Author of:

McDonald, Robert A.J. & W. Peter Ward (editors). British Columbia: Historical Readings (Douglas & McIntyre, 1981).

McDonald, Robert A.J. Making Vancouver: Class, Status, and Social Boundaries, 1863-1913 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996)

A Long Way to Paradise: A New History of British Columbia Politics(UBC Press, 2021) $39.95 h.c. 978-0-7748-6471-8

[BCBW 2021]

A Long Way to Paradise: A New History of British Columbia Politics by Robert A.J. McDonald (UBC Press $39.95)

Review by Gene Homel (BCBW 2022)

When I studied Canadian history at universities in the Sixties and early Seventies on my way to a Ph.D., the emphasis was still on traditional politics—governments, elections, parties, key policies.
But our baby-boom generation, steeped in the ferment of those years, chose to focus instead on the emerging social history based on subjects such as women, class, labour and the “Left.” With some exceptions, mainstream political history was largely set aside.
A new history of British Columbia richly blends political history with the not-so-new social history in the late Robert A.J. McDonald’s A Long Way to Paradise covering B.C.’s history from union with Canada in 1871 to the NDP’s victory under Premier Dave Barrett in 1972.

A prominent scholar in UBC’s History Department, McDonald focused on class, status, region, gender and ethnicity, the stuff of social history. He was completing this book when he suddenly died in June, 2019. A group of historians including Jean Barman ensured that the culmination of McDonald’s work would be published in a timely way.

As McDonald noted, most British Columbians still think about their history through a politics framework, and the time was ripe for what he called “a balanced, general history of B.C. politics” that reflected the research of the last fifty years including work done on B.C. women, First Nations, labour, and the Left.

Readers who follow current B.C. politics will sense the familiar continuities between past and present in A Long Way to Paradise. The “people versus elites” political culture and individualist versus collectivist values of the early 1970s when the NDP first came to power, were equally present a century ago.

The alienation of public resources to a handful of large corporations, megaprojects, political corruption, the efforts of working people to gain effective power, and the dispossession of Asians and Indigenous people have deep roots in B.C. history. McDonald emphasizes the important role of political ideologies in these areas, including: conservative, liberal (both 19th century and contemporary), and socialist.

At Confederation, politics reflected a “Fight Ottawa” stance and bitter grievances over the Canadian Pacific Railway and the immigration of Chinese labourers. Traditional wealthy colonial elites were in decline in the 1880s, challenged by democratic politics, but most agreed that Asians and Indigenous people (the latter greatly outnumbered whites at first) had no place in a society defined by whiteness and British origins. First Nations’ assertions of aboriginal title were suppressed until the 1960s.

The gross give-aways of public resources, particularly land to railway companies, were typified by grants to a few businessmen/cabinet members, of which the Victoria “Colonist” newspaper asked: when has personal financial advantage ever been “regarded as an objection to an (elected) representative?”
The attack on corruption, coupled with democratic, class-based and populist ideas, heightened in the 1890s and early 1900s, as it did elsewhere in Canada. The result was the election of labour and socialist MLAs, as well as the development of a reform-minded Liberal Party, which opposed the reign of Conservative Premier Richard McBride (1903-1915). The “people’s Dick,” as McBride was called, transformed B.C. politics on the basis of organized provincial political parties and economic boosterism.

The Liberal governments that followed McBride in 1916 initiated government reforms that helped pave the way for Liberal Premier Duff Pattullo (1933-1941), whose new brand of activist state liberalism responded to the Great Depression.

McDonald extensively details social democracy, as exemplified by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in the 1930s and 1940s and its 1961 successor the NDP. He traces the ideas and policies of such strands as anti-elite populism, rural cooperation and Marxist socialism, and describes the colourful personalities who built the B.C. Left.

Voters’ enthusiasm for radical change in the Depression and War years of the forties brought the CCF to the brink of power, but a Coalition of the Liberals and Conservatives blocked the social democratic CCF from forming a government in 1945.

“Class divisions played a role in the subsequent polarization of provincial politics” between the CCF/NDP, and the Coalition and its 1952 successor, W.A.C. Bennett’s Social Credit Party. Bennett spoke vaguely of individualism and “free enterprise” while attacking large monopolistic corporations. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of conservative populism, the Socreds presided over twenty years of large-scale megaprojects, resource extraction and economic growth.
McDonald then details Tom Berger’s efforts to remake the NDP in the sixties to appeal to the liberally-minded middle class, as well as the more traditional populist appeals of Dave Barrett. The NDP’s 1972 victory over the tired Socreds was based on profound modernizing changes in B.C.’s society: increasingly urban and middle-class populations concerned with social development, human rights and the environment. Although McDonald does not report on the Barrett years, these are covered in The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power 1972-1975 (Harbour, 2012) by Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh.

Historian Lara Campbell noted that McDonald, “hoped that A Long Way to Paradise would be read not just by academic specialists but by a wider public interested in how societies think about the obligations and role of government and the relationship between the individual and the collective.” His book richly deserves the wider public that he wished for. 9780774864732

Gene Homel has been a faculty member at universities, colleges and institutes since 1974.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
British Columbia: Historical Readings
Making Vancouver: Class, Status, and Social Boundaries, 1863-1913
Working Lives: Vancouver, 1886-1986