When a UBC Press’er reads or watches the news, it’s customary to say “Hey! We have a book on that!” And that’s especially true during election season. Interested in big issues? We have books on that! Interested in political communication? We have a whole series on that, and one on political history too! How about political parties? Yep… we have books on (some of) those too.

We’re lucky at UBC Press to work with many Canadian political scientists; our politicians and parties are often the basis of much of their research and published work. For example, if you’re interested in the Liberal Party of Canada, previous books have included R. Kenneth Carty’s Big Tent Politics: The Liberal Party’s Long Mastery of Canada’s Public Life, and Paul Litt’s analysis of the 1960s Trudeaumania phenomenon. In fact, Pierre Trudeau and his government have been the subject of many UBC Press books, including The Constant Liberal (2018) by Christo Aivalis and Trudeau’s World (2017) by Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein. And let’s not forget Lester B. Pearson’s legacy explored in Mike’s World: Lester B. Pearson and Canadian External Affairs. If political biography is your jam, we have biographies on John Napier Turner, Paul Martin Sr., and of course Bill Graham’s 2016 political memoir, The Call of the World.

Still in the realm of political biography, how about some Tory stories? We have Hugh Segal’s forthcoming memoir, Bootstraps Need Boots: One Tory’s Lonely Fight to End Poverty in Canada, and we’ve gone rogue with Reassessing the Rogue Tory: Canadian Foreign Relations in the Diefenbaker Era, a collection edited by Janice Cavell and Ryan M. Touhey. On the policy side, scholars looked at former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s foreign policy in The Harper Era in Canadian Foreign Policy, edited by Adam Chapnick and Christopher J. Kukucha.

We’re deepening our political party list with the New Democratic Party. Reviving Social Democracy (2014) looked at the federal NDP’s transformation from “nearly dead party” to new power player in Canadian politics. David McGrane digs a little deeper into the NDP's political marketing strategy in The New NDP: Moderation, Modernization, and Political Marketing (2019).

I could end this article here, but I’d be neglecting (or avoiding) a rather obvious hole in our list: We don’t currently have books specific to the Green Party of Canada, Bloc Québécois, or the new People’s Party of Canada. But, hey, maybe you’d like to write one!