The New Politics of Western Canada
The New Politics of Western Canada
Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures
The Canadian West: an economic engine with a history of grievance against federal power emanating from the east. The New Politics of Western Canada grapples with the West’s complex, multifaceted past to promote a better understanding of this vast region’s political realities and the challenges that lie ahead.
Contributors re-examine the historical and contemporary meanings attached to “the West” as a form of identity, through themes such as colonialism, gender, and class. They develop a nuanced analysis of Western political ideology, from resentment-based populism to the regional left. And they explore pressing Western economic and policy concerns, such as labour, health care, and Indigenous democratic participation and protest.
Together, these themes provide intelligent new ways of interpreting underexplored aspects of Western Canadian politics, adding depth to earlier attempts to explain the region as a political, economic, or sociological space.
Scholars and students of Canadian politics and history will find this richly detailed collection rewarding, as will advocacy groups and journalists covering Western Canadian politics.
Home to one third of Canada’s population, the political significance of the West is steadily growing. The New Politics of Western Canada offer insights into the ideas, interests, and political movements based in the West that shape many conversations in contemporary Canadian politics. As various chapters note, Western conversations on both the left and the right inform national debates. This collection is an important contribution to the study of Canadian politics.
The contributors to The New Politics of Western Canada rescue us from a bankrupt, narrow focus on ‘Western alienation’ to a critical exploration of the racial, gender, class, environmental, and provincial conflicts within the colonial-settler region referred to as ‘Western Canada,’ including ongoing struggles of Indigenous people to regain sovereignty and to maintain their cultures and land base. This is a refreshing reset in discussions about politics in a region once presented as a unified entity only of interest in terms of its elites’ conflicts with central Canadian elites.
Charles Smith is a professor of political studies at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. He is co-editor, with Bryan M. Evans, of Transforming Provincial Politics: The Political Economy of Canada's Provinces and Territories in the Neoliberal Era and co-author, with Larry Savage, of Unions in Court: Organized Labour and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He is co-editor of Labour/Le Travail, Canada’s foremost journal of labour studies and labour history.
Tom McIntosh is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of Regina and a researcher at the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit. He has published nine books on Canadian politics as well as peer-reviewed articles in such journals as The Lancet, Canadian Public Administration, the Canadian Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law, and Healthcare Policy.
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