A History of the Canadian Peoples Chapter 9 Review

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 5

-After months of debate in the Canadian press and in the cabinet, Prime Minister Mackenzie King read a formal statement on immigration policy to the House of Commons on 1 May 1947. -King insisted that Canada wanted to encourage immigration, but also that Canada's "absorptive capacity" must be taken into account. -He did not further define "absorptive capacity," which many Canadians chose to see as an economic measure. -Others thought it a coded term for racism, an interpretation that gained force from King's spirited defence of the nation's right to pursue a discriminatory immigration policy that would not appreciably alter the makeup of the Canadian population, which, of course, was essentially of European descent. -King further declared that although Canada's membership in international organizations did not oblige it to accept specific numbers of refugees and displaced persons (a barb directed towards External Affairs), "We have, nevertheless, a moral obligation to assist in meeting the problem, and this obligation we are prepared to recognize". -In the wake of King's statement, 5 teams of immigration officials visited camps in Austria and Germany in the summer of 1947 to select potential immigrants. -A new system of screening was put into effect, and an expansion of the term "close relative" was introduced. -Those selected were mainly under the labour selection category. -They were granted visas and transported to a port of embarkation where they signed labour contracts. -On arrival in Canada, each immigrant got money for railway tickets and meals. -Most of the security concerns were over potential Communists rather than ex-Nazis.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 10

-After the war a handful of Canadian intellectuals became fascinated by the media's role in modern society. -Given Canada's long history of wrestling with communications, this was perhaps not surprising. -The Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan (1911-80), following the lead of economic historian and communications theoretician Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), would become the chief international guru of media culture, one of the first thinkers to arrive at and communicate some idea of the effect that electronic media were having on culture at every level. -His first book, "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man" (1951), examined comic strips, advertisements, and other promotional imagery of the American press to convey insights into "that very common condition of industrial man in which he lives amid a great flowering of technical and mechanical imagery of whose rich human symbolism he is mainly unconscious". -Like his mentor, Innis, McLuhan took the media seriously. -Unlike Innis, however, McLuhan was not prepared to condemn the mechanization process and its introduction of a "mass" dimension.

Conclusion of Chapter 8

-Against a backdrop of economic prosperity and substantial population growth, Canada after the war finally appeared to be fulfilling its promise. -Substantial strides were made on fronts as different as social welfare and cultural policy. -"Progress" was everywhere. -Quebec's place within the Constitution had not yet emerged as a serious problem for the federal government, which by 1959 appeared to have established itself as a typical 20th century centralized state.

Aboriginal People In Canada (1945-1960) Part 2

-Alcohol was probably the major health hazard, less from long-term effects than from accidents and violence, neither of which could be dealt with effectively by improvements in medical service. -Native people drank for the same reasons that other socio-culturally dislocated and economically disadvantaged people around the world did: out of frustration and a desire to escape. -The First Nations were slow to organize to improve their conditions. -A number of Saskatchewan groups merged into the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians at the end of the 1950s, however, and in 1961 the National Indian Council was formed "to promote unity among Indian people, the betterment of people of Indian ancestry in Canada, and to create a better understanding of Indian and non-Indian relationships".

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 2

-All of Canada's resources in late 1945 and early 1946 were devoted to transporting its troops home. -Some of them had been in Britain since 1939. -Partly as a result of the length of the stay abroad, almost 50,000 Canadian soldiers had found wives in Europe, mainly in the United Kingdom, although some soldiers had married women on the continent, especially in Holland. -There were over 20,000 children from these marriages. -Obviously these dependants would have to be allowed to accompany their soldier husbands and fathers back to Canada, and the Canadian Department of National Defence facilitated matters as expeditiously as possible, not only admitting these women and children without question, but also providing them with transport, documentation, and the transfer of money and possessions as well. -The brides were informed there would be only a single one-way journey provided at government expense. -Being uprooted was not an easy experience for many of these women, but they were for the most part welcomed enthusiastically in their new homes.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 11

-An increased role for organized labour accompanied other economic trends of the affluent society. -Union membership increased and unions were organized in a number of new industries. -World War II had marked a major turning point for Canadian labour, which had fought any number of bitter strikes during the Depression in search of an unfettered right to bargain collectively with employers. -It received precious little support from government in this effort. -The percentage of union members in the total civilian labour force had actually declined slightly between 1929 and 1939. -During the war, however, the federal government had decided to co-opt labour into the war effort. -Both Ottawa and the provinces began the slow process of altering labour legislation to recognize and protect the rights to organization and collective bargaining. -The key breakthrough came in 1944 when the federal government, by wartime Order-in-Council, introduced PCO 1003. -This order introduced recently adopted American principles of compulsory recognition and collective bargaining, creating the machinery necessary to protect both management and labour in contested cases. -By 1946, 17.1% of all workers and 27.9% of non-agricultural workers belonged to unions.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 3

-The apparent Liberal stranglehold on Quebec had its impact on the other parties, particularly in terms of choice of leaders and electoral strategies. -During this period, neither the Progressive Conservatives nor the CCF ever seriously considered selecting a leader from Quebec, not even a unilingual English-speaker, let alone a French Canadian. -Nor did the other parties make much of an effort to campaign in French Canada, except in 1958. -The Liberal Party, therefore, continued its historic collaboration with francophone Quebec. -It alternated its leaders between anglophones and francophones, following Mackenzie King (1919-48) with Louis St Laurent (1948-57) and Lester B. Pearson (1958-68). -This association tended to polarize Canadian federal politics. -The Liberals also did well with other francophone voters, particularly the Acadians of New Brunswick.

Aboriginal People In Canada (1945-1960) Part 1

-As in earlier periods, one group that did not fully benefit from affluence and growth was the Aboriginal population. -Improvements in First Nations medical care began in 1945 when responsibility for it was transferred from Indian Affairs to the Department of National Health and Welfare. -This shift helped close gaps but did not eliminate them, chiefly because improved health care was not a panacea; it treated only the symptoms, not the causes of First Nations problems. -At this time, infant mortality rates among Native peoples were greatly reduced for the first 28 days of life, but these rates continued to run four to five times the national average for the remainder of infants' first year. -A change in major causes of death from infectious to chronic diseases occurred, but overall Indian and Inuit mortality rates still ran at more than twice the national average, and the incidence of death from accidental causes and suicide increased. -Accidental and violent death was third on the list of killers for all Canadians, but first for First Nations, even though automobile accidents were not common in most Native communities.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 11

-As many recognized by 1952, Canada desperately needed to overhaul and rethink its immigration policy. -That goal was hardly achieved in the new Immigration Act of that year, produced after only four days of hearings by a House of Commons subcommittee that heard testimony mainly from the large transportation companies. -Most of the other players involved in immigration, such as the trade unions and the ethnic organizations, were not heard at all. -As a result the 1952 Act dealt mainly with administrational procedures rather than new initiatives. It expanded the discretionary powers of the cabinet and the Immigration Department to select immigrants, even on a case-by-case basis, but did not much alter the criteria used in the selection. -Many found the Act was concerned mainly with keeping people out. -These included particular customs, unsuitability for Canadian conditions, and probable inability to become readily assimilated into probable inability to full Canadian citizenship. -The noisiest complaints about the 1952 Act came from the ethnic communities, who organized to lobby for their own particular agendas. -The 1952 Act had little to say about refugees and nothing to say about the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 1

