Elections in Oxford County, 1837-1875: A Case Study in Democracy in Canada West and Early Ontario by George Emery (review)

Elections in Oxford County shows that the "old turf " of nineteenth-century Canadian political history still has plenty to offer. Employing a novel case-study approach, University of Western Ontario professor emeritus George Emery explores the thirty-eight provincial and federal elections that took place in Oxford County, Ontario, between 1837 (Upper Canada's final election) and 1875 (Ontario's first election under the secret ballot). Through this methodology, the author seeks to better understand the electoral behaviour of nineteenth-century Canadians and to appraise democracy at a time when Canadians hotly contested its merits.

As a local political and electoral history, Elections in Oxford County is exceptionally thorough. After the first two chapters set the local stage, the author employs biographies, memoirs, and newspaper reports to detail chronologically every election, by-election, controverted election, candidate, party candidacy meeting, nomination day, party platform, electoral issue, polling day, and dirty electoral trick that took place in the county. In doing so, he exhaustively illustrates how Oxford County participated in the peculiarities of the open voting system. Yet the author also demonstrates how Oxford stood apart electorally from other Ontario counties. Unlike elsewhere, the majority of those who won their elections in Oxford came from outside the county. Toronto's would-be parliamentarians greatly outnumbered the city's parliamentary seats. Oxford offered an accommodating alternative. The author thus reveals that the local situation of Oxford County did not fit the clientelist model of nineteenth-century Ontarian electoral candidacy proposed by S.J.R. Noel in Patrons, Clients, Brokers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), whereby local patrons translated the obligations and deference of their clients into votes and electoral victories.

Perhaps the most important contribution made by Elections in Oxford County derives from its examinations of electoral behaviour. Historians so far have had only glimpses into how nineteenth-century Canadians made their electoral choices. The author goes beyond this through his use of Probit model statistical analyses. Canada West took censuses and held elections in 1851 and 1861, and Ontario did the same in 1871. By comparing census returns with voters' lists and a remarkably complete set of poll books, the author has compiled a wealth of information about the individual identities and judgments of Oxford voters. Through these data, the author convincingly demonstrates - albeit using language that may sound foreign to readers not versed in statistical analysis - that ethnic ties and religious affiliations played dominant roles in deciding voter preferences. While the author is the first to admit that his findings are specific to Oxford County, they offer forceful confirmation of what other nineteenth-century Canadian electoral studies have suggested.

Elections in Oxford County also bills itself as an assessment of nineteenth-century Canadian democracy. At the outset the author posits a "maximally developed parliamentary democracy" (xi) as an explanatory model. This model encompasses the various principles of citizen self-governance that, when taken together, form the ideal parliamentary democratic system. Using the model as a kind of checklist, the author then examines how Oxford County elections, from decade to decade, stacked up against the model based upon electoral law, franchise law, and the extent to which these laws were followed. The author concludes that mid-nineteenth-century Ontario, despite its changing laws, was not wholly democratic and that "the net amount of democracy remained stable over time" (183). This familiar argument is unsurprising, considering that nineteenth-century Canadians generally did not view democracy as a virtue. It took until the end of the nineteenth century for Ontario to abolish the property qualifications on its electoral franchise. Even then, most Aboriginal Ontarian men still could not vote, never mind all Ontarian women.

The author's concentration on democracy participates in an American historiographical trend (albeit in a very different cultural context) that eschews liberalism and adopts democracy as an interpretive framework for political history...