Canadian party politics collapsed in the early 1990s. This book is about that collapse, about the end of a party system, with a unique pattern of party organization and competition, that had governed Canada’s national politics for several decades, and about the ongoing struggle to build its successor. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics discusses the breakdown of the old party system, the emergence of the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois, and the fate of the Conservative and New Democratic Parties. It focuses on the internal workings of parties in this new era, examining the role of professionals, new technologies, and local activists.

To understand the ambiguities of our current party system, the authors attended local and national party meetings, nomination and leadership meetings, and campaign kick-off rallies. They visited local campaign offices to observe the parties’ grassroots operations and conducted interviews with senior party officials, pollsters, media and advertising specialists, and leader-tour directors.

Written in a lively and accessible style, this book will interest students of party politics and Canadian political history, as well as general readers eager to make sense of the changes reshaping national politics today.

R. Kenneth Carty's profile page

William Cross is Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University. His recent publications include Political Parties (UBC Press 2004); Political Parties, Representation and Electoral Democracy in Canada (Oxford University Press, 2002); and Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics (UBC Press 2000, with R. Kenneth Carty and Lisa Young).

Dr. Cross' work also appears in numerous academic journals. He has served as Director of the Canadian Democratic Audit since 2000.

William Cross' profile page

Lisa Young’s work has appeared in Jones Av., Misunderstandings Magazine, Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, Rampike, among others. She is a fiction editor and senior poetry editor for Existere. She belongs to the Plasticine Poetry Collective, and Moosemeat as well as a few other long-standing writing groups in Toronto. When the Earth is her first poetry collection.

Lisa Young's profile page

En adoptant le systeme de parties federaux comme fil conducteur, les auteurs ont produit un ouvrage d’une grande originalite ... Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics est un ouvrage fort utile pour la comprehension de l’evolution des parties et elections au Canada.

ISUMA, vol. 1, no.2

Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics is a valuable resource for bringing together existing scholarship on Canadian political parties, and for attempting to map a still-emerging forth party system ... It is an impressive opening volley in what promises to be a long and lively debate over the nature and role of parties in the Canadian political process.

Canadian Journal of Political Science