Prairie Capitalism

John Richards: You are asking me about the beginning of my academic career when you mention that book Prairie Capitalism. I still maintain an interest in the Prairies but, I must admit, I have not written about prairie history since.

Aurora: It seems an interesting contrast to me. Larry Pratt, when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, gave me a paper he'd just written on pipelines and the plans for Ft. McMurray and so on, which was much very much of a piece with earlier work of his, going back to his book on the northern boreal forest, on Syncrude, as well as the book you wrote with him. So there's a clear continuity of intellectual interest there, throughout his career. But with you: was the book a one-off?

John Richards: Not a one-off inasmuch as I maintain a strong interest in Saskatchewan as a political community. I was actually closer to the provincial NDP administration under Roy Romanow in the 1990s than I was as a MLA there in the 1970s, under Allan Blakeney. I should add here that Larry's intellectual interests have also broadened a great deal since we wrote Prairie Capitalism. He and I have remained friends, and both of us have explored themes that transcend the Prairies. I guess we're similar in the sense that we have returned from time to time to write about prairie themes. Larry was always fascinated by resource politics, so his writing about oil pipelines and pulp mills in Alberta is consistent with his contribution to Prairie Capitalism. Where I have remained constant is in my respect for the prairie tradition of pragmatic social policy. I think the Canadian welfare state in general a good thing. The best of it comes out of the prairies, in the sense of social programs managed efficiently, – something rare in Ottawa. Had it not been for the fortuitous fact that Canadians began medicare as an experiment in Saskatchewan, it would not be the success that it is. Had Ottawa set it up, independently of the provinces, based perhaps on the precedent of taking on unemployment insurance, it might well be mired in the inefficiencies of that program. Canadian medicare is far from perfect but it’s obviously a better way of organizing health insurance than what Americans have – and that is largely due to the fact that the administrative complexities of running it are manageable at a provincial level whereas they are not at the national level. I'm not a western separatist - but I conclude emphatically that Ottawa is not good at micro-managing complex programs that operate across the country. Running medicare entails answers to questions such as, what kinds of healthcare professionals to hire and how much to pay them? Do you close a hospital in town A and open a new hospital in town B? Inevitably, these decisions are subject to intense political controversies. You can’t make these decisions efficiently if you're simultaneously grappling with interregional redistribution trade-offs between Newfoundland and Alberta.

Aurora: My sense from federal provincial politics is that unless provincial jurisdictions are bribed with far vaster amounts of money than they appear to be being bribed with, they would never forgo the jurisdictional struggle over health care.

John Richards: I’m just now writing to my friend Greg Marchildon in Saskatchewan. He's a former Deputy Minister to the Premier. Greg was part of the NDP administration of the 1990s that slashed spending before Ralph Klein did.

John Richards: And balanced the provincial budget before Ralph Klein – in much more difficult circumstances, not having large oil revenues. Ten years ago, Greg and others in the government were engaged in a painful process of closing hospitals – which should've been done earlier, since they could not deliver good health care. They should've been closed at the time I was an MLA in the 1970s. We kept them open as source of employment in small towns. Not until the country’s fiscal crisis in the early '90s did the “senior governments” (provinces plus Ottawa) seriously come to terms with these inefficiencies. Saskatchewan was the first to do so. If Ottawa had been running the province’s small hospitals, we would still be grappling with the need to close fifty of them.

Aurora: I would argue that one of the things going on in the 1990s was that a very significant tap, if it was not being shut off, certainly was being screwed down considerably.

John Richards: By screwing down the tap, you’re referring to Paul Martin’s 1995 budget. But Saskatchewan commenced its major spending cuts three years before. And the post-1995 intergovernmental transfer cuts were proportionately not that severe: about 5 percent of aggregate provincial program spending across Canada. I’m not an apologist for Paul Martin. He is guilty of much of the economic nonsense that figured in the Red Book, the Liberals’ 1993 election manifesto. It was full of waffle about the desirability of deficit spending in recessions and the need for restoring a fiscal surplus only gradually. The Red Book described the Tories as heartless because they tried to reduce the deficit too aggressively. Given what the Liberals did in their first term of office, the Red Book reminds one of Orwellian doublespeak.

