Times of Transformation

Larry Ostola speaks with Barbara Messamore about her book Times of Transformation. Times of Transformation positions the watershed 1921 federal election in the context of activist efforts and the revolutionary mood in the years following the Great War. New Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King, who went on to become Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, came to power, with his party capturing every Quebec seat. The 1921 election brought many Canadian firsts: the first post-Confederation minority government, the first time women were eligible to vote on terms equal to men, and the first effective fracturing of the two-party system, with the establishment of a federal Labour party and the dramatic rise of the Progressives.

In her engaging, in-depth account, Barbara Messamore shows how these changes had been brewing at the activist level even before the end of the war. The Progressive party owed its success to the increasing politicization of farmers and the importance of tariff policy, freight rates, and grain prices to the western voting base. Suffrage came after a decades-long battle for political rights for women. Labour strikes swept the nation in the post–Great War era, and a new national Labour party gained Commons representation. The 1921 election in Canada was a manifestation of long-building forces for change that embodied the global zeitgeist of postwar disillusionment and hope.

Barbara Messamore’s detailed exploration of this turning point election will appeal to those interested in history, biography, and the evolution of Canadian democracy

Barbara J. Messamore is a professor of history and department chair at the University of the Fraser Valley. She is the author of Canada’s Governors General, 1847–1878 and coauthor of Narrating a Nation: Canadian History Post-Confederation and Conflict and Compromise: Pre-Confederation Canada. She cofounded and edited the Journal of Historical Biography and is president of the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada.

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