A History of the Canadian Peoples Chapter 10 Review

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 3

-A third factor in the new acceptance of cultural diversity was the rapid transformation into modern times of the rural communities of Canada between 1945 and 1960. -In 1945 most rural Canadians lived in virtual isolation in a world of unpaved roads, horse-powered vehicles, cash shortages, and an absence of telephones and electricity. -By 1960 the roads had been paved. -The horse had been replaced by the tractor and the automobile. -Farm families now had cash, from the monthly mothers' allowance cheque from the federal government, if from no other source. -Virtually every family had a telephone, and the world of electricity meant milking machines, electric stoves, and refrigerators, as well as radios, television sets, and stereos. -Rural and farm families had become plugged into the larger industrial economy rather than isolated from it, and there would be no going back.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 15: The Counterculture

-It is impossible to define a precise moment at which the bubble of the sixties' youth energy burst. -Many of the characteristics and tendencies of the period continued in fragmented fashion into the succeeding decades. -But at the end of the sixties the naive beliefs of the young received a series of shocks when American student activists were ruthlessly suppressed at Chicago (1968) and Kent State (1970). -At the same time, the central rallying point, American involvement in Vietnam, was gradually removed. -In Canada, the founding of the Parti Québécois in 1968 provided a place within the system for many Quebec student activists. -Two years later the October Crisis demonstrated how far some activists were prepared to go in the use of violence, and how far the Canadian state was prepared to go in suppressing it. -The purging of the NDP's Waffle movement in 1972 perhaps completed the process of neutralizing activism, at least in English-speaking Canada. -Some observers explained the collapse of the sixties youth movements in terms of demography. -Young people got older and acquired jobs. -In any event, by 1973 only memories of the "good old days," often in the form of the lyrics of rock songs, were left for most of the sixties generation.

The Beginning of International Drift Part 4

-Pierre Trudeau's attempt to reorient Canadian foreign policy met with limited success. -He managed to reduce Canada's military commitment to NATO and to reduce the size of Canada's armed forces. -In 1972 the government produced a policy document that recommended a "Third Option": less dependence upon the Americans. -But if Canada moved away from the Americans, where would it go? -The obvious answer was to Europe. -Canada had waited too long and had become too closely identified with (not to mention integrated in) the American economy. -The fizzle of the European initiative was followed by a similar effort in Asia, with perhaps slightly better success.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 6: The Emancipation of Manners

-The state played its own part in the reformation of manners. -Pierre Elliott Trudeau achieved a reputation that helped make him Prime Minister by presiding over a reformist Department of Justice from 1967 to 1968. -He became associated with the federal reform of divorce in 1968, as well as with amendments (in 1969) to Canada's Criminal Code dealing with abortion and homosexuality. -Trudeau's remark that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation struck a responsive chord. -He was Prime Minister in 1969 when a commission was appointed to investigate the non-medical use of drugs. -While its interim report, published in 1970. did not openly advocate the legalization of soft drugs, such as marijuana, its general arguments about the relationship of law and morality were symptomatic of the age. -The commission maintained that the state had the right to limit the availability of potentially harmful substances through the Criminal Code. -At the same time it added that it was not necessarily "appropriate to use the criminal law to enforce morality, regardless of the potential for harm to the individual or society".

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 6: The Nation & Quebec

-Although John Diefenbaker had come to power with the assistance of Quebec voters, neither "the Chief nor his English-Canadian supporters ever really attempted to understand Quebec's aspirations. -It was left to the Liberal minority governments of Lester Pearson to respond to what was obviously a feistier Quebec. -To some extent, most Canadians were prepared to be sympathetic with Quebec, since few could conceive of a nation without its francophone province. -Pearson adopted three strategies. One was co-operative federalism, a concept exemplified in a series of agreements (1963-5) between Ottawa and the provinces, which accepted the need for consultation and flexibility, chiefly by having Ottawa give up many of the constitutional pretensions it had been insisting upon since the 1940s. -This strategy ran aground because, as one political scientist put it, "Quebec's demands for autonomy appeared to be insatiable". -Later critics would regard Ottawa's concessions as the beginning of the end for a strong federal state.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 1

-In the 1960s the average Anglo-Canadian discovered that Quebec was unhappy with Confederation. -That discovery was part of the completion of Quebec's transformation into a secularized, urbanized, and industrialized region that differed little in many respects from its central Canadian neighbour, Ontario. -The transformation was often associated with the Quiet Revolution in the first half of the decade, a term used by the media to describe the modernization of Quebec. -The structural changes to French-Canadian society had already taken place before 1960, even though at the close of the 1950s traditional French-Canadian nationalism in Church and state, symbolized by the Union Nationale, still seemed to prevail. -The critique of tradition had already been elaborated and the program of reform for Quebec was well articulated. -All that remained was to fit the government of Quebec and popular aspirations together. -That task was begun by the provincial Liberal Party, led by Jean Lesage (1912-80), which defeated the Union Nationale and came to power in 1960. -The leading Liberal strategists did not realize at the time just how ready Quebec was for change, or how easily the traditional institutions and ways would crumble once they were confronted by an activist government composed of politicians drawn from Quebec's new middle and professional classes.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 5: The Emancipation of Manners

-Language, at least as the media used it, was equally rapidly liberated. -Canadian writer, whether in fiction, poetry, drama, film, or history, had usually employed a sanitized and almost unrecognizable version of spoken French or English. -Earle Birney's comic war novel "Turvey" (1949) suggested the use of profanities by Canada's soldiers by means of dashes in the text. -But "Turvey" only hinted at the larger reality. -In everyday life many ordinary Canadians used not only profanities but a rich vocabulary of vulgar slang that could be found in few dictionaries of the day. -In French Canada, that everyday language was called "joual". -While earlier writers like Gabrielle Roy and Roger Lemelin had suggested its use, later writers such as Michel Tremblay (b. 1942) actually began to employ it. -Tremblay's play "Les Belles-Soeurs," written in 1965 but not produced until 1968 because of concerns about its language, cast its dialogue in "joual". -His later plays added sexually explicit themes, including transvestism and homosexuality. -By 1970, bot language and themes previously considered unsuitable became public across the country.

A Still Bouyant Economy Part 3

-Some disparities were not regional at all, although they often had geographical overtones. -Low wages, high unemployment, low labour force participation, and a limited tax base (constraining the financing of public services) together created higher incidences of inequality in some provinces. -Young people under 25 were twice as likely to be unemployed as Canadians over that age, for example, and youth unemployment skyrocketed in marginal areas. -Substantial evidence was advanced in this period showing that an individual's ethnic group, racial origin, and gender also affected economic success. -And then there were the poor. What constituted real poverty in Canada remained a matter of continual debate. -What was indisputable, however, was the inequality of national personal income in Canada. -The wealthiest 20% of Canadians earned over 40 % of the income, and the poorest 20% earned less than 6%. -Most of those in the poorest 20%, it should be added, were employed.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 1

-The era 1958-72 involved complex currents and countercurrents. -Discussion of even the most major movements can only scratch the surface. -Nonetheless, any account of the sixties must begin by considering 3 of the period's most striking developments: a broad societal shift towards liberalization; the appearance of a youth-centred counterculture; and the emergence of newly energized collective minorities in Canadian society. -Sixties rhetoric was able to find a venue on radio and television. -The reformers were the first radicals ever to have access to colour television. -Only a few contemporaries ever managed to get beneath the rhetoric to understand the substance of the critique.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 10

-The journal "Parti pris" (1963-8), founded just after the first wave of FLQ bombings with an "indépendantiste and Marxist perspective, published in January 1965 a special issue entitled "Pour une littérature québécoise", giving a name, quickly adopted, to the current and future works of francophone writers in Quebec. -That issue also promoted the use of "joual" in creative writing. -The poet Paul Chamberland (b. 1939), one of the founding editors, wrote that "any language must be shaken to its very foundations through the disfigurement inherent in our common speech, and in the lives of all of us." -Most of this literary explosion went unheeded in English-speaking Canada, partly because of the scarcity (and difficulty) of translations, but also, one suspects, because of the uncongenial spirit behind it. -Canadian scholarship, like other areas of elite culture, expanded and was strengthened in the 1960s. -A combination of grants from the Canada Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the National Research Council, together with an increase in the number of Canadian universities, vastly added to the numbers of academics and research students. -Canadian scholarship grew not only in volume but in reputation, achieving international recognition in many disciplines.

Overview of Canada (1958-1972) Part 2

-The usual picture of Canada after World War II shows a naive and complacent society that, with the aid of imported American ideas, suddenly questioned virtually all its values. -There are a number of important qualifications to make to such a view. -There was more ferment under the surface in post-war Canada than was recognized at the time. -In many respects, ideas and behaviour that had previously been underground suddenly shifted into the public arena. -Discontent was a product of the rising expectations caused by economic affluence. -As is so often the case, much confrontation occurred because institutions did not change rapidly enough. -Canadians were able to take over much of the American critical vocabulary because of their profound suspicions of the American system. -Social critics in the United States struck a chord with Canadians who had similar feelings about the contradictions of American society and culture.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 4

-With a smaller readership than fiction commanded, poetry not only held its own but acquired a substantial audience. -Irving Layton (1912-2006), Earle Birney (1904-95), and Al Purdy (1918-2001) were sent on reading tours by their publisher and became almost as adept in performance as in writing. -Performance of a different kind marked the career of Leonard Cohen (b. 1934), who straddled the worlds of high and popular culture when he set some of his poems to music, wrote new songs, and sang them to his own guitar accompaniment. -Cohen had played in a band in his teens and published his first book of poetry, "Let Us Compare Mythologies," in 1956 at the age of 22. -It was followed in the sixties by two novels, including his haunting classic "Beautiful Losers" (1966), and by several poetry collections that were exceptionally appealing to the younger generation in their imagery and themes. -In 1968, he refused a Governor General's Award for his "Selected Poems". -In the same year his first record album, "Songs of Leonard Cohen", appeared soon to be followed by "Songs from a Room" (1969). -A few of his songs had already been performed by Joan Baez and Judy Collins, but Cohen's own liturgical baritone was the perfect vehicle for popularizing them.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 14: The Counterculture

-"The bureaucratic forms of organization shared by communism and capitalism," wrote one American activist "were embodiments of insult to the ideals of individualism, spontaneity, mutual trust and generosity that are the dominant themes of the new sensibility. -Such ideals motivated the hippies, who accordingly dropped out of mainstream society. -Earlier generations of middle-class Canadians had dutifully struggled up the ladder of success. -Many of the sixties generation lacked such ambition or direction. -They were their parents' children, searching for personal self-fulfillment through any possible means. -For some, the quest led to vulgarized versions of Eastern mystical religions. -For others, it led to communes close to nature, often on remote islands. -For the vast majority, it certainly meant experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, particularly cannabis, and a sexual freedom bordering on promiscuity in an age when sexually transmitted diseases seemed easily treatable with antibiotics. -Such experiments, together with a revolution in popular music, were the core of the sixties for participants and onlookers alike. -Rock music was almost impossible to define, incorporating as it did so many musical styles ranging from black rhythm and blues to traditional folk music to Indian ragas to medieval Gregorian chant. -Nevertheless, rock served as the symbol that both the young and separated them from their parents.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 5