-At the federal level there were two major parties, the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives. -In this period there were other federal parties as well, chiefly the CCF and Social Credit. -The nature of the Canadian electoral system, particularly the "first past the post" method of determining victorious candidates in single-member constituencies, combined with the continued presence of a multiplicity of parties to reduce to inconsequence the relationship between the popular vote and the number of seats in the House of Commons. -True political mandates were difficult to find in such electoral results. -The Liberals never won more than 50% of the popular vote in any election in the period 1945-60, although they came close in 1949 and 1954. -Only the Diefenbaker government of 1958 was elected by more than half of actual votes cast. -The correlation between popular vote and number of seats could be quite low for both major and minor parties. -The system tended to translate any edge in the popular vote for a major party into considerably larger numbers of seats and to dissipate votes for other parties. -Third parties were much better off if their support was concentrated in a few ridings (as was true for Social Credit) and not spread widely across the country (as was the case for the CCF). -In 1953, for example, the Liberals had 48.8% of the popular vote to 31% for the PCs, 11.3% for the CCF, and 5.4% for the Social Credit Party. -These percentages translated into 171 Liberal seats, 51 PC, 23 CCF, and 15 Social Credit.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 8

-At the provincial level, few provinces enjoyed genuine two-party politics. -Long-governing parties with near monopolies were common, and even in Atlantic Canada, where there was a long tradition of trying to keep provincial and federal governments of the same party, the party in power was not necessarily Liberal. -The Tories, under Robert Stanfield, took over Nova Scotia in 1956; Tories ran New Brunswick from 1951 to 1961. -Quebec was controlled by Maurice Duplessis's Union Nationale. -The Tory "Big Blue Machine" ran Ontario, while Alberta (1935-72) and British Columbia (beginning in 1952) were governed by Social Credit. -In British Columbia, W.A.C. Bennett (1900-79) took advantage of an electoral change (the preferential ballot), designed by a warring coalition to keep the socialists out of power, to win enough seats to form a minority government in 1952. -Continuing to exploit brilliantly the social polarities of a province divided into free enterprisers and socialists, Bennett never looked back. -The CCF governed Saskatchewan. -There was no provincial Liberal government west of Quebec between 1945 and 1960, although the coalition government of Manitoba was usually headed by a Liberal.

The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society in Post-War Canada Part 7

-Before the mid-1950s no one anticipated the arrival of a serious educational crisis, for in the decade after the war, classes in existing schools simply got larger while a few extra teachers were hired. -But finally the problem of overcrowding became too obvious to ignore. -Shortage of space was only partly a result of the baby boom. -The new insistence on high school diplomas for everyone represented a profound social revolution and created a need for more room at the universities. -Canadians saw more education as the key to dealing with modern industrial conditions. -Curiously, however, Canada lagged badly behind other countries in terms of vocational and practical education, preferring instead to force the vast majority of its students into traditional academic endeavours. -Much of the thinking that justified expanded education was imported from the United States, but these ideas increasingly were accepted by Canadian parents and taxpayers, particularly after the Russians put Sputnik into orbit and inadvertently gave rise to a concerted campaign for educational reform throughout North America.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 12

-Critics saw several reasons for the silence on refugees. -One was the common belief that refugees were looking for temporary asylum rather than permanent resettlement. -Another was the concern that not all refugees were necessarily responsible citizens driven out of their countries for the wrong reasons. -Finally, there was the racial factor. -Canada took some characteristic in 1956 when it decided as a humanitarian gesture to admit some of the 900,000 refugees living in camps in the Middle East. -A Canadian immigration team visited camps in Jordan and Lebanon, selecting 98 potential citizens from the 575 candidates presented to them by international refugee organizations. -Eventually, 39 heads of families, primarily of Palestinian origin, were admitted to Canada in 1956. -The tokenism manifest here is evident when the selection process is compared with that employed during and after the Hungarian Uprising of November 1956.

The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society in Post-War Canada Part 6

-Between 1946 and 1960 Canadian education, responding partly to the baby boom, partly to changing social expectations, transformed itself entirely. -Canadians had long accepted the concept of universal education in the primary grades. -In the 1940s and 1950s education for all was extended to secondary levels by raising the school-leaving age to 16. -In 1945 there were 1,741,000 children in provincially controlled schools. -By 1960-1 that figure had risen to 3,993,125. -The expenditure per pupil in public schools nearly tripled between 1945 and 1958. -Thousands of new schools had to be built to accommodate the increased student population. -Teachers, who before 1946 had needed only a year or two of training in teachers' college, by the 1960s had to have a university degree. -In 1956 the authors of "Crestwood Heights" observed that the flagship suburban community they had studied was, "literally, built around its schools." -In "Crestwood Heights" (Toronto's Forest Hill), education was "aimed primarily at preparing pupils for a middle-class vocation in a highly-industrialized culture". -Such was the goal of baby-boomer education, all across Canada by the early 1960s.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 4

-But the Liberal political advantage was not confined to support from francophones. -While national political parties needed to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters across the nation in order to gain power, only the Liberals consistently succeeded in this appeal, chiefly by staking out their political ground outside French Canada slightly to the left of centre. -Mackenzie King had specialized in adopting the most popular goals of the welfare state, often lifting them shamelessly from the platform of the CCF, a practice his successors continued. -The Liberals preferred to find urbane, well-educated leaders from the professional middle classes, oriented to federal service and politics. -Each man had his own expertise. -Mackenzie King was a professional labour consultant and negotiator who had studied economics at Chicago and Harvard and had written a well-known book entitled Industry and Humanity (1918). -St Laurent was a former law professor at Laval, who became a highly successful corporation lawyer and president of the Canadian Bar Associatision. -Pearson had begun as a history professor a history at the University of Toronto before joining the Department of External Affairs as a mandarin and professional diplomat. -None of these men had earned a doctorate, but all held civilian appointments that in our own time would probably require one.

The Cold War in Canada Part 1

-By 1945, Canada was probably already too deeply enmeshed in its linkages with the United States ever to cast them aside. -Great Britain, financially strapped, was not likely to provide much of a counterweight. -Canadian involvement in the Cold War was almost inescapable. -There were numerous signs in the last years of World War II that the Russians and the Americans were the emergent world superpowers, eager to carve up the world into respective spheres of influence. -Countries like Canada were virtually excluded from the process of peacemaking with the defeated enemies, as well as from most of the significant diplomatic manoeuvring of the post-war period. -The nation found itself unable to translate its wartime manpower and resource commitments into any post-war place in the decision-making corridors of power that would remake the world. -Canada protested privately about being left out of the surrender agreement with Germany, being left out of the drafting of a unilateral statement ending the war, and being left out of the Italian surrender. -The final straw may have been the Allied decision to admit France (a nation that had allowed itself to be occupied by the Nazis and had fought Germany with only an army in exile) to the ranks of the "Occupying Powers" of Berlin. -As a result of the war, Canada did substantially increase its overseas diplomatic contacts, with 25 posts abroad in 1944 and 36 by 1947, but it hardly improved its international position. -Towards the close of the war shrink to nothing. Canada tried to create some diplomatic distance from the Americans in their continual arm-wrestling with the Russians, but the notorious Gouzenko affair made it difficult for Ottawa to remain on sympathetic terms with the Russians.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 9

-By 1949 Canada was finally brought to the realization that its concentration on human brawn was biting off its nose to spite its face. -A new sponsorship program allowed up to 500 highly trained displaced persons into Canada, although it emphasized that most admitted could not immediately practise their skills. -On the other hand, some countries, particularly the United States, had always been quite willing to accept skilled enemy aliens, even those openly Nazi, if they were scientists working in such areas as weapons research. -Few scientists, no more than 50, were admitted to Canada before 1950. -In a well-received book published in 1951, economist Mabel Timlin actually studied the question of "absorptive capacity," concluding that Canada was capable of accepting larger numbers of immigrants from an economic standpoint and that such acceptance, by increasing the population, "should mean a higher physical product per capita and hence higher real incomes for Canadian citizens". -The displaced persons who came to Canada in the years immediately after the war shared much in common with one another. -Most had suffered years of emotional turmoil, both in Europe and then in Canada. -The sorts of jobs available to most immigrants, at the bottom of the occupational chain, tended to be in remote districts and subject to seasonal unemployment. -The Canadian government provided little counselling or other assistance for the newcomers, leaving voluntary organizations to fill the gap as best they could. -On the other hand, the post-war newcomers had the great psychological advantage of knowing that they could never return to a former life, thus providing a sense of finality and permanence to their new situation, and that almost any material conditions were better than those they had suffered in the refugee camps.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 3

