A Full and Sympathetic Accounting

The past is indeed a foreign country. They do things differently there. Just how foreign and different the Ontario and Canada of the 1960s and early 1970s were from today comes home in almost every page of Steve Paikin’s latest book. Public Triumph, Private Tragedy: The Double Life of John P. Robarts tells the previously untold story of Ontario’s 17th premier. That in itself is a compelling tale, but in the course Paikin also recounts a good deal about how we got here from there.

The life of communities, like those of individuals, is a permanent state of transition. It is only when one freeze-frames a moment from the past that the full extent of that transition becomes apparent. And when that historic picture is within one’s own memory, the shock of change comes home.

I was a reporter on Ontario politics for The Globe and Mail and later a columnist for the Toronto Star during much of the period covered by Paikin’s book. I also wrote a...