Discovering Confederation: A Canadian's Story.

• Author: Schneiderman, David
• Position: Book review

Discovering Confederation: A Canadian's Story by Janet Ajzenstat, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 158p.

Janet Ajzenstat tells us that her mentor at the University of Toronto, Allen Bloom, once advised her to take up a great book and read it sympathetically --make the best case you can for your author, he exhorted.

It is easy to read this book--a welcome intellectual biography by Canada's leading authority of its political origins sympathetically. Indeed, there is much to admire in this glimpse at a political philosopher who came to appreciate the 1867 Canadian constitution and its version of parliamentary democracy.

Beginning with her graduate studies at McMaster at age 36, under the influence of George Grant and his Lament for a Nation (whose nineteenth century collectivism she later rejects), and then moving to the University of Toronto for doctoral work under Blooms' tutelage (he would later author the academic bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind), Ajzenstat attends to the rough outlines of her scholarly career. Serendipitously, it seems, Ajzenstat took up Lord Durham's Report of 1849 as her great text. Her dissertation and the resulting publication (The Political Thought of Lord Durham) remain the best introduction to Durham's political philosophy.

Moving to Philadelphia after her marriage to the late Samuel Ajzenstat, she joined the anti-war movement and other socialist causes before heading to McMaster University where her beloved Sam secured a job in the philosophy department. Starting her academic career late, and with two children at home, Ajzenstat began seeking academic positions wherever she could find them. Initially denied a post at McMaster, she taught at Calgary and then Brock, before finally returning to McMaster with a faculty position in hand at age 57. With mandatory retirement in place, she had eight years of fulltime teaching left to her.

These outlines serve as -backdrop against which the ideas in this little book flow. Discovering Confederation is all about ideas. Her preoccupation with Lord Durham and liberal constitutionalist Pierre Bedard, and her interest in Confederation and Canadian constitutional reform have been about unearthing the liberal foundations of the Canadian political project as a framework for debate among political ideologies.

She repudiates the Hartz-Horowitz thesis: that Canada was founded by American loyalists who were in pursuit of a conservative collectivism...