-By the end of 1945, perhaps two million refugees and other displaced persons remained in allied territory, mostly in Germany but also in Austria and Italy. -The majority had been housed in refugee camps. -Few of these people had proper documentation, and more than a few had been Nazi soldiers and collaborators, even war criminals, who now posed as innocent victims. -Establishing the legitimacy of each refugee was virtually impossible; therefore, Canadian officials did not want to accept immigrants from these camps. - An investigation into immigration policy was conducted in May of 1946 by the Canadian Senate's Standing Committee on Immigration and Labour, which, to the surprise of immigration officials, supported such immigration. -This report emphasized that "Canada, as a humane and Christian nation, should do her share toward the relief of refugees and displaced persons". -The Committee also criticized the government for its failure to produce a proper immigration policy.

Federal-Provincial Relations in Post War Canada Part 4

-By the mid 20th century, Canadian political leaders had worked out a variety of informal means for dealing with matters of constitutional disagreement. -One of the most important was the federal-provincial conference, which was employed regularly after 1945 to deal with financial business and gradually came to address constitutional matters as well. -So long as the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis represented Quebec at these gatherings, Quebec stood by a traditional view of the 1867 arrangement. -The province protected its existing powers fiercely, but did not particularly seek to expand them. -Another dimension was added to the post-war constitutional situation through John Diefenbaker's insistence on the introduction of a Canadian Bill of Rights, however. -The Americans had produced their Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to their 1787 Constitution) as part of the process of ratifying the Constitution. -In Canada, the British constitutional tradition insisted that Parliament was supreme, while the courts automatically protected against the abuse of power.

The Cold War in Canada Part 4 (The Search for Middle-Power Status)

-By the time NATO was established in 1949, the Cold War had extended beyond Europe into Asia, where a Communist government headed by Chou En-lai had taken over China. -Communism made gains in other places like Indochina and Korea, which had been partitioned after the war. -The United States always saw these Communist governments as mere extensions of international Communism rather than as movements of legitimate national liberation. -In 1950 North Korea invaded American-supported South Korea. -The Americans took advantage of a temporary Soviet boycott of the Security Council of the United Nations to invoke universal collective security in regard to the Korean situation. -The Canadian government was in a quandary. -It had no peacetime military of its own to send, nor was it enthusiastic about participating in collective security under the American aegis.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 1

-Canada ended World War II with neither an immigration nor a refugee policy sufficient for the situations in which it would soon find itself, particularly internationally. -The Canadian government and the Canadian people were, by and large, exclusionist, racist, and not very humane in their attitudes towards immigration. -Over the next few years, this position would change, however. -Circumstances, as well as slowly changing values, would literally force Canada to accept millions of immigrants, including both displaced person and refugees (the distinction between the two was never entirely clear in the eyes of the public). -Whether the people came from now non-existent countries or had been uprooted or fled from states in which they no longer had homes, by 1962, the government would overhaul its immigration procedures to bring at least a formal end to racist immigration policy.

The Growth of the State Part 4

-Canada ended the war with a limited federal pension program, a universal family allowance scheme, and housing legislation designed chiefly to provide employment. -In 1945 Ottawa had also proposed to the provinces a national universal pension scheme for Canadians over 70 (with a means test provincially administered for those 65 to 69), a national public assistance scheme for the unemployed, and a health insurance scheme to be shared by the provinces and the federal government. -The almost inevitable failure of the Dominion-Provincial Conference on Reconstruction to achieve these objectives meant that federal progress on social protection moved ahead extremely slowly. -Apart from the creation of the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation to assist in providing low-cost mortgage loans to Canadian families and a limited home-building program (10,000 houses per year), little happened on the housing front in the 15 years after 1945. -On the health-care front, the government in 1948 established a fund for health research and hospital construction, but did little else on health until 1957 when it passed the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act. -This legislation allowed the federal government to provide 50% of the cost of provincial hospital insurance plans. -A new Old Age Security Act of 1951 provided a $40-per-month pension to all Canadians over the age of 70, but still insisted on a means test for those between 65 and 69. -In 1956 a limited federal Unemployment Assistance Act with a means test passed Parliament. -Education remained almost entirely a provincial matter before 1960.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 2

-Canada was hardly alone in discovering that culture in its various forms was an important matter in the post-war world. -Few nations, however, had a greater need for conscious cultural policy than Canada. -It was a nation without a single unifying language and with at least two of what many after 1945 began to call "founding cultures." -At the same time, francophones and anglophones often meant something quite different when they talked about culture. -While nobody doubted that French Canada's culture was distinctive, defining the culture of the rest of the nation was more problematic. -More than most nations, Canada was exposed to external cultural influences, particularly from its behemoth neighbour to the south, the United States. -The Americans purveyed to Canada and then to the world a profoundly American cultural style, anchored in popular culture.

The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society in Post-War Canada Part 1

-Canadians emerged from World War II with 15 years of disruption behind them. -Normal expectations for family life had been interrupted in various ways. -During the Depression, marriage and birth rates had decreased and the average age at marriage had risen. Between 1939 and 1952 the marriage rate jumped substantially, especially among the young. -More family units were formed each year, while the birth rate and the annual immigration intake rose. -Birth rates climbed because women who had married early tended to begin bearing children early as well, and to continue expanding their families while remaining at home. -The result was a substantial increase in the total numbers of children in Canada between 1941 and 1961. -This period was known as the baby boom, a demographic phenomenon that occurred in the United States during the same period. -As these children arrived at each stage of life in waves, their sheer numbers put heavy pressure on the facilities that had to accommodate them. -The phenomenon hit primary education in the 1940s and then rolled progressively through the Canadian educational system and other aspects of society as the baby boomers got older. -Secondary schools were affected in the 1950s, universities in the 1960s, employment in the later 1960s, and so on.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 13

-Canadians had seen the events in Hungary unfold on their television screens, with young student "freedom fighters" armed with nothing but stones facing Soviet tanks in the streets. -Occurring as it did in the midst of the Cold War, the plight of the more than 200,000 refugees who fled to Austria quickly gained public sympathy. -Immigration Minister Jack Pickersgill moved quickly, and before the end of November he announced the government's plan to provide free passage to Canada for every refugee who met Canadian admissions standards. -By the spring of 1957, Canada had brought nearly 20,000 Hungarians to North America on board more than 200 chartered airplane flights, and by the end of the year another 10,000 Hungarians had arrived in Canada. -These refugees were mainly young male students with urban backgrounds; many were Jewish. -The new arrivals were, of course, fervently anti-Communist, which simultaneously made them popular with Cold Warriors (the House of Commons welcomed them enthusiastically almost to a person) and to some extent unpopular with some of the older generation of Hungarians in Canada, whose politics leaned further left. -The enthusiasm of their welcome may have led some of the newcomers to assume that life in Canada would be easier than it turned out to be, particularly as many suffered from severe trauma because of their experiences.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 11

-Categorizing culture has never been simple. -One of the principal artistic developments of the post-war period, the commercialization of Inuit art, well demonstrates the problems. -The Inuit of the Arctic had for centuries carved a complex image world in ivory and other materials, mainly for their own pleasure. -In the late 1940s several Canadian artists working in the North, led by James Archibald Houston (1921-2005), encouraged the Inuit to offer their carvings for sale in the south through co-operative marketing. -Later in the 1950s Houston would teach the Inuit how to translate their striking images into prints. -The federal government encouraged commercialization, with the assistance of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild and the Hudson's Bay Company. -Inuit artists quickly produced some of Canada's most distinctive images, known around the world. -Their combination of tradition and deliberate commercialization, while not unique in this or any other period, resists facile generalizations.

