The wide-ranging arguments about Canadian unity, or rather the prospect of its disunity, in Why Canadian Unity Matters and Why Americans Care: Democratic Pluralism at Risk deserve the closest attention in the one place where they are least likely to be given credence—Quebec. Charles Doran’s concern is the implications of secession, which he maintains would be not just disastrous for Canada, but also damaging to the United States and even serious for the rest of the world.
No Canadian could get away with making such a claim, which would immediately be denounced as absurdly extravagant. But Doran is an American. And not just any American at that. A senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, he brings substantial attributes to his new work on Canada. He has long been the dean of that handful of policy wonks in Washington who actually know that Canada exists and how it functions. He is well enough connected in...
Stephen Clarkson co-authored the two-volume Trudeau and Our Times in the 1990s (McClelland and Stewart, 1992, 1997) and wrote The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics (University of British Columbia Press, 2005). The third volume of his trilogy on North America since 9/11—Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct U.S. Power—was published in 2011 by the University of Toronto Press.
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