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Witty and anecdotal, creative and analytical,
The Canadian Revolution is a self-proclaimed journalist's book from Canada's foremost journalist, Peter C. Newman. This is Newman's most original work--the concept of a Canadian Revolution is Newman's alone. He builds his case by taking his reader across a political landscape that was, he argues, rendered unrecognizable between 1985 and 1995. The revolutionaries--Mulroney, Klein, Manning, Bouchard, and unwittingly, John Turner--have so transformed the country's political and economic life that Canada will never again see the old two-party system. This is not a dull, quasi patriotic lament, but rather a carefully crafted political satire. That the victims present fairly easy targets does not make Newman's treatment of them any less amusing: the Royals are an "inbred family of promiscuous mediocrities"; the governors general are "superannuated political hacks"; and a host of prominent Canadian politicians are reduced to caricatures. Above all,
The Canadian Revolution offers a compelling portrait of Mulroney, stabbed in the back by Bouchard, succeeded by an accidental lightweight, and working "around the clock digging into problems and turning over rocks that ought to have remained undisturbed." This is a highly entertaining and provocative book.
--William Newbigging
Book Description
A social, political, and economic revolution has forged a profoundly different Canadian society in the closing decade of the 20th century. In the manner of his seminal history of the Quiet Revolution and the Pearson years, The Distemper of Our Times, Peter C. Newman details the tempestuous transformation of Canadian reality in the 1990s. The Canadian Revolution looks at the politicians, poets, tycoons, and performers who have made the history that matters most. Newman brings these often-unrecognized pivotal moments into sharp focus, highlighting key political figures like Pierre Trudeau and Preston Manning and the very different visions of Canada that have struggled for ascendance in the past decade.
