JAMES BRYSON MCLACHLAN is one of Canadian labour’s legendary heroes. He deserves a comprehensive biography and David Frank insures that that biography is not only a thorough picture of one labour leader’s life but a panoramic overview of the forces that shaped coal miners’ struggles in the early 20th century and labour radicalism of the times more generally. While the author acknowledges that he is documenting the life of an exceptional individual, he notes also that J.B. McLachlan, in many respects, simply embodied the Nova Scotia miners’ achievements after 1917 of "a strong union and a tradition of independent labour politics." (4) His approach is that McLachlan was a remarkable individual shaped by particular social circumstances. This book has won several prizes, including the John W. Dafoe Book Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Robert S. Kenny Prize for labour history books. It sets a very high standard for labour history biographies, indeed biographies generally.

      There are many clues in McLachlan’s early life as to why he emerged as both a union militant and a political radical. Born into a Scottish working-class family in 1869 in the small Borders village of Ecclesfechan, he was influenced by a grandfather who had experience of both Chartism and the cooperative movement, as well as by Bible readings and an interest in the works of the British historian, Thomas Carlyle. McLachlan was only four when his family moved to the industrial Clyde area, and his father and older brother began working in the coal mines, while his sisters worked as dressmakers. At age ten, J.B. also went down into the mines, never really to emerge until he was blacklisted by the Nova Scotia capitalists from practicing his trade 30 years later. He was only a teenager when he was selected as one of sixteen miners’ delegates to meet the Lanarkshire Coal Masters’ Association in Glasgow in March, 1887, to demand a wage increase. The miners had been on strike for a month, fighting valiantly to keep strikebreakers from damaging their efforts to achieve economic justice. They had called off the strike when the masters used carrot and stick to get them to the bargaining table: the stick was that there would be no talks while a strike continued, and the carrot was that there would be talks with all issues to be discussed when the strike ended. In the end, however, the capitalists not only ignored the strikers’ just demands, but imposed longer hours of work. This experience served to educate the young McLachlan regarding both the greed and duplicity of the capitalists on the one hand, and the importance of unbending worker militancy on the other.

      McLachlan continued to labour in the Scottish mines until 1902, moving from mine to mine to find work. He had married in 1893 and was a father of four when the family decided to move to Canada in search of an economic security that eluded them in their homeland. By the time he came to Canada, McLachlan, if not yet clearly a socialist, was certainly a labour radical. He was influenced by miners’ leaders such as Keir Hardie not only in adopting the view that workers needed their own political representatives alongside militant unions but also in believing that temperance, education, and self-improvement were all essential if miners were to improve their lives.

      McLachlan’s work life in Canada began in Sydney Mines at the Princess Colliery. Finding that the struggle in Canada was much the same as in the Old Country, McLachlan gradually adopted socialist views and defended them in the Halifax Herald in 1906. Capitalism, he argued, robbed citizens of their economic citizenship. He became a member of the Socialist Party of Canada and spearheaded efforts to bring the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) into the Nova Scotia coal mines to replace the Provincial Workmen’s Association, once a defender of miners’ interests but by McLachlan’s time in Canada an ineffective force in protecting workers’ interests. In spring, 1909, McLachlan and the other members of the executive of District 26 of the UMWA were blacklisted by the mineowners. For the rest of his life, this miner of 30 years would eke out a living sometimes as a union employee, but more often as a small farmer and a labour journalist.

      As secretary-treasurer of District 26, McLachlan was the key miners’ leader during the ten-month Nova Scotia strike in 1909-1910. He had his work cut out for him as the mineowners evicted miners from their company homes. The union had to quickly set up tents and build ramshackle buildings to house families tossed into the cold by companies that had profited from the sacrifices of the workers and their families. Capital certainly won that round despite the workers’ heroic efforts. McLachlan was charged with publishing a criminal libel against Dominion Coal and jailed. A jury exonerated him, but it would not be the last time that capital tried to silence J.B. McLachlan by using the courts.

      The McLachlan family moved to a small farm on Steele’s Hill, likely in 1913. McLachlan continued both his political and union efforts. While he was roundly defeated in a bid for the provincial legislature on the Socialist ticket in 1916, he proved successful in reviving District 26, which had been devastated by capital’s attack in 1909-10 and in finally dislodging the PWA from the mines of the province. In 1921, McLachlan played a key role in the launching of the Maritime Labour Herald, a newspaper representing the miners’ viewpoint. That year, he came close to election to Parliament as a Farmer-Labour candidate in Cape Breton South and Richmond. While he won an absolute majority of the votes in the mining districts, the rural vote went too strongly for the Liberals for this labour radical to carry the day.

      J.B. McLachlan played a much-celebrated role in the fightback of miners and steelworkers in Cape Breton from 1923 to 1925. Roy Wolvin, the key figure in BESCO, a monopoly over the coal and steel industry of the province, set out to use wage cuts and work intensification as the means to increase shareholders’ profits from the workers’ sweat. But Wolvin had the state authorities in his pocket, and McLachlan was arrested in 1923, imprisoned in Dorchester Prison, and charged with sedition. Eventually convicted and sentenced to two years in jail, McLachlan was freed after only four months as a result of a concerted campaign by the labour and progressive movements that caused the authorities to reckon McLachlan was more of a danger while in jail than freed to continue his propaganda work. His time in jail weakened J.B.’s health but he emerged from prison to continue as involved in the struggle as he ever was. He worked tirelessly to organize international support for the miners in 1925 during a five-month struggle in which they proved BESCO vice-president J.E. McLarg wrong in his contemptuous claim that "they can’t stand the gaff."

      The McLachlan who emerges from Frank’s account is clearly a public man who had little time left over for his family. Without his wife’s efforts both at raising the family and managing precarious family finances, his children would have starved and received little attention. Yet, if McLachlan was typical of many "great men," regardless of class in this era, in having a wife behind him who was relegated to a supportive role, he was not, by the standards of his time, sexist. While many labour leaders had a discourse that emphasized manliness and the union’s role in defending masculinity, McLachlan’s rhetoric was more familialist. He emphasized the need for women to be involved in strikes since the purpose of strikes to him was to defend the household that women kept alive through their work and their management of finances.

