Mary Janigan, "Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark" (2013)

The subtitle of this book is: "The West versus the rest since Confederation."

The "West" Janigan refers to here is essentially Canada west of Kenora, and south of Great Slave Lake. This history she tells, somewhat surprisingly, does not focus on the National Energy Plan, or even the resource control crisis of the 1970s. What she narrates is the lesser-known foundation for these two conflicts: the struggle between the federal and Western provincial governments over with whom should reside the right to control (and ideally to benefit from) the natural resources within the provinces' boundaries.

Janigan's narrative begins with the Metis rebellions of the 1870s and 1880s, which essentially led to Manitoba's creation and entry into Confederation, and closes with the 1930 Constitutional amendments that granted resource control to Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Discussion of the 1970s and 1980s conflicts is included as a rather brief epilogue.

She has managed to weave a compelling story, tying together long-overlooked or under-studied events. She pays due attention to archival documents, publicly available information as well as personal correspondence. She creates a fulsome sense of the persons involved, with consideration for their professional and individual personal lives. Unfortunately, this degree of detail sometimes drives the momentum of the story - a story that due to its often legalistic intricacy is prone to lose readers anyway - off into unproductive and questionably helpful lay-bys. For instance, discussion of the travails of settlers learning to build sod houses is no doubt interesting, and provides some context for Western development, but is hard to fit against the intricate and looping to-and-fro of federal-provincial policy negotiations.

Additionally, the book would have greatly benefitted from a closer connection between what was presented as the critical 1918 Dominion-provincial conference, the 1930 Constitutional amendment, and the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. I think that the author's intention was likely to focus on the first two, but the addition of the latter was included in part as a means to "sexy up" the book for a wider audience. If this was the case, more was needed for the discussion to not come across as an afterthought. Given the importance of Janigan's story for rethinking the more recent conflicts, the book seems to have missed a really important opportunity.