A Dissenting Voice

“Smith’s commentary ages well; the works have a time capsule authenticity and a rhetorical urgency.” -- J.P. Lewis, CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Since the days when John Diefenbaker was prime minister, Denis Smith has studied and written about the innermost workings of Canadian government as well as the men and women who make it work. Rogue Tory, his biography of John Diefenbaker, was acclaimed by Books in Canada as “finely written, thoroughly researched, superbly organized, and scrupulously fair. It rivals Donald Creighton on Sir John A. Macdonald as the best biography of a Canadian prime minister.” 

Now Smith celebrates his more than sixty years as an observer of -- and sometime participant in -- the Canadian political arena with this newly revised and expanded collection of essays, addresses, reviews, polemics and diversions written between 1959 and 2018. The topics range from Canada’s participation in the first Gulf War to efforts to reform the institution of Parliament;  now included are five new pieces on subjects as diverse as the founding of Trent University, the Napoleonic Wars, and the origins of pond hockey. Along the way, the author considers the place in history of such figures as Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Michael Ignatieff, Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper, and many others. The result is a collection that is intriguing, thought-provoking, sometimes amusing, and always insightful.