Review of \u3ci\u3e Western Visions: Perspectives on the West in Canada\u3c/i\u3e by Roger Gibbons and Sonia Arrison

In the 1997 Canadian election, Preston Manning\u27s Reform Party emerged as Her Majesty\u27s Loyal Opposition with 60 seats in the House of Commons. The Liberal Governing Party of Prime Minister Jean Chretien would have been reduced to a minority had Liberals not won 101 of Ontario\u27s 103 seats. Why and how did this development occur? What are some of its probable consequences? Western Visions provides a timely and revealing set of answers to these questions so closely related to Canada\u27s perennial national unity crisis. Most academics and interested citizens think about that crisis primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of the secessionist movement in Quebec. Little wonder, as Gibbons and Arrison remind us, that Canadians living in the four western provinces, now comprising 30% of Canada\u27s population, feel like stangers in a strange land