After opening as above, Dornan writes on:

McGoogan is a splendid storyteller, the author of 16 previous books on subjects ranging from the Highland clearances to the history of Arctic exploration. What these books have in common is that they tell stories about strength of character in the face of hardship and hopelessness. This is his first political book. The stories he tells here keep the pages turning.

There are portraits of novelists and war correspondents, resistance fighters and underground agitators. People who stood up to tyranny. Some of them are famous even today: George Orwell, André Malraux, Norman Bethune, and we need to be reminded of why.

Matthew Halton is here, the CBC radio correspondent who landed with the first wave of troops at Juno Beach on D-Day. And Farley Mowat, who fought in Sicily in a brutal campaign and went on to become one of Canada’s most beloved authors.

Others died in extermination camps and Gestapo prisons, and McGoogan reminds us of their stories, too. One of the chapters—trigger warning—is titled “A Young Mother Survives Torture.” . . .

In a free society, the thing that prevents autocracy is not the ballot, at least not all by itself. It is the system of laws, regulations, institutions, and precedents designed to prevent authoritarianism, and that up until now has been doing a pretty good job.

McGoogan argues that we stand today at a historical juncture, where an ascendant right has had enough of this system of laws, regulations, institutions and precedents, and means to rewrite it.

If the non-Poilievre parties were all sufficiently frightened of what’s about to happen to Canada—if they genuinely believed we are pitching over into authoritarianism—then they might put their differences aside and work together, as though on a war footing. The way Churchill ran a cross-party War Ministry from 1940 until the defeat of Nazi Germany. . . .

Me again with one small correction. It has been a while since I took off the gloves but my first book was overtly political. In 1991, CANADA’S UNDECLARED WAR: Fighting Words from the Literary Trenches won a couple of awards. That was a mere 34 years ago! How could anybody forget?