At 15, John Porter's father lost his job in Vancouver and his family moved to England in search of stable work.
He joined the school at a particularly important ferment: while the university had abandoned its social democratic and Fabian roots, its professors and students were heavily influenced by a liberal reformism which, in the words of one commentator, was "a widely shared belief that the irrationality of war and suffering could be eliminated by the judicious application of humane rationality specifically manifested in the form of a generous and intelligent welfare state."
He was offered a job teaching political science at the adolescent Carleton College and, two years later, switched to Sociology – becoming the school's first appointment in the field.
The idea for the project had found its genesis at the LSE where, he had told his PhD supervisor, he wanted to "write an interpretation of Canada as a modern democracy."
The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada, Porter's most important work, was published in 1965 by University of Toronto Press.
Porter concludes The Vertical Mosaic with the following observations: Canada is probably not unlike other western industrial nations in relying heavily on its elite groups to make major decisions and to determine the shape and direction of its development.
The nineteenth-century notion of a liberal citizen-participating democracy is obviously not a satisfactory model by which to examine the processes of decision-making in either the economic or the political contexts...
He noted that this class in the 1950s was a tightly knit group of wealthy, predominantly British-descended men, centred in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario.
In 1965, the year The Vertical Mosaic was published, sociology, as a discipline, had virtually no academic or mainstream currency: nationwide there were only 115 university based sociologists.
Further, while contemporary Canadian sociology is marked by its breadth of topics and questions – class, power, race, education, ability, work, gender – and, frankly, a commitment to a left-leaning politic, none of this was true in 1965.