False Expectations: Politics and the Pursuit of the Saskatchewan Myth.

Walby, Kevin

False Expectations: Politics and the Pursuit of the Saskatchewan Myth. Dale Eisler. Regina: CPRC Press, 2006. $24.95 sc. 251 pp.

False Expectations centers around an idea of the Saskatchewan myth: that Saskatchewan is a bountiful land where success can be achieved. For Eisler (p. xi), "this belief in a greater future is at the core of Saskatchewan identity." The argument is that the myth can never be actualized. Saskatchewan is no El Dorado, though it often has been depicted as a lucrative promised land in national and provincial propaganda. This book will interest lay and scholarly readers concerned with Saskatchewan's place in Canada's history.

Eisler's lucid history traces key events related to Saskatchewan's political and economic history. Early surveyors like John Palliser in the late 1850s declared the mid-west a desert unfit for "civilized man." In the 1870s, John Macoun described the prairies as a fertile region that could sustain large populations. Immigration advertisements in Europe claimed the prairies could support 50 million people. However, western settlers were kept as an economic colony of central Canada through various federal governments' commitment to high tariffs. Eisler writes that "the farm economy would create the wealth that would be cycled from abroad into the tariff-protected manufacturing economy of central Canada" (p. 27). Highly fluctuating incomes of agriculture settlements made the elevated charges of farming difficult to shoulder. The Seed Grain Act of 1908 and the Hail Insurance Act of 1912 sought to provide farmers some protection from crop failure and damage. Groups like the Saskatchewan Agriculture Credit Commission believed co-operation should be the guiding principle of the Saskatchewan farm economy. Growing connections between farming and labour politics allowed for the creation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the writing of the Regina Manifesto. Eisler chronicles Tommy Douglas' Fabian leadership of the CCF through the 1940s and 1950s, the creation of the initial Crown Corporations, the development of a public health-care system, and the move toward developing a natural resource sector with the rise to power of Ross Thatcher's Liberals.

Though Eisler does a decent job of substantiating his claims throughout False Expectations, it must be asked what a focus on such a spatialization of politics (e.g., "the province") truncates from a history of the region. A strong focus on the Saskatchewan myth glosses over local forms of contestation based on urban place attachment. For instance, Eisler argues im/migration policy was focussed around settling the grain belt and making it productive. While this is valid, the Temperance Movement was also a major factor that influenced migration eastward from Ontario cities. The Temperance Colonization Society (TCS) wanted to build a western utopia free from eastern vices, and was a fundamental influence shaping the character of many towns and cities. The streets of Saskatoon, for example, were laid out by the TCS. A significant regulatory agent in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Saskatoon, the TCS even influenced where ferry and commercial services were located.

Ethnic antagonism was also articulated on a more local than provincial level. Business owners and residents in Saskatoon's late 1920s "Chinatown" were displaced from "the east" to "the west" side to make room for a hockey rink and a Legion building. This "east/west" division in Saskatoon was marked by Temperance Street, with colonies and town formations on the west adhering to temperance rules. My point is that every town and city in Saskatchewan today has been configured through such historical, local moments of emergence. The urban imaginary resonates with people as much or more than any imaginary of the nation or the province. Since urban imaginaries are absent from Eisler's analysis, the author does little to move the discipline of political economy away from state-centric assumptions of sovereigntist politics and toward thinking about movements and municipalities.

More critical questions can be asked of False Expectations regarding the relationship between colonialism and the Saskatchewan myth. Eisler does well to discuss the policies of early federal governments regarding the attempted assimilation of Canada's Aboriginal peoples. He also discusses the disturbing eugenicist tendencies of Douglas' thought, and the absence of consideration of Aboriginal peoples' wellbeing in CCF and NDP policy. But how did it come to be that surveys of the prairies were carried out, that the land was "settled"? There is no discussion of the historical marginalization of Aboriginal peoples on the prairies. False Expectations begins with the National Policy on populating the west, but this ignores prior colonial relations. The idea of terra nullius--meaning "empty land"--was not only fundamental to the colonization of the New World by the Old World. Historically, it was also fundamental to the colonization of the prairies by Central Canada. Eisler does not expand upon the idea of terra nullius as a major aspect of the Saskatchewan myth. This is unfortunate, since it eschews a critical history of the events that allowed for the settling of Saskatchewan and, ultimately, the Saskatchewan myth itself, to be intelligible.

Kevin Walby; kwalby@connect.carleton.ca

Department of Sociology and Anthropology; Carleton University