In Search of a New Left: Canadian Politics After the Neoconservative Assault

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom,
and the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

James Laxer is a committed socialist, a former contender for the
leadership of the NDP, and a founder of that party’s Waffle movement.
A man of conscience, he deplores today’s worship of the marketplace
and the bottom line. Such values, he reminds us, mean that corporations
make enormous profits while employees lose their jobs and society
suffers. Towns disappear, and lives are wasted.

Laxer’s heroes include Tommy Douglas, the father of medicare, and
David Lewis, his successor as national NDP leader. His villains include
Bob Rae’s Ontario government, which abandoned socialist principles and
destroyed NDP credibility across Canada; Mike Harris’s Conservatives,
who are closer in philosophy to U.S. Republicans than to Harris’s
Conservative predecessors in Ontario; and the current crop of Canadian
capitalists, who, in contrast to the philanthropic Masseys, lack
patriotism and sensitivity.

Laxer sees hope in the demonstrators who appeared on the streets of
Hamilton early in 1996 to protest the Harris government’s policies, in
Maude Barlow and the Council of Canadians, in the Canadian Auto Workers
Union and other extraparliamentary pressure groups. His lucidly written
book is a healthy antidote to the business-dominated newspapers that
saturate Canada today.