      McLachlan’s battles with the American UMWA leadership, particularly the dictatorial John L. Lewis, demonstrated his commitment to democratic unionism for the miners and a fighting union. Lewis proved as able to cut McLachlan out of the union as the bosses had proved able to keep him out of the mines. But he remained influential among the coal miners till the end of his life, decrying the reality that his once-beloved District 26 "had become a ‘dues-collecting machine’ for John L. Lewis, and a ‘wage-cutting tool’ for the company." (445)

      McLachlan’s devotion to workers’ rights and socialist revolution led him to the Communist Party in the early 1920s as the Socialist Party receded. He embraced the Bolshevik Revolution and V.I. Lenin, who remained his hero even as the clever party bureaucrat, Josef Stalin, redefined Leninism and turned the socialist revolution in large part into a paranoid killing machine that murdered most of the Old Bolsheviks and sizeable groups of peasants. Frank traces the development of McLachlan’s commitment to the world Communist movement with its promise to end wage slavery forever and his impact on the Communist Party of Canada. McLachlan had visited the Soviet Union and observed the royal treatment that coal miners received both in terms of their working and living conditions. Though the Soviet Union was a poor country that had suffered immensely both from the backwardness inherited from the Czarist Empire and from the devastation inflicted by the counter-revolutionaries backed by Western armies, its government managed to give more dignity to coal miners than the government of wealthy capitalist nations like Canada. McLachlan was neither the first nor last miners’ leader to be impressed by the excellent conditions experienced by coal miners in the Soviet Union. In the early eighties, a miners’ leader in Alberta, who was unsympathetic to Communism generally, confided in me that the miners were the aristocrats of the Soviet Union and he could never expect to win comparable working conditions and fringe benefits, particularly in the form of long, free holidays at seaside vacation dachas, for his members.

      Frank explains carefully why McLachlan broke with the Communists in 1936 as the party used its influence to force miners in a progressive breakaway union into re-entering the UMWA. McLachlan wanted the Nova Scotia miners to be in one union, and did not reject the UMWA out of hand. But he was repulsed by the idea that the Communists made no demand that District 26 be freed from the iron grip of John L. Lewis and his henchmen. Lewis was such an authoritarian that in the early thirties, the majority of UMWA districts in Canada and the United States were under direct central union supervision, their elected officials having been deposed by Lewis.

      Just as Frank is careful to dispel simplistic explanations of why McLachlan opposed the specific terms of unity for the coal miners in the "united front" period, he is at pains to explain that McLachlan, despite having broken with the Communist Party, remained a revolutionary. While he was on friendly terms with some social democrats such as CCF leader, J.S. Woodsworth, he was not a reformist and was not moving towards the social democratic party as he approached death in 1937. In fact, as Frank indicates, McLachlan believed that his point of view, not that of the Canadian party brass, correctly embodied the Red International of Labour Unions’ (Profintern) point of view as to how Communist unionists should approach unity discussions with non-Communist unionists.

      All very good, but here Frank is just too respectful of his subject, as biographers tend to be. McLachlan was clearly completely out of touch with what Stalin was up to in the mid-thirties or how the "world Communist movement" worked. The Profintern was subordinate to the Comintern, the world association of Communist parties, which, in turn, had become a creature of the Stalin party and government in Moscow. Stalin regarded the Comintern and Profintern, seen in Lenin’s day as the instruments to spread world revolution and end Soviet isolation, as tools to aid in Stalin’s goal of creating "socialism in a single country." As Nazism, abetted by Western capitalist governments, became a military threat to the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership, whose understanding of fascism and Nazism in the period of Hitler’s accession to power is most kindly described as naïve, came to their senses. It was necessary to create a united front of anti-fascist forces in the West that would join the Soviet Union in confronting the Nazi danger both militarily and diplomatically. Any idea of working towards revolution in Western countries was permanently shelved, along with left-wing union strategies. The Canadian party leadership DID understand what Stalin wanted them to do. It was McLachlan who had a romantic view both of the Soviet Union and the revolutionary potential of the miners. Rightly or wrongly, he would not sacrifice his fellow workers to anti-democratic union bureaucrats in order to fulfil left-wing bureaucrats’ notions of the long-term good of Communism. But it was self-delusion for him to believe that he, and not the CPC, had correctly interpreted the Comintern line and that the Canadian party leadership were simply sacrificing the miners to the opportunities created by Lewis’s willingness to use Communists in the United States and Canada as organizers for the CIO. In practice, the Communists throughout Europe also gutted the independent unions they had created during the ultra-left "Third Period." Even had there been no CIO, Canadian Communists would have been obliged, in order to support Soviet foreign policy, to renounce independent militant unions in 1935.

      Mostly, however, David Frank refrains from giving his subject undue powers of prophecy or wisdom. The J.B. McLachlan who emerges in this biography is a dedicated and unafraid defender of workers who becomes a committed socialist because of capitalism’s soul-destroying treatment of workers. The Cape Breton coal miners have been relegated to the past by neo-liberalism along with changing economic circumstances, and the Communist Party of Canada has also slipped into oblivion. But the economic system whose oppression McLachlan directly experienced as a coal miner and to whose eradication he gave much of his life continues on. McLachlan’s story can only be an inspiration for many generations to come, and David Frank is owed a debt of gratitude by all who defend the anti-capitalist cause for a vivid, readable, and nuanced appreciation of this working-class hero’s life.

Éric Leroux. Gustave Francq: Figure marquante du syndicalisme et précurseur de la FTQ (Montréal: VLB, 2001)

ENFIN! Une biographie longtemps attendue d’une figure de proue du mouvement syndical au Québec. Éric Leroux a fait de Gustave Francq le sujet de sa thèse de doctorat à l’Université de Montréal et nombreuses sont les personnes intéressées à l’histoire du mouvement syndical au Québec qui accueilleront avec plaisir et même reconnaissance cette biographie d’un personnage capital dans l’histoire syndicale canadienne et québécoise.

      Comme la plupart des biographies, celle-ci appartient au genre de l’histoire-mémoire plus qu’à celle de l’histoire-problème, et se fonde sur une quantité impressionnante de sources et d’ouvrages. Il y a des biographies où le manque de papiers personnels pousse l’auteur à combler les trous (de mémoire) par une grande attention au contexte et à tout ce qui se passe autour du personnage central. Et il y a les autres où l’abondance de documents risque d’absorber toute l’attention myope des biographes. Éric Leroux, dans son ouvrage à la fois extrêmement fouillé et bien équilibré, réussit a démêler l’écheveau des nombreux documents légués par son sujet: correspondance, pamphlets, éditoriaux et chroniques, en plus des témoignages de contemporains, tout en situant et en expliquant les combats syndicaux et politiques, les campagnes pour le droit à l’éducation ou aux mesures sociales, et facilitant ainsi la compréhension des grandes questions sociales qui ont marqué le Québec de l’époque de Francq, de sa naissance en 1871 à sa mort en 1952.

