Samara is having a contest for the best political book in Canada over the past 25 years and Ezra Levant’s Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights is nominated. Levant’s book and personal ordeal dealing with the human rights commission industry in Canada has done more than anything or anyone to highlight the threat to personal liberty inherent in HRCs. In 2009  we named Levant our Person of the Year to honour his battle against these petty bureaucrats and it would be great if his excellent book won best political book of the past quarter century, so please vote for Shakedown.

The other books are the type of books you would expect on such a list. In fact, I’m surprised that Shakedown was nominated, but it would have been great if it was nominated alongside such classics as William Gairdner’s The Trouble with Canada: A Concerned Citizen Speaks Out or the follow-up The Trouble with Canada … Still, or Gairdner’s The War Against the Family: A Parent Speaks out on the Political, Economic and Social Policies that Threaten Us. Also missing are two excellent books that looked at the changes in Canada that remade the country into a European welfare state: Peter Brimelow’s Patriot Game: Canada And The Canadian Question Revisited and C.P Champion’s The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964-68. It is notable that there are no policy books and really just one pure biography (on John A. MacDonald). I would have liked to see Ted Morton and Rainer Knopf’s The Charter Revolution and the Court Party, a brief but insightful volume on how Canada allowed the judiciary to usurp Parliament as the primary instrument of social policy creation in the country, nominated, as well as Interim columnist Rory Leishman’s Against Judicial Activism: The Decline of Freedom and Democracy in Canada which looks into the same issue in greater depth.

Considering the bias shown in the list Samara nominated, we should be thankful for Levant’s inclusion. But it is clear that elitist outfits such as Samara still consider conservative — whether qualified with the adjectives social or moral, or not — to be largely outside respectable opinion and worthy of honour.