If NDP organizers want a primer to hand out to all first-time convention delegates about how to make sense of the sometimes unintelligible undercurrents at work in the policy-rich but fractious world of the New Democratic Party of Canada, they could do worse than order up a few boxes of Lynn Gidluck’s Visionaries, Crusaders and Firebrands: The Idealistic Canadians Who Built the NDP. Non-NDP readers would learn a lot as well. For example, it will surprise many to learn about the role of that political party (or more precisely its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) in the creation of the Bank of Canada and the country’s current banking regulatory environment, which many would argue helped save Canada from the worst impacts of the 2008 market meltdown. This and many other threads of the political and policy fabric of Canada can be traced to the early activists and their successors profiled in this book.
Gidluck writes in an interesting and...
Frances Lankin is a former member of Ontario’s legislature and Cabinet minister. Lankin spent more than a decade as CEO of the United Way of Toronto. She was recently commissioned by the Ontario government to co-lead a review of the province’s social assistance program.
Advertisement
Advertisement