The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society in Post-War Canada Part 4

-Central to any post-war middle-class household were its children, around whose upbringing the parents' lives increasingly revolved. -The baby-boom generation grew up in a child-centred atmosphere in both home and school. -Older standards of discipline and toughness in the parent-child relationship were replaced by permissiveness. -New child-rearing attitudes found their popular expression in "The Pocket Book of Baby" and "Child Care" by the American pediatrician Benjamin Spock, which outsold the Bible in Canada after the war. -Spock replaced more austere Canadian manuals. -The book was one of the earliest mass-market paperbacks, sold over the counter at drugstores and supermarkets for less than 50 cents. -In its pages the reader could find continual reassurance. -Use your common sense, said Spock; almost anything reasonable is okay. -"Trust Yourself" was his first injunction. -The good doctor came down hard against the use of coercion of any sort. -In toilet training, for example, he insisted that "Practically all those children who regularly go on soiling after 2 are those whose mothers have made a big issue of it and those who have become frightened by painful movements." -Spock explained that children passed through stages. --Once parents recognized what stage of development their child had reached, they could understand otherwise incomprehensible behaviour and recognize that seemingly exceptional problems were really quite common.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 10

-Clearly, Canada spent large sums of public money on scientific research, but the nation was not getting much industrial advantage from the expenditures. -Canadian scientists had co-operated with American counterparts to produce the IBM 101 electronic statistical machine in time for it to analyze the 1951 Canadian census data. -But before long, the new technology became American, and Canadians were never in the front lines of the microchip revolution of later years. -In 1962, expenditure on research and development as a proportion of sales averaged 0.7% by all Canadian manufacturers, as opposed to 2% by American manufacturers and even larger proportions in Germany and Japan.

Federal-Provincial Relations in Post War Canada Part 2

-Constitutional revision was no easy matter to contemplate. -As we have seen, conflict had been literally built into Confederation by the British North America Act. -The Dominion of Canada was a federal state, with a central government in Ottawa and local governments in the provinces. -While the intention of the Fathers of Confederation had been to produce a strong central government, they had been forced by the provinces (especially what would become Quebec) to guarantee them separate identities. -These identities were protected through an explicit division of powers between federal and provincial governments in sections 91 and 92 of the British North America Act of 1867. -The division thus created reflected the state of political thinking in the 1860s. -It gave the federal arm the authority to create a viable national economy. -It gave the provinces the power to protect what at the time were regarded as local and cultural matters. -Some of the provincial powers, such as those over education, were acquired because the provinces demanded them. -Others, such as the powers over the health and welfare of provincial inhabitants, were not regarded by the Fathers as critical for a national government. -Lighthouses and post offices were more important than public medical care in the 1860s.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 6

-Contributing to the new influx of displaced persons were fresh pressures on the Canadian government in 1947. -First, the rampaging economic prosperity being supervised by C.D. Howe (Minister of Reconstruction and Supply) required more labour. -"The speeding up of the immigration movement," he insisted, had to be "treated as a matter of high priority". -Second, the nature of the refugee lobby changed substantially. -Symptomatic of this shift was the establishment in June 1947 of the Canadian Christian Council for Resettlement of Refugees (CCCRR). -This organization was composed of various German immigrant aid groups and concentrated on helping refugees from Germany and Austria, especially the Volksdeutsche, those Germans who had lived outside Germany's borders. -With the assistance of the CCCRR, more than 120,000 refugees ultimately were admitted in Canada, placing the nation behind only the United States, Australia, and Israel in the number of refugees it received in the post-war period.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 1

-Culture in Canada and Canadian Culture (the two were never quite synonymous) after World War II emerged as major public issues. -This was a major development of the post-war period. -Culture had not been entirely ignored before 1945, but it had always taken a back seat to political and economic matters. -Canada's cultural performance (or lack of it) was explained chiefly in terms of priorities. -Culture was a luxury that would come only with political and economic maturity. -Such maturity was now at hand. -A number of parallel developments affecting culture occurred after 1945. -One of the most obvious saw both federal and provincial governments attempt to articulate and implement public cultural policy. -The policy initiatives were driven chiefly by concerns to protect homegrown culture from being overwhelmed by external influences. -They helped create a variety of new cultural institutions in the post-war period. -On the creative level, many contemporary artists began deliberately cultivating a naive or native style, with considerable public success, thus helping to breach the older boundaries of art and culture. -Other artists enthusiastically joined international movements.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 5

-Despite its mandate to articulate a national cultural policy, especially in radio and television broadcasting, the Commission was chiefly interested in elite culture and elitist ways of dealing with it. -What needed to be preserved was a culture of excellence that was "resolutely Canadian." -In 1951 it recommended the creation of a national television service as quickly as possible. -It also wanted both radio and television broadcasting to be "vested in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation." -This monopoly would help "to avoid excessive commercialism and to encourage Canadian content and the use of Canadian talent". -It supported the expansion of the National Film Board, the National Gallery, the National Museum, the Public Archives, the Library of Parliament, and the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of the National Parks Service. -It also recommended the extension of the concept of the National Research Council (for scientific research) into the humanities and social sciences through the creation of a Council for the Arts, Letters, Humanities, and Social Sciences. -Much of its agenda would be implemented in piecemeal fashion by federal governments over the next decade. -The Canada Council, for example, was established in 1957.

The Cold War in Canada Part 3

-Economic considerations impelled Canada in an inevitable direction as the international situation unfolded and the nation became America's docile junior partner. -Prime Minister King was leery of a complete economic integration proposed by the Americans late in the war, and supported by many of his own civil servants. -But by this point, Canada and the United States had become closer trading partners than ever before. -Moreover, when the American Congress approved the Marshall Plan early in 1948 (in which the United States proposed to rebuild war-torn Europe with unrestricted gifts of money and goods), Canada was forced to do something. -If European reconstruction was limited solely to American goods, Canadian trade would shrink to nothing. -Canada needed market access into the American program, that is, permission for Europe to use American money to buy Canadian goods. -The US readily agreed. -King used North Atlantic security as a way out of continental free trade. -A security treaty would not only deflect reciprocity but, as a multilateral arrangement, might provide a much-needed international counterbalance against American military domination. -The Americans were not enthusiastic about a multilateral arrangement for North Atlantic security, but the Canadians pressed hard. -Some Canadian diplomats even wanted non-Atlantic Commonwealth countries admitted, and Escott Reid, the deputy under secretary of state for external affairs, sought a treaty that encompassed social and economic issues as well. -The Americans ultimately accepted the North Atlantic Treaty's military and security provisions, particularly the centralization of command under what would inevitably be an American general. -They quietly scuttled other aspects of the alliance.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 1

-Economic prosperity and growth were at the root of all developments from 1946 to 1960 and beyond. -Almost all aspects of planning in both the public and private sectors were based on assumptions of constant growth, and such thinking seemed to work. -Between 1946 and 1960, per capita income in Canada nearly doubled, thus increasing the Canadian standard of living. -Canadians believed there were no limits to growth. -Great Depressions were disasters of the past, and the standard of living could continue to rise. -Politicians and their expert advisers argued that governments could now manage economies. -They could correct for negative movements soon after they began. -The operative economic wisdom was Keynesianism, named after the English economist John Maynard Keynes, whose writings provided much of the theoretical underpinning of the new affluence.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 17

