bullies and double
crossers”; the B.C. Law Society was “politically motivated” in its
investigation of an errant lawyer–minister; the NDP was less loyal to
him than he was to it.

However, not all of the book is a rant. Harcourt’s views on urban and
provincial as well as federal–provincial affairs are informative.
Among the best chapters is the one devoted to the Charlottetown Accord
and its unraveling as seen by a Western (and essentially sympathetic)
premier. “BC’s problem,” he says more than once, is that life
moves too fast, and that its social democrats have too many opponents in
the legislature, the media, the boardrooms, and the universities.

Restraint is not a political virtue west of the continental divide, and
this autobiography is representative of its provenance.