      Comme l’annonce le sous-titre du livre, Gustave Francq est d’abord une personnalité du monde syndical. Né en Belgique, il immigre à Montréal à 15 ans et apprend ici son métier de typographe sans jamais couper les liens avec son pays natal. Engagé très tôt dans le militantisme syndical, il grimpe les échelons du syndicalisme international, c’est-à-dire affilié à la Fédération américaine du travail (FAT), jusqu’à devenir vice-président du Congrès des métiers et du travail du Canada, président du Congrès des métiers et du travail de Montréal, président de l’Union des journalistes de Montréal et membre du comité exécutif de la Fédération provinciale des travailleurs du Québec. Pour défendre les intérêts ouvriers, en 1916 il fonde et dirige l’hebdomadaire syndical Le Monde ouvrier. Mais Francq occupe une position ambiguë dans les rapports de classe: dès 1904 il possède sa propre imprimerie; il est membre de la Montreal Board of Trade et de la Chambre de commerce de Montréal; enfin, il devient, dans les années vingt, haut fonctionnaire du gouvernement provincial.

      Ses orientations idéologiques évoluent au fil de sa carrière. De libéral travailliste il glisse, dans les années vingt, vers un libéralisme réformiste voué à l’harmonie sociale. Pourfendeur de la lutte des classes, Francq croit pouvoir améliorer la condition ouvrière à l’intérieur du capitalisme et se dissocie des grandes luttes ouvrières comme les grèves de 1919. Indéfectible gomperiste- ne considèrait-il pas Samuel Gompers, le leader de l’American Federation of Labor, comme un ami- il privilégiera exclusivement les syndicats de métiers contre la One Big Union, contre les Chevaliers du Travail et, en 1938, le Congrès d’Organisation industrielle. Il appuiera la conscription pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale jusqu’à s’opposer aux objecteurs de conscience. Comme le souligne plusieurs fois l’auteur, Francq, social-démocrate réformiste ou libéral, était un apôtre de la conciliation entre le capital et le travail. Malgré cette modération, il restera la bête noire des syndicats catholiques, inspirés de la doctrine sociale de l’Église et très conciliants envers le patronat pendant la période étudiée. Pour un syndicaliste comme Francq, la Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada est un élément divisif de la classe ouvrière. De plus, elle entretient un nationalisme qui lui répugne. Ce n’est que la politique anti-ouvrière de Maurice Duplessis qui rapprochera les deux centrales.

      L’ouvrage de Leroux situe le syndicalisme québécois dans l’espace nord-américain: il se développe en «parallèle». (13) Mais l’auteur ne nous présente pas un homme de la trempe de Francq comme un vulgaire valet de la Fédération américaine du travail. Il tend, beaucoup plus que les Américains, à faire confiance à l’État en matière de politique sociale en appuyant les allocations familiales, en siégeant à la Commission des accidents de travail et en présidant la Commission du salaire minimum des femmes. Cette dernière réforme illustre bien la position de Francq: soucieux d’harmonie et de modération plutôt que d’égalité des sexes, insistant sur les avantages d’une telle mesure pour les employeurs et l’industrie, susceptible aux pressions du gouvernement, il préside une commission dont les effets s’avèrent plus pervers qu’avantageux pour la grande masse des travailleuses.

      L’organisation d’une biographie n’est jamais facile: la chronologie recoupe plusieurs moments-clefs sur plus d’un demi-siècle, les engagements se succèdent sans être complètement abandonnés et les thèmes se chevauchent. Éric Leroux a choisi d’adopter une approche thématique: dans un premier temps, il traite successivement du syndicalisme, de la législation sociale et de l’action politique ouvrière, pour s’en tenir plutôt à une narration chronologique dans les derniers chapitres. Chaque lecteur et lectrice pourrait exprimer des frustrations et suggérer un autre ordre dans l’organisation des thèmes. Ainsi, puisque, à mon avis, une familiarité avec les principes de la franc-maçonnerie est fondamentale pour comprendre Gustave Francq, pourquoi faut-il attendre si longtemps avant de traiter du sujet? La philosophie franc-maçonne imprègne toute la pensée de Francq. On y retrouve les racines de ses engagements: le rationalisme, l’importance de l’éducation, l’idéal démocratique. La fondation de journaux ouvriers témoigne de l’importance accordée au savoir par les francs-maçons. L’héritage franc-maçon de Francq demande aussi des explications. L’adhésion à la loge n’était pas anodine à une époque où elle était passible d’excommunication par l’Église catholique. Il reste que dans sa forme, cette biographie oblige les lectrices et lecteurs à de constants aller-retour dans le temps qui font parfois perdre de vue la synchronie des événements.

      Malgré les éléments explicatifs fournis par l’auteur, les grands courants et enjeux qui ont marqué cette époque gagneraient à être approfondis. Un personnage se meut dans le caractère, dans l’esprit de son temps. L’époque de Francq est celle d’une grande poussée industrielle depuis la fin du 19e siècle, accentuée par la guerre et les années vingt, qui met en conflit ses promoteurs, surtout libéraux, apôtres du progrès et de la modernité, et les conservateurs nationalistes et cléricaux. C’est celle de la montée du fascisme et des clivages qu’elle crée dans le monde intellectuel québécois. On ne peut pas perdre de vue cette toile de fond nationale et internationale. Aussi, l’énumération des réformes sociales poursuivies par Francq et par les syndicats internationaux devrait faire l’objet d’une remise dans leur contexte pour faire ressortir l’importance respective de chacune et montrer les enjeux idéologiques et pratiques qu’elles provoquent.

      Il faut, même dans un ouvrage aussi érudit, relever quelques affirmations qui porteraient à débat. Ainsi, les mesures sociales prises par le Québec sous le gouvernement libéral d’Adélard Godbout entre 1940 et 1944 ne sont pas uniquement imputables à la crise économique qui les précèdent, mais aussi au climat socio-économique créé par la guerre et aussi au programme politique du parti libéral depuis plusieurs années, et plus particulièrement, inspiré cette fois par la Crise, celui de 1938. On se demande aussi pourquoi Leroux fait appel à Robert Rumilly, chroniqueur plutôt qu’historien, pour appuyer certains jugements.

      Il est regrettable que l’index, si précieux pour ce genre d’ouvrage, ne soit que nominal, ce qui limite sérieusement son utilité. Il faut toutefois remercier Leroux d’avoir inclus une chronologie qui permet de suivre en synchronie les étapes de la vie de Francq.

Ravi Pendakur, Immigrants and the Labour Force; Policy, Regulation and Impact (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000)

THIS BOOK is a contribution to studies about immigrants, immigrant women, and people of colour in Canada. By a meticulous and accessible (for non-economists) analysis of census data from Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver, Pendakur demonstrates that the Canadian state, through its immigration policy, is able to influence and is influenced by the nature of economic relations, including the labour market.

      The author states that these aforementioned issues are largely unexplored. This is hard to believe since he has listed authors such as Peter Li and Vic Satzewich in his bibliography who have done just that, and they are not alone. Unfortunately he does not refer to these works in the first part of the book when he is discussing the locations of immigrants in the labour market. I think that his analysis would have been greatly strengthened if he had. Be that as it may, Pendakur’s study is a significant contribution to this body of knowledge.