-Fairclough managed to get cabinet approval for an Order-in-Council in 1959 that limited the entry of non-dependant relatives into Canada. -This limitation immediately affected the Italian flow but also the flow from other Mediterranean countries such as Portugal and Greece, that featured large extended families and chain migration. -The ethnic communities of these nations raised a wave of protest, claiming the new policy discriminated against them. -Fairclough insisted that over the long term the limitation on sponsorship would produce a more diversified immigration. -But she was forced to back down, stating that she was asking the cabinet to withdraw the Order-in-Council in favour of new regulations to be introduced later. -This initiative failed partly because the issues were not clearly understood and partly because the government had not taken sufficient account of the vociferousness of the ethnic community; when push came to shove, the government did not want to alienate ethnic voters. -Post-war immigration greatly changed the face of Canada, especially in Ontario. -Most of the new immigrants settled in the larger cities of the province, or in urban concentrations in other provinces. -The Canadian city became honeycombed with ethnic neighbourhoods, featuring churches, markets, bakeries, restaurants, and clubs to cater to particular local tastes.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 10

-In June 1950, by Order-in-Council PC 2856, Canada expanded admissible categories of European immigrants to include any healthy individual of good character with needed skills and an ability to integrate. -That same year saw the Department of Citizenship and Immigration established to replace a previous administrative structure in which immigration had been a branch of the Department of Mines and Resources. -Canada now had an immigration policy of sorts, and a separate agency to administer it. -In 1951 Canadian immigration policy reached out tentatively beyond Europe. -The Canadian government agreed with the governments of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon to admit a few additional newcomers from each of these nations beyond the old quotas on Asians.

The Growth of the State Part 1

-Government at all levels, federal, provincial, and municipal-grew extremely rapidly after the war. -For the Dominion government, the extension of its power and authority represented a continuation of wartime momentum. -For provincial governments, extensions of power were necessary to counter federal incursions in areas traditionally reserved for the provinces. -All levels of government found the Canadian public responsive to the introduction of new social services, even if it was piecemeal -The emergence of a much more powerful and costly public sector was fuelled partly by increased social programs, partly by the growth of a Canadian public enterprise system after the war. -While the Canadian public enterprise system went back to the 19th century, the development of Crown corporations greatly accelerated during and especially after World War II. -Both federal and provincial governments created Crown corporations, publicly owned and operated. -They modelled management structures on private enterprise and usually administered these corporations on a hands-off basis. -Many Crown corporations came into existence to provide important services that could not be profitably offered by private enterprise. -The CCF government of Saskatchewan created many Crown corporations from the time of its election in 1944.

The Cold War in Canada Part 2

-Igor Gouzenko (1919-82) was an obscure cipher clerk in the Russian embassy in Ottawa. -In September 1945 he brought material to the RCMP that demonstrated how the Russians had organized a spy ring in Canada during the war. -Nowadays spying is taken for granted, but at the time Gouzenko's information and the subsequent arrests of Canadian citizens (including one member of Parliament) were absolutely shocking. -Canada did not exchange ambassadors again with the Russians until after 1953. -In public opinion polls in 1946, Canadians proved far more willing than people in other nations to believe that Russia sought to dominate the world. -The Gouzenko incident would also send shock waves across the Western world, for loose ends from the files made it apparent that the Russians had suborned not only Canadians but their allies. -Moreover, it became evident that the tight security connected with research on atomic energy carried on in Montreal had been breached. -The Russians had received secret information that may have aided them in developing their own atomic bomb in 1949. -With the two superpowers both possessing nuclear capability, the standoff that characterized the Cold War began in earnest. -Unlike the British and French, the Canadian government declared its refusal to use nuclear power for military purposes.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 3

-In 1945 (or at any point earlier), Canada had considerably more cultural activity than most Canadians would have recognized at the time. -One of the problems was that cultural commentators relied on highly restrictive critical canons and categories. -Much of Canada's cultural life went on outside the boundaries of what critics and experts usually regarded as Culture with a capital C. -Canadians became involved in culture on a non-professional basis for their own pleasure. -The resultant culture came from folk traditions more than from high art. -Moreover, it was not necessarily distinctly Canadian. -By 1945, Canadian government, particularly at the federal level with the Public Archives, the National Gallery, the National Film Board, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, already had a substantial if largely unrecognized role in culture. -Prime Minister St Laurent was told during the 1949 elections that the Liberals might lose votes to the CCF from "those Canadians who have a distinct national consciousness and feel that more should be done to encourage national culture and strengthen national feeling." -As a result, St Laurent appointed the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, usually known as the Massey Commission after its chairman, Vincent Massey.

The Growth of the State Part 5

-In 1945, the last year of the war, federal expenditure was just over $5 billion, with another $451 million spent by the provinces and $250 million by municipalities. -In 1960 the Dominion still spent $5 billion, although far less on the military, but provincial governments now spent $2.5 billion and municipalities another $1.7 billion. -Much of the increase went to social services. -The result was a vast expansion in the numbers of government employees. -In 1945, the last year of the war, the Dominion had 30,240 permanent civil servants and 85,668 temporary ones. -At the beginning of 1961, it employed 337.416 Canadians, most of them "permanent" and many of them female. -Both provincial and municipal employment grew even faster. -The provinces employed 50,000 in 1946 and 257,000 in 1966, while the municipalities increased from 56,000 in 1946 to 224,000 two decades later. -By 1960 there was a sense (at least on the federal level) that matters could get out of hand. -The Diefenbaker government in that year created the Royal Commission on Government Organization to improve efficiency and economy. -It was chaired by J. Grant Glassco (1905-68).

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 15

-In 1958 Prime Minister John Diefenbaker appointed a woman as Minister of Immigration. -Ellen Fairclough (1905-2004) was a Hamilton businesswoman and was the first female appointed to a federal cabinet post. -Immigration was not expected by Diefenbaker to be a heavy responsibility, and Fairclough was given Indian Affairs as well. -But a number of general problems related to immigration had surfaced by the later 1950s. -3 were of critical importance. -First and foremost were the ongoing difficulties with the sponsorship program, by which those already in the country could sponsor close relatives as immigrants. -Second, there was the need for an expanded and liberalized selection policy, particularly in terms of attracting non-Europeans. -Third, there was a need for administrative reform. -Fairclough first tackled the sponsorship program. -With the virtual end of the European refugee influx in the early 1950s (except for the Hungarians), the basic way in which immigrants got to Canada was through being sponsored by close relatives already in the country. -The sponsorship system, begun in 1946, had some advantages, as it authorized chain migration (by which one immigrant sponsored another) and provided a means of integrating the newcomers quickly into the Canadian community, as well as of preventing them from becoming public charges. -The national group that took greatest advantage of sponsorship was the Italians. -More than 240,000 Italian immigrants arrived in Canada between 1946 and 1961, over 90% of them sponsored by relatives, by far the heaviest proportion of sponsored arrivals among any immigrant group. -Critics complained that many of these newcomers would not have qualified for admission had they not been sponsored.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 6

-In this period of growth, nobody paid much attention to environmental issues. -"Affluence," not "effluence," was the watchword. -Prior to 1960, Canadians were only dimly aware of the dangers of "pollution," a word that the had only just come into common use. -Nuclear experts insisted that nuclear accidents were extremely unlikely and did not worry about the disposal of half-life radioactive nuclear wastes. -Petrochemical plants dumped waste into surrounding waters and paper-processing plants dumped poisonous mercury and other effluents into rivers and lakes. -Solid industrial waste was usually buried, often used as landfill to create new housing estates near large urban centres, such as the Love Canal area in New York near Niagara Falls. -Many inland rivers and lakes deteriorated into cesspools of industrial waste and human sewage. -Acid rain spread, unrecognized as an international problem. -Farmers dumped chemical fertilizers and weed killers into the oil, where they eventually ended up in underground aquifers. -Economic growth and development were the measures of all things, and the few Canadians preaching caution were often regarded as a lunatic fringe of troublemakers.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 2 (Components)