-A fifth factor, related in part to rural transformation but involving the entire society, was the rapid modernization of Quebec. -Between 1939 and 1960 Quebec caught up socially and economically with English-speaking Canada. -The process involved substantial industrialization and urbanization. -Quebec ceased to be a traditional society with its values based upon Catholicism. -Symptomatically, the birth rate in Quebec in these years dropped from one of the highest in Canada to one of the lowest. -The socio-economic transformation was accompanied by a series of profound ideological shifts within Quebec society that shook its foundations to the very core. -The patterns of that development were relatively comprehensive to anyone familiar with what was happening elsewhere in developing societies. -Traditional forms of defensive nationalism, including the power and authority of the Church, were eventually swept away by a new powerful and secular form of nationalism that had already become fully articulated in the years before 1960. -The main opposition to the new nationalism came less from the old nationalism than from a renewed current of 19th century liberalism adapted to 20th-century Quebec conditions. -In the 1960s, these two competing ideological currents would find popular labels in Quebec as "separatism" and "federalism." -Quebec's new internal nationalism meant that the province no longer served as a brake on federal policies of liberalization and that, instead, the province's demands helped contribute to change.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 2

-A second factor was the post-war immigration itself. -Between 1946 and 1972 more than 3.5 million "new Canadians" entered the country, an average of about 135,000 per year. -Even after emigration to other nations from Canada is subtracted (since people, especially recent arrivals, also left the country in substantial numbers), the net gain was well in excess of two million. -By 1971, one in every four Canadians claimed an ethnic origin other than British, French, or Aborginal. -Proportionate to the total population, the post-World War II figures for immigration were not as significant as the earlier influxes of immigration to Canada before Confederation and before the Great War, but the post-war immigration was different. -Unlike earlier arrivals, many of whom ended up on isolated farmsteads on the frontier, this population settled almost exclusively in the cities, especially those in Ontario and Quebec, transforming them enormously in the process. -Before 1945, for example, Toronto had been a predominantly Anglo-Saxon city, where only in certain areas could any language other than English be heard. -By 1961 it was a city of ethnic neighbourhoods. -Although Montreal had always been bilingual rather than unilingual, the sense of it as a polyglot city was present by the 1960s, as was the case in almost all of the larger cities of Canada west of the Atlantic region. -The urban concentration of the post-war immigration made for the emergence of multi-ethnic cities.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 7: The Nation & Quebec

-A second strategy dealt with the symbols of sovereignty, with the government looking towards reform before 1967 and the Centennial Year of Confederation. -A new Canadian flag was adopted by Parliament in 1964 after the Liberals ended the debate through closure; a new national anthem was approved in 1967. -Centennial Year gave everyone a chance to display the new flag and sing the new anthem. -Substantial amounts of money were spent on the celebration, with its centrepiece the Canadian Universal and International Exhibition at Montreal, familiarly known as Expo 67. -The show was attended by millions of Canadians. -That summer an event occurred that shares an almost equal place in the history of the period. -The occasion was the visit of French President Charles de Gaulle. -From the outset, Ottawa and Quebec had jostled over protocol for the visit. -On 24 July de Gaulle stood on the balcony of a Montreal hotel with open arms, receiving the tumultuous applause of half a million Quebecers. -It was an emotional moment. -He spoke of cherished memories such as the liberation of France in 1944. -Then, before the huge crowd and a television audience of millions, he concluded: "Vive Montréal! Vive le Québec! Vive le Quebec libre!" -Whether de Gaulle had deliberately insulted the Canadian government and people (the official Pearson position) or had merely referred to Quebec's efforts to affirm its identity (the position of Quebec Premier Daniel Johnson) was irrelevant. -The exclamation had been vociferously cheered, and the nation had been given yet another reminder of its deep division.

The Beginning of International Drift Part 1

-After Pierre Trudeau succeeded Pearson in April 1968, an undeclared and never co-ordinated policy of retreat from middle-power pretensions was accelerated. -Trudeau had long been critical of Canada's foreign and defence policies. -Soon after his accession to office, he initiated formal reviews, which the Departments of National Defence and External Affairs found most threatening. -The Prime Minister was particularly eager to raise "fundamental questions," such as whether there was really a Russian threat to world order, or whether the US"[would) sacrifice Europe and NATO before blowing up the world". -The bureaucrats were not comfortable with such questions, nor were several of Trudeau's cabinet colleagues. -Trudeau had a reputation as an internationalist, but he disliked the military, and ultimately proved much more comfortable with domestic matters than external ones. -For Trudeau, protecting the sovereignty of Canadian territory was far more important than international peacekeeping. -Defence budgets continued to be cut and active Canadian involvement in NATO was pared to the lowest limits of allied acceptability. -The best-known armed action by the Canadian military was its occupation of Quebec during the October Crisis of 1970. -In 1973 Canada sent a large military mission to Vietnam to serve on a revised International Commission for Control and Supervision. -Its purpose was to allow the Americans to withdraw from that troubled corner of the world, but the Commission was not able to act effectively.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 9

-Although there had been some shift in country of birth of immigrants after 1945, in 1965 Britain still provided nearly 30% of the newcomers, continental Europe nearly half, and the United States 10%, leaving only a little over 10% of immigration originating in the remainder of the world. -At this time, all of the top 10 'nations of origin" except the United States were still European. -In 1966 the Liberal government of Lester B. Pearson epitomized much of the official Canadian philosophy of immigration when it put immigration under the same minister as manpower in the Department of Manpower and Immigration. -The opposition in Parliament criticized the melding of immigration policy into the labour portfolio, preferring instead a department of citizenship and immigration. -The deputy minister of the new Department of Manpower and Immigration found his task no easy one. -The new ministry sounded out public opinion in 1966 through the publication of a White Paper on Immigration Policy. -This document argued for the recruitment of workers with high degrees of skills, regardless "of race, colour, or religion." -It also insisted that the government should not hesitate to keep out misfits and criminals. -Public hearings on the White Paper by the Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons on Immigration began in November of 1966. -The Joint Committee heard a full spectrum of opinion from what Tom Kent has called the "special interests." -The Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) in Quebec opposed an emphasis on skills, insisting that such a policy would represent an international brain drain in which Canada would weaken Third World nations by taking their professionals.

A Still Bouyant Economy Part 6

-Canadian nationalism emerged in the labour movement as well in the 1960s. -This issue combined with others, particularly discontent among younger workers with the traditional nature of union leadership and organization. -The older union leaders were not much interested in broad reform issues. -They tried to dampen the reactions against local branches of international (i.e., American-dominated) unions that were seen as collaborators with American multinationals in both the "sellout" of Canada and the maintenance of the "military-industrial complex." -By the later 1960s many rank-and-file union members expressed discontent with American domination. -The Americans took more money out of the country in dues than they returned in assistance; they failed to organize outside traditional industrial sectors; they often supported American military adventurism abroad; and, finally, they did not understand Canada and treated Canadian members with contempt. -At least so went the complaints.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 4: The Emancipation of Manners

-As for sexuality, it became more explicit. -Canadians began to talk and write openly about sexual intercourse, contraception, abortion, premarital sex, and homosexual behaviour. -In place of the winks and nudges that had always accompanied certain "unmentionable" topics, a refreshing frankness appeared. -Many of the issues of sexuality revolved around women's ambition (hardly new) to gain control of their own bodies and reproductive functions. -Part of the new development was the rapid spread of the use of Enovid, the oral contraceptive widely known as "the pill" after its introduction in 1960. -The pill seemed to offer an easier and more secure method of controlling conception. -Its use became quite general before some of its unpleasant side effects came to light. -One of the pill's advantages was that the woman herself was responsible for its proper administration. -The birth rate had already begun declining in 1959, and probably would have continued to decline without the pill. -Enovid symbolized a new sexual freedom (some said promiscuity) for women that gradually made its way into the media. -By the mid-1960s, popular magazines that had previously preached marriage, fidelity, and domesticity were now featuring lead articles on premarital sex, marital affairs, and cohabitation before marriage.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 17: The Rise of Militant Collectives

-As with so many other long-standing Canadian problems, that of the Aboriginal peoples moved into a new activist phase. -Earlier, in the 1920s, the League of Indians, formed in 1919, had struggled for attention and against internal divisions. -The state and the Canadian polity were not ready for a pan-Indian organization. -In the 1960s Native leaders built partly on their own traditions of constructing organizations to speak for First Nations and Inuit concerns. -In 1961 the National Indian Council (NIC) was founded. -This organization was formed by Native people, many of whom had recently moved to the city, who hoped to to combine the concerns of status and non-status Indians. -Métis were also involved in the NIC. -In 1968 political incompatibility led to the dissolution of the National Indian Council and the formation of two new groups: the Canadian Métis Society (which in 1970 renamed itself the Native Council of Canada) representing Métis and non-status Indians, and the National Indian Brotherhood (which would become the Assembly of First Nations) representing status Indians. -Activists were also able to take advantage of American models and Canadian federal policy, particularly the 1960 Bill of Rights. -The search for new sources of raw materials for exploitation in the Canadian North threatened Aboriginal ways of life, forcing them into the political mainstream. -By the end of the decade, an emerging Native militancy was able to marshal its forces to confront the federal government when it tried to rethink the Aboriginal problem.

A Still Bouyant Economy Part 1

-Behind all the reform sentiment of the sixties was a persistently prosperous economy. -Inflation (which ran at an annual average rate of 2.1% between 1959 and 1968) and interest rates remained manageable. -The nation continued to provide jobs for most of its expanding population, with unemployment rates under 6% for most of the period. -Critics might note that these rates were substantially higher than in other highly industrialized nations, where unemployment was under 2%. -But for the vast majority of Canadians, the performance of the economy seemed more than satisfactory, particularly after 1963, when a veritable explosion of construction projects began and foreign trade blossomed. -Everywhere there were the visible signs of prosperity in the form of cranes and hard hats. -Montreal and Toronto built subway systems. -Large and small shopping malls sprouted up everywhere. -Cultural facilities proliferated. -Each province put up new university buildings. -Equally important were a number of projects in the North, usually associated with hydroelectric expansion. -The bellwether of the Canadian economy continued to be Ontario, still the only province with a mixed economy balanced between manufacturing and primary production. -Ontario contained such a large proportion of the nation's people that its successes consistently raised national averages.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 4

-Both the preference for urban life of post-war immigrants and the rural transformation helped contribute to a fourth factor in the change, which was the overall extent to which Canada became an urban nation in the years after 1945, especially in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. -This new wave of urbanization was based on a transportation shift to automobiles and trucks, the change from industrial to service production, and suburban development, as well as on the influx of immigrants and rural Canadians into the urban centres. -In 1941 only 55% of Canada's people lived in cities. -That figure grew to 62.9% in 1951 and 69.7% in 1961. -By 1971 over three-quarters of the Canadian population lived in an urban environment. -Cities have usually been responsible for breaking down the old traditionalism of a society, and for long-resident Canadians in the post-war period, they did their job. -It must be added that for many new arrivals, large cities and the resultant concentration of ethnic groups in complete communities meant that Canadian cities could actually slow acculturation rather than speed it up.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 3

