This is a book about the transformation of Canada - not a sudden one, not the product of a single catastrophe or a single act of political will, but the slow, cumulative, and still-unfinished transformation of a society that once organized itself around a set of collective commitments into one that has, over the course of roughly four decades, abandoned most of those commitments without quite admitting that it has done so. It is a book about what Canada built in the years after the Second World War, why it built it, what it cost and what it purchased, and about the long, complicated, morally evasive process by which the building was taken apart. It is, at its heart, a book about a broken promise - not the promise of politicians, which most discount, but the deeper promise that a society makes to its members when it decides, collectively and with genuine seriousness of purpose, that it will organize itself around their security and their dignity rather than around the accumulation of private advantage.