-In truth, the overall pattern of affluence was neither solely attributable to government management nor distinctive to Canada. -It was general across the Western industrial world. -It started, in part, with the rebuilding of the war-torn economies of Europe and Asia. -It continued with heavy expenditures on military defence during the Cold War. -Filling consumer wants after a generation's deferral of expectations helped. -Then prosperity continued under its own momentum for a time, aided by the baby boom. -Foreign trade was an important component of Canadian affluence. -The volume of imports and exports increased substantially. -Canada became integrated into the American trading market as Great Britain decreased in importance as a trading partner. -The government set the value of the Canadian dollar in relation to the American dollar, and attempted to control Canadian foreign exchange and Canadian domestic banking through the Bank of Canada. -After 1954, banks were allowed to extend consumer credit and mortgage loans, although before 1967 they were limited in the interest they could charge. -Canada's monetary policy was to increase the supply of money in circulation, producing inflation that eventually would run out of control.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 7

-Liberal dominance before 1957 was moderated less by the opposition parties than by other factors. -One was the increased size and scope of the apparatus of bureaucracy, including a "mandarinate" at the top of the civil service. -Powerful senior civil servants stayed in their posts despite changes of minister or government. -They provided most of the policy initiatives for the government. -Another important limitation was the force of public opinion, which often restrained policy initiatives and provided a public sense of fair play. -The Liberals under St Laurent lost the 1957 election for many reasons, but one of the most critical was a public sense that they had become too arrogant. -Government closure of debate over the Trans-Canada Pipeline in 1956 served as a symbol for Liberal contempt of the democratic process. -As the new leader in 1958, Lester Pearson blundered in, challenging the minority government of John Diefenbaker to resign in his favour without offering any compelling reasons for so doing.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 9

-Liberal success in Newfoundland was a product chiefly of unusual local circumstances. -Joseph R. Smallwood parlayed strong Liberal support for Confederation with Canada into an unbroken tenure as the province's first Premier from 1949 until early 1972. -After a somewhat complicated journey, Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. -Effectively bankrupt, the province had surrendered its elective government to Great Britain in 1933. -It was governed until 1949 by an appointed commission, which balanced the budget but was not very popular. -After 1945 the British government sought to get rid of its colonial obligations and ordered a National Convention elected in 1946 to decide Newfoundland's future. -In a preliminary referendum in 1948, 69,400 voters (44.5%) voted for a return to the pre-1933 situation, 64,066 (41.1%) voted for Confederation with Canada, and 22,311 (14.3%) voted for the continuation of the Commission of Government. -Seven weeks later, on 22 July 1948, a second referendum brought an 84.9% turnout: 78,323 Newfoundlanders (52.3%) voted for Canada and 71,344 (47.7%) for the resumption of Crown colony status. -Confederation did best outside the Avalon Peninsula and St John's. -The Canadian cabinet accepted the decision on 27 July 1948, allowing Smallwood, now leader of the Liberal Party, to head an interim government that easily won the province's first election in many years.

French Canada after World War II Part 2

-Many Canadian commentators outside Quebec who were aware of the province's transformation assumed that the continued electoral success of Duplessis and the Union Nationale represented confusion on the part of many French Canadians. -Since social and economic modernization, in the long run, should lead to French-Canadian assimilation into the majority society of North America, said external observers, in the short run it must be causing internal chaos. -The standard post-war assumptions about Quebec's modernization, that it meant short-term confusion and long-term loss of distinctiveness, were not particularly valid. -The socio-economic transformation was accompanied by a series of profound ideological shifts within Quebec society that shook its very foundations. -The patterns of that development ought to have been comprehensible to anyone familiar with what was happening elsewhere in developing societies. -The power and authority of defenders of traditional Quebec nationalism, including the Roman Catholic Church, were being swept away by a new secular nationalism that had become fully articulated under Duplessis. -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 ideologies would find popular labels as "separatism" and "federalism."

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 5

-The Progressive Conservative Party also had three leaders in this period: John Bracken (1942-8), George Drew (1948-56), and John Diefenbaker (1956-67). Bracken and Drew had been successful provincial premiers with little federal experience, while Diefenbaker had been an opposition spokesman in the House of Commons from 1940. -Bracken had been a university professor (of field husbandry) and administrator before entering politics. -The other 2 had been small-town lawyers. -All 3 were regarded as being to the left of their parties, and the PC party platforms of these years looked decidedly progressive. -Diefenbaker was "sui generis", a brilliant if old-fashioned public orator and genuine western populist. -All the PC leaders had strong sympathies for the ordinary underprivileged Canadian, although only Diefenbaker managed to convince the public of his concerns. -None of these men spoke French comfortably, and they left what campaigning was done in Quebec to others.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 16

-Most family-sponsored Italians were either dependants (women, children, the elderly) not likely to enter the Canadian labour force, or unskilled males able to work only as labourers on heavy construction sites and thus likely to flood the unskilled job market. -More than one-half (60%) of these newcomers were from southern Italy, with the regions of Abruzzi, Molise, and Calabria providing the vast bulk of the immigrants. -Most sponsors were male, and especially before 1956, males predominated in the immigration. -But the chains gradually expanded, and by the later 1950s whole families and entire villages were coming to Canada. -By the end of the decade, Immigration Department studies indicated that fewer than 10% of these new arrivals would have been admitted to Canada under other circumstances. -Because of the volume of Italian immigration, the Italian agents for immigrants to Canada committed fraudulent practices, chiefly the misrepresentation of facts upon immigration applications. -The Immigration Department began a deliberate bureaucratic slowdown of Italian immigration, as well as introducing an informal quota of 25,000 immigrants per year. -The result was a huge backlog of cases, well in excess of 50,000.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 14

-Not all the immigrants who came to Canada in the years after World War II remained in the country. -One student of that immigration calculated that about 23% of all post-war immigrants had left the country by 1961, and further estimated "that Canada succeeded in retaining approximately 60% of the immigrants who entered the country from the United States, about 70% of those from Britain, and 80% of those from other countries". -For most post-war European immigrants to Canada, their commitment to their new nation was fairly strong. -In many cases, immigrants had few family members and sometimes no country to which to return. -In other cases, a return to a much less prosperous lifestyle at home was possible but hardly desirable. -For the British, the years immediately after the war were ones of deprivation, but economic conditions gradually returned to normal in the United Kingdom, and social conditions under the "welfare state" may even have improved, particularly for the working classes. -In any case, upward of 100,000 British immigrants to Canada returned to their homeland during the 1950s. -Most had been reasonably successful economically but had not substantially improved their social or occupational standing. -Those who had married (and/or had children) in Canada were far more likely to remain, and single people, especially females, were far more likely to return home. -The presence of close relatives in Canada was also important in the decision to remain.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 6

-Not long after the Massey Commission had reported, the Royal Commission on Broadcasting was formed in 1955, chaired by Robert Fowler (1901-80) of Montreal. -It made its final report in 1957. -The Fowler Commission had to deal with the shift from radio to television and the prevalence of American-produced records, movies, and shows in both media. -It insisted that the century-old Canadian answer to Americanization was for the government to provide "conscious stimulation" through financial assistance, an approach it clearly favoured. -In addition to subsidies and protective measures, the Fowler Commission recommended another cultural strategy: regulated competition with a "mixed system of public and private ownership." -The Diefenbaker government translated Fowler's recommendations into its Broadcasting Act of 1958, creating the Board of Broadcast Governors to monitor broadcasting to ensure that the service would be "basically Canadian in content and character". -In September 1952, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation opened the nation's first two television stations in Toronto and Montreal, and over the next two years it extended its television coverage to 7 other metropolitan areas. -At the time, only 146,000 Canadians owned television receivers (or "sets" as they were usually called).