-But the Bomarc-B missile was armed with a nuclear warhead, and Canada had a non-nuclear policy. -Diefenbaker thus refused to allow the Bomarcs to be properly armed, erroneously insisting that they could be effective with non-nuclear warheads. -The question took on new urgency in 1962 after President Kennedy confronted the USSR over the installation of Russian missile bases in Cuba. -As Soviet ships carrying the missiles cruised westward towards Cuba and Kennedy threatened war if they did not turn back, NORAD automatically ordered DEFCON3, the state of readiness just short of war. -Neither Diefenbaker nor his ministers were consulted, much less informed, about this decision. -The Prime Minister was furious that a megalomaniac American President could, in effect, push the button that would destroy Canada. -In the end Nikita Khrushchev backed down in the fearsome game of nuclear chicken, but Cuba changed Canadian public opinion, which had tended to be against nuclear armament. -The crisis provoked considerable media disccussion of the government's prevarications and inconsistencies over nuclear and defence policy. -NATO made it quite clear that Canada was part of the nuclear system. -Liberal leader Lester Pearson announced that the Liberals would stand by the nation's nuclear commitments even if the government that had made them would not. -There was no point in housing nuclear weapons on Canadian soil if they could not be instantly deployed in the event of a crisis.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 5

-By 1970 he was widely recognized as part of the pantheon of poet-singers that included Bob Dylan, Donovan Leitch, and Paul McCartney. -Such songs as "Suzanne", "Bird on a Wire," "It Seems so Long Ago, Nancy," and "The Story of Isaac" entered the consciousness of the counterculture. -Cohen captured perfectly youth's scorn for hypocrisy. -His songs counselled survival by withdrawal from the contests of life into a private world of the spirit, not in triumph or failure but in endurance through ceremony and self-understanding. -These were powerful messages for the Woodstock generation. -Ironically, while Cohen's songs contained almost no specific Canadian references, his sense of self-deprecation and self-abnegation was generally accepted as quintessentially Canadian. -The sixties also saw the creation of a number of small presses across the nation and the emergence of "Can Lit" as an acceptable field of study. -By 1970 virtually every Canadian university offered an undergraduate course in Canadian literature, and a critical canon had more or less been established, which naturally emphasized the distinctly Canadian qualities of Canadian writing.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 12

-By 1970 it was increasingly clear that the old fabric would not hold, although neither mainstream Canadian historians nor the revisionists had any idea of how to reweave it. -Although the traditional synthesis had broken down, a new history had not yet appeared. -A new maturity and international acceptance of culture produced in Canada was to be found everywhere. -We can see one major shift in the performing arts, where an amateur tradition of the 1950s was transformed quite swiftly into a full-fledged professional system operating from coast to coast. -For example, Winnipeg, a middle-sized, geographically isolated urban centre with no particular tradition of cultural patronage, by 1970 was supporting a fully professional symphony orchestra; the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and other dance companies; an opera association mounting several works each year; the Manitoba Theatre Centre, an acclaimed model for regional theatre, whose impressive Mainstage opened in 1970; an active art gallery; and a major concert hall. -Thanks to various centennials, similar facilities and institutions soon existed in every major urban centre across Canada. -By 1970 no important Canadian city or region was without its own professional theatre company, art gallery, and symphony orchestra.

A Still Bouyant Economy Part 5

-By the end of the period, a handful of environmentalists had begun pointing out the damage being done by those reaping resources without concern for conservation practices and the consequences of pollution. -American author Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1962) first called the attention of many Canadians to the evils of toxic chemicals in the environment, and the infamous story of Grassy Narrows in 1970 reinforced the message. -At Grassy Narrows, in northwestern Ontario, a pulp mill upstream from the Grassy Narrows Reserve pumped lethal mercury into the waters from which the Aboriginals took their fish. -Many inhabitants were systematically poisoned in the process. -Moreover, the issue of foreign ownership, first introduced by the Gordon Commission in 1958, took on a new life in the later 1960s when it became associated with American multinational corporations. -Radical younger scholars such as Mel Watkins (b. 1932) called for the repatriation of the Canadian economy. -Watkins headed the Task Force on the Structure of Canadian Industry, which in February 1968 released a report entitled "Foreign Ownership and the Structure of Canadian Industry" (the Watkins Report). -Such critiques of American multinationalism merged with a widespread Canadian hostility to the policies of the United States, especially in Vietnam, as well as with the concerns of those worried about maintaining a distinctive Canadian identity. -Public opinion shifted considerably between 1964 and 1972 over the question of further investment of US capital in Canada. -According to a 1964 Gallup poll, only 46% of Canadians thought there was already enough American investment, and 33% wanted more. -By 1972, 67% said that was enough, and only 22% wanted further amounts.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 22: The Rise of Militant Collectives

-By the late 1950s more advanced legal and medical thinking had come to recognize the value of decriminalizing homosexual activity, at least between consenting adults. -The sixties would see the expansion of this view, partly because of public lobbying by a number of gay organizations, such as the Association for Social Knowledge (1964), that emerged in the period. -An increasing number of gay newspapers and journals also made their appearance. -Like other minority groups, gays and lesbians began to concentrate on constructing a positive rather than a destructive self-identity. -The 1969 revisions to the Criminal Code did not legalize homosexuality, but they did have a considerable effect on the gay community. -It was now possible, if still courageous, to acknowledge one's homosexuality ("coming out of the closet"). -The ranks of openly practising gays greatly expanded. -It was also possible to become more aggressive in support of more homosexual rights, and the first gay liberation organizations were formed in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa in 1970 and 1971. -These groups led the way in advocating the protection of sexual orientation in any human rights legislation adopted by the government. -By the early 1970s a number of collectivities were making new demands for constitutional reform and political change. -The political and constitutional agenda of Canada was no longer confined to such matters as extending the welfare state, satisfying Quebec, or redefining the federal-provincial relationship. -It now had to take into account a variety of organized and articulate subgroups of Canadian society, of which Aboriginal peoples, blacks, women, and gays were only the most vocal, insisting that their needs also deserved attention.

The Expansion of the Welfare State in Canada (1958-1972) Part 5

-By the late 1950s virtually everyone could agree on the need for universal high school education, and by 1970 over 90% of Canadian children of high school age were in school. -Increasing numbers of high school graduates were entitled to a university education, and the decade of the 1960s was the golden age of university expansion in Canada. -Not only were new facilities constructed, but 20,000 new faculty members were recruited, most of them from the United States. -By 1970 public spending on education had risen to 9% of the gross national product, and represented nearly 20% of all taxes levied by all three levels of government. -Before 1970 the disagreement between the universalists and the means testers had been relatively muted. -Both sides could agree that there had been an absence of overall integrated planning in the growth of the welfare state. -Little attention had been paid to the long-range implications of any policy. -Bureaucracies and programs had been allowed to expand with no thought for tomorrow. -The later 1960s had introduced a new ingredient into the mix, however. -Governments began routinely spending more money than they were receiving.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 13

-Created with substantial public monies in the form of block grants from all levels of government, new arts institutions initially relied heavily on recent immigrants to Canada for professional expertise. -Many of these professionals became teachers and sponsors of spinoff activities. -It was not long before highly qualified younger Canadians were ready to step into these companies and organizations, and a substantial local audience had been developed. -One of the secrets of public success in music and theatre was the introduction of annual subscription campaigns. -Unlike audiences in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin, where tickets were sold for individual events, patrons of Canada's performing arts were asked to buy blocks of tickets in advance to guarantee an audience. -If by 1970 the personnel in the performing and exhibitory arts were mainly Canadian, the repertoire on display tended to be largely an international one, both in origin and in style. -Canadian artists, playwrights, composers, and choreographers still had trouble finding their own place and audience within the standard repertoire regardless of their style. -How their art could be distinctly Canadian was an open question that ate away at the hearts of many Canadian creative people throughout the period.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 6

-Despite Prime Minister Pearson's high profile as a successful world diplomat, his governments were not distinguished for their triumphs in the international arena. -In fairness to Pearson, the world was changing in other ways not sympathetic to Canada's self-proclaimed role as a middle power. -After 1960 the United Nations General Assembly opened its doors to dozens of Third World countries, most of them recently emerged from colonial status and quite hostile to the Western democracies. -The new complexities of politics and expectations within the General Assembly, and in the various collateral UN organizations, worked against a highly developed and industrialized nation such as Canada, populated chiefly by the descendants of white Europeans, which also happened to be a junior partner of the United States. -In UN bodies Canadian diplomats found themselves in the embarrassing position of defending the country's internal policy, particularly towards Aboriginal peoples, in the face of criticisms of racism and insensitivity to human rights. -Canada was not in the same league as South Africa, perhaps, but its record on human rights was a hard one to explain internationally. -At the same time, the success of the European Economic Community (first established in 1958) made Western European nations more important international players, while Japan had succeeded in restoring its industrial position. -As a result, Canada became less important among the industrial nations at the same time that it became less credible in the Third World.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 2

-Despite his electoral successes in Quebec in 1957 and especially 1958, Diefenbaker was always associated (and associated himself) with English Canada. -Diefenbaker's administration gave way to the Americans on the big principles while balking over the unpleasant consequences and details. -Diefenbaker, moreover, was thoroughly detested by American President John F. Kennedy, who referred to "the Chief" as one of the few men he had ever totally despised. -Three related issues (the decision to scrap the Avro Arrow, the acceptance of American Bomarc-B missiles on Canadian soil, and the government's reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962) illustrate the government's problems. -When Diefenbaker terminated the Avro Arrow project early in 1959, he did so for sound fiscal reasons. -The plane had no prospective international market and would be inordinately expensive to build only for Canadian needs. -The Prime Minister justified his decision in terms of changing military technology and strategy. -An aircraft to intercept bombers would soon be obsolete, said Dief, and what Canada needed were missiles obtainable from the Friendly Giant. -It turned out that Canada still needed fighters, however, and the country had to buy some very old F-101 Voodoos from the Americans. -By cancelling Canada's principal technological breakthrough into the world of big military hardware in return for an agreement whereby pats of equipment purchased by Canada from the American defence industry would be assembled in Canada, Diefenbaker probably accepted reality.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 13: The Counterculture

-Despite the incident at Sir George Williams, youthful protest was not quite the same in Quebec as in Anglo- Canada. -While Quebec's young were no less alienated than their anglophone compatriots, their anger found an outlet in opposition to Canadian federalism's colonial oppression of their own province. -Young people of university age (although seldom at university) formed most of the active cells of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), including the one that provoked the October Crisis of 1970. -The FLQ's rhetoric and tactics during the crisis were clearly modelled on extreme movements of protest in the United States and Europe. -English-speaking Canadian students talked of the "student as ni##er," but French Canadians saw their entire society as comparable with that of the blacks in the US or an oppressed Third World nation. -Radical young Quebecers were able to become part of a larger movement of protest and reform that cut across the age structure of Quebec society. -Unlike their counterparts in English Canada, young protestors in Quebec were not cut off from the mainstream of adult society.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 1