      Through a process described by him as a "cohort attainment model," he compares three cohorts of "immigrants" and "non-immigrants" in four census periods: 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991 as far as their location within the labour market is concerned. They are tracked from their entry point into Canada and then into the decades following.

      The analysis is made more dynamic by locating his problematic within the larger political economy of Canada, marked by a shift from a resource-based economy in the pre-war period, to the rise in manufacturing industries in the post-war period and finally the transformations of the new economy of the 1990s. The evolution of immigration policy from its overtly declared racist forms in the pre-war years to a more sanitized and sometimes covertly racist version in the post-war period also provide the backdrop for his analysis. Pendakur describes the relationship between the period of immigration, place of birth, schooling, and one’s location in the labour market.

      Utilizing an eight-sector typology of industries developed by the Economic Council of Canada and Statistics Canada, Pendakur is able to locate immigrant and non-immigrant cohorts in specific segments of the labour market based on skill requirements and job quality. What adds to the value of his research is that he is able to make conclusions about the positioning of immigrants from particular sources, such as those from the UK versus others from Italy, as well as for men versus women. This is an extremely useful analysis for those interested in gender, race, and ethnic patterns in labour participation. While social science studies so far have relied on a limited number of interviews, personal testimonies, and archival research, Pendakur’s study uses a much larger data set, viewing immigrants over time.

      The locations of immigrants relative to non-immigrant groups did not vary dramatically over the three decades looked at. The cohort that entered Canada in 1961 (mainly sponsored), and which was followed between 1961 and 1991, apparently did not change their occupations over those 30 years. Immigrant men remained concentrated in construction and manufacturing, while their female counterparts remained in manufacturing and service industries. Many in the immigrant male cohort were born in Italy and filled construction and service jobs since most lacked fluency in an official language. Construction jobs emerged as a male immigrant niche for this cohort and this sector commanded relatively higher wages with a variety of skill and schooling requirements. The service sector, on the other hand, was marked by low skills, education, and wages. Immigrant women in the same time periods worked predominantly in manufacturing and services, a large proportion concentrated in the garment sector, marked by low wages.

      Cohorts entering Canada from 1961 to 1977, who were tracked in 1981 and 1991, inluded sponsored immigrants as in the earlier cohort as well as a large proportion of independent immigrants from countries previously excluded as sources of immigration because of racial discrimination. The latter came under the Points System of 1967. Patterns revealed in the earlier period continued in the 1970s and afterwards with these cohorts. However, there seems to have been a movement out of manufacturing and construction into service sectors. Pendakur comments that this movement was not an indication of an actual shift in start-up employment for immigrants, rather it reflected the entry of younger, Canadian-educated immigrants. Country of education seems to be a cause for discrimination faced by immigrants and this has a direct impact on how well immigrants do in the Canadian labour market. It is apparent that immigrants schooled in the UK and US are given full credit for their education and therefore fare similarly to Canadian-born workers. The reverse is true for immigrants schooled elsewhere.

      Immigrant women who lacked fluency in an official language, including large numbers from China, Italy, and Greece continued to work in manufacturing, particularly in garment factories. Others who could speak English and French and had higher levels of schooling, from the Caribbean, Northern Europe, and Asia outside of China, went into social services.

      Immigrant men and women were over-represented in manufacturing and personal services and under-represented in better-paid sectors. Partly, the exclusion of immigrants in the latter sectors was due to lack of fluency in an official language and low levels of (or devalued?) schooling of sponsored immigrants, but it was also due to discrimination. Pendakur states that adjusting the data by education and age did not change the distribution radically.

      The movement of significant numbers of immigrants into self-employment is an interesting phenomenon flagged by the author. Those who made such a move did so within the same sector where they had been waged workers before, such as in construction and services. This could be a demonstration of the lack of mobility for immigrants due to discrimination and the entrenchment of ethnic niche employment. Overall, self-employment was much higher for immigrants compared to non-immigrants over the three decades studied.

      The limitations of census data analysis are apparent in Pendakur’s study as the actual lived experiences of immigrant men and women, their motivations, interactions, and strategies with gatekeepers, educators, and employers cannot be studied through numerical data. Nuances of inclusions and exclusions can be best studied with qualitative methodologies. That is lacking in this book, which is limited to quantitative analysis.

      In the last section of the book, there is a fascinating problematization of the state-constructed category, "visible minority," and a related critique of the policy of employment equity. Pendakur argues that by creating one singular category, class variations within and between different non-white groups are obfuscated. But then, a capitalist state can hardly be expected to acknowledge and remedy class inequalities as a structural problem. Pendakur speculates that the singular category was created to give some political clout to people of colour. In effect, the category "visible minority" homogenizes a diverse population, thereby making employment equity unable to help those who need it most. To illustrate his point, he demonstrates that west Asians are better represented in managerial positions than whites, blacks, and south and south east Asians. In another chapter, co-written with his brother Krishna Pendakur, he shows that it is true that people of colour earn significantly less than whites in Canada, but emphasizes that this wage gap is experienced differently by different ethnic and racial groups. Aboriginal men and visible minority men who are Canadian-born as well as those who are immigrants suffer the most disadvantage in terms of wage disparity. Visible minority women do not seem to have lower wages than Canadian-born white women, although aboriginal women do. In addition, among Canadian-born white workers, Greek and Portuguese men and Greek women face a significant wage gap. Thus, it is evident that all visible minorities and even all white groups do not encounter the wage gap in the same manner or to the same degree.

      Employment equity also does not address education equity, which is required to create a supply of qualified persons who could apply for positions. Thus, the program ends up helping people who have the education and skills required to be in upper echelon positions. Those who do not possess these prerequisites due to racism in educational access cannot be helped by Employment Equity.

      It is hard to know whether Pendakur is critical of the philosophy of employment equity in abstraction or whether his critique is directed at the actual program in place at the federal level. Assuming that he is coming from the latter position, I expected a more extensive critique of the federal program of equity, which in its present form, is toothless, since it lacks clear goals, timetables, as well as penalties for not achieving equity. There was no mention of the fact that the program was limited to federally regulated crown corporations and only later included the federal government itself as an employer. Private-sector companies are largely exempted from the program unless they are involved in large contracts with the federal government.

      I was hoping to see a problematization of the category "immigrant" as the author has done with the category "visible minority." However, this never happens. Pendakur assumes that anybody who is born outside Canada and who now resides here is an immigrant. This is highly problematic since the term "immigrant" is still common-sensically associated with those who are deemed non-Canadian, those who are "others." To address a person who has lived in Canada for 10, 20 or 30 years as an immigrant is unacceptable to many and symbolically sets them apart from "Canadians" who are deemed to be entitled to the privileges of citizenship. When does a person cease to be an immigrant and become a Canadian? Pendakur does not discuss this thorny question and chooses to use the term "immigrant" unproblematically.

