Discipline of Power: The Conservative Interlude and the Liberal Restoration. 2nd ed.

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Jeffrey Simpson is The Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist, an
intelligent and well-informed writer whose musings sometimes set the
terms of the country’s political debate. He is also no mean
contemporary historian; his book, Discipline of Power won the 1981
Governor General’s Award for nonfiction, and deservedly so.

Reprinted here—by a scholarly publisher appropriately
enough—Simpson’s book stands up well; 15 years later, it remains the
single best account of the rise and fall of the Joe Clark government.
Simpson argues that the Conservatives who took office in 1979 simply
failed to understand that in order to rule the country, they had to
accept the need for discipline; instead, they went their several ways ,
while the prime minister, pleasantly ineffectual as always, completely
failed to impose control and direction. The results were the
disintegration of the high hopes of 1979 in the defeat of 1980 and the
return to power for four more years of Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals. The
Tories then returned, but without Joe Clark as the party’s head;
instead, Brian Mulroney would seize the brass ring and alter Canada
forever. Simpson’s new introduction to this volume briefly traces
Mulroney’s career and the destruction of the Conservative government
in the 1993 election. Whether or not he will prove right in his
prediction that Canadians are unlikely ever to forgive the Tories for
their actions in office under the hated “boy from Baie-Comeau”
remains to be proven.