The Saskatchewan NDP was elected in 1991 in a context of fiscal incompetence of the previous Tory administration in the province. In 1992 it faced the highest provincial debt to GDP ratio in the country. And to the credit of the incoming government, it set about cutting programs in 1992. This was three years before Paul Martin saw the light. At the time, the NDP represented the majority of Canadians at the provincial level. The party formed government not only in Saskatchewan but also in BC and Ontario. In these two provinces, however, the NDP ran large deficits in the early 1990s. In 1993, Bob Rae began a policy of fiscal restraint. In private, public sector union leaders at that point damned the NDP premiers in vitriolic language. The positions pursued by the public sector unions in BC and Ontario essentially destroyed the NDP’s credibility as a governing party. The federal NDP also collapsed as a credible national party in the '93 federal election. Saskatchewan received no credit among the chattering classes in Toronto for conducting a valuable exercise in salvaging viable social programs. For two decades Canada had run non-stop deficits and built up a dangerous level of public – provincial plus federal – debt. We potentially faced a sell-off of our dollar, as happened to the Mexican peso.

We come back to my thesis that fortunately the provinces, and not Ottawa, that run these complex social programs like education and health care. Canadians want medicare: no provincial government, not even Alberta’s, would ever gut medicare. Medicare survives intact because Canadians want it, not because Ottawa imposes rules. There is a need for a few rules, but I think these have to be jointly negotiated by the feds and the provinces. There's no easy solution to the problem of rapidly rising health care costs. All countries, from Sweden to America, are experiencing a crisis about health care funding. You can, in the last year of somebody's life, spend a fortune and prolong life by three weeks. Is it worth doing? In most cases, the answer is no. Roughly half of all health care in wealthy industrial countries are spent in the last year of life, which is an indication of just how end-loaded health care has become. No country really knows how to decide the moral dilemmas of how much health care to provide in the terminal stages of life. This is personal; my sister-in-law died aged forty-eight of cancer in August of 2003. She rejected intensive treatment at the end, and opted for palliative care thereby saving medicare many thousands of dollars.

Aurora: Perhaps the central thesis of Prairie Capitalism is its argument about province-building. In these two rigidly defined spaces, of Saskatchewan or Alberta, Prairie Capitalism looks at how an economic identity and a state presence is formed within two somewhat arbitrarily defined spaces, Saskatchewan and Alberta..

John Richards: How to respond? You're right in your summary, the book is about building regional state institutions. Larry and I, given our respective interests in Alberta and Saskatchewan as well as our interest in resource policy, saw some common themes in both provinces, despite their consistently electing governments of different political labels. One shared theme across the two provinces was that of populism, a political phenomenon that paid little respect to the 49^th parallel. There are obvious parallels between, for example, the United Farmers of Alberta and analogous movements in the US - not surprising, because a great deal of Alberta’s first generation settlers were from mid-western United States, unlike first generation farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, most of whom were from Europe. But leaving aside the port of departure of the settler families, it struck Larry and me that the style of Saskatchewan and Alberta politics was similar. How can you draw a sharp distinction between the Non-Partisan League in the Dakotas and Minnesota, the United Farmers of Alberta and similar movements in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and ultimately the CCF, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, predecessor of the NDP? You can’t. With Prairie Capitalism, Larry and I were countering the excesses of Canadian nationalist discourse in the 1970s, which was shot through with a variety of intellectual arguments to the effect that Canada was inherently dissimilar from the United States. Much of this nationalist academic activity, whether Marxist-inspired in the case of writers such as Mel Watkins or conservative in the case of Donald Creighton and others, was centred at the University of Toronto. The Marxist and Conservative would both go to dinner at Massey College and agree that the Americans were bad and we Canadians were good. Larry and I did the opposite. Living in the “boonies,” we became interested in the extent of similarities between Canada and the US. We wrote about the roots of Alberta and Saskatchewan politics in the politics of the Mid-Western United States. I was particularly interested in Saskatchewan, which -- for a variety of accidental reasons -- pioneered many of the social programs that Canadians value. The intellectual roots of the Saskatchewan social policy tradition were both American and British.. Obviously the CCF-NDP copied traditions of the British Labour Party. But many of the brightest bureaucrats in Tommy Douglas’s government learned their core ideas as graduate students in liberal US universities, such as Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, and even Harvard.