      Despite the concerns expressed here I think that this 200 page book must be read by anyone interested in immigration, labour, gender, and anti-racist studies. The data presented is highly provocative and can be utilized in a variety of ways to complement qualitative studies undertaken by social scientists in similar fields. Discrimination, segregation, and pay inequities are clearly demonstrated between workers of different ethnic and racial groupings. It also confirms that inequalities suffered by many non-Canadian workers are not merely a symptom of adjusting and settling in a new country. It is largely an indication of discrimination and racism.

Oiva W. Saarinen, Between a Rock and a Hard Place : A Historical Geography of the Finns in the Sudbury Area (Waterloo: Wilfrid University Press, 1999)

OIVA W. SAARINEN, a historical geographer at Laurentian University, begins his work by noting that an "advantage of working with Finnish historical geography is the fact that this ethnic group can lay claim to having one of the richest archival heritages extant." (xiii) As it turns out, Between a Rock and a Hard Place reflects that archival abundance, for better and worse, in providing a wealth of data on Sudbury-area Finns, especially on the period up to World War II.

      Convinced that Finns "left an indelible imprint" on the Sudbury area, (1) Saarinen seeks a "framework for comparable studies involving other ethnic groups in North America."(1-2) He also reaches out to readers interested in the particular, the local. Brave and all-encompassing though such an approach might be, it is fraught with difficulties: does the specific tell us much about the general? Then there is the question of balance: Saarinen terms his book a "celebration" of Finnish heritage – while not excessively filio-pietistic, such celebratory aspects do appear.

      The overlying thesis here is suggested by the evocative title. As Saarinen sees it, Finns in the often sulphur-blackened landscape about Sudbury had only two options for self-improvement – the labour movement and political activism.(2) But how deep did it penetrate? Saarinen concedes the existence of "hall socialism" and other forms of pragmatic institutional activity; he also shows that few Finns actually belonged to organizations of any ilk. (272) Yet he largely ignores his own evidence in insisting on a far-reaching "Great Divide" among area Finns. Did the left/right split really matter beyond the respective elites – who by dominating the record keeping, the newspaper reportage, and the like, certainly kept it visible? If so, why did so few Finns formally join the fray? Saarinen rightly shows that as immigrants and wage earners in resource economies (or small farmers with minuscule capital), Finns faced formidable obstacles should they opt for active membership in "radical" groups. But instead of delving deeper into the supposed "Divide," he describes the institutional "players." More confusingly, he ultimately shifts ground; he urges a "recast[ing of] the leftist/radical tradition of the Finns in Canada ... as being progressive rather than radical or communist in character." (274) Perhaps the "Great Divide" was not so great? Were Finns really between two immovable objects, or were they more empowered, able to negotiate an admittedly "rocky" road as they saw fit?

      That being said, these organizations and the unquestioned commitment of a minority of local Finns to their respective causes deserve the attention that Saarinen provides. Here one will find a wealth of information on the group activities of the Sudbury-area Finns. If only for coalescing scattered data, the book deserves the attention of anyone interested in the immigrant experience in Canada. Discussion of political activity, the churches, working-class organization, and more, reveal that Finns, both men and women (Saarinen tries hard to include discussion of the latter) melded homeland views and New World ideas into an effort to both ease settlement and prevent assimilation. Between a Rock and a Hard Place is on especially fertile ground in suggesting that the border did matter, with the American authorities cutting immigration quotas in the 1920s – the Finnish Canadian experience was not just a smaller imitation of the American case. (123) One does wish for a few more consistent and developed generalizations that would aid comparative study.

      The relatively thin level of generalization reflects a problem with studying the Finnish experience, especially from the 1890s to World War II. Saarinen’s evident familiarity with the super-abundant Finnish archival record (supplemented by a thorough reading of secondary sources) creates a tendency to report rather than to analyze. Saarinen’s self-stated goal of serving the local, particular interest makes such reportage almost inevitable. There is much to appreciate: for instance, a long (80 page) chapter outlining the geographical pattern of Finnish settlement provides good summary histories of the rural enclaves, the mining camps, and the portions of Sudbury where Finns settled. One can applaud the effort and the resultant maps; the latter, while frustratingly small, are a valuable element of this work. But a tight focus can be hard to maintain, and on occasion Saarinen loses grip of the lens. Besides largely irrelevant tidbits and near gossip about colourful characters, errors inevitably penetrate the minutia. For instance, in covering the "Whitefish/Louise" Finns, Saarinen provides a "first settler" date (1905) where a pioneer actually arrived some six years earlier. Such "errors" are in a way insignificant – but they also raise questions about Saarinen’s approach. Where does important detail end and trivia begin? How many "pioneers" does one mention? Who makes the text; who the endnotes; and who does not make it at all? Similarly, the twenty biographies scattered through the book seem quite arbitrarily chosen and inconsistent in coverage.

      No less troubling is the tendency to intermingle generalization with minutia – thus the Beaver Lake history reveals a "leftist" rural enclave, while literally next door (the easternmost Beaver Lake Finn was a neighbour to a Louise Township Finn) the folks were supposedly much farther to the "right." If so, why ? Not because of the environment, which was virtually identical. Meanwhile, the Waters settlement, characterized as conservative, was home to several left-wing institutions. So we are provided with interesting micro-depictions of the Finnish settlement – but we are also left with sweeping generalizations sometimes contradicting the detail.

      The sheer volume of Saarinen’s pre-1940 data also raises concerns. Many times, Between a Rock and a Hard Place minimizes post-World War II issues. The decline of Finnishness in the rural enclaves is dealt with very briefly – often a paragraph covers the past 50 years where several pages dealt with the first half century. What was the nature of the decline? Is today’s Finnishness limited to a few pieces of glassware or the occasional Finnish laatikko (casserole)? Saarinen briefly discusses the retention of symbolic Finnishness (259-261), but given efforts like those of Timothy Dallen on rural Finns around Thunder Bay, more discussion of postwar ethnic decline would have been welcome.

      Ironically, given the emphasis on working-class ideology, the limited postwar coverage often emphasizes the Finnish élite – Finns who "made it" in business and the like. Perhaps a little "close to home," this coverage veers near the congratulatory: do we really need references to saunas imported from Finland? What of the many Finns who never "made it"?