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 8

-Not until 1957, however, did American investment and the growth of multinationals become important public issues. -As late as 1956, one of the leading textbooks in Canadian economic history referred to foreign investment as "one of the mainsprings of progress" without mentioning its less desirable aspects. -The foreign investment issue was brought to the public's attention by the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects, chaired by Walter Gordon. -The report of the Commission, released after the Liberal government that had appointed it was defeated in 1957, observed that "No other nation as highly industrialized as Canada has such a large proportion of industry controlled by non-resident concerns". -The Commission's concern was not immediately shared by the public, however.

The Growth of the State Part 2

-One of the largest public enterprises of the 1950s, the St. Laurence Seaway, was a Crown corporation. -For many rural Canadians the extension of electricity into all but the most remote corners of the country was a great development of the post-war period. -Many provinces consolidated electric utilities in Crown corporations after the war to extend services. -The federal government had hoped to expand Canada's social services after the war, at least partly to justify continuing control of the major tax fields it had acquired under wartime emergency conditions. -At the Dominion-Provincial Conference on Reconstruction, which began on 6 August 1945 (the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan), Ottawa discovered that not all the provinces were willing to withdraw permanently from the fields of personal and corporate income tax. -Quebec and Ontario, particularly, were equally unenthusiastic about surrendering their constitutional rights to social services. -The provincial rebuff to Ottawa in 1945 did not mean that the Dominion gave up on social security measures. -Both funding and constitutional haggling, however, would be continuing problems.

French Canada after World War II Part 6

-Signs of the profound changes that had occurred and were still occurring in Quebec could be seen in the province's intellectual and artistic communities. -In 1948 Paul-Emile Borduas released his famous manifesto, written originally in 1947. -"Refus global" was a rambling series of passionate, almost poetic utterances attacking virtually everything in Quebec society at the time. -Some young painters were not satisfied with the combination of spontaneity and traditional spatial perspectives advocated by Borduas. -Led by Fernand Leduc, they produced a manifesto in 1955, signed "Les Plasticiens", that was less inflammatory than "Refus global", but that also insisted on artistic freedom. -It said that its subscribers were drawn to "plastic qualities: tone, texture, forms, lines, and the final unity between elements". -Abstractionism quickly ceased to be regarded as particularly avant-garde in Quebec. -In the theatre, some attempt was made to break out of the constraints imposed by realism. -One particularly striking example was "Le Marcheur" (The Walker) by Yves Thériault, which was presented in 1950. -It featured a dominant father (never seen on stage), who controlled the lives of everyone around him at the same time that he united them in their hatred for him. -The father could be seen as the traditional French-Canadian paternal tyrant, or Premier Duplessis, or the Church.

Federal-Provincial Relations in Post War Canada Part 3

-Over time the division of powers gave the provinces the responsibility, in whole or in part, for many of the expensive aspects of government, including health, education, and welfare. -Provincial ability to raise the revenue needed to meet these obligations was limited, however. -Many important aspects of welfare came to be shared among governments. -The BNA Act's division of powers was clearly dated, ambiguous, and contentious. -Despite the miracle of Canada's survival, the Constitution was constantly strained. -Then, as now, critics of the existing system stressed its tensions, while its defenders lauded its capacity for survival. -One of the key problems was the settling of disputes over interpretation of the BNA Act itself. -The Act provided for a judicature modelled on British arrangements, with a Supreme Court at the top. -This Court, established in 1875, was not always the court of final recourse on constitutional matters. -Until 1949 constitutional questions could be finally appealed to a British imperial court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. -In the years after Confederation, the JCPC had interpreted the Constitution in ways highly favourable to the provinces. -Even with the successful elimination, after the war, of this example of continued colonialism, amendment of the Constitution was extremely difficult. -Amending procedures were not spelled out in the Act itself. -The convention had grown up that amendment required the consent of all provinces, which was not easy to obtain. -Moreover, such amendment could ultimately be achieved only by an Act of the British Parliament.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 9

-Part of the critique of American multinationalism was related to Canada's scientific research and development policy. -Critics noted that Canada spent a far smaller proportion of its science dollar on the development side of research and development. -They added that industry in Canada contributed a far smaller share of scientific activity than in any other highly industrialized nation. -The reasons for these lags, many insisted, were to be found in Canada's ability as a branch-plant economy to import technology developed elsewhere. -In 1959, example, industry was responsible for only 39% of scientific research in Canada, as opposed to 58% in Britain and 78% in the United States. -By this time, the federal government's outlays in scientific activity were in excess of $200 million per year, while in 1959 Canadian industry spent only $96.7 million on research and development at home/ -Research money for the Avro Arrow was supplied not by A.V. Roe, but by the Canadian federal government. -Moreover, 95% of all Canadian patents between 1957 and 1961 involved foreign applicants, nearly 70% of them American.

The Cold War in Canada Part 6 (The Retreat from Internationalism)

-Part of the gradual change in Canada's place in the world was a result of technology. -When, in 1953, the USSR added a hydrogen bomb to its nuclear arsenal, Canadians became even more conscious that their nation sat uneasily between the two nuclear giants. -Everyone's attention turned to air defence. -Canada expanded the RCAF and began development of the famed CF-105 (the Avro Arrow). -The United States pushed for increased electronic surveillance in the Arctic. -In 1955 Canada agreed to allow the Americans to construct at their own expense a series of northern radar posts called the Distant Early Warning (or DEW) Line. -The Americans also pressed for an integrated bilateral air defence system, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), which was agreed to by the Diefenbaker government soon after it took office in 1957. -The Canadian government made a half-hearted attempt to educate its citizens on the dangers of nuclear war, but they were so horrible and unthinkable that most Canadians resolutely refused to pay much attention.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 8

-Perhaps even more than the automobile or the detached bungalow on its carefully manicured plot of green grass, television symbolized the aspirations and emergent lifestyles of the new suburban generation of Canadians. -Unlike other leisure time activities that required "going out," television was a completely domesticated entertainment package that drew Canadian families into their homes. -Until the late 1960s, most families owned only one television set, located in the living room. -Particularly on weekend evenings during the long Canadian winter, the only sign of life on entire blocks of residential neighbourhoods, or on rural roads with their scattered farmhouses, was the flickering glow of black-and-white television sets coming from otherwise darkened houses. -The family could entertain friends who enjoyed the same popular programs, and everyone could enjoy snacks served on small metal "TV tables" or even a meal taken from the freezer and heated in the oven (the "TV dinner"). -Some of what people watched was Canadian-produced, but most prime-time shows came from the Hollywood dream factory. -Despite the popularity of Saturday evening's "Hockey Night in Canada," first telecast in 1954, television served to draw Canadians ever deeper into the seductive world of American popular culture.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 4 (Sectors of the Economy)

-Regional disparities in manufacturing continued and even grew. -Central Canada, especially Ontario, experienced most of the gains in manufacturing. -Ontario produced over 50% of total manufacturing value added in the nation and dominated the manufacture of durable goods and big-ticket consumer items in many industries. -In 1957, for example, Ontario turned out 98.8% of Canada's motor vehicles, 90.7% of its heavy industrial goods, 90% of its agricultural implements, and 80.7% of its major household appliances. -Canadian manufacturing served two principal markets. -One was the domestic consumer market, which exploded after 15 years of "doing without. -The other was a huge market for military hardware to equip Canada's armed forces, which greatly increased in number after 1950. -Canada was ambitious to produce homegrown equipment, but had to settle for subcontracting parts of Canadian orders through American branch plants. -The Diefenbaker government's decision to scrap the Avro Arrow in 1959 ended the last serious Canadian venture in the independent development of military hardware.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 4

-The Massey Commission existed because its time had come. -It did not invent a cultural policy but merely publicized one. -While its recommendations were crucial in increasing government involvement in the arts, they were precisely the ones envisioned in the Commission's terms of reference, which were in turn a product of considerable lobbying by well-established arts groups. -The Commission held extensive public meetings, receiving 462 briefs and listening to 1,200 witnesses. -The witnesses, reported its chairperson, represented "13 Federal Government institutions, 7 Provincial Governments, 87 national organizations, 262 local bodies and 35 private commercial radio stations". -In most respects the Massey Commission looked backward instead of forward. -It attempted to promote a Victorian vision of culture. -It may have established most of the agenda of federal cultural policy for at least a generation to follow, but that agenda was narrowly conceived.

