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The Art of the Possible: A Handbook for Political Activism

by Amanda Sussman

The title, as well as the content, of Amanda Sussman’s guide to lobbying the federal government neatly demonstrates just how far we’ve come since the heady days of the 1960s, when “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible” was a slogan as integral to the times as sit-ins and tie-dye. A consultant to Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch and a former aide to cabinet ministers, Sussman presents an insider’s guide to what she feels is the best way to bring about change in Canada: lobbying for incremental reforms from within the parliamentary system.

Unfortunately, after some 300 pages, one is left wondering how, exactly, she has come to this conclusion. While Sussman certainly seems to know her way around the corridors of power (and, perhaps to the detriment of this work, tends to idealize them), the book proves problematic on a number of levels, not least of which is the misleading title. Indeed, drought-stricken Saskatchewan farmers, homeless people on the streets of Vancouver, and families living downstream from a corporation’s carcinogenic effluent are unlikely to find many helpful hints here amid the constant cautions to lower expectations and learn how to compromise.

Rather, the book seems aimed at people in the Toronto-Montreal corridor who are able, if they have the funds and disposition, to make trips to Ottawa and lobby MPs and federal bureaucrats. A lone individual or small group is likely to feel overwhelmed, if not disempowered, by the one-track approach that Sussman presents as political activism.

Much of the text reads like a civics textbook: how a budget is formed, how Parliament is structured, how “responsible government” is supposed to work. What is missing here, however, is what one would hope to find in a guide to political activism: what to do when Sussman’s system hits the brick wall of a federal government that is, despite the author’s insistence to the contrary, notorious for discouraging civic involvement.

In the end, if this guide were presented in the broader context of the hundreds of forms of political action that, in concert with lobbying, have traditionally produced change in democracies, it could have been a more useful, not to mention hopeful, community resource.

 

Reviewer: Matthew Behrens

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $22.99

Page Count: 280 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-7710-8340-2

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2007-10

Categories: Politics & Current Affairs