This is a book that has grown like Topsy. First published in 1983 with the title The West, it has appeared in updated editions with new introductions in 1994, 2006, and now (with a new title) in 2014. Its author, John F. Conway, is chair of the University of Regina’s sociology and social studies department as well as a one-time student radical who writes frequently for Regina’s lively magazine Prairie Dog, where he is known as “Saskatchewan’s most scathing sociologist.”
So don’t expect a carefully “objective” history of the vast region of Canada that stretches from Ontario’s western border to the Pacific Ocean. Conway has a point of view. It simmers quietly during the first eight chapters of the current volume (1867–1983 — which comprised the 1983 edition), begins to bubble in the chapters added for the 1994 edition, and reaches a furious boil in the additional chapters required to bring the story up-to-date, in 2006 and in 2014.
And the new title? “The Rise and Fall of Social Democracy in the West” would more accurately capture the theme. Conway is not writing from the triumphalist angle of a Westerner who has finally seen power within Confederation shift away from the hated Central Canada. Instead, he describes the betrayal of progressive principles and political victories (health insurance, wheat pools) that were part of Western Canadian politics until first neo-liberalism and then the Harperite right came to dominate not just the four Western provinces but also the country. The 2006 election of a prime minister from Alberta, with a caucus dominated by Westerners, was a Western “victory tasting much like a defeat.” Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s election, Conway writes, led directly to the “dismantling of the structures and programs which had provided social and economic shelter to Westerners in the past.“
The early chapters of this book provide a good review of Westerners’ struggle, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to make their voices heard. Politicians and financiers always recognized that the West would be the source of the new Dominion’s wealth, as long as they solved the transportation problems and lured enough new settlers. Residents of the Prairies and British Columbia would simultaneously produce raw materials (especially wheat) for export and provide a captive market for Central Canadian manufacturers. But, from the Dominion’s earliest days, the boom-and-bust economic cycles, exacerbated by Ottawa’s disregard for the region, guaranteed unrest — including the 1885 Northwest Rebellion, the Winnipeg General Strike, and demands for provincial control of natural resources.
New parties emerged, with widespread support among rural voters. Although both the Social Credit Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) were fading by the beginning of the Second World War, “The farmers and workers of the Prairies had presented two visions of a new basis for the national economy,” writes Conway. The idea that government should help alleviate the harsher consequences of unbridled capitalism had taken root throughout North America.
But the postwar story of the West quickly morphs into the story of Canada’s slide into petro-economy status. Despite the West’s growing power thanks to its resource riches, alienation festered. According to Conway “The defeat and degradation of [former Prime Minister John] Diefenbaker, the failure of the CCF/NDP to make a national breakthrough, and the [Lester] Pearson government’s growing pre-occupation with Quebec all tended to increase a Western sense of political distance from Ottawa.” The West began to flex its muscles — and then the OPEC crisis struck in 1973. From that moment onwards, regional tensions flared, and the interests of international oil companies trumped those of Westerners, who had a different vision for their provinces and country.
The final chapters of The Rise of the New West describe the steady defeat of progressive policies in each of the four Western provinces, even when nominally progressive parties were elected. Harper’s Canada, in Conway’s opinion, is “a land ruled by a shrinking and mean-spirited government, rushing to imprison people ... [and] bloody-mindedly callous about the environmental consequences of unregulated economic growth.“
There are cracks in the renovated facade of The Rise of the New West. First Nations are nowhere to be seen in the post-Confederation chapters, probably because they were largely written before the avalanche of new scholarship. Later chapters, in which the phrase “corporate agenda” echoes repeatedly make no mention of larger global economic pressures. But Conway’s scathing style and Saskatchewan perspective are a bracing corrective for anyone who makes the ignorant assumption that Westerners all think alike.
— Charlotte Gray (Read bio)
Charlotte Gray is a past chair of Canada's History Society and a past winner of the Pierre Berton Award.