-For much of the period, the Liberal hegemony of the King-St Laurent years appeared to be broken or at least bending. -Not until the arrival of Pierre Trudeau did the Liberals get back on track, and that was at least partly because Trudeau represented a new style of political leadership, consonant with the age of television. -John Diefenbaker, who became Prime Minister in 1957 and swept to a great victory in 1958, had a very old-fashioned political style. -His bombastic speeches sounded as if they had been rhetorically crafted in the 19th century, and he revelled in being a House of Commons man, good in the specialized cut and thrust of debate in that legislative body. -Diefenbaker inspired tremendous loyalty from some members of his party, but he seldom created confidence in his capacity to master public affairs. -He was better at being the Leader of the Opposition than Prime Minister. -Diefenbaker held a variety of contradictory positions; his latest biographer calls him a "Rogue Tory." -He was a populist reformer at the head of a party that contained many genuine conservatives. -He was simultaneously a Cold Warrior and a Canadian nationalist, holding both positions equally fervently. -Despite his electoral successes in Quebec in 1957 and especially 1958, Diefenbaker was always associated (and associated himself) with English Canada. -Diefenbaker's administration gave way to the Americans on the big principles while balking over the unpleasant consequences and details. -Diefenbaker, moreover, was thoroughly detested by American President John F. Kennedy, who referred to "the Chief" as one of the few men he had ever totally despised. -Three related issues (the decision to scrap the Avro Arrow, the acceptance of American Bomarc-B missiles on Canadian soil, and the government's reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962) illustrate the government's problems.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 11

-Having listened to the interest groups, the ministry moved quickly to major reform of immigration policy, instituting in 1968 a major new mechanism for immigration selection, the "points system." -Thus, education, employment opportunities, skills, age, and the immigration officer's assessment of potential were all to be awarded points adding up to a maximum total of 100. -The points system (skills had only limited support from the hearing) was put in place apart from sponsorship, which was continued (although with reduced categories) because of its support from corporate Canada, trade unions, and ethnic groups. -A new procedure allowing for the application for immigration status from within the country was also introduced and would ultimately become one of the most controversial parts of the new immigration law. -This last policy was prompted chiefly by the appearance as visitors in Canada of American draft evaders and was intended to regularize requests for landed immigrant status from this particular group of refugees. -In the late 1960s as many as 100,000 Americans seeking to avoid service in the Vietnam War had come to Canada and were sheltered by Canadians and the Canadian government. -The points system officially eliminated discrimination on the grounds of race or class but managed to perpetuate several traditional features of Canadian policy. -By awarding large numbers of the points required for acceptance as an immigrant to Canada on the basis of occupation, education, language skills, and age, it continued both the economic rationale for immigration and the selectivity of the process.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 18: The Rise of Militant Collectives

-In 1969 the Department of Indian Affairs, under Jean Chrétien (b. 1934), published a White Paper on federal Indian policy. -All-encompassing in its reassessment, the document had three controversial recommendations: the abolition of the Indian Act (and the Department of Indian Affairs), which would eliminate status Indians; the transfer of First Nations; and the devolution of responsibility for Aboriginal people to the provinces. -The White Paper touched off bitter criticism in all quarters, not least because it had been generated with little prior consultation with Native groups. -It produced the first popular manifesto for Canadian Aboriginals in Harold Cardinal's "The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada's Indians" (1969), which argued for the re-establishment of special rights within the strengthened contexts of treaties and the Indian Act. -The White Paper was consistent with federal policy towards all minorities, including French Canadians, at the end of the 1960s. -It called for the advancement of the individual rather than the collective rights of Native peoples. -An assimilationist document, the White Paper insisted that treaties between the Crown and Aboriginals had involved only "limited and minimal promises" that had been greatly exceeded in terms of the "economic, educational, health, and welfare needs of the Indian people" by subsequent government performance. -Allowing Aboriginal people full access to Canadian social services (many of which were administered provincially) would mark an advance over existing paternalism.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 15

-In 1969, on the other hand, Major League Baseball granted a National League franchise to a Montreal team to be called the Expos, demonstrating that if the local markets were big enough, the moguls could be won over, at least temporarily. -As for the Canadian Football League, it entered its most successful decade to date. -Teams became totally professional and drew considerable crowds. -The fans appeared quite satisfied with the Canadian game and its differences from the American one (the size of the field, the number of downs, the "rouge") and with the large number of Canadians who, thanks to a quota system on imports, played it. -In September 1961 the federal government finally took some initiative on the problem of sports in Canada. -Bill C-131, intended to "encourage, promote and develop fitness and amateur sport in Canada," passed both Houses of Parliament unanimously. -Much of the bill's bipartisan political support was a result of public outcry over Canada's poor performance in international competitions, including hockey, and was part of the country's Cold War posturing.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 11: The Counterculture

-In English Canada, what really ignited the revolt of youth was the war in Vietnam. -In retrospect, the extent to which Vietnam dominated the period becomes even clearer to us than it was to people at the time. -The war became the perfect symbol for the sixties generation of everything that was wrong with mainstream American society. -It was equally exportable as an emblem of American Evil, representing everything that the rest of the world hated about the United States, including its arrogant assumption that it was always morally superior. -For these reasons, Vietnam was central to the Canadian counterculture in a variety of ways. -Hostility to American policy in Vietnam fuelled Canadian anti-Americanism, as a paperback book about the United States entitled "The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S." demonstrated in 1967. -This hostility also connected young Canadians with the burgeoning American protest movements. -Many Canadian university faculty members recruited during the decade were Americans, most of them recent graduate students critical of American policy. -They were joined in their sympathies by an uncounted number of American war resisters (some said as many as 100,000 at the height of the war), the majority of whom sought refuge in communities of university students or hippies in large Canadian cities.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 1

-In some senses, Canadian culture, quite apart from its multicultural aspects, came of age in the 1960s. -Years of development of cultural infrastructure within the private sector, combined with a new government recognition of the need for conscious cultural policy and an enormous expansion of the Canadian university system, brought at least elite culture to a flowering. -A national cultural policy, first articulated by the Massey Commission, was actually implemented under Diefenbaker and Pearson. -Intended to foster a distinctive Canadian identity in the face of the ubiquitous Americans, it employed all possible cultural strategies, ranging from subsidies (the Canada Council) and protectionism (policy regarding Canadian magazines and Canadian content regulations for television introduced in 1961) to regulated competition (the Board of Broadcast Governors, established in 1958, licensed new television stations, which came together as a new television network in 1961 called CTV). -Within the realm of "serious" culture, Canadian governments at all levels were prepared to spend large amounts of money to produce works that would meet international standards. -To a considerable extent they succeeded. -Whether the culture that resulted was Canadian Culture was, of course, another matter entirely.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 7

-It was not only the configuration of world politics that had altered by the 1960s. -So had the policy of the United States. -President Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson, were actually more hard-bitten and confrontational Cold Warriors than their predecessors, Truman and Eisenhower. -The latter had been extremely embarrassed in 1960 when the Russians shot down an American U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. -Kennedy, on the other hand, authorized dirty tricks by the CIA in foreign countries, and he made no apology when they were exposed. -His only regret about the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by US backed Cuban exiles, for example, was that it had failed. -Most important, however, both Kennedy and Johnson permitted their governments to become even more deeply involved in the quagmire of Southeast Asia. -In 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with Hanoi as its capital, to be independent of French colonial control. -When the French government proved incapable of defeating the armed "insurgents," Canada in 1954 became involved in attempts at international control. -It served as one of three members, with Poland and India, of a joint commission. -Canada was actually eager to participate to bolster its middle-power pretensions in the world. -The 1954 commission set the pattern for the next 20 years: one Iron Curtain nation, one Western ally of the United States, one neutral power, with votes often going against Canada as the American supporter. -From the outset Canada had deceived itself into believing that it had a free hand to carry out its work without either upsetting the Americans or appearing to act merely as a lackey of the United States.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 7

-Just as immigration in the post-war period changed Canada's view of itself, so did immigration policy change the character of immigrants to Canada. -As we saw in Chapter 9, Ellen Fairclough, the Minister of Immigration, sought unsuccessfully in 1959 to limit family immigration sponsorship to immediate family members, but she persisted with immigration reform. -In 1962 she tabled in the House of Commons new immigration regulations that removed racial discrimination and introduced skill as the major criterion for unsponsored immigration. -Such a policy was consistent with Prime Minister Diefenbaker's 1960 Bill of Rights, which rejected discrimination based on race, colour, national origin, religion, or gender. -With this change to immigration policy, sponsored immigration, which was continued, almost immediately became by definition part of the old discriminatory system favouring European over non-European immigrants, since there were many more Canadians of European descent to sponsor new arrivals. -To avoid this result, he added that it was going to be necessary to open the door to close relatives from all parts of the world and to reduce somehow the flow of European close relatives. -However, section 31(d) of the regulations did not open the sponsorship door to non-Europeans.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 20: The Rise of Militant Collectives

-Laura Sabia (1916-96), president of the Canadian Federation of University Women and leader of the call for a national evaluation of women's status, responded with a classic sixties threat: she would lead a women's protest march on the capital. -The Pearson government behaved characteristically. -Although not convinced that women had many legitimate grievances, it dodged trouble by agreeing to an investigation "to inquire and report upon the status of women in Canada, and to recommend what steps might be taken by the federal government to ensure for women equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society". -The Royal Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1967, examined areas under provincial as well as federal jurisdiction and made its recommendations based on four operating assumptions: the right of women to choose to be employed outside the home; the obligation of parents and society to care for children; the special responsibilities of society to women because of maternity; and, perhaps most controversially, the need for positive action to overcome entrenched patterns of discrimination. -The Commission's report provided a program that would occupy mainstream feminism for decades to come.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 3

-Margaret Laurence (1926-89) was another Canadian novelist who created a mythologized Canadian space. -Having lived with her husband in Somalia and Ghana from 1950 to 1957, she was residing in Jordan when her African novel, "This Side of Jordan" (1960), appeared. -Soon afterwards, she completed the first of her four "Manawaka" novels, which brought her international acclaim. -"The Stone Angel" (1961), "A Jest of God" (1966), "The Fire-Dwellers" (1969), and "The Diviners" (1974) could be read on many levels and are arguably the most richly textured fiction ever produced by a Canadian writer. -Laurence's setting may have been as far removed from urban Montreal as it was possible to get, but like Richler, she created a place out of what she knew. -The mythical town of Manawaka, set somewhere on the Canadian prairies, was a strongly conceived and living entity, linking some powerful female protagonists struggling against hypocritical Scots-Canadian constrictions and their own pasts. -Noting that she was not much aware that her "so-called Canadian writing" was Canadian, Laurence once commented that "this seems a good thing to me, for it suggests that one has been writing out of a background so closely known that no explanatory tags are necessary".