Aurora: I know a little bit about Tommy's background. He was a reasonably good friend of my grandfather's, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, but never one to let ideology stand in the way of a good friendship, particularly with a politician. When Tommy Douglas lost. . .

John Richards: He lost his seat when he ran in Regina in the 1962 federal election, at the height of the medicare crisis. We think of medicare now as one of the distinguishing features between Canadians and Americans. That we're for it and they’re not proves for some that we’re superior. But in 1962, when the Saskatchewan NDP introduced medicare, by no means did Canadians think of it as a means to define being Canadian. Mandatory government-managed health insurance for basic hospital and medical services was intensely controversial. The controversy over medicare lingered after 1962 and the CCF/NDP lost the subsequent provincial election in 1964, in part over medicare. Recall that Tommy Douglas resigned as Premier in 1961 to accept the federal NDP leadership. In his Regina riding, the 1962 federal election turned into a referendum on the about-to-be-introduced medicare program. At the time, the good folk of Regina rejected medicare, by rejecting Douglas who, tail between his legs, came to BC and managed to enter Parliament via a bye-election later in the year.

Aurora: What I was going to say about Douglas was his own description of his childhood. He had an operation in his knee and it was simply fortuitous that the doctor who had some intellectual curiosity about the type of operation it might be, that he actually experimented. The consequence was that Douglas did not lose his leg or end up with a limp.

John Richards: He had tuberculosis of the joint. As I recall, by good fortune, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Manitoba took him under his wing. Tommy, an intensely moral man, believed God had favored him and he was called upon to re-pay God’s favour. Douglas’s religious faith came from both American and British nonconformist religious traditions. He was the last great prairie social gospeller.

John Richards: Yes, the social gospellers like Douglas, J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles had primarily English socialist reference points to their politics. They weren't Marxists, however, as much as they were reform Methodists. To his great credit, Douglas, fifteen years as Premier in 1959, in what you would have thought would have been the twilight of his political career, retained the social gospel faith of his youth. He made a moral, as opposed to partisan, decision that he would fight the forthcoming 1960 provincial election on the issue of medicare. In many ways this was a personal decision taken by him alone. He was not forced into it by any short run political pressure from his supporters. It was not a prominent issue on the political horizon. He made a province-wide speech in, as I recall, December of 1959, saying that he intended that the next provincial election should be a referendum on universal medical insurance. The election was in June. The CCF always scheduled elections in June: farmers had got the crop in and didn't yet know whether grasshoppers or drought or early frost would destroy it. Farmers tended to be optimists in June, willing to re-elect the government.. The campaign turned out to be intense, but Douglas won. He didn't realize at the time how intense would be the political conflict over the next two years as his government prepared to introduce medicare. And, as we have discussed, in the midst of the battle he succumbed to the blandishments of David Lewis and others that the newly formed federal NDP needed him as leader.