      What then, does that leave us ? Minor errors borne of synthesis; a publisher unwilling or unable to provide full pages for very detailed maps and charts; rather idiosyncratic biographies and more. One also wishes that Saarinen’s goal of a "framework" for comparative analysis received a little more weight; so, too, his postwar coverage. Yet for all its flaws, Between a Rock and a Hard Place deserves praise. Led astray on occasion by the depth of his research and pride in his Finnish heritage, Oiva Saarinen has nonetheless done yeoman work. Readers with any interest in Canadian immigration, or in the ethnically diverse, northern resource frontier of Canada, should say kiitos! (thank you!)

Shirley Tillotson, The Public at Play: Gender and the Politics of Recreation in Post-War Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

SHIRLEY TILLOTSON’s new work on recreation is a study of ambivalence and failure. In exposing this basic pattern, through a tight blend of theory and evidence, this book succeeds admirably. Tillotson’s focus is on recreation politics during the first fifteen years of postwar welfare state building at eleven governing levels, and she addresses a crucial question: did gendered hierarchies change as organized, public leisure expanded? Through this opaque window, her chapter themes consider how recreation, as a publicly-subsidized social movement, dissipated into a publicly-consumed social service. Tillotson shows how Ontario’s postwar recreation goals came to be defined, how its bureaucracy expanded, and how its growing professionalization – the role of a new cadre of mostly male recreation directors – redefined masculine leadership. She asks how an ostensibly liberal-democratic movement’s search for legitimacy tried to transform itself and the society it served, but could not. Drawing on Carole Pateman’s critique of liberalism and the welfare state, which uncovers its inherent failure to reposition boundaries of gender, Tillotson structures her evidence, quite effectively, along a complex narrative to examine how recreation’s contradictory aims brought little in the struggle for gender equality or for social democracy in postwar Ontario.

      What could have been an activist social movement, fostering new relations between classes, genders, ethnicities, and ages, became by the mid-1950s a socially-reproducing, community service. In this prolonged and complex process, gendered power relations between breadwinning men and homemaking women; between boys and girls; and between all lives constrained by existing boundaries of lived experience and expectation, remained remarkably fixed, remarkably "normalized," and remarkably unchallenged by an increasingly centrist politics of public leisure administration. Recreation as "public play" became a vehicle of social reproduction. New funds became available, and were allocated. Consumerism had an impact. Recreation’s governing and administrative structures took shape, generally within existing norms. Its ambivalence, its failures, and the basic gender and power assumptions displayed patterns of continuity, not change. Of course, implicit to Tillotson’s entire approach is the argument that a potential fork at the road actually appeared with the end of war. I myself doubt that participatory, social-democracy and increased gender equality could have attracted more attention than it did before the 1960s, but also feel, that big "what if" aside, that all readers now have a carefully-researched study of why and how Ontario’s recreation politics at mid-century ultimately acted to forestall, not promote change.

      But, as a study situated in the postwar reconstruction period and throughout the 1950s, it conscientiously works against the pitfalls of homogenizing the period. Tillotson delivers a nuanced approach to the ambivalent discourses – of recreation professionals and volunteers – through which liberal ideals and social structure collided. "Public recreationists with a liberal vision of participatory democracy," Tillotson states in a well-crafted introduction, "thus had to struggle to establish new organizational methods, while working with leaders committed to existing, contradictory conventions of social power." (17) Her work convincingly locates discourses that reproduced gender relations, using documents – provincial government, municipal, and volunteer bodies – generated on an ambivalent terrain: between the public worlds of active citizens and the private worlds of family life. "In imagining that public recreation would be both democratic and liberal," Tillotson notes, "by having ‘private’ people as its leaders, its designers built into it such contradictory features that its decline from a movement to service was virtually ignored." (17) As a work that moves between the boundaries of public practice and personal politics, her chapters address what she sees, overall, as recreation’s backward-facing, gendered politics.

      Tillotson begins by reconstructing policy aims worked out among the province’s Community Programs Branch (CPB), the Ontario Adult Recreation Board, and local recreation organizations, particularly the making of the new profession of recreation directors. Her research is drawn, primarily, from the records of Ontario’s CPB, the Recreation Directors Federation of Ontario, and the Ontario Recreation Association. Some colourful personalities appear, like former athlete and war hero J.K. (Johnny) Tett, a CPB promoter, who helped to change recreation’s image "from the prim and class-biased one of ‘wholesome’ and ‘constructive’ activities to a more inclusive one of popular fun." (48) Throughout, Tillotson cites recreation theorists, activists, volunteers, and professional recreation directors hired across Ontario towns, as each played their parts within her underlying "social movement-to-social service" narrative. The ideas and efforts of University of Toronto community organization expert Alan Klein, Simcoe Arts and Crafts Association director Louise Colley, and American physical education professor G. Ott Romney, among many others, are examined in a study that crosses boundaries of class and gender whenever possible. Primarily, the voices of middle-class men appear, since men, as "family men," increasingly shaped public recreation politics, but Tillotson considers carefully the impact of wage-earning volunteers, women, and ethno-cultural minorities. Noting that in 1949 only 3 of 56 local recreation directors were women (by 1963 the preponderance of males still held at 86 of 90), Tillotson examines an interesting site of gender fluidity through the common plight of recreation directors trying to fashion new roles. These new recreation professionals had to be simultaneously manful, playful, helpful, and useful to the communities they served. I liked the use of Parsonian typologies of masculinity and femininity, between which they (about one third of assistant directors were women) were torn, in part because the trait names themselves – aggressive, "planful," self-confident versus affectionate, obedient, and cheerful – derived from the period under review. The "job itself was potentially feminizing," Tillotson concludes. (80)

      I also liked the nuanced approach to gender itself that Tillotson often adopts in using "social hierarchies" as the activated system in which gender operates. This is brought out in chapter four, which considers how recreation’s "authority" as a bureaucratic, gendered enterprise became legitimized within existing notions of family and community life. The comparatively broad time span considered here, 1946 to 1958, nears that covered by the book itself. So does the argument – that in pursuing their new, evolving roles, recreation directors, as professionals, undermined their "larger democratic project." (77) Recreation’s force in restructuring social hierarchies was, especially for gender equality, ambivalent, a failure really. With respect to children’s programs, Tillotson makes clear that while recreation directors were "altering something of what the welfare state meant to women and girls, they relied on and reproduced gendered hierarchy in the development of their profession." (87)

      With her thesis well demonstrated as a province-wide pattern, Tillotson presents a very useful case study, drawn from Brantford, and partly from the relatively long tenure (1945-53) of that city’s first recreation director, John Pearson. Perhaps inspired, as other recreationists were initially, by Chicago social worker and theorist Saul Alinsky’s call to action for a "peoples" governance on local, neighbourhood levels, Pearson seemed intent on keeping something of Alinsky’s bottom-up populism alive in a milieu, often of middle-class sensibilities that supported existing social hierarchies. The city-funded Brantford Playgrounds and Recreation Commission was made up of mostly middle-class women and men from groups like the IODE and Optimists. They comprised, in other words, an ambivalent body, hardly the voices for social change that, fundamentally, did not gain strength until the latter 1960s. Nonetheless, from early 1945 to 1948 some 300 men and women joined Pearson’s community committees, with slightly more men than women, of mixed classes with slightly more working-class women, and of notable ethno-cultural diversity. Ninety-one per cent, however, were married, and if any ideal prevailed it was that of a "stable," family model. By 1953, however, the Community Committees Council which attempted to articulate Brantford’s familial-biased, social hierarchy had been displaced by a bureaucratized Recreation Committee. Gendered boundaries changed little in the process.