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 10

-No matter who was in charge and at what level, the size and scope of the apparatus of bureaucracy continually expanded. -The scope of bureaucracy had political as well as economic implications. -The larger it got, the harder it was to manage. -A host of journalists and popular commentators attacked governments at all levels for mismanagement and waste, but as one commentator astutely pointed out, "It is true that the initial motive for reforms may be the outsider's simple-minded belief that gigantic savings can be effected. -But once set an investigation afoot and the economy motive gets quickly overlaid with the more subtle and difficult problems of improved service and efficiency". -The Royal Commission on Government Organization, appointed by Diefenbaker in 1960, found itself unable to effect major changes in the bureaucracy, particularly in downsizing the scope of operations. -All governments, including federal Liberal ones, increasingly found themselves entrapped by the actions of their predecessors and by the difficulties of dismantling systems once created. -Government was becoming more difficult and the nation increasingly impossible to lead.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 9

-Not only was Trudeau a thoroughly bilingual French Canadian who was likely to appeal to Quebec, but he was continually able to convince the electorate that he was far more of a reformer than his subsequent policies would indicate. -After years of apparently irresolute national leadership, Trudeau also seemed to be a strong figure. -In some respects he was, as his behaviour in the October Crisis of 1970 demonstrated. -The Prime Minister did not hesitate for a moment to invoke the War Measures Act and employ the military against the FLQ. -Most of the nation appreciated his decisiveness. -The era was also characterized by a number of long-serving and highly visible provincial premiers, who provided considerable stability for the provincial cause in the regularly held federal-provincial conferences. -While federal leadership had been ineffective for the 10 years before Trudeau, almost all the provinces had seemingly strong leaders. -There continued to be little genuine two-party politics anywhere in Canada. -Instead, dominant parties were usually in control. -In Newfoundland Joey Smallwood still governed virtually unopposed. -In New Brunswick Louis Robichaud was in control from 1960 to 1970. -Ontario had John Robarts, Manitoba had Duff Roblin, Saskatchewan had Ross Thatcher, while Alberta still had Ernest Manning and British Columbia was led by W.A.C. Bennett. -Few of these governments were Liberal. -Ross Thatcher (1917-71) headed the only provincial Liberal government west of Quebec between 1945 and 1972, and he was a vociferous critic of the federal Liberals. -By the early 1970s the only provincial governments controlled by the Liberals were in Prince Edward Island and Quebec. -Pierre Trudeau's conception of liberalism and federalism certainly did not accord with that of Quebec's Liberal Premio, Robert Bourassa.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 10: The Nation & Quebec

-On 8 October 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared in the House of Commons a federal government policy of "multiculturalism within a bilingual framework." -The policy would involve, he said, assistance to all Canadian cultural groups to continue to grow, to overcome cultural barriers to full participation in Canadian society," to interact with other cultural groups, and to conversant in one of Canada's two official languages. -The reaction from Quebec was immediate and negative. -French Canadians, probably quite accurately, saw the emphasis on multiculturalism as a way to deflect the aspirations of Quebec by demonstrating that its linguistic and cultural aspirations were not unique and could not be considered apart from the needs of other communities in Canada. -René Lévesque described multiculturalism as a "red herring" designed "to give the impression that we are all ethnics and do not have to worry about special status for Quebec.". -Many French Canadians were incensed that Trudeau had chosen to link multiculturalism with language as well as culture. -According to more than one commentator in Quebec, multiculturalism had reduced the Quebec fact to an ethnic phenomenon.

Conclusion of Chapter 10

-On the whole, the developments in sports were remarkably similar to those in other cultural sectors, and indeed the nation in general. -By the early 1970s sport had been thoroughly drawn into the net of federal and provincial government policy, turned over to the bureaucrats and bean-counters. -It had not yet answered the question of whether excellence and Canadian-ness were truly compatible, although the sense was that a sufficient expenditure of money would in the end resolve all problems. -Unbeknownst to its participants, however, sport in Canada was about to share with other aspects of the Canadian experience a new sense of existing on the edge of some kind of precipice, about to free-fall into new and unknown territory. -What consequences the fall would have were anybody's guess, although there were increasingly loud mutterings about the limits of growth. -After 1972 Canadians would have to explore together the implications of a world in which not all things were possible. -They would discover, as money and resources became more limited, that the infighting could be extremely fierce.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 11

-One field that had great difficulty coming to terms with the rapidly changing world of scholarship was Canadian history. -Canadian historians almost by definition could not aspire to international repute, since in the broader scheme of things the history of Canada was of little interest to anyone outside the country. -For most historians of Canada working within the English speaking tradition, Canadian history was National History. -The focus was unremittingly progressive. -The country was settled, adopted representative government, turned responsible government into the union of the provinces, and with union moved gradually but inexorably towards full nationhood. -Quebec, of course, had its own paradigm, equally nationalistic and political in nature. -This comfortable mindset was overturned when younger historians began asking new questions about race, class, ethnicity, and gender that emerged out of the political turmoil of the late 1960s. -These younger scholars also questioned the glaring neglect in the traditional approach towards Aboriginal peoples, women, the working classes, and racial minorities. -To these changes, Quebec historians added their own, often influenced by new European schools of analysis. -Research and writing in Canadian economic and social history began to ask implicitly whether the old paradigm of nation-building was flexible and capacious enough to integrate the new methodologies and theories.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 9: The Counterculture

-One of the most obvious manifestations of the ferment of the sixties was the rebellious reaction of young baby boomers against the values of their elders, a movement that came to be known as the counterculture. -Many Canadian rebels of the period took much of the style and content of their protest from the Americans, although they had their own homegrown concerns, especially in Quebec. -As in the United States, youthful rebellion in Canada had two wings, never mutually exclusive: a highly politicized movement of active revolution, often centred in the universities and occasionally tending to violence; and a less overtly political one of personal self-reformation and self-realization, centred in the "hippies." -Student activists and hippies were often the same people. -Even when different personnel were involved, the culture was usually much the same, anchored by sex, dope, and rock music. -The participants in the two Canadian branches of youthful protest also had in common distinctly middle-class backgrounds, for these were movements of affluence, not marginality.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 19: The Rise of Militant Collectives

-Ottawa seemed surprised that Native people responded so negatively to the White Paper, conveniently ignoring its implications for the concepts of treaty and Aboriginal rights. -Prime Minister Trudeau defended the policy as an enlightened one, noting that "the time is now to decide whether the Indians will be a race apart in Canada or whether they will be Canadians of full status". -He added, "It's inconceivable, I think, that in a given society one section of the society have a treaty with the other section of the society. We must all be equal under the law". -Like other collectivities that discovered a new voice in the 1960s, Canadian women had been quietly preparing for their emergence (or re-emergence) for many years. -Whether or not one took a patient view of the lengthy period of quiescence from the enfranchisement of women to the blossoming of the women's liberation movement (and most modern feminists understandably did not) some things had changed, and some political experience had been acquired. -The Committee on Equality for Women, which organized in 1966 to lobby for a Royal Commission on the status of women, consisted of experienced leaders from 32 existing women's organizations united by their feminism. -Their first delegation to Ottawa was ignored.

The Expansion of the Welfare State in Canada (1958-1972) Part 1

-Part of the reason for the continual expansion of government bureaucracy was regular (if unco-ordinated) expansion of the Canadian welfare state. -Politicians viewed expanded social services as popular vote-getters, and no political party strenuously opposed the principles of welfare democracy. -Although the Diefenbaker government was not associated with any major program, it had initiated a number of reviews and Royal Commissions, the recommendations of which would pass into legislation under the Liberals. -The minority Pearson government was pushed towards improved social insurance by the NDP, its own reforming wing, and competitive pressures from an ambitious Quebec and other provinces. -Were Ottawa not to introduce new national programs, the federal government could well lose control of them to the wealthier and more aggressive provinces. -The expansion in 1964 of family allowances to include children up to the age of 18 who were still in school merely imitated something introduced by the Lesage government in 1961. -In 1965 the federal government attempted to introduce a national contributory pension scheme, but settled for one that allowed Quebec its own plan.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 2

-Perhaps the greatest success story was in Canadian literature. -Before the 1960s the market for, and interest in, works of literature by Canadian writers was not strong. -There was no tradition of indigenous literary criticism, only a handful of literary periodicals existed, and almost nothing approximating a literary community could be found anywhere outside Quebec. -In 1976 critic Northrop Frye noted "the colossal verbal explosion that has taken place in Canada since 1960". -That explosion saw a number of Canadian writers achieve international critical recognition. -"The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" by Mordecai Richler (1931-2001), published in 1959, met with great popular success and established Richler as a major writer. -Duddy Kravitz entered Canadian popular culture as an ethnic wheeler-dealer desperate for the security of land. -Richler was not the first novelist to mine the rich vein of ethnicity in Canada, but he was the first to mythologize the urban ghetto, its inhabitants, and way of life. -In 1966 he confessed: "No matter how long I continue to live abroad, I do feel forever rooted in Montreal's St Urbain Street. This was my time, my place, and I have elected to get it exactly right".

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 5

-Quebec's attitude towards Confederation changed perceptibly during the 1960s. -Under Duplessis, Quebec supported provincial rights to prevent Ottawa from taking control of them. -Under Lesage and his successors, provincial powers were something to be exercised positively as Quebec built its own welfare state and accompanying bureaucracy. -Quebec's newly empowered middle class became increasingly conscious of the powers beyond their reach. -A substantial separatist movement developed in the province, its most visible example the FLQ. -This organization, founded in March 1963, soon began a terrorist campaign to publicize its views. -In November 1967, René Lévesque took a more traditional path towards political change when he resigned from the Quebec Liberal Party and began organizing the Parti Québécois, which was devoted to some form of independence. -Along with increased constitutional militancy came increased fears for the future of the French language, with many French Canadians turning a suspicious eye on the immigrant groups in Quebec who were still educating their children in English. -By 1970 no Quebec politician wanted to be publicly associated with anything less than provincial autonomy. -The first round of separatist agitation came to a climax in October 1970 when two cells of the FLQ kidnapped a British diplomat, Trade Commissioner James Cross, and a Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, murdering the latter.

A Still Bouyant Economy Part 4

-Some of Canada's endemic economic problems were better publicized (if not better resolved) in the 1960s. -There were a number of obvious weak points. -One was in the food-producing sector. -Canadian farmers continued to find that increased mechanization and use of fertilizers meant that fewer hands were needed to produce larger crops. -Canadian farms became ever more capital-intensive, marginal lands less attractive, yet returns to the farmer remained sluggish. -Most increases in food costs to the consumer were caused by non-agricultural factors, such as transportation and processing, rather than by increased returns to the farmer. -The farm population in Canada had been declining absolutely for decades, and this era was no exception. -Between the 1961 and 1971 censuses, the number of farm residents fell from 2,072,785 to 1,419,795. -Drops were especially marked in Prince Edward Island and Manitoba. -As for the fishery, the admission of Newfoundland to Confederation in 1949 only increased the numbers of fishers in serious difficulty. -Experts' warnings about overfishing were ignored by governments eager to create programs to aid fishers and fishing communities.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 16

-Speaking about amateur sports at that time, Opposition leader Lester Pearson (who had played lacrosse and hockey while at Oxford) said: "all the publicity attached to international sport and the fact that certain societies use international sport, as they use everything else, for the advancement of prestige and political purposes, it is a matter of some consequence that we in Canada should do what we can to develop and regain the prestige we once had, to a greater extent than we now have in international competition". -Although the legislation was deliberately vague, it allowed the government to subsidize amateur coaches and teams, particularly in national and international competitions. -In 1968 the National Advisory Council, set up under the Art to recommend policy and oversee its implementation, was shunted to one side in favour of professional bureaucrats within the Ministry of National Health and Welfare. -Amateur sports in Canada had been taken under the wing of the welfare state. -In that same year Pierre Trudeau promised in the election campaign a new study of sports in Canada. -The "Report of the Task Force on Sports for Canadians" was published in 1969. -Despite the increased government involvement in and subsidization of amateur sports, in 1976 Canada acquired the dubious distinction of becoming the first (and so far only) nation to host the Olympic Summer Games (in Montreal) without winning a gold medal.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 4

