Canada has undergone a tectonic shift that has buried the liberal elites of yesteryear, Globe and Mail writer John Ibbitson and pollster Darrell Bricker persuasively argue in The Big Shift (published February, 2013 by HarperCollins).

"We believe that fortune favours the Harper government in the next election," the duo write.

"But we don't believe this is about the next election. We believe it is about the next decade, the next generation, and beyond. We believe that the Conservative Party will be to the twenty-first century what the Liberal party was to the twentieth: the perpetually dominant party, the natural governing party."

Bold statements? Ruffling some feathers? Maybe. But Ibbitson and Bricker back it up in this lively dissection of how Canada has changed forever.

Their thesis is that "Laurentian Elites," the Toronto and Montreal liberals who have dominated politics for so long, are doomed because they missed the - wait for it - "big shift" in political power. The power is now in Western Canada and suburban Ontario.

Ibbitson and Bricker spend 304 pages explaining why this is, but if you were to condense the book into one word it would be immigrants. That and the unstoppable growth of Alberta.

"Throughout the West, robust growth is a constant," they write. And with unending growth comes wealth and power.