In Search of Canadian Political Culture (review)

The idea of "political culture," developed first by American political scientist Gabriel Almond in the 1950s during the ascendance of the behavioural revolution, is given new life in Nelson Wiseman's Canadian-focussed account. By eschewing the traditional focus on a singular national political culture, as well as the utility of relying solely on ahistorical public opinion surveys, Wiseman brings a variety of historical, institutional, and attitudinal evidence to bear in an account that suggests Canada is defined by at least five distinct regional/provincial political cultures. These political cultures are to be found in: 1) Atlantic Canada (Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia); 2) Quebec; 3) Ontario; 4) the "Midwest" (Manitoba and Saskatchewan); and 5) the "Far West" (Alberta and British Columbia). For Wiseman, a key element that sets apart the five sub-national cultures he identifies is the variable impact of immigration over time. In particular, he suggests the relevance of distinct waves of immigration beginning with that from France (which lasted until 1760) and concluding with the most recent post-1945 wave from Southern Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

The frameworks advanced in the 1950s and 1960s by Louis Hartz, Gad Horowitz, and Seymour Martin Lipset shared an attempt to identify cultural and ideological variations between and within the United States and Canada. Wiseman builds on these frameworks, and makes them less static, by incorporating elements of the Canadian political economy tradition sensitive to economics (class politics and staples, or resource exports). In so doing, Wiseman puts forward a nuanced account, that is, somehow more open to the possibility of change. Thus, for example, rather than focusing only on "formative events" (such as the stress Lipset placed on the arrival of Loyalists in Canada following the American revolution), Wiseman also advances the idea of "quakes" (the discovery of oil in 1947 in Alberta would be an example of a quake). As he puts it more generally, "the past influences what is to come, but that future in not absolutely bound by or obligated to that past" (263).

Following a lively introduction, the first five chapters of the volume address the idea of "political culture" with special reference to Canada. Here we learn that history (especially immigration history), surveys, institutional structures (including the constitution and political party systems), and political socialization play a role in identifying political culture. The last five chapters of the book address each of the five sub-national cultures identified by Wiseman.

It is hard to fault a book when the writer offers qualification. As Wiseman asserts of his interpretation of Canadian political culture from the outset, "No claim is made that it is the only possible explanation or the definitive interpretation" (10). Still, three points can be made in light of the concepts and ideas that Wiseman does say are valuable.

First, while the relevance of history is stressed in relation to political culture, there is little attention paid to new historiography that may dispute past interpretations and evidence. To take one example, it is surprising—in light of Quebec historiography since the 1980s that challenges the idea of a monolithic, non-liberal, and feudal past prior to the Quiet Revolution—to read Wiseman's assertion that "because liberalism emerges as a major force in Quebec as late as it does —only in the 1960s—the rise of socialism is retarded, occurring much later and perhaps more vigorously than in English Canada" (177).

Second, the attention to the Canadian political economy tradition given in this book falls short of reflecting on a relevant concept that emerges from this approach, and that is the idea of Canada as a "white settler colony." In much contemporary work, this conceptualization has drawn attention to the ways in which colonialism, ethnicity, "race" (including shifting boundaries of whiteness and white privilege), gender, and other social relations of power have intersected in complex ways in Canada's past and present. As a consequence, while Wiseman asserts that "the multicultural minorities...