Derailed: The Betrayal of the National Dream

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

This is a book with a strong though unoriginal thesis: Canada is in a
“mess” because of “bad government.” Evidence to support this
claim is found in the size of the public debt, the growth in public
expenditure and public employment, and in official acceptance of special
status for certain people. Canadians recognize this as bad government,
because for most of their history they have experienced good government,
defined here as the absence of these features.

The rot began—unintentionally the authors say, when the St. Laurent
government introduced equalization payments, and when it extended
unemployment benefits to seasonal workers in Newfoundland fisheries. It
became policy, however, under John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, and
approached “a higher level of mendacity” under Pierre Trudeau. The
temptation, which leaders for three-quarters of Canada’s history
resisted, but to which their successors succumbed, was to use government
to promote a sense of identity. The lesson of the past, say Bercuson and
Cooper, is that Canada thrived when its leaders pursued a national
policy, but declined when they advocated a national vision, however that
was defined.

In its own words, Derailed advances a “libertarian” critique of
“collectivist” policies. For this reason, it will offend readers who
do not share the authors’ distrust of government with a mission. Yet
the authors are right when they say that government in Canada changed at
the end of the 1950s. The question they do not ask is why this happened
when it did. The answer consists of more than personalities; it embraces
the impact of television, the end of empire, the internationalization of
politics (beginning with the Kennedy phenomenon in 1960), and more.
Derailed looks at none of these. For this reason, and despite its title,
the argument remains one-track all the way to the end of the line.