Preface and Acknowledgements
Preface and Acknowledgements
The chapters collected in this volume were written in the fall of 2025 by students enrolled in History 403 and History 803, an upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminar at the University of Regina that I have had the pleasure of teaching for many years. The course focuses on Canada’s political history, and that particular offering coincided with a moment of considerable national unease. Canadians were growing increasingly anxious about the economic and political pressures being exerted on their country by the United States and its 47th President, Donald J. Trump. It was an appropriate moment for students to turn their attention to the relations between prime minister and president and examine how several of Canada’s prime ministers have managed the unequal but indispensable relationship with their southern neighbour since Confederation in 1867. Not every prime minister is treated here, but a clear and important theme emerges from the students’ research: the relationship between Canada and the United States has not been a problem to be solved resolved quickly through a single treaty, a decisive diplomatic exchange, or a moment of mutual goodwill. It is, rather, an enduring and essential feature of Canadian statecraft and a challenge that each prime minister inherits and must navigate anew, shaped by the particular personalities, pressures, and priorities of the moment.
Writing well is hard work, and the students represented in these pages deserve genuine recognition for the effort and care they brought to their chapters. After researching the issues a prime minister and president had to deal with, the students shared their findings with their peers and prepared draft chapters that I then reviewed and edited. After further revisions, each chapter was given to Kate Baltais, a professional copy-editor with considerable experience with the major publishing houses in Canada and internationally. The results speak for themselves, and we owe Kate our gratitude and thanks for working with diligence, care and patience with our students. It is a credit to her professionalism and her dedication to the importance of the written word. Receiving professional advice and assistance with their writing was both a shock but also a great learning moment for our students. Every one of them agreed, without reservation, that her contributions had substantially improved their work.
The involvement of a copy-editor of Kate’s calibre was made possible through a generous OEP Program / CTL’s Open Pedagogy Fellowship from the University of Regina. We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Nilgün Önder, Associate Vice-President (Academic), for that support, and we extend our particular thanks to Shuana Niessen, OEP Program Manager, for her interest and assistance with this book. She even kindly and professionally created the image for the book cover and helped in numerous other ways. In the Department of History, our Head, Dr. Philip Charrier, was, at usual, supportive of the project as he invariably is for any initiative aimed at deepening students’ engagement with the discipline.
The greatest thanks, however, belong to the students of History 403 and History 803 who, in 2025, joined the long line of students before them in the conviction that Canada’s political history is not merely a subject to be studied in seminar rooms and examined on paper. It is a story worth telling, worth arguing about, and worth sharing with readers beyond the university and it is a story that, as the chapters in this book make clear, is still very much being written.
Raymond B. Blake 31 May 2026