John Richards: Yes, well after he resigned. Shortly before the 1960 the provincial election, the Liberals found a charismatic and skilled leader in Ross Thatcher. An ex-supporter of the CCF, he had the passion of the convert in his rhetorical attacks on socialism. Elected as Leader of the Opposition in 1960, he led a passionate campaign against medicare. Fortunately for the fate of medicare, when Douglas agreed to leave the province, he left the administration in the hands of competent lieutenants. Woodrow Lloyd became Premier. He is an under-appreciated man in the history of introducing medicare. Of Welsh background, he grew up on a farm in the southern part of the province, grew up dirt poor. Woodrow was a bright young man but his family couldn't afford to send him to university during the Depression so he went through teacher's college. He became a teacher, and Douglas recruited him to run in 1944. From then until he became Premier, he was probably the best education minister the province ever had. It fell to Woodrow Lloyd to steer the government though the medicare conflicts of 1962. Fortunately, there were others able to play a strategic role, among them Allan Blakeney. Allan is an interesting politician. He had no prairie roots. After his graduation as a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford in the late 1940s, he looked across the country and asked, “Where is the most progressive government with which I can work?” He opted for Saskatchewan. He rose up in the provincial civil service, and entered provincial politics in 1960. He was elected and was Health Minister during the crucial months before and after introduction of medicare. Administratively, medicare is a complex undertaking. To give an example. Two years later, in 1964, I was a young, naïve summer intern of the provincial government. I recall senior officials describing to me secret meetings with insurance company executives in hotel rooms in Edmonton as the officials undertook a crash course in learning the details of physician payment routines for an insurance company. On the other side of this conflict, Ross Thatcher combined forces with the provincial Medical Association, ably led by some fiery, conservative doctors. The opponents received a lot of money from the American Medical Association, whose leaders were fearful that this might become a precedent for something similar in the United States. Matters came to a head in the spring of 1962. Medicare was to be introduced on the first of July. Douglas lost his attempt to get into Parliament, a further embarrassment to our side. The doctors refused to practice under “socialized medicine.” Three quarters of the province’s physicians closed their offices on the 1^st July. To maintain minimum health services, the government hired over 100 doctors from England. In early July, several fatalities were attributed to alleged incompetent care provided by the imported “scab” doctors. The opposition organized mass rallies on the grounds of the Legislature demanding that the MLAs meet to debate medicare. Woodrow Lloyd opted to use a mediator, Lord Taylor, a seasoned official involved with the British National Health Service. The combination of Lloyd’s political acumen and Taylor’s mediating skill produced, after three weeks a settlement. My parents, both physicians were among the small minority of local doctors who broke with the Medical Association and continued to practice during the month of July. The settlement negotiated by Taylor hued fairly closely to what the provincial government wanted. It retained the key principle that the government become the single payer of medical bills. The government did make compromises to the existing private insurance companies, and reined in the more aggressive left-wing opponents of the doctors who hoped to establish a large network of community health clinics. The best historical account of this conflict is by Sam Wolfe, who co-wrote a book called Doctors Strike.^[1]

Aurora: I remember reading an article in Labour/Le Travail about the doctors’ strike. It may have been by him, but I haven’t read that book. The article was quite well done.

John Richards: Wolfe was a left-wing physician who served as the first chair of the provincial Medicare Commission set up to administer medicare. This lengthy diversion to discuss the beginnings of medicare helps explain why I place such importance on provincial innovation. It was hard enough to implement medicare in one province with a committed cabinet and competent civil service. Without the successful Saskatchewan precedent, I strongly doubt that any federal Liberal government would have had the political fortitude to face down the opposition and manage the administrative complexities adequately. While Douglas has rightfully earned fame for his role in bringing medicare to Canada, his lieutenants who actually implemented the program – Blakeney, Lloyd, Wolfe and many others – have not received the credit they deserve.

John Richards: Even in the 60s, I was involved. I was elected to the legislature in 1971, the year Blakeney became Premier.

John Richards: In the late 1960's I was at graduate school in the United States and I became involved in activities against the Vietnam War. When I came back to Canada, in 1970, I more-or-less identified with the left wing “Waffle” faction of the NDP. A strange name for a political movement. According to the apocryphal story, someone said, if we’re going to waffle, better to waffle to the left than to the right. One of the people who influenced me at the time was Woodrow Lloyd, with whom I had become friends. He died too young, just after the NDP won in 1971. To make a long story short, I was frustrated with the slow pace of progress. I crossed the floor and sat as an independent, in the middle of my first term. I got a lot of press in the two following years, and then ran as an independent in 1975, as an independent socialist. I was roundly defeated, and licking my wounds, returned to graduate school to finish a long-delayed PhD and write Prairie Capitalism. I won on paper the battles that I had lost in fact.

John Richards: Yes. You may have heard of John Bennett. He was an anthropologist at Washington University who wrote about rural societies from Japan to Israel to Saskatchewan. He came to the prairies and wrote about Hutterites and ranchers in southwestern Saskatchewan. We became friends.

Aurora: I'm thinking he and a colleague published a book on a Canadian western community close to the border.^[2]

John Richards: Most of his fieldwork was in the Cypress Hills area of southwestern Saskatchewan.

John Richards: No, but he was a friend and mentor. He was one reason I went to Washington University. Another influence was Irving Horowitz. He was in turn a student of C. Wright Mills. But whereas Mills came from a radical Texas background, Horowitz came from a left Jewish New York background. Horowitz introduced me to many ideas prevalent among left wing sociologists in the United States.

Aurora: I understood from Larry Pratt that when the two of you met up, you immediately realized that you had similar interests, on the one hand in Alberta, on the other, in Saskatchewan.

