Canadians Shakedown the Choices for the Best Political Book and Ezra Levant Comes Out On Top
August 3, 2011 – Toronto – The votes are in for the Writers’ Trust of Canada and Samara’s Best Canadian Political Books of the Last 25 Years project and the winner by popular choice is Ezra Levant’s Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, published in 2009.
Shakedown edged out the three other highest vote getters: Stevie Cameron’s On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years, published in 1994; Lawrence Martin’s Harperland: The Politics of Control, published in 2010; and John Duffy’s Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership, and the Making of Canada, published in 2002.
Thousands of Canadian readers voted online from a list of 12 finalist books, originally publicized on June 27.
The Best Canadian Political Books of the Last 25 Years project highlights books that have captured the Canadian political imagination and contributed in a compelling and unique way to how Canadians understand a political issue, event, or personality. Its goal is to be a resource for Canadians to learn about their political history and encourage readers to reflect on the contribution that these books make to our country’s great political debates.
An event featuring the project finalists discussing the state of political writing in Canada is being planned for later this year. Additionally, the possibility of developing a companion version of this project focused on French-language Canadian political books is under exploration.
To comment on the results and learn more about the project, including question and answer profiles with each of the 12 finalists, visit our project-specific website.
Shakedown is an exposé revealing how far government-appointed human rights bodies have strayed from the noble purpose for which they were created.
“Shakedown, and the fights it describes, were important public moments for me,” said Levant. “It was a political act of defiance, it was a legal act, it was a journalistic act.”
Ezra Levant is a prominent conservative commentator who currently hosts The Source on Sun News Network and is a columnist for the Sun Media newspaper chain. Born in Calgary, he now lives in Toronto.
