Though so much of Canada's recent historical experience has been refracted through the lens of its larger neighbour to the south, Kevin Anderson's analysis of the Canadian embrace of the ‘last acceptable prejudice’ reveals a unique dynamic. While both the American and Canadian expressions of anti-Catholic hostility shared certain rhetorical tropes – the enduring ‘medievalism’ of immigrant Catholic enclaves and the divided political loyalties of those owing religious allegiance to the pope – the Canadian experience, at least prior to the Quiet Revolution, was fundamentally informed by the existence of Francophone Quebec, a Catholic enclave whose origins predated the establishment of Anglophone Canada.

Anderson's analysis encompasses the entirety of the twentieth century, but focuses on the period from 1914 to 1945, an era in which the disinclination of a majority of the Quebecois to participate in two global conflicts was all too evident. ‘They breed while we bleed’, fulminated Claris Silcox in 1945, in language that was not untypical of Baptist fundamentalists like Thomas T. Shields but which sat uneasily with Silcox's position as executive secretary of the Social Service Council of Canada and director of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews. This contrast goes to the heart of Anderson's argument, since his cast of characters includes not only Shields and the Saskatchewan Conservative James Anderson (elected with the support of the Ku Klux Klan in 1929), but also such progressive luminaries as Silcox, James Woodsworth – a founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation – and the Canadian historian Arthur Lower. Anti-Catholicism was by no means the preserve of the political Right and fundamentalist Protestants but a part of the warp and woof of a broadly defined Anglo-Canadian identity.

If Canadian anti-Catholic thought transcended religious and political divisions, it also reflected the general consensus – at least prior to 1965 – that Anglo-Canadian identity was grounded in a sense of Britishness; a ‘responsibility to represent traditional British values in the face of the complacency of the mother country’ (pp. 15–16). In both the recurrent battles over separate schools (a controversy with which many Americans were all too familiar) or the heated wartime debate over family allowances (portrayed as a further concession to the fecund Catholics of Quebec), the importance of the Canadian connection to the mother country continued to be emphasised as against the enduring separatism of a Catholic Quebec promoting connections with Franco's Spain and Pétain's Vichy.

Anderson's approach is fundamentally that of an intellectual historian and reminiscent of Patrick Allitt's work on American Catholicism. The plethora of personalities with which he confronts the reader might present a challenge to those with limited awareness of the ebb and flow of twentieth-century Canadian history, but he certainly demonstrates the subtle distinctions that separate the Canadian experience of anti-Catholicism from its American counterpart prior to 1965. After that date, however, the commonality of approach between the United States and Canada is increasingly evident, as the language of anti-Catholicism came to be deployed in the service of a multicultural agenda by activists blissfully unaware of its earlier political origins.