John Richards: We met in 1975 – no, I am wrong, I think we first met a couple of years earlier. When I was beaten in the 1975 Saskatchewan election, licking my wounds, my wife and I departed from Saskatchewan. I spent four years in Edmonton, working on a doctoral thesis and simultaneously writing Prairie Capitalism with Larry.

Aurora: This was the period after the first oil shock, a period of controversy about federal-provincial relations. One of the things I wanted to ask about Prairie Capitalism is that no one else seems to have picked up the torch, to pursue your particular analysis of regional state formation and its trajectory. In terms of political history in Alberta, there's an odd fixation with Social Credit. There must be 10 books on Social Credit.^[3] The interpretive approach of Prairie Capitalism attracted a good deal of attention at the time, and then everyone went back to writing about other things.

John Richards: I think you're right. To start with, the ten books on Social Credit that you refer to reflect a spate of interest among prominent Canadian political scientists at major universities. Alberta Social Credit was a case study for a group of Canadian intellectuals who found in it proof of their prior convictions. For C.B. McPherson, the Marxist philosopher, Social Credit illustrated the evils of what he called “possessive individualism.” For others, it was an example of irrational populism. Larry Pratt and I approached Social Credit with more sympathy; we did not view western Canada as a minor appendage of central Canadian elites. We were genuinely interested in the complex forces shaping this particular region. Larry’s initial intellectual background was in diplomatic history. He approached federal-provincial conflicts and oil politics from the perspective of a diplomatic historian. Larry did not subsume Alberta politicians as a case study of irrational populism, on the one hand, or as representatives of a class, on the other. He became interested in what did a bright leader like Peter Lougheed wanted to do with power and wealth in Alberta. Larry was not likely to be mistaken as a “flak agent” for Peter Lougheed, but he gave Peter Lougheed his due. Here was an important individual in Canadian politics at the time. I put the question back to you: why has Canadian history not been more interested in regional politics?

Aurora: I think part of the answer is some historians’ suspicion that it’s parochial and not significant. Not only is it parochial and not significant, it’s also difficult to get much purchase onto a more theoretically sophisticated (if you’re a younger person) or a more important (if you're an older person) theme, and so it's not something that connects to something that one would want to be connecting to. British Columbia historiography, a literature with which I'm familiar, has become very interested in Native-European relations and issues around the Native past. But few BC scholars have any interest whatsoever in the regional politicians who were largely responsible for fashioning Native policy. Which I find odd.

John Richards: I find it odd too. Even though I have lived in Vancouver for a quarter century, I do not identify with this province. I dislike the right wing populism of Wacky Bennett.^[4] I dislike intensely the “Old Labour” – as opposed to Tony Blair’s “New Labour” – tradition here. A good example of that was NDP Premier Glen Clark. While these are the dominant aspects of political culture in this place, few academics write about it. Don Blake is an honourable exception. There's little good history that rises above antiquarian historiography and analyzes how and why this province has generated this particular polarized political culture.^[5] It’s a failure in Canadian history not to have done this kind of work for British Columbia. But what would you think of someone like Gerry Freisen? There's a Manitoba-based historian who has written primarily about his region.

Aurora: And I think his book The Canadian Prairies is definitive in the best sorts of ways. Gerry Friesen’s a very good historian. But he's also one of the very few western Canadian historians to look above the level of the province. Most historians of western Canada don’t see themselves dealing with a large geographical area that transcends particular political boundaries. After all, these boundaries don’t have much significance until some time in the early to mid 20^th century.

John Richards: Even then, they have limited significance. History is caught up almost inevitably in Canada with national myth-making, which is a curse. It limits good regional history. Those in the Laurentian school, for example, can think of themselves as establishing myths on which to build a country. They don't want their myth-making sullied by regional facts that run counter. Realistic western Canadian history has to address the fact that much of the regional experience we share with the western United States – for good and for bad. Insistence on that realism drew Larry and me together. I earlier mentioned that if you look at the political left in western Canada, for example, you've got to acknowledge links to the United States. From an administrative and intellectual point of view, you've got to acknowledge the importance of the University of Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin and the state government are home of the Progressives and of the “good government” tradition. Many of the bright administrators in western Canada earned their doctorates at the University of Wisconsin, the most important university of the upper Midwest. Many of the reforms running through western Canada over the 20^th century are pragmatic ideas emanating from the US Midwest. None of that fits very well with Donald Creighton or Mel Watkin’s view of Canadian history. On the West Coast there's history to be written about the parallels up and down from San Francisco to Vancouver.

