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Political Parties in Canada Conrad Winn and John McMenemy Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976, pp. xi, 291

Students of Canadian political parties inured to a literature long on chronology, organizational charts, and party rhetoric and short on excitement are likely to be intrigued by the catalogue of adjectives contained in the Foreword by the editor of the series of which this book forms a part. "Provocative," "innovative," "assertive," "contentious," "heretical," are some which catch the eye, as do "straightforward," "readable," and "well-organized." It would be remarkable for any scholarly book to live up to such an advance billing, especially among an audience presumably made up primarily of orthodox political scientists who, according to one of the volume's contributors, have only recently shed the blinders of the Cold War and are still handicapped by "mosaic thinking." In fact, the book is not completely iconoclastic, as acknowledged by the principal authors themselves, since " . . . the book accepts the conventional wisdoms about the differences in style and electoral support of the parties, but rejects the conventional wisdoms about differences in policy" (I). While the major revisionist thrust of this book is to be found in the chapters on "Policy Dispositions (Outputs)," occasional sallies are made in earlier chapters as well. While some of them are intriguing—evidence that the elections of 1887-1896 may not have marked critical realignment of Conservative and Liberal supporters in Ontario and Quebec, for example—others suffer from statistical overkill, contain dubious propositions, or may be misleading. The elaborate test (64-66) of the hypothesis that "French Canadians are more likely to vote for a party whose leader is French Canadian than for a party whose leader is English Canadian" is an example of the first problem. Such an hypothesis obviously requires a control for party label which is impossible, since the Conservatives have never been led by a French Canadian. Other propositions based on the presence of a French Canadian lieutenant apply to a limited number of elections or also have no cases in key cells. The section on geographical cleavages, while containing much useful material, particularly of a comparative sort, suffers from forced comparisons between Social Credit and Reagan Republicanism and fascism; a rather selective test of the proposition that "non-depressed peripheries" exhibit "left-wing tendencies"; and the suggestion that the Winnipeg General Strike was an expression of cultural resentment. However, the most unsettling analysis, particularly for a book which will be undoubtedly widely used as a text, is contained in the chapter on "Class Cleavage." In it Professor Chi revives his argument that we have all been percentaging our tables of party support and class the wrong way, thus underestimating the class content of mass political behaviour (97ff.). While this provides a useful point of departure for the examination of the class cleavage, other aspects of the analysis are disturbing. Noting an apparent increase in the inequality of the income distribution in Canada, as measured by changes in the Gini Coefficient between 1951 and 1971, he suggests (92) that despite the doubling of real per capita income during this period, progress "brought a remarkable and disturbing increase in the level of inequality of income." However, Perspective Canada, the source of the data, says of it (152) that "changes in inequality are . . . relatively minor, and in any event are based on inadequate data."