Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 by E.A. Heaman Copyright © The Ontario Historical Society, 2018 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ Document généré le 5 avr. 2021 20:56 Ontario History Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 by E.A. Heaman Robert A.J. McDonald Volume 110, numéro 2, fall 2018 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1053518ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1053518ar Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) The Ontario Historical Society ISSN 0030-2953 (imprimé) 2371-4654 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer ce compte rendu McDonald, R. A. (2018). Compte rendu de [Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 by E.A. Heaman]. Ontario History, 110(2), 239–241. https://doi.org/10.7202/1053518ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1053518ar https://doi.org/10.7202/1053518ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/2018-v110-n2-onhistory04085/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ 239book reviews these complexities wonderfully. Again and again throughout this book, Goodhand’s interviewees assert that their biggest barrier to confronting vio- lence against women was the failure to rec- ognize the “scope and nature of the prob- lem” (141). Reading this book, one can’t help but reflect on the similarities with our present moment and the almost-daily revelations of entrenched violence that have come to light because of the #MeToo movement. Feminists still battle against an assumption that violence against women is the result of the individual patholog y of a bad man, rather than a manifestation of patriarchy and the oppression rooted in colonialism, racism, disability, and other kinds of inequality. There was widespread reluctance, for example, to identify the ten murders and sixteen injuries that resulted from the so-called Toronto van attack of April 2018 as patriarchal violence, despite the fact that it was perpetrated by a young man who was reportedly motivated by rage at being spurned by women and consid- ered himself “involuntarily celibate.” To- day, as in the early 1970s, “it’s a lot easier to pretend it isn’t a problem” (141) if we don’t recognize the “scope and nature” of gender-based violence. Goodhand’s his- tory captures both the ongoing need for feminist activism at the level of society and state, and, equally importantly, it reminds us of the need to recognize and support the women who do the fundraising, write the grants, organize the meetings, buy the groceries, and clean the houses, doing the daily work of caring for the victims and survivors of violence. Lisa Pasolli Queen’s University Tax, Order, and Good Government A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 By E.A. Heaman Montreal and Kingston: McGill Univer- sity Press, 2017. xiv, 582 pages. $39.95 hard- cover. ISBN 978-0-7735-4962-3. In Tax, Order, and Good Government Elsbeth Heaman makes a compelling case that it is time to write taxes and pov- erty into Canadian history. Framed as an example of the “new political history,” the book studies Canada’s tax history as a social history of politics for the period 1867 to 1917. It does so from both the top-down perspective of the state and the bottom-up perspective of the people. Of 240 ONTARIO HISTORY these, it is the bottom-up perspective, re- flecting the author’s desire to understand how popular agency influenced the way that “taxes mediated between wealth and poverty,” that drives the narrative (11). In- deed, Heaman argues, though Canadian historians have ignored the country’s tax history, such was not the case for the peo- ple themselves whose debates about taxa- tion addressed the problems of wealth and poverty head-on. This book is a study of what Canadians said about wealth, pover- ty, and taxes before the introduction of the federal income tax. It is written from the perspective of progressives who challenged the rule of property. As Heaman observes, the “desperate pleas of the poor from harsh taxation do matter. They give this book its moral centre” (17). Heaman argues that the Canadian state at Confederation, and for decades after under Conservative and Liberal Par- ty administrations, governed according to classic liberal principles. They did so as clients of the propertied class, protect- ing wealth and ensuring that poverty was “a problem of civil society rather than the state” (50). To achieve this goal it limited federal taxation to indirect customs and excise taxes, which spread the federal tax load to the general population through the tariff, disproportionately burdening Cana- dians as consumers. The creative heart of the book is the author’s extensive coverage of tax history at the provincial and munici- pal levels where direct taxes prevailed, and from which the radical potential of taxing income spread. The emphasis on direct taxation “prompted searching questions about how municipal