Book Review of The Limits of Participation: Members and Leaders in Canada's Reform Party by Faron Ellis

Authors

David J. Hall, Department of History and Classics, Emeritus, University of Alberta

Date of this Version

Fall 2006

Comments

Published in GREAT PLAINS RESEARCH 16:2 (Fall 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

The Reform Party began as a populist party of regional protest in western Canada in 1987. Its policies were mostly on the right of the political spectrum, and from the early 1990s it developed ambitions to become a national party. In 2000 it amalgamated with some Progressive Conservatives (PC) to form the Canadian Alliance (CA), and in 2003 the CA and a rump of the PC Party united to form the Conservative Party of Canada; in January 2006 the Conservatives won a minority government. Although Faron Ellis's book was completed too early to include much about the denouement of this process, it does provide some of its background.