-Such defence blunders did Diefenbaker no good in the 1962 election. -By January 1963 defence issues had reduced his cabinet to conflicting factions. -The minority government fell shortly afterwards. -Traditional Canadian nationalism as practised by John Diefenbaker was simply not compatible with the missile age. -During much of Diefenbaker's leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party from 1956 to 1967, his chief political opponent was Lester B. (Mike) Pearson. -The contrast between the two men was instantly apparent, and the "Dief and Mike" show (in the Commons and outside) was the joy of political cartoonists and satirists for that entire decade. -Pearson was a soft-spoken former diplomat who had won a Nobel Peace Prize for conciliation in the Suez Crisis of 1956. -Quietly ambitious, he had little House of Commons or domestic experience. -Apart from the 1958 election, the nation never gave either Pearson or Diefenbaker a mandate to govern, thus perhaps reflecting its suspicion of their qualifications. -The voters preferred Diefenbaker in 1957, 1958, and 1962 (the first and the third elections producing minority governments), and Pearson in 1963 and 1965 (both times in a minority situation). -Pearson was better able to govern with a minority, since his party could arrive at unofficial understandings with the CCFNDP, something not possible for the Diefenbaker Tories. -Pearson was no more able than Diefenbaker to rein in ambitious colleagues or provinces, however. -The decade 1957-67 was one of constant federal political turmoil and federal-provincial hassles.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 8: The Emancipation of Manners

-Termination of pregnancy became legal if carried out by physicians in proper facilities, and following a certification by a special panel of doctors that "the continuation of the pregnancy of such female person would or would be likely to endanger her life or health." -The Criminal Code was also amended in 1969 to exempt from prosecution "indecent actions" by consenting couples over the age of 21 who performed such acts in private. -The reformation of manners, if not morals, based on the twin concepts that the state had no place in enforcing morality and that individuals were entitled to decide on the ways in which they harmed themselves, was largely in place by 1969. -There were clear limits to liberalization, however. -Since 1969 Canada has witnessed a resurgence of demands for state intervention in areas where liberalization was held to produce adverse consequences. -Thus many women's groups have come to advocate stricter legislation on obscenity and indecency, particularly in the media, in order to protect women and children from sexual abuse.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 6

-The "Quiet Revolution" of the 1960s would be a major impetus to a number of new Canadian policies. -Most Quebecers were quite happy to accept ethnic minorities so long as they were prepared to speak French and associate themselves with the aspirations of Quebec. -In the process of dealing with the new Quebec, a succession of Canadian governments would remake policy towards immigration and ethnic culture. -Finally, as discussed in Chapter 9, the new communications media, particularly the general expansion of television right across the Canadian population after 1950, increasingly plugged Canadians into the world. -While television put Canadians back into their homes, clustered around the TV set to watch their favourite shows, it also helped force them out of their narrow insularity, not so much into their local communities as into the international world previously beyond their ken. -It was not lost on Canadians that Richard Nixon was defeated in the 1960 American election by John F. Kennedy in no small part because Nixon sweated profusely and appeared to have a five-o'clock shadow during the first-ever televised presidential debate. -In less than a decade Canadians would choose their own charismatic, media-savvy politician, Pierre Trudeau, to lead the country. -And during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ongoing developments became "must-see" television in Canada just as they were were in the United States.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 9: The Nation & Quebec

-The 1960s saw a renaissance of Acadian culture and a new political awareness that Acadian interests had to be served. -Thus both major New Brunswick parties supported bilingualism, French-language education (including a university at Moncton), and the entrenchment of Acadian culture in the province. -Bilingualism and biculturalism helped rejuvenate francophones elsewhere in Canada, most of whom were fluently bilingual. -Not only did they gain advantages in obtaining federal employment in their regions, but their educational and cultural facilities received a good deal of financial assistance from the federal government as well, as did numerous other organized ethnic groups once multiculturalism became official policy in 1971. -"Non-charter" ethnic groups had vociferously informed the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism of their unhappiness with the concept of two languages and two cultures, insisting that such a policy offended those not part of the "charter" community. -The Commission had devoted a separate book of its final report to the "other ethnic groups," and seemed to be suggesting that there was more to Canada than simply two cultures. -Indeed, in 1971, as we have seen, more than one in every four Canadians was not a member of the charter communities.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 14

-The 1960s were also a critical decade for popular culture, particularly that valiant effort to keep the Canadian identity from being totally submerged by American influences. -The record was mixed, as developments in Canadian sports well demonstrate. -Nothing could be more quintessentially Canadian, for example, than hockey. -But that sport entered the post-war period in the hands of the American entertainment industry, and the situation never really altered. -By the 1960s only at the NHL level did Canadian teams have any real representation (two of six teams, in Toronto and Montreal). -At the minor-league level only Vancouver had a professional team. -The NHL finally expanded in 1967, adding six new American franchises in what was hoped were hockey hotbeds like St Louis and Philadelphia. -Not even Vancouver, to its chagrin, could get a look-in. -The chief argument against new Canadian teams was related to television. -American TV viewers would not watch professional sports played by "foreign" teams, said the experts, and the secret of expansion's success was a US national television contract.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 10

-The Canadian Labour Congress agreed, adding that unskilled immigrant workers were needed to carry out "tasks which native born or already established immigrants refuse to perform because of their better training." -The Mining Association of Canada definitely wanted at least 4,000 semi-skilled workers admitted per year, noting, "The type of immigrant we have in mind has been the backbone of the labour force of the mining industry in the past. ... a man has to be physically fit; but his education is not too important, so long as he can read or write." -Canadians would not work in mines, reported one witness from the mining interests, because there are no roads, no TVs, no cars, few girls, little or no liquor and most people recoil from the idea of working underground". -No mention was made by this witness of the danger or relatively low pay experienced by miners. -Most Canadian industrialists advocated the admission of the unskilled, although the Canadian Manufacturers' Association and the Canadian Medical Association both stressed the need for those who were technologically prepared. -The Canadian Jewish Congress emphasized humanitarian concerns, "the need for people to find asylum." -Many ethnic organizations applauded the new emphasis on skills, but most also insisted on the maintenance of the sponsorship category.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 4

-The Lesage government also sensed the importance of Frère Untel's call for the preservation and extension of French-Canadian culture and the French language. -It had already created the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in 1961, which presided happily, with grants and other forms of support, over a veritable explosion of French-Canadian art and writing in the 1960s. -The Ministry of Cultural Affairs in many ways typified the Quiet Revolution. -The Lesage government was not so much the agent of change in Quebec as its "animateur". -As such it was the beneficiary of years of preparation by others. -What the Liberals did was to identify some of the key problems, thus liberating the new-found aspirations of Quebec. -Nevertheless, Lesage's government was defeated in 1966 by a rejuvenated Union Nationale under Daniel Johnson (1915-68), chiefly because it had failed to follow to its nationalist conclusion the logic of the revolution over which it had presided. -The Union Nationale continued the Lesage program with louder nationalist rhetoric. -In 1970 the party in turn was defeated by the Liberals under the new party leader, Robert Bourassa, partly because it was squeezed between the Liberals and the newly formed Parti Québécois (PQ), partly because too many of its leaders had suffered fatal heart attacks (as had similarly happened to the Union Nationale a decade earlier when first Duplessis and then his successor, Paul Sauvé, died).

The "Radical Sixties" Part 2: The Emancipation of Manners

-The Sixties have been credited with (or blamed for) a revolution in morality in which the traditional values of our Victorian ancestors were overturned virtually overnight. -Firmly held moral beliefs do not collapse quite so rapidly or easily, of course. -Rather, a belief system that was already in a state of decay and profoundly out of step with how people actually behaved in their daily lives was finally questioned and found wanting. -A previous Canadian reluctance to examine morality ended. -The brief upsurge of formal Christianity that had characterized the post-war era suddenly terminated. -Canadians ceased attending church in droves. -The phenomenon was especially evident in Catholic Quebec. -The shifts involved were international ones that went much further elsewhere in the industrialized world than in Canada. -By comparison with Sweden or California, for example, Canadian manners appear in retrospect to have remained quite old-fashioned.

The Beginning of International Drift Part 2

-The Trudeau government called it home in mid-1973. -Canada was no longer a self-defined middle power. -It had no clear conception of its place or role in world affairs. -Canada's problem in the world was basically simple. -Its economic indicators entitled it to major-league status, but its population was small and its close relationship with the United States inevitably consigned it to being a minor-league subsidiary player. -The Canadian image abroad was as perplexing as its policies. -On the one hand, the country continued its irritating habit of preaching from on high to nations that did not regard themselves as morally inferior. -Catching Canada in hypocritical moral contradictions became a favourite international game. -Canada's multilateral involvements limited its abilities to provide practical support for human rights issues, despite some internal pressures to adopt a more interventionist human rights position. -On the other hand, Canada continued to be one of the most favoured destinations for immigrants from around the world. -Ordinary people accepted that life was better in Canada. -Indeed, surveys regularly listed Canada at the top of the international standard-of-living table.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 10: The Counterculture

-The United States was the spiritual home of the sixties counterculture in English Canada. -Americans had gone further than anyone else both in suburbanizing their culture and in universalizing education. -The rapidly expanding university campus provided an ideal spawning ground for youthful rebellion. -The campus had helped generate, in the civil rights movement, a protest crusade that served as a model for subsequent agitation. -Civil rights as a public concern focused attention on the rhetorical contradictions of mainstream American society, which preached equality for all while denying it to blacks. -It also mobilized youthful idealism and demonstrated the techniques of the protest march and civil disobedience, as well as the symbolic values of popular song. -When some American blacks left the civil rights movement, convinced that only violence could truly alter the status quo, they provided models for urban guerrilla activity, including the growing terrorist campaign in Quebec that was associated with separatism. (French-Canadian youths could identify with Pierre Vallières's "White N###ers of America.")

A Still Bouyant Economy Part 2

-The averages disguised marked discrepancies and disparities. -Some of them were regional. -Overall, the most seriously disadvantaged area was the Atlantic region: the Maritime provinces plus Newfoundland. -Per capita average income in this region was persistently more than 30% below the figures for the other provinces, and a much larger proportion of the population than elsewhere worked in marginal primary resource extraction, which was often seasonal in nature. -Even after taxes, Ontario's per capita income in 1970 was 70% higher than Newfoundland's. -Many commentators insisted, however, that the real regional disparity was between the industrial heartland of central Canada and the resource hinterland that constituted most of the remainder of the country. -Canadians were naturally drawn to the more prosperous regions, while the Atlantic region and Saskatchewan and Manitoba lost population in the 1960s through out-migration. -A perception of disparity underlay much of the nation's political discontent.

