W.A.C. Bennett and the rise of British Columbia: With a new afterword

This ia a truly masterful work on a person British Columbians recently selected as their person of the century. Mitchell has done a top notch job in recounting the life and times of W.A.C., using the medium of a biography to relate the growth and development of a region. This is even more remarkable given the disfavour that biographies of white, male politicians have fallen into in the past few decades as a historical means of recounting the past. Mitchell relies heavily on personal interviews he conducted with Bennett in the last years of his life, along with those of the many individuals involved with this first Socred regime. The only fault I can personally site with this book is that it might be too sympathetic, a point Mitchell even alludes too!There is not much that this book misses out on. It starts literally at the beginning with W.A.C.'s start in New Brunswick, the move to Alberta and the starting of the first hradware strore, and then the final move to the Okanagan where Bennett was to become involved in politics, leading a rather obscure existence (with a few failures along the way) before he finally bolted from the coalition government to start Social Credit in the early 1950s - a move which was decidely different than the grassroots movement of Social Credit in Alberta. Social Credit in B.C. would always be a top-down movement.Regardless, this is an excellent piece of work and does much to shed some light on the political history of a province whose historiography has been woefully inadaquete in this area.

With the ascention of the technocrat Bill Bennett to the premier's office, one may indeed wonder if the age of populism in B.C. and across Canada is over. David Mitchell provides a masterful picture of one of Canada's great politicans; a man in the exclusive company of past politicans like Bill Aberhart, Diefenbaker, Mitch Hepburn, and Joey Smallwood. The difference between Bennett and these others is the amount of success in their political careers. Mitchell also guides readers through the time of expansion, "The Rise of BC," accomplishments that were largly due to the efforts of it's premier. Mitchell states that when Bennett finally passed away in 1978, BC was, for the first time in a quarter of a century, on it's own. He's right. BC has always lacked strong premiers to lead the province since Bennett. The book is a beautiful journey through Bennett's life, his times, and the province he moulded in his image. Anyone wishing to understand BC politics and BC in general need to first understand the man who defined both, and Mitchell does an exceptionally good job of doing so.