Close Ties: Railways, Government, and the Board of Railway Commissioners: 1851-1933.

For his first book, Ken Cruikshank, an assistant professor of history at Trent University, has crafted a concise yet informative analytical and narrative history of Canadian railway rate policy and of Canada's first national regulatory agency, the Board of Railway Commissioners. Throughout, he establishes the political and economic context in which the policy decisions of the Railway Commissioners and the ideas behind them led logically to the outcomes described. This is clearly a Canadian story, one that was only occasionally affected by events in the United States.

The story begins and ends with a clear focus on the efforts of numerous business interests in Canada to respond to the consequences of Canadian railway rate decisions. The Board of Railway Commissioners came about because of, and operated …