Book Review

Making Good was written to order for a social history series designed "for undergraduate courses" and to "Fill the gap between specialized monographs and textbooks." It is not footnoted and is not intended to make an original contribution to scholarship. It is, nonetheless, an effort of two able scholars to assess and make sense of an important emerging theme in historical studies.	1
It represents, its authors tells us, an analysis of how Canadian elites and the state in the formative national period, 1867–1939, used the law to define and enforce morality. The authors cast their net widely, dealing with such assorted subjects as the criminal law and penal practices, the regulation of the liquor and drug traffics, discriminatory immigration laws and legislation directed at controlling or penalizing aboriginal populations, minority groups, women and children, and generally the entire structure of religious and educational institutional systems.	2
It is useful to consider these subjects together and to offer interrelated explanatory paradigms that focus on broad issues of elite control and governmental oppressions. Nonetheless I would not adopt this book for undergraduate courses. Professors Loo and Strange suggest, reasonably enough, that earlier studies using the term social control deployed it to depict the state "as a kind of hammer poised over the people" while they prefer to use the concept of the net—"restrictive, yet full of holes." In practice, however, the hammer imagery retains pride of place, and the impression predominates of early modern Canada as a frightening and frightful place for all except the smug, male, Protestant elite.	3
Undeniably there is some truth in this picture and the state did use the law in its several forms as an instrument of social repression, and often it did so, as this account rightly emphasizes, with but limited success. Yet reality, of course, was far more complex, nuanced, and interesting as historical studies that deal separately with each of the themes addressed here often demonstrate. Perhaps oversimplification and a return to the hammer metaphor is the price the authors pay for their ambitious attempt at synthesis in a brief study. Yet their approach also falters when it too often assumes the malignity and oppressiveness of the state apparatus without reflecting on how and why this should have been the case in the Canadian democracy of this era. To the extent that this book is adopted in undergraduate courses it should provoke some spirited discussions of its thesis and content, and that perhaps is what its authors intend.	4
Peter Oliver York University

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