At the turn of the century, Canada learned to govern with letters, ledgers, and persuasion rather than edict. Laurier's Long Afternoon follows the country from the humid election night of 1896 to the rupture of 1914, tracing how sunny ways became an operating system: Orders-in-Council as instruments, clerks and inspectors as quiet protagonists, and compromise as both civic virtue and hidden cost. Manitoba's school crisis is the opening test-settled not by fiat but by regulation, petitions, and a carefully timed half hour at day's end-teaching a federation to lower the temperature without extinguishing the fire. Habits formed in classrooms spill into the grain trade and the cabinet room, as Ottawa bargains with railways, calibrates grants, and turns quarrels into contracts.
From there, the canvas widens: the grid is driven across the prairie; ports at Québec and Halifax become sorting machines for people and ideas; and a new board culture takes hold-railway rates here, deportation hearings there-where procedure promises fairness even as statutes sharpen their edges. Immigration policy modernizes with the sweep of a pen, expanding categories of exclusion while nurses, inspectors, and station agents turn law into a daily ritual. In Parliament, the same administrative voice argues for a modest Canadian navy, while outside the chamber, numbers-tariffs, rates, car allocations-remake power. Persuasion proves elastic, sometimes humane, sometimes coercive in a softer key.
Imperial weather rolls in: South Africa stamps parades onto calendars; the Alaska boundary sours illusions; the Naval Service Act splits friends; and the 1911 reciprocity election forces a reckoning between sentiment and arithmetic, factories and wheat. Laurier's method, so deft in fair weather, hits its limits as loyalty, markets, and nationhood collide. Yet even in defeat, the machinery he built keeps humming-boards hearing complaints, ships drilling, mail moving-proof that a young state had learned to act like one.
Told in scene-driven prose, this volume braids kitchens to cabinet tables, schoolrooms to ports, and prairie section lines to parliamentary clauses. It is a ledger-honest account of a country trying to be decent by design, showing how every achievement carried a price and how compromise, once institutionalized, could protect or erode in the same measured hand. When the light finally changed in 1914, Canada had the tools of a modern state-and a set of unresolved arguments it would carry into the fire.