      Social historians need to know more about how normative patterns, ideal and lived, intersected with local life, with the politics of everyday local community activities, like building a rink or staffing a playground program. It is primarily the ebb and flow of social power distributions – how societal and Ontario-wide forces shaped local recreational politics – that this book engages critically, which I think is a necessary methodological tactic. Tillotson explicitly sidesteps a socio-cultural study, one attempting to interpret the lived experiences and memories of ordinary Ontarians who remade themselves through leisure by skating, rughooking, or playing baseball in the countless teams and programs that grew in leaps and bounds. This is not meant to be a study of popular culture, nor even a social history of ordinary experience. Nor does it focus on the complexities of any large sample of front-line activists, volunteers, or participants. "Both in researching and writing, I have remained fundamentally ambivalent about the people in this movement," Tillotson explains. (19) While this may be a somewhat overstated disclaimer, she does present a careful dissection of the narrower stage of recreationist politics itself. "While I can certainly interpret the meaning of their project as a whole, the individuals involved were a mixed bag – appallingly innocent, contemptibly complacent, bracingly pragmatic, and deeply idealistic – and thus impossible to characterize collectively." (19) Instead, this book offers a well-grounded (including a revealing table of sex and class distributions for Brantford volunteers from the immediate postwar years to 1961) explanation of their structural incapacity to build a social democratic movement.

      Would, for other projects, historicizing that "mixed bag" of ordinary recreation builders, and users too, be so problematic? Through other methods, including oral history, it seems quite possible to consider how boundaries of social difference – gendered, class and age-based, and ethnic – were actually experienced on the ball diamond, in the ballet class, or the mixed-sex-and-age archery class, which in fact Tillotson includes photographic evidence of as a prime vehicle for "broad accessibility." But that, of course, would lead to other studies. Tillotson instead offers a sophisticated and carefully-demonstrated basis for other researchers to go beyond the political as inscribed in the minutes, meetings, and policy debated and toward the personal as witnessed in life-writing and in memory. I am quite sure, I might add, that other work addressing other questions, focusing instead on users rather than programs, would implicitly reinforce Tillotson’s basic premise.

      Did Tillotson choose a city case and study topic generally that too neatly fits into a pattern of ambivalence, then failure, for social democracy and gender equality? I do not think so. It is true that her socialist feminism deeply structures her entire approach, but that fact is discussed openly, not skirted. Overall, I felt closer to a historical text that began with her personal response to the end of the Cold War, with telling signs added of her own time, place, and parentage. To argue, as she does in the next-to-final chapter, that feminism failed to take hold (but had some foreshadowing) in recreation in the 1950s, that making volunteer leadership democratically "representative" of the community seems to have entailed putting "Dad" – male volunteers and recreation directors – in charge, is not supposed to make us feel simply that recreation failed. Rather, like schools, hospitals, and other provincial and federal welfare state programs, recreation operated at points of intersection between social hierarchies, however fluid, and social demands, in a self-proclaimed liberal democratic society that in fact imposed old demands on new freedoms.

      This book engages a growing conversation on postwar normalization, one that now has a place in courses on Canada in the postwar – Coldwar/Babyboom/Consumerist – period. I hope it is used widely to help shape our understanding of gender politics since 1945. Both undergraduates and period specialists will find much to learn from it. From studies of normalized ideals in education, to heterosexual dating practices, to fatherhood and family life, recreation as a local activity crosses many domains. Tillotson’s study of its politics and its gendered implications, in my view, goes a long way toward revealing how.

Leah F. Vosko, Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of the Precarious Employment Relationship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

THIS IS A WONDERFUL BOOK, and a perfect reminder of the old maxim, "don’t judge a book by its cover." Inside the extremely pink, but otherwise blank cover, lies a thoughtful analysis addressing one of the central issues in the work world from a number of different vantage points. Leah Vosko explores the triangular relationship between workers, multiple employers, and employment agencies, and the implications this has for the balance of class power.

      Leah Vosko’s book encompasses the history and evolution of the Temporary Help Industry (THI) in Canada and the regulatory system, both national and international, that developed around it. Vosko traces the normative shift from the Standard Employment Relationship (SER), which marked the post-World War II period to the current period, where in casualized employment, workers have few rights and can expect or demand little from employers. Normative is italicized, because the SER, as Vosko notes, was not for everybody – it was a white male breadwinner norm. Vosko links the Temporary Employment Relationship (TER), to the feminization of employment and the increased commodification of labour. This term is used to indicate not just women’s entry into the labour force en masse, but the harmonizing down of men’s jobs so that virtually all women and many men are engaged in non-standard casualized employment There are gender and race differences between women and men and between white men and Canadians who are immigrants, non-white, and Aboriginal. Vosko reminds us that these differences are classed as well. There is marked polarization among women and among men in the dominant group along the lines of the good jobs/ bad jobs dichotomy.

      In developing her thesis about the racialized aspects of the THI, Vosko traces it back to the Canadian state’s nation-building and immigration policy, in which the state’s commitment to "an ethnically pure British settler colony" conflicted with and contradicted the capitalist class’ desire for a supply of cheap, temporary male labourers and guest workers. Linking the Temporary Help Agencies (THA) of the current period with this predecessor makes a connection that this reader finds illuminating, but not necessarily immediately obvious. Making this link is a significant contribution to how we think about casual work. Resistance grew to the abuses common in these private employment agencies for both xenophobic reasons, and in response to their exploitative character. Federal, provincial, and municipal regulation developed as well as the International Labour Organization (ILO) position that "labour is not a commodity."

      The direct predecessor of the THI is the typewriter companies of the early 20th century that managed to elude the attempts to regulate private employment agencies. These companies were legitimate because they did not charge fees. To encourage the sale of typewriters, companies offered the services of stenographers and typists, who were female, well educated, young, and largely Canadian born. These Canadian women who were relegated to the fringes of the labour force and denied access to a SER nevertheless were quite privileged compared to their immigrant sisters who were limited to positions as foreign domestic workers, leaving them vulnerable to work under harsh conditions, and ultimately to arrival in Canada minus the citizenship entitlements given to other classes of immigrants.

