E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2017) THOSE OF US WHO keenly feel our inadequacies as economic historians are reassured by Elsbeth Heaman's claim that her latest book is a cultural history of taxation. In this way, those of us grown used to the idea that the history of Canada can be written without dealing with the history of taxation at all are brought face to face with the race, class, and gender dimensions of a question we have been quite happy to leave to our colleagues in the economics department. The publication of Tax, Order, and Good Government marks a turning point in our understanding of the first half-century of the country because Elsbeth Heaman has created a coat of many social, cultural, and economic colours stitched together by the history of taxation.

The book is characterized by the complexity of its simplicity. The author begins with a deceptively simple point that is on the money: John A. Macdonald's National Policy--that is, the tariff--was a tax. She then complicates the simplicity by pointing out that the National Policy was not just about revenue; it was politically intended to provide enough revenue for the federal government to stay clear of taxpayer anger and protest. The acquiring of that revenue was based on the tariff, a clientelist indirect tax that involved the blatant transfer of money from the poor to the rich. At the heart of book, therefore, is how and why of what Heaman calls Macdonald's quasi-imperialist project broke down in the first half century of Confederation.

In the decades following Confederation, Macdonald's government was able to hide behind the tariff by making fairness in taxation a local issue that focused on the inability or refusal of the poor to pay their taxes. In this way attention was diverted from the clientelism and corruption of the rich and redirected squarely on racialized minorities who were perceived as not paying their fair share. In her chapter on British Columbia, Heaman reveals that taxes were collected at gunpoint, the Chinese engaged in tax riots, and the attempt to collect poll taxes from Aborginal People living off reserve ultimately failed. Living up to her promise to deliver a cultural history of taxation, Heaman powerfully evokes the ways in which Chinese evasion of tax paying provided the pretext for racist whites in BC to deny the Chinese rights of citizenship.

The chapter on Montreal most powerfully evokes Heaman's claim that it is the "desperate pleas of the poor for relief" that give the book "its moral centre." (17) Heaman chronicles, in French and English, the anguish of desperate Montrealers unable to pay even a meager water tax. The figures are astonishing; in 1903 alone, 31,270 households were in arrears on their water taxes. (229) Warrants for seizure were issued in astonishing numbers, into the tens of thousands in some years. This was the municipal government, the level of government charged with keeping the poor from starving: a responsibility of which the federal government had washed its hands. The genius of Heaman's analysis is that it takes an issue, taxation, that many of us had dismissed as a bourgeois concern, and uses it as a vehicle to bring us face to face with brutal poverty and dispossession.

But the story does not end there. In taxing directly everything from dogs to water, municipal authorities had to engage taxpayer anger and, in the process, demonstrate fairness. In Montreal, the works of progressive businessman H.B. Ames (author of The City Below the Hill) and journalist Jules Helbronner made major contributions to a fiscal reform movement that led to the creation of "a widespread popular movement for social and economic reform." (330) Fiscal reformers insisted that a tax system must be based on moral and social considerations, and these considerations increasingly worked their way upwards into the federal realm.

The World War I period brought the efforts of tax reformers to fruition; by 1917 the Macdonaldian ship was listing badly and in danger of sinking. The Wartime Income Tax Act was passed in September 1917, in part because major elements of the propertied classes wanted it in preference to a general property tax on accumulated wealth. Heaman recognizes the role of socialists and the labour movement in demanding the conscription of wealth, but insists that we recognize that their agitation was rooted in demands for fair taxation and social justice reaching back into the 19th century. In 1917 the wealthy were being forced to face their failure to make a meaningful contribution to the state's financial responsibilities to the poor that tax reformers had been demanding for decades. As Heaman convincingly argues, the poor were becoming visible in a way they had never been before, aided by the rise of statistics gathering and analysis embodied in the creation of a permanent Dominion Bureau of Statistics in 1918. At last, a conception of the public good and concern with the social had become a permanent fixture of the liberal federal state.

The book is a tour-de-force for anyone not expecting a Canadian version of Shays' Rebellion. Heaman has discovered that the militia was called out to put down a tax revolt in Low Township, Quebec in 1895. She makes a convincing argument that there were "discrete tax revolts" (11) in Montreal, Toronto, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, and that there were "moments of resistance and revolt" (7) throughout the land.

The argument that there was a grassroots tax revolt of a nation-wide character is less convincing, and relies to a great extent on taking the single tax movement seriously. Heaman powerfully and effectively disputes the perception that the movement was cranky and marginal, quite rightly taking historical heavyweights W.L. Morton and C.B. Macpherson to task for their neglect of its importance. However, it is fair to question Heaman's stance as the first historian to take the movement seriously; she is 40 years behind Ramsay Cook, who did it in an article in Historical Papers in 1977. That said, Cook's recognition was focused on the 1880s and 1890s, and Heaman convincingly argues that the political impact of the movement extended into the World War I period, and was a factor in the passing of the Wartime Income Tax Act. In addition, Cook's list of injustices that fuelled the movement contains a notable omission, unfair taxation, that Heaman so forcefully gives its due.

The poor may be at the moral centre of the book, but the evidence Heaman provides suggests that it was the middling people of property who had most of the agency. As the author points out, the single tax movement was based in a cross-class alliance, and what made the movement so enduring and widespread was the fact that the middling people of property identified with the poor rather than the rich. One suspects, however, that they were more motivated by Georgeism's opposition to taxes on improvements than with any genuine fellow feeling for the poor. Heaman herself acknowledges that the income tax was both progressive and regressive; it was a victory for progressive businessmen, and there are cynical socialists out there who will conclude that the poor got little more than trickle down.

Elsbeth Heaman is an historian of big ideas, and historians of big ideas tend to make bold statements to which historians of more limited vistas reply: "Hey, wait a minute, what about... " As one of the latter, I had any number of "what about" moments as I read the book. But this is not the issue; the issue is that Heaman has written one of those rare books that changes our way of thinking about the Canadian past. You may have your reservations about the weight Heaman places on the income tax as the barometer of progressive social reform, but you will not be able to think about the Canadian poor in the same way again. So, if are you comfortable in your understanding of Canadian political history in the years 1867 to 1917, do not read this book. But if you want to grow as an historian, find a great topic for a PhD thesis, and or just be shaken out of your complacency, Tax, Order, and Good Government needs to find a home on your bedside table.

PETER CAMPBELL

Queen's University