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S tephen Harper's government was known above all for one thingmessage control. Brand Command, written by Memorial University political communications expert, Alex Marland, helps make sense of this message control and explores the implications of such control for democracy in Canada. It is a well-researched and well-written book, but it is not a comforting read. Marland takes a provocative and highly relevant position visà-vis Canadian politics, power, and communications-i.e., that as interactive, web2.0 media expand democracy itself shrinks. Indeed the dominant metaphor for the Canadian political scene is that of a communications war. Marland argues that while rhetoric and image manipulation are as old as politics itself, there is something new under the political sun-branding. Brand Command's thesis is that centralization of power in the hands of the political elites has to be understood in the context of communication practices and technologies. With what is called the "permanent campaign", governing parties integrate governing with promotion of the image (brand) of the party leader and the larger party. The autonomy of parliamentarians, the media, and civil servants (who serve the people) is compromised as branding erodes essential barriers between partisanship and governance. Moreover, Marland argues that Westminster systems like Canada's-with their tendency toward party unity and centralization of power-are more prone to political branding than presidential systems. The branding of commodities begins in the mid-eighteenth century when consumer goods with little discernible difference (coffee, tea, cocoa, soup) were packaged and marketed around a brand name. Later, advances in consumer research allowed consumer desires and longings to be fed back into and stimulate the overdetermined brand. Marland does not suggest that Harper's Conservatives invented political marketing and branding, but they developed it to an extreme.

This paper explores a rarely discussed side of celebrity -the 'state celebrity' produced by state broadcasting systems. The state celebrity is explored by way of a case study of four central television personalities -not, incidentally, all white men -found on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The state celebrity differs in important respects from individual entrepreneurial celebrities found in commercial contexts. As such, theories of celebrity that focus primarily on commodification, consumption, and individualism do not adequately explain this form of celebrity. The state celebrities discussed here are found to support state formation and legitimate state cultural policies. Thus, state celebrity must be understood in terms of its state positioning, as the state broadcasting system provides the framework and conditions for the celebrity's appearance and performances.

For contemporary Durkheim scholars, the presentation of Durkheimian sociology in introductory textbooks is notoriously flawed. In this article, we examine the presentation of Durkheim’s work in popular English-language Canadian sociology textbooks. We show that textbooks present two distinct “Durkheims.” First, they characterize him as a founder of the discipline and the sociological project of challenging common-sense explanations of social life. Second, Durkheim appears as the father of structural functionalism who advocates a conservative, integrating vision of society. We argue that to understand why these two versions of Durkheim persist in sociology textbooks, we must appreciate the symbolic place of classical authors in the discipline. The two “textbook Durkheims” endure because they operate as symbols for both the coherence and divisions of the discipline. We suggest that integrating contemporary Durkheimian scholarship into textbooks would require revising conventional textbook approaches of sorting classical authors as founders of contending sociological perspectives.