Talking Points

As a work of explanatory prose, The Professor and the Plumber is intelligent and accessible, providing a light-on-jargon, leftward-tilted introduction to the causes and consequences of the rise of extreme economic inequality in Canada and around the world since 1980. However smart, though, it’s a pamphlet trying to squirm free from the ­confines of undramatic dialogue.

The author, Eric W. Sager, is a historian and professor emeritus at the University of Victoria. He has also recently published a related but much longer, denser, and more academic look at the subject, Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea (which I reviewed in these pages in the October 2021 issue). The new book takes the form of a fictitious dialogue, between a female “smartass university professor” and her cousin, a male plumber, who has always been “good at fixing things.” The two...