TORONTO – Canadians have chosen the best political book of
the last 25 years.
The winner by popular choice is Ezra Levant’s Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining
Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, published in 2009.
Following closely behind Shakedown
were: Stevie Cameron’s On the Take:
Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years, published in 1994;
Lawrence Martin’s Harperland: The
Politics of Control, published in 2010; and John Duffy’s Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership,
and the Making of Canada, published in 2002.
Thousands of Canadian readers voted online from a list of 12
finalist books, for the Writers’ Trust of Canada and Samara’s Best Canadian
Political Books of the Last 25 Years project.
The project highlights books that spark the Canadian
political imagination and contribute to how Canadians understand politics.
To learn more about the project, including question and
answer profiles with each of the 12 finalists, visit Samara Canada.
More
on the finalists:
Shakedown is an
exposé revealing how far government-appointed human rights bodies have strayed
from the noble purpose for which they were created.
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“Shakedown, and the fights it describes, were important public moments
for me,” said Levant. “It was a political act of defiance, it was a legal act,
it was a journalistic act.”
Ezra Levant is a
prominent conservative commentator who currently hosts The Source on Sun News Network and is a columnist for the Sun Media
newspaper chain. Born in Calgary, he now lives in Toronto.
On
the Takeis a cautionary tale about the misuse of power and public
money for personal gain as it exposes the ways in which Ottawa operated during
Mulroney’s years in power.
“I wanted to write about politics
with as much drama and style as any good novel,” said Cameron. “The power of
pure story-telling – of simple readability – that became my goal in On the Take and all my books.”
Stevie Cameron is an investigative journalist who has
written widely and published books on such figures as Karlheinz Schreiber and
Robert Pickton. She lives in Toronto.
Harperlandis a study of the first four years of
Stephen Harper’s government, portraying a defiant leader focused on party
discipline, message control, and maintaining a steady hand on the helm.
“The major
challenge was to get inside material, stuff that had not been written about
Harper before,” said Martin. “I was surprised so many spoke so candidly because
the prime minister ran a closed shop and, even though some of these people had
left his office, it was still risky for them to speak on the record.”
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Lawrence
Martin is an Ottawa-based public affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail and the author of 10
books.
Fights
of Our Lives demonstrates why elections matter in a play-by-play account
of the ideals and mechanics behind five pivotal federal contests.
“I’ve always loved elections and politics in general and
I have participated in almost 50 campaigns from college elections to national
ones,” said Duffy. “It’s not so much that I’m a writer who did a book on
politics, as that I’m a political activist who happened to write a book.”
John Duffy is a public policy consultant and has served as a senior
strategic advisor to several federal and Ontario Liberal leaders. He lives in
Toronto.
The
remaining eight finalists are:
* Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, Volume 1: The Magnificent Obsession
(1990) and Volume 2: The Heroic
Delusion (1994)
* Andrew Cohen, While
Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World (2003)
* Terry Fallis, The
Best Laid Plans (2008)
* Ron Graham, One-Eyed
Kings: Promise & Illusion in Canadian Politics (1986)
* Richard Gwyn, John
A: The Man Who Made Us; The Life and Times of John A. MacDonald, Volume
One (2007)
* Christopher Moore, 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (1997)
* John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (2008)
* Paul Wells, Right
Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s
Conservatism (2006)
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