Tax, Order, and Good Government

Was Canada’s Dominion experiment of 1867 an experiment in political domination? E.A. Heaman looks to taxes provides the answer: they are a privileged measure of both political agency and political domination. To pay one’s taxes was the sine qua non of entry into political life, but taxes are also the point of politics, which is always about the control of wealth. Modern states have everywhere been born of tax revolts, and Canada was no exception. rnrnHeaman shows that the competing claims of the propertied versus the people are hardwired constituents of Canadian political history. Tax debates in early Canada were philosophically charged, politically consequential dialogues about the relationship between wealth and poverty. Tax, Order, and Good Government tells the story of Confederation without exceptionalism or misplaced sentimentality and, in so doing, reads Canadian history as a lesson in how the state works.rn