Aurora: And the economic flow. BC coal for example was the energy the fueled California.

John Richards: “North-south” history is potentially secessionist in its implication of commonality of ideas, lifestyle, and politics between what took place in California and what took place in British Columbia. Ronald Reagan is not Wacky Bennett. I don't want to push these parallels that far. But the union traditions of the northwestern states’ forest sector are not inherently different from the union traditions of British Columbia: strong early communist influence, concentration in forestry and fishing …

Aurora: And there are organizations like the Wobblies, events like the 1919 general strikes, all around the same time. At the time Prairie Capitalism was published in 1979, I was away in New Zealand. When I came back in 1982, that book was a standard text in western Canadian history on the east side of the mountains. I'm curious about its reception. On the one hand, it became widely popular and widely adopted. But it challenged the left nationalist analytical framework, which was reasonably well established from one coast to the other. What was the reaction from your colleagues, friends in the academe?

John Richards: Larry and I - no insult to Larry intended - are both somewhat marginal academics. I'm an economist who’s not in an economics department; he's a political scientist who resigned after disputes with some of the more ideological colleagues in his department at the University of Alberta. Neither of us had the penchant to form acolytes or engage in Kulturkampf within our respective disciplines. We recognized that we were arguing against Canadian nationalist orthodoxy, but we went on to other matters, rightly or wrongly. Speaking for myself, I was not interested in fighting with C. B. McPherson’s ghost. I was not interested in fighting with the quasi-Marxist political economists, as represented by Mel Watkins or Jim Laxer. They are bright people, but I think they exaggerated the cultural differences between Canada and the United States. On another matter, I think they underestimated the historical significance of the linguistic divide between French and English. Because they did not intuitively appreciate the role of language in Canadian politics, they failed to realize importance of federalism, of de-centralized jurisdictions, to make this country work. We began this conversation with my defending the provincial role in social programming.

Aurora: And your book begins with a quote from Trudeau doing much the same thing.

[1] Robin F. Badgley and Samuel Wolfe, Doctors’ Strike: Medical care and conflict in Saskatchewan, Toronto: Macmillan, 1967.

[2] John Bennett and Seena B. Kohl, Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890-1915, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

[3] In the 1950s, the University of Toronto Press brought out a ten volume series, “The Social Credit Movement in Alberta: Its Background and Development,” edited by S. D. Clark. For scholarly comment on this series, see Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976, pp. 166-7; T. D. Regehr, “Historiography of the Canadian Plains after 1870,” in Richard Allen, ed., A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains, Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 1973, pp. 94-95; and Robin W. Winks, “Canada,” in Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth: Trends, Interpretations and Resources, Durham: Duke University Press, 1966, pp. 95-96. More recently, an Athabasca University colleague, Alvin Finkel, wrote The Social Credit Phenomenon In Alberta, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989, as well as several shorter pieces, including the chapter, “Alberta Social Credit and the Second National Policy,” in Robert Wardhaugh, ed., Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001, pp. 29-49. Other recent studies include Daniel Bell, Social Classes and Social Credit in Alberta, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993, Bob Hesketh, Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, and Janine Stingel, Social Discredit: Anti-Semitism, Social Credit and the Jewish Response, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.

[4] W.A.C. Bennett, premier of British Columbia from 1952 to 1972, was known by many as “Wacky Bennett,” a comment on his policies drawn from the accident of his initials.

[5] See for examples Donald E. Blake, David J. Elkins, & Richard Johnston, Two Political Worlds: Parties and Voting in British Columbia, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985, and Donald E. Blake, R. Kenneth Carty, Lynda Erickson, Grassroots Politicians: Party Activists in British Columbia, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991.

[6] - P. E. Trudeau, “The Practice and Theory of Federalism,” in M. Oliver, ed., Social Purpose for Canada, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961, p. 377; reprinted in Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians, Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1968, pp. 130-31.

Links

Mouat, Jeremy (2005) Thinking about Prairie Capitalism: Interviews with Larry Pratt and John Richards Aurora Online