2026 Donald Smiley Prize

Winners: Alex Marland, Jared J. Wesley, and Mireille Lalancette

No I in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics (University of Toronto Press) 

Excerpt from jury report: No I in Team is a theoretically rich empirical analysis of the predominance of party loyalty over Canadian representative democracy. Marland, Wesley, and Lalancette illuminate the deep social and institutional origins of loyalty, its consequences for representation and democracy, and paths forward for recalibrating parliamentarians toward their role as delegates and trustees instead of brand ambassadors. Drawing on an impressive set of interviews, the authors distinguish representational styles of contemporary Canadian parliamentarians. The books shows that even the beloved maverick — the ostensible holdout — is tethered to the centralizing imperatives of “the family.” No I in Team is remarkable in the breadth of its empirical coverage and thus stands as an authoritative text on political parties and democracy in Canada.