Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jeffrey L. McNairn's book grapples with the development of public debate in the British colony and why the concept of "public opinion" became authoritative. Influenced by Jürgen Habermas's well-known formulations about the "public sphere" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, McNairn charts the growth of public opinion and the lineaments of a public realm in which political and social organizations were set in place. The first part of the book explores the creation of a Canadian "public" through various mechanisms and relationships: the implementation of the British constitution, with provisions such as an elected assembly and the rule of law; the development of the press and, equally importantly, a public readership; the rise of voluntary societies, with their concomitant creation of both political and social spheres; and the complexities of "public opinion" as it was invoked in a range of political debates. In the book's second half, McNairn explores the trajectories of Upper Canadian politics in the 1840s and 1850s, from the demise of mixed monarchy in 1843 to debates over the political course of the colony that covered a range of choices: "parliamentary government, populist democracy, and the checks of balances of American republicanism" (p. 271). McNairn is particularly interested in the latter options among Conservative politicians and thinkers, who gave serious (if not majority) thought to republican ideology and the potential for annexation of the colony by the United States. He also considers shifts in colonial reformers' ideology and practices as they dealt with the realities of implementing parliamentary government. This section charts their movement away from the radicalism of the 1830s to, as he describes it, the more "oligarchic and institutional profile of parliamentary government" (p. 359).

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