Remaining Loyal

Book excerpt: When social democratic politicians in the 1990s moderated their ideas and policies as part of a turn towards the "third way," they were assailed as traitors to the cause. Remaining Loyal demonstrates that while third way social democrats in Quebec and Saskatchewan supplemented certain social democratic ideas with more right-wing economic programs, their public policies remained true to the original spirit of social democracy. Drawing on a range of archival resources, David McGrane traces the evolution of social democracy in Quebec and Saskatchewan from their respective origins in social Catholic thought and agrarian protest movements at the turn of the twentieth century to the most recent Parti Québécois and New Democratic Party governments. In doing so, he reconstructs the public policies of traditional social democracy from the postwar era and the third way in the 1990s and early 2000s and finds both differences and continuities. McGrane contends that remaining loyal to core social democratic values is exactly what differentiates the third way from neo-liberalism in Saskatchewan and Quebec. The first historical comparison of social democracy in Saskatchewan and Quebec, Remaining Loyal challenges how we think about the recent ideological evolution of left-wing parties in Canada and the rest of the world.