taxation related to the big social and economic questions of the day,” leading, for instance, to the On- tario legislature’s decision in March 1899 to pass a new direct tax on wealthy corpo- rations (252). Yet, even when the federal government, under war conditions, began taxing income in 1917, the resistance of property successfully constrained the tax’s capacity to confiscate capital and redistrib- ute wealth. An important agent of this transfor- mation was Henry George’s single tax, which Heaman concludes was a far more important instrument of social inquiry about the concentration of Canadian wealth than historians have appreciated. While single tax was particularly popular in the west, she argues, it infused virtually all forms of progressive thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, serving as “a useful instrument of alliance building. It got bread-and-butter concerns more squarely into mainstream liberal politics” (320-323). Single taxers helped to engineer new thinking about the relation- ship between wealth and poverty, from Heaman’s perspective the central question of Canada’s tax history in the half century after Confederation. One of the book’s prominent features is its hard-charging flow that sweeps up in its 470 pages a vast trove of historical in- sight about Canadian political history and the ideas about taxation and wealth that shaped it. It is written from the perspective of a particular understanding of the mean- ing of liberalism, one that in the Lockean tradition puts property at its centre. But among the several variants of liberalism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras was “new liberalism,” a strand influenced by intel- lectuals such as John Stuart Mill and T.H. Green that was more deliberately collectiv- ist than classic liberalism while remaining faithful to core liberal values. Is it possible that Heaman’s highly-focused equation of liberalism with property underestimates the challenge to Canada’s class-based tax system that flowed from the statist ideas of “new liberal” reformist thought? The au- 241book reviews thor’s handling of the relationship between taxes and racism is one of the most intrigu- ing but ultimately unsatisfying aspects of the book. For instance, the chapter on the tax history of the recently-created province of British Columbia is an important addi- tion to the Pacific province’s historiogra- phy, moving beyond the earlier insights on racism in BC by Patricia Roy. Heaman’s argument that BC politicians in the 1870s “tried, as much as possible, to tax by race” is convincing (97). So too is her assertion that during the war income tax was intro- duced in a manner that aimed to protect the property interests of the Anglo wealth community rather than those of French Canadians. But I do wonder how germane the question of racism is to the central ar- gument of the book. Quibbles aside, Tax, Order, and Good Government represents a powerful addi- tion to the developing field of “new po- litical history.” In particular, it helps to define the field in two ways. First, along with Shirley Tillotson’s recently-published Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy (2017) it challenges readers to consider how the tax system mediated relations between citizens and the Canadian state. Heaman’s empha- sis on the creative function of municipal and provincial tax policies, and the need to understand how thinking about taxes encompasses all levels of the state, is an im- portant contribution to the development of Canadian political history. In addition, Tax, Order, and Good Government reminds us that there is much more to be said about the relationship between wealth, poverty, and political power in Canadian history. Heaman has written an outstanding book that, while too long, is consequential. It is a book that Ontario History readers will find provocative and rewarding. Robert A.J. McDonald Department of History University of British Columbia (Ret.) With Never Rest on Your Ores, Nor-man B. Keevil of Teck-Hughes Gold Mines Ltd. adds his family’s story to a stack of popular mining histories written in Ontario since the 1960s. In the tradition of the genre, Never Rest on Your Ores celebrates liberal corporate as- cension while erasing Indigenous people. Despite some serious problems, readers may find some useful material here: Teck- Hughes is of a newer generation than the usual subjects of popular business story- telling (i.e. the long-dead behemoths of the early twentieth century industry). Never Rest on Your Ores portrays an ag- ile, connected, and responsive company which successfully navigated the cyclical nature of its industry and continues to shape the world in the present. Keevil’s portrayal is rooted in his ca- Never Rest on Your Ores Building a Mining Company, One Stone at a Time By Norman B. Keevil Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 474 pag- es. $39.95 cloth. ISBN 978-0-7735-5155-8. (www.mqup.ca)