The Expansion of the Welfare State in Canada (1958-1972) Part 2

-The changing demography of Canada guaranteed that there would be continual pressures on the government to improve the pension system. -Those who wanted improved benefits were able to make common ground with those who sought to control costs. -Both could agree on the superiority of a contributory scheme. -The Medical Care Act of 1966 built on provincial initiatives with a cost-sharing arrangement. -By 1968 all provinces and territories had agreed on cost-sharing arrangements with Ottawa that produced a social minimum in health care. -For most Canadians, access to medical service (doctors and hospitalization) would thereafter be without charge. -Occasionally cynicism triumphed. -Early in 1965 Prime Minister Pearson wrote his cabinet ministers asking for suggestions of policy initiatives that would shift attention from political harassment by the opposition over mistakes and difficulties. -The result was a Canadian variation of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. -Canada proposed a full utilization of human resources and an end to poverty. -Actual reforms were not very significant.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 7

-The coming of age of Canadian writing was not matched by a similar maturation in Canadian book publishing, which found itself subject to several disturbing market trends, most notably an inability to make money in a retail climate dominated by foreign publishers. -Ryerson Press, the oldest major publisher in Canada and supported by the United Church of Canada, was so much in debt that it was sold in 1970 to the American firm McGraw-Hill. -In the same year, the Ontario government appointed a Royal Commission on Book Publishing (1970) and had to rescue McClelland & Stewart from an American takeover. -Even though the federal government established a policy of giving support to Canadian controlled publishing firms through such agencies as the Canadian Book Publishing Development Program and the Canada Council, as did provincial governments in various ways, including through the Ontario Arts Council, Canadian publishing had entered an era of chronic precariousness that the quality of the writing available to be published only served to emphasize.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 7: The Emancipation of Manners

-The concept that it was not the state's function to enforce morality flew in the face of the Canadian tradition, which had always embodied morality in the Criminal Code. -The new liberalism informed many of the legal reforms of the later 1960s. -A number of Roman Catholic bishops, in a brief to a special joint committee of the legislature on divorce in 1967, stated that the legislator's goal should not be "primarily the good of any religious group but the good of all society". -Such liberated thinking paved the way not only for a thorough reform of federal divorce legislation, making divorce easier and quicker to obtain, but also for amendments to the Criminal Code in 1969 regarding abortion.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 1

-The conversion, within the space of a single generation, from a very insular and parochial nation to one that was relatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan, much more capable of toleration of ethnic differences, has been one of the most remarkable and underrated public changes in Canadian history. -One factor in the change of attitude was World War II, a war in which over a million Canadians served in the military, more than half of them overseas. -Unlike the Great War, which most Canadian soldiers spent in disgusting trenches on the continent of Europe, World War II actually gave Canadians some foreign experience. -Over a quarter of a million troops spent up to four years in Great Britain, waiting for the Big Show of D-Day to begin and at least sometimes playing at being tourists. -Canadian soldiers fought in Italy and through France, the Low Countries, and Germany. -Such fighting was not nice but it was considerably more broadening than life in a muddy trench. -That over 50,000 Canadians met foreign girls and got to know them well enough to propose marriage suggests some of the possibilities. -The American popular song of World War I had queried, "How you gonna keep 'em, down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" -That question was really much more relevant for Canada in 1945 than in 1918.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 9

-The effect of the socio-economic changes in Quebec on writing in that province was considerable. -The influence was reciprocal: one fuelled the other. -The literary transformation began in the late 1950s with "La Belle Bête" (1959) by the 20-year-old Marie-Claire Blais (b. 1939). -This novel astonished the reading public (no less in its English translation, "Mad Shadows") and scandalized the clergy with its portrayal of characters representing various kinds of moral and physical ugliness, and for its powerful impressionistic scenes of betrayal, disfigurement, pyromania, murder, and suicide. -Blais was discovered outside Quebec by the American critic Edmund Wilson, who observed that she showed herself "incapable of allowing life in French Canada to appear in a genial light or to seem to embody any sort of ideal". -The literary transformation that began in the late 1950s continued throughout the next decades. -The anger and violence of language and subject matter, radical changes in syntax and formal structure, the freeing of style and content from the constraints of tradition, not only mirrored but fostered the spirit of liberation and the new goals of Quebec society. -This work was no longer called French-Canadian but "Québécois" fiction.

Overview of Canada (1958-1972) Part 1

-The era 1958-72 in Canada will always be labelled "the sixties". -Life in those years was a bit like riding on a roller coaster. -Revolution was in the air, but it never quite arrived. -Everything seemed to be happening at roller-coaster speed. -Although the ride was frequently quite exhilarating, the view from the front seemed to open into a bottomless abyss. -Almost every positive development had its downside. -The Canadian economy continued to grow, but the unpleasant side effects became more evident. Government sought to reform the legal system regarding divorce while the rates of marital breakdown reached epidemic proportions. -The Roman Catholic Church internationally introduced a series of unprecedented reforms, but Canadians stopped attending all churches in record numbers. -An increasing number of students at Canadian universities became concerned about American influence in Canada, only to be influenced themselves by American student reaction to the war in Vietnam. -A variety of collective minorities began insisting on their rights, the acceptance of which would require the complete remaking of social justice and, indeed, society, in Canada. -The nation celebrated its Centennial in 1967, the most memorable event of which was probably an off-the-cuff public exclamation by French President Charles de Gaulle.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 8: The Nation & Quebec

-The final policy initiative of the Pearson Liberals was the concept of equal partnership, including the notions of cultural dualism and "two founding cultures". -The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was set up in 1963 to implement equal partnership. -The Commission discovered, to its surprise, that not all Canadians believed in cultural dualism. -It ended up recommending official bilingualism, which was implemented by the Official Languages Act of 1969. -By the time bilingualism was formally adopted, Quebec had passed well beyond the stage of accepting its implications. -Many political leaders were calling for a policy of unilingualism within the province. -After the earlier entrance of Quebec's "Three Wise Men" (Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, and Pierre Trudeau) into Parliament and the cabinet in 1965, Pearson's resistance to Quebec had stiffened, however. -Quebec was not the home of all French Canadians, for there were hundreds of thousands of francophones living outside that province. -The need to provide continuing protection for this outlying population was a principal argument of the federalists within Quebec. -Francophones outside Quebec were understandably ardent federalists, and they were the chief beneficiaries of bilingualism and biculturalism. -Only in New Brunswick were the francophones (the Acadians) sufficiently concentrated geographically and sufficiently numerous to regard themselves as a distinct people.

The Expansion of the Welfare State in Canada (1958-1972) Part 3

-The first Trudeau government, responding to the reform euphoria of the era, actually contemplated shifting the grounds of social protectionism in "the Just Society." -To bureaucrats and political leaders in the late 1960s the emphasis of mainstream reform had been to carry out the agenda of the 1940s for the establishment of a "social minimum" providing basic economic security for all Canadians. -Now, at least briefly, they debated the possibility of expanding the welfare state to include some measure of income distribution. -Poverty came to be seen as a serious problem worthy of public focus. -The Economic Council of Canada in 1968 described the persistence of poverty in Canada as "a disgrace." -Later that same year a Special Senate Committee on Poverty was established under Senator David Croll's chairmanship. -In 1971 this committee produced a report, "Poverty in Canada", which insisted that nearly two million people in Canada lived below the poverty line. -More radical critics, in "The Real Poverty Report" that same year, put the figure much higher. -Poverty not only characterized the lives of millions of Canadians, but it was structural, regional, and related to racial and gender discrimination. -A number of schemes were suggested, including a guaranteed income for low-income families as part of the family allowance package.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 2

-The first major step had to do with hydroelectricity. -The tradition that had to be overcome was the long-standing Quebec fear, nurtured for decades by the Union Nationale, of anything resembling economic statism (or socialism or communism). -Anti-étatisme in Quebec was not the same thing as a do-nothing government. -Under Duplessis, the provincial government had spent a lot of money on public services, including many hydroelectric projects to assist rural electrification. -What the Minister of Natural Resources, René Lévesque (1922-87), proposed on 12 February 1962, without consulting his colleagues, was the enforced government consolidation of all existing private hydroelectric companies into one massive Hydro-Québec. -Hydroelectricity was an ideal place to fight the battle of nationalization, partly because electrical generation and supply was a public enterprise right across North America, partly because it directly touched the pocketbook of the rural Quebecer, who was most likely to oppose state action. -Despite a famous "Jamais!' from Premier Lesage, nationalization was quickly accepted by the Liberal cabinet as a winning campaign issue, and the Liberals took it to the province in 1962 with the slogan "Maîtres chez nous." -Led by Lesage and a compelling Lévesque, the Liberals managed to turn Hydro-Québec into a symbol of the economic liberation of Quebec from its colonial status, thus co-opting the new nationalism with a vengeance. -Liberal expenditures on welfare state reform and public enterprise tripled the provincial budget in the early 1960s, which saw provincial government involvement in almost every economic, industrial, and social activity in Quebec.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 11: The Nation & Quebec

-The government embodied multiculturalism in a Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism, created in 1973, and in a separate section of the Department of the Secretary of State (the Multiculturalism Directorate), which was given funds to support multicultural activities of various sorts. -Much of the funding was devoted to the support of ethnic research and scholarship, contributing to an explosion of ethnic studies, although money was also made available to ethnic organizations for various purposes and was subject to considerable criticism. -The ethnic community was not united in its response to the funding for multiculturalism. -Some members of the ethnic community complained that the funds were "minuscule," while others pointed to the waste of money on meaningless projects. -In the wake of the federal policy, various provincial governments also proclaimed policies of multiculturalism and began funding ethnic organizations and ethnic studies. -The concept of multiculturalism was introduced into most provincial educational curricula to socialize schoolchildren to the new complexities of Canadian society, although not much was done about providing education in ethnic languages.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 3: The Emancipation of Manners

-The liberation of manners occurred simultaneously on several visible levels. -The old media taboos against sexual explicitness, obscenity, and graphic depiction of violence virtually disappeared. -Television attempted to maintain the traditional standards, but TV news itself constantly undermined that self-restraint with its coverage of what was happening in the world. -The sixties were probably no more violent than any other period in human history. -However, constant television coverage of the decade's more brutal events, increasingly in "living" colour, brought them into everyone's living room. -The memories of any Canadian who lived through the period include a veritable kaleidoscope of violent images: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr; the Paris and Chicago student riots of 1968; scenes in Vietnam (including the My Lai murders of innocent civilians and the defoliation of an entire ecosystem). -Closer to home, there was the October Crisis of 1970. -Canadians liked to believe that violence happened outside Canada, especially in the United States. -Canadians somehow were nicer. -On the eve of the October Crisis, the Guess Who, a Canadian rock group, had a monster hit, the lyrics of which pursued some of the most common metaphors of the time. -"American Woman" identified the United States with violence and Canada's relationship with its southern neighbour in sexual terms, a common conceit of the time.