      I found the material documenting the international regulation of the THI the least satisfying. While the establishment of international standards is not insignificant, the ILO has no real power other than a fairly limited moral authority to actually enforce their provisions. It is, however, a necessary part of her argument about the normative shift from the SER to the TER. For me the heart of the book is in the wonderful material Vosko collected from interviewing managers and workers in a THA. Gaining entry was quite a feat, and in these chapters, one really gains an insight into the exploitative nature of the THI. She also documents how highly skilled immigrants take jobs as temps in the hope of gaining much needed Canadian experience only to discover that because their work site is separate from their legal employer, the THA, they are unable to get references for the work they have done. The triangular nature of the relationship where the agency is the employer, and is responsible for recruitment, payroll, and dismissal, but the worker is actually working for the "customer" of the agency leads to a very problematic situation for enforcing workers’ rights. Even when the placement is in a unionized firm, contracting out clauses in a collective agreement result in this group of workers not receiving union wages or benefits. From the point of view of the employer, or the "customer" of the THI, this is an ideal situation – the disposable workers who can be hired and fired at will and to whom an employer need have no obligation.

      In developing her argument about the normative shift to the TER, Vosko examines the Ontario version of workfare, called "work first." The mandate of "work first" is to match "employable" social assistance recipients with THA. Penalties for non-compliance by refusing to accept work or a referral to a placement are loss of benefits for up to three months. If a recipient refuses more than once, the cutoff period for benefits is six months. Vosko managed to attend a training session for welfare recipients, where the message that social assistance recipients are given is that they have about as much chance of full-time work with benefits as winning the lottery. Under new legislation of the Harris Government, Ontario Works participants are prohibited from unionizing. In Vosko’s eyes, these social policy measures constitute a throwback to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when private employment agencies engaged workers under coercive and exploitative conditions. Only pressure from organized labour and immigrant communities could curtail those practices.

      Finally, Vosko harnesses her theoretical argument to the historical case study and examines what can be done to improve employment conditions for temporary workers. She proposes collective actions embracing unions and better labour laws. In particular, some form of broader based bargaining supported by the organized labour movement is important in improving the conditions of these workers.

      One can see, even from this all too brief review, the wealth and diversity of material that lies between these pink covers. This book is impressive for the careful scholarship, and the multiple approaches that enrich the author’s discussion of the subject. Temporary Work is obligatory reading for all of us to gain a sense of how this casualized labour market came to be, and as a model of good research. I cannot recommend it too highly, and let’s hope that in the next edition (there will be many editions of this book), we actually have a cover worthy of its contents.

Patricia O’Reilly, Health Care Practitioners: An Ontario Case Study in Policy Making (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

HEALTH CARE PRACTITIONERS provides detailed, descriptive documentation of the social history of a wide variety of health practitioners in the province of Ontario. One table alone represents the positions of 45 different practitioner groups after the Regulated Health Professions Act (RHPA) of 1991. Calling her work a story, O’Reilly provides a post-positive analysis of the history of policy-making and change in the positions and divisions of various health care practitioner groups from their own perspectives and the perspectives of various representative spokespersons, as well as written documentation. She argues for the method of hermeneutics, which involves placing herself in the position of those studied in order to get at their version of reality, their story. The analytical base is the dialectic of the interaction between ideas and institutionalization as understood hermeneutically in the dynamic development and growth of these practitioner groups.

      This is a valuable book that brings together extensive documentation of Ontario health care from the point of view of the role of practitioners vis à vis one another, the state, and the public dating from 1788 in British-governed Québec. Here a particular group of practitioners was elevated above the others. They were said to be scientific as they were educated in Great Britain. This elevated status was legislated and stricter licensing procedures began to be enforced. From the early beginnings to the modern period, O’Reilly documents the processes whereby various practitioner groups were embedded, marginalized, and excluded in and through health care legislation. She summarizes some of these processes in several interesting tables that divide practitioners into those who deal with the whole body and are independent such as medical practitioners; those who are merchant-service providers such as dentists; those who are technique specialists such as chiropractors; technology specialists, such as dental technologists; and those who are assistants such as registered nurses. These groups are categorized at several points in time in terms of their degree of embeddedness, marginality, and exclusion.

      The book itself is 244 pages long but it includes 100 more pages of footnotes based on readings of a myriad of historical policy documents of numerous practitioner groups, "associations," "colleges," "boards," and "societies," as well as legislation. It also includes over 100 interviews with representatives of all of the colleges and some of the associations of health care practitioners governed under the RPHA, key policy advisors, bureaucrats, government officials, and a sample of non-RHPA-regulated and non-regulated health practitioner organizations as well as health practitioners themselves. Finally, O’Reilly includes a participant-observation component to background herself in this research. She worked in the provincial health care bureaucracy during the drafting of the RHPA.

      This is a book of detail, of history. It is not a book of explanation and prediction. It is not a book that tries to understand the processes observed through any new or even older theoretical/explanatory lens. The interviews, while claiming to represent the viewpoints of variously situated bureaucrats and practitioners, are not actually situated in any systematic way that would allow them to be seen as representative and allow generalizations to be made on their behalf. This is the story of the things said, about ideas and institutions from the perspectives of the health care practitioners and their groups and associations. It is not, however, a study of their actual behaviour. Nor is there a window on the ways that conflicts and complex negotiations were worked out. As such, although its focus is on change over time, there is little discussion of the difficult processes through which change was worked out. Max Weber is mentioned once, in the introduction. Karl Marx is never mentioned. This is not a study that contextualizes the local (Ontario health care practitioners) by paying attention to larger theories of social and political/economic change. Rather it is a story, well written and full of rich detail based on interviews and written reports with a focus on the 1960s to the 1970s.

Gregor Murray et Pierre Verge, La représentation syndicale: Visage juridique actuel et futur (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999)

LE VOLUME porte surtout sur le système juridique encadrant le syndicalisme québécois vu sous l’angle des deux principales formes de représentation syndicale, soit celle qui s’effectue à l’intérieur de l’entreprise via la négociation collective et celle qui a cours au-delà de l’entreprise dans divers organismes socio- économiques. Les auteurs s’interrogent également sur les problèmes que les transformations du marché du travail posent à l’encadrement juridique de l’action syndicale.

      Le premier chapitre comprend une portion historique qui est plutôt mince et fait plutôt référence à la progression du syndicalisme en Europe et aux États-Unis plutôt qu’au Québec et au Canada. L’analyse est donc peu ancrée dans l’expérience syndicale d’ici. Et pourtant, depuis longtemps, les travailleurs québécois ont été tentés par diverses formes de représentation syndicale. L’action de lobby auprès des gouvernements comme porte-parole des salariés date de la fin du 19e siècle et la Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (actuelle Confédération des syndi