Immigration Reform In Canada (1958-1972) Part 8

-The new regulations also provided for an Immigration Board semi-independent of the Immigration Department to hear appeals, except in sponsorship cases. -On the front of illegal Chinese immigration, the government decided to declare an "amnesty" to all Chinese who had arrived illegally in Canada before 1 July 1960. -This was the first of a long series of amnesties that would be declared to deal with illegal immigration to Canada. -The Liberals complained in Parliament that this cosmic shift in Canadian policy had occurred without any public debate, which was of course true. -Whether Canadian public opinion would have sustained such a non-racial policy in 1962 is, of course, quite doubtful. -The new non-racial policy did not have an immediate impact on Canada because of the low level of immigration in the early 1960s. -The low levels were a result of budget cutbacks to the Department of Immigration under the Diefenbaker government caused by financial rather than policy considerations. -At the same time, it must be admitted that the Diefenbaker cabinet saw immigration as an unpleasant and necessary evil upon which as little money as possible should be spent.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 3

-The other great symbolic reform of Lesage's Quiet Revolution was the secularization and modernization of Quebec's educational system. -Since before Confederation, education had been in the hands of the Catholic Church, which staffed its schools chiefly with priests and nuns teaching a curriculum slow to change from the 19th-century classical one. -By 1960 the Church itself was in trouble, not just in Quebec but around the world. -Criticism of Quebec education was led by a Catholic clergyman, Brother Jean-Paul Desbiens (1927-2006), who published the best-selling "Les Insolences de Frère Untel" (translated in 1962 as "The Impertinences of Brother Anonymous"), based on a series of letters he had written to "Le Devoir" in 1959. -The spate of responses to Frère Untel, many of them in the form of letters to editors of newspapers, demonstrated that he had struck a chord in the province. -Lesage responded with a provincial commission of inquiry into education, chaired by the vice-rector of Laval University, Monseigneur Alphonse-Marie Parent. -The Parent Commission's hearings produced a battery of complaints and indictments of the Quebec system, most of which the Commission endorsed in its 1963 report. -The Parent Commission called not only for modernization along North American lines but for administration by a unitary secular authority. -Armed with this endorsement, in 1964 the Lesage government passed Bill 60, which for the first time placed education in Quebec under provincial administration. -Quebec education was thereafter rapidly brought up to national standards.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 8

-The relatively small market for English-language books in Canada, the enormous volume of foreign books available, the dominance of foreign-owned publishers, and the self-defeating policy of allowing full return of unsold books, all of these factors put Canadian-owned publishers at a competitive disadvantage. -For authors even to be successfully published in the United States had its disadvantages, since the American publishers would sell their leftover books (known as "remainders") in Canada at a fraction of the price the Canadian publisher was still asking for the same book. -Publishers in Quebec experienced less difficulty than those in the rest of Canada, despite the small market. -Apparently the people of Quebec were more willing to buy books about themselves and their culture from local publishers, and there was less American competition.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 5

-The returning Liberals, who regained power in 1963 under Pearson, spent most of the 1960s attempting to implement the integration of Canada's armed forces, mainly on the grounds that duplication of resources and command structures was an expensive luxury the nation could not afford. -A unified Canadian military would be both leaner and meaner, capable of remaining within acceptable budget figures. -A White Paper to this effect was released in March of 1964, and Bill C-90, which amended the National Defence Act by creating a single Chief of Defence Staff, was introduced into the House of Commons on 10 April 1964. -The amendments producing a fully integrated military headquarters with a single chain of command received royal assent on 16 July 1964. -The country and its politicians, however, continued to hold schizophrenic attitudes towards the Canadian military, its foreign obligations, and Canada's overseas role. -Canada wanted to control its own destiny, which probably required a neutral stance internationally. -Neutrality in international affairs would cost even more than the American and NATO alliances, however, so everyone pretended that Canada could hold the line on military spending and still honour its commitments through administrative reform. -At the same time, Canada began a long, slow, gradual process of reducing its armed forces, a process that was still underway in the 21st century.

The Expansion of the Welfare State in Canada (1958-1972) Part 4

-The year 1970 had already seen the publication of a federal White Paper called "Income Security for Canadians," which pointed the escalating costs of social insurance and criticized the principle of universality that had previously governed Canadian policy. -The ultimate result was the new Unemployment Insurance Plan of 1971, which extended and increased coverage without actually addressing the concept of a guaranteed minimum income for all Canadians. -At about the same time, Ottawa eliminated a separate fund for Canada pension contributions and began considering them as part of the general revenue of the government. -Reformers had long insisted that access to education was one of the social rights to which all Canadians were entitled. -Increasing access meant creating new facilities. -The presence of the baby-boom generation gave urgency to that implication. -Parents were much attracted to the practical benefits of education in providing future employment and a better life for their children. -The results in the 1960s were enormous pressures on education budgets and increasing demand for the production of more and better teachers. -School authorities attempted to ease some of their problems by consolidating rural education through use of the ubiquitous yellow school bus, a process that continued into the early 1970s. -Teachers acquired more formal credentials, became better paid, and organized themselves into a powerful professional lobby that was sometimes even unionized.

The "Radical Sixties" Part 12: The Counterculture

-The youthful reaction advocated an eclectic kind of socialism that was Marxist-influenced, democratically oriented, and idealistically verging on romanticism. -This youthful reaction is usually referred to as the New Left. -The movement was much better at explaining what was wrong with the present system than at proposing workable alternatives. -It had no example of a large-scale society that operated on its principles. -Nevertheless, Canadian student activists rose to positions of power in their universities, establishing several national organizations, such as the Student Union for Peace Action (1965). -Student radicalism flourished at a few universities, such as Simon Fraser, York, and the Université de Montréal. -Many of the less extreme student activists joined the Waffle wing of the NDP, which attempted to radicalize that party in the direction of economic nationalism and social reform. -Perhaps the most publicized student protest in Canada occurred in February 1969 when the computer centre at Sir George Williams University in Montreal was occupied for two weeks to protest racial intolerance and the "military, imperialistic ambitions of Canada in the West Indies".

The "Radical Sixties" Part 21: The Rise of Militant Collectives

-Virtually simultaneous with the Royal Commission was the emergence of the movement usually known as women's liberation. -This articulate and militant branch of feminism had begun in the United States as an off-shoot of the student movement, partly a product of the failure of male student leaders to take women seriously. -Women's liberation shared much of its rhetoric with other leftist movements of decolonization. -Not surprisingly, the liberationists found their organizing principles in issues of sexuality, particularly in the concept that "woman's body is used as a commodity or medium of exchange". -True liberation would come only when women could control their own bodies, especially in sexual terms. -Thus birth control and abortion became two central political questions, along with more mundane matters, such as daycare and equal pay for equal work. -Such concerns brought feminists into conflict with what became known as male chauvinism at all levels of society. -At the beginning of the 1970s, the women's movement stood poised at the edge of what appeared to be yet another New Day. -The minority perhaps most closely linked to the women's liberationists was composed of homosexuals and lesbians. -Like the libbers, the gays (a term they much preferred to other more pejorative ones) focused their political attention on sexuality, particularly the offences enshrined in the Canadian Criminal Code.

The Beginning of International Drift Part 3

-Whatever the Department of External Affairs was or was not doing, Canadians themselves became citizens of the world in a way that would have been incomprehensible to earlier generations. -By the early 1970s, relatively cheap airplane tickets to go anywhere in the world had become an accepted part of life. -In the 1960s the kids had travelled the world, carrying backpacks festooned with the Canadian flag and sleeping in youth hostels. -Now their parents followed them, staying in hotels that were just like those at home. -Almost every Canadian family had at least one member with photographs of a major overseas expedition. -Cheap airfares also brought relatives from abroad to visit Canada. -All this travel combined with new immigration to make Canada an increasingly cosmopolitan place to live. -Canadians drank less beer and more wine, much of it imported. -They ate in restaurants with exotic cuisines, learned to cook similar food at home, and insisted that this type of food be available at their local supermarkets.

Political Leadership In Canada (1958-1972) Part 8

-When the American administration gradually escalated both US involvement and the shooting war in Vietnam after 1963, Canada's position became increasingly anomalous, both on the commission and outside it. -Lester Pearson was still hoping to mediate in April 1965 when he used the occasion of a speech in Philadelphia to suggest that the American government might pause in its bombing of North Vietnam to see if a negotiated settlement was possible. -He was soon shown the error of his ways in no uncertain terms. -In a private meeting with Lyndon Johnson shortly thereafter, the American President shook Pearson by his lapels and criticized Canadian presumptuousness with Texas profanity, -Vietnam certainly contributed to a new Canadian mood in the later 1960s, both in Ottawa and on the main streets of the nation. -Canadians now sought to distance themselves from the policies of the "Ugly Americans," although never by open withdrawal from the American defence umbrella. -The victory of Pierre Trudeau in 1968 marked a new era, which by the early 1970s saw a return to Liberal hegemony. -The Tories had chosen Robert Stanfeld (1914-2003) to succeed Diefenbaker. -The soft-spoken Stanneid seemed a good match for Lester Pearson, but could not compete with the trendy and articulate Trudeau. -Like the pop stars he seemed to emulate, Trudeau was capable of repackaging his image (and his policies) to suit conditions changing so fast they seemed to be "blowin' in the wind."

The "Radical Sixties" Part 16: The Rise of Militant Collectives

-While much youthful protest disappeared at the end of the decade, the baby boomers had joined in some movements that outlasted the era. -The sixties saw a number of previously disadvantaged groups in Canadian society emerge with articulated positions and demands. -These included, among others, Aboriginal peoples, blacks, women, and homosexuals. -To some extent, all these groups shared a common sense of liberation and heightened consciousness during the heady days of the sixties, as well as some common models and rhetoric. -The several black movements in the United States, especially civil rights and black power, were generally influential. -It was no accident that almost every group, including French Canadians, compared itself with American blacks. -While on one level other emerging collectivities could hardly avoid sympathizing with French Canada, on another level the arguments and aspirations of Quebec often seriously conflicted with those of other groups. -Many collectivities sought to mobilize federal power to achieve their goals, often seeing the provinces and provincial rights as part of their problem.

Quebec During This Period (1958-1972) Part 12: The Nation & Quebec

-While multiculturalism was introduced as a highly politicized policy by a Prime Minister who did not really take minority ethnic causes very seriously, it struck a responsive chord with many Canadians. -For Pierre Trudeau, multiculturalism was probably mainly part of a Quebec strategy that also may have been important as part of a conscious elimination of ethnic and racial discrimination. -For many Canadians, however, it would become part of a new definition of national identity, a statement of the Canadian "mosaic" in contradistinction to the American "melting pot." -The mythology of the mosaic would become even more powerful after the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights (again by Trudeau) in 1982. -Before long, many Canadians had quite forgotten the Prime Minister's contextualization of multiculturalism as being "within a bilingual framework." -It would eventually become such a potent metaphor that many Canadians felt that their behaviour had to live up to its ideal.

A Still Bouyant Economy Part 7

-Withdrawal from international unionism began seriously around 1970, and would increase over the next few years as wholly Canadian unions grew in numbers and membership. -One of the major factors in the homegrown union movement was the success of public sector unionism in the 1960s. -In 1963 the Canadian Union of Public Employees organized, and in 1967 thousands of civil servants repudiated staff associations and formed the Public Service Alliance of Canada. -Outside the civil service, but within the public sector, unionization was particularly marked in the teaching and health care professions. -Strikes by postal workers, teachers, and even policemen irritated large sectors of the Canadian public. -Anger at the interruption of what many Canadians saw as essential services would eventually help make the unions easy targets in the 1970s as scapegoats for Canada's newly emergent economic problems.

Canadian Culture During This Period (1958-1972) Part 6

-Without a new breed of scholarly critics who were prepared to take Canadian writing seriously, and without the subsidies that helped sustain author, critic, teacher, and journals, writing would have developed more slowly. -McClelland & Stewart's enduring New Canadian Library series began in 1958, offering during the sixties mainly reprints of classic and long out-of-print novels. -"Canadian Literature", the first review devoted only to the study of Canadian writers and writing,' was founded in 1959 by George Woodcock (1912-95). -The collectively written "Literary History of Canada" was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1965. -For many critics, the challenge was to reveal quintessential Canadian qualities in the imaginative elements of the literature. -Québécois fiction shared in the cultural flowering, with the anger and violence of language and subject matter, and with radical changes in syntax and formal structure, not only mirroring but fostering the spirit of liberation and the new goals of Quebec society.