Federal-Provincial Relations in Post War Canada Part 1

-The 1945-6 Dominion-Provincial Conference on Reconstruction had served as the arena for the renewal after the war of constitutional conflict between the Dominion and its provinces. -In August 1945 the federal government tabled a comprehensive program for an extended welfare state based on the tax collection and economic policy of a strong central government. -It sought the co-operation of the provinces to implement its plans. -Ottawa wanted agreement that it could keep the emergency powers it had acquired to fight the war, especially the power to collect all major taxes. -The Conference adjourned for study, finally meeting again in April 1946. -At this point Quebec and Ontario in tandem simultaneously denounced centralization while insisting on a return to provincial autonomy. -Ontario had some social programs of its own in the planning stages. -Quebec, led by Duplessis, wanted to keep control of social powers in order not to have them implemented. -In the wake of this meeting, the federal government offered a "tax rental" scheme to the provinces, whereby it would collect certain taxes (on incomes, corporations, and inheritances) and distribute payment to the provinces. -Ontario and Quebec went their own ways, but the remaining provinces (and Newfoundland after 1949) accepted tax rental, which (along with suitable constitutional amendment) had been recommended by the Rowell-Sirois Commission in 1940.

Federal-Provincial Relations in Post War Canada Part 5

-The BNA Act had protected some minority rights, but had displayed little interest in the rights of the individual, which were crucial to the American approach. -This notion of spelling out rights, either for individuals or collective groups, was a potentially profound change in the Canadian Constitution. -Diefenbaker's Bill for the Recognition and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, fulfilling campaign promises of 1957 and 1958, passed the federal Parliament in 1960. -As it was limited to the federal level, and the rights it protected could be overridden by national emergencies, it had little immediate impact. -A full 10 years would go by before the Canadian Supreme Court would hear a case based on the Bill of Rights, but its implications for constitutional reform, particularly when combined with the growth of new and politically conscious minorities in the 1960s, were substantial. -At the end of the 1950s the Canadian Constitution stood on the cusp of great change. -Canadians ought to have recognized that neither constitutional nor federal- provincial problems were solely the product of the presence of Quebec in Confederation. -Nevertheless, the issue of Quebec became inextricably bound up with increasing federal-provincial tensions. -Constitutional reform would become the panacea for the nation's divisions.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 6

-The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation had emerged from the war with high hopes, gaining 15.6% of the popular vote and 28 members of Parliament in the 1945 federal election. -Its popularity decreased regularly thereafter, however. -By 1958 it was reduced to 8 MPs and 9.5% of the popular vote. -This erosion of support came about partly because the CCF was mistakenly thought by some to be associated with international Communism, and partly because much of the Canadian electorate regarded it as both too radical and too doctrinaire. -The CCF showed no strength east of Ontario and was not a credible national alternative to the two major parties. -After its 1958 defeat, the CCF remobilized through an alliance with organized labour (the Canadian Labour Congress), which in 1961 would produce the New Democratic Party under the leadership of former Saskatchewan Premier T.C. (Tommy) Douglas. -The Social Credit Party won some scattered seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan after the war, but would achieve prominence only after Robert Thompson (b. 1914) became president of the Social Credit Association of Canada in 1960 and party leader in 1961.

The Cold War in Canada Part 5 (The Search for Middle-Power Status)

-The Korean War increased the pressure for a military buildup. -By 1953 the defence budget stood at nearly $2 billion, up tenfold since 1947. -Public opinion in the 1950s consistently supported rearmament. -The policy-makers at the Department of External Affairs did their best to give Canada an autonomous international presence, developing a Canadian reputation for sending small numbers of soldiers to trouble spots to supervise international agencies and monitor local conditions. -Peacekeeping operations were carried out in Indochina and the Middle East, especially Cyprus. -The nation's standing reached its high point in 1957 when Lester B. Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the 1956 hostilities in Suez. -Pearson, with American support, found a way for Britain and France to back out of an impossible situation created by their ill-conceived invasion of Egypt to protect the Suez Canal. -Canada had earned its place among the "middle powers," a characterization that became popular with Canada's international relations specialists at the same time as it flattered the nation's pretensions. -But the world changed rapidly after Suez, and middle-power status altered with events.

The Shape of Politics In Post War Canada Part 2

-The Liberals had a number of advantages in the pursuit of continued federal power, of which two were absolutely critical. -Above all they had the ongoing support of Quebec, which elected one of the largest blocks of seats in the House of Commons. -Support from francophone Quebec had come to the Liberals in the 1890s following the ascension of Laurier to the Liberal leadership and the recent memory of the execution of Louis Riel, was solidified during the Conscription Crisis of the Great War, and was further confirmed by Mackenzie King's management of that same issue during World War II. -The Liberals did not lose a federal election in Quebec between 1896 and 1958, usually winning more than three-quarters of the available seats. -To triumph nationally without Quebec's support, an opposition party needed to win the vast majority of seats in the remainder of the country, including Ontario (in which the two major parties were always fairly evenly matched). -The Tories did win anglophone Canada in 1957. -Such a victory could produce only a minority government, however. -The Diefenbaker sweep of 1958 was the exception that proved the rule. -In other elections the Liberals were able to persuade Quebec's francophone voters that the competing parties were unsympathetic to French Canada.

The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society in Post-War Canada Part 5

-The baby boom combined with the attitudes of the permissively raised Spock generation and the new affluence to produce a category of adolescence segmented from and sandwiched between childhood and adult society. -More and more young people were encouraged to remain in school longer. -Progressive-minded educators treated them as a distinct social phenomenon. -The authors of "Crestwood Heights" (1956), a study of a wealthy Toronto suburb, found a central theme in the "difficulties experienced by the child in living up to the expectations of both parents and the school for 'responsibility and independence!" -They labelled the 16-19 age group as one of "Dependent Independence." -The loss of community through urbanization and suburbanization provided a real challenge for social control. -Kept out of the workforce, teenagers did not become full adults. -Law and custom combined to prevent them from enjoying full adult privileges. -These kids had considerable spending power. -Encouraged to live at home, the youngsters were not often required to contribute their earnings (if any) to family maintenance. -Instead, their parents gave them pocket money or allowances. -Canadian teenagers rapidly became avid consumers, providing a market for fast food, clothing fads, acne medicine, cosmetics, and popular music. -Melinda McCracken has explained that "to be a real teenager you had to drink Cokes, eat hamburgers [known as nips in Winnipeg because the local Salisbury House chain sold them as such], French fries [known in Winnipeg as chips, in the English fashion], go to the Dairy Queen, listen to the Top Forty and neck".

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 7

-The boom of the post-war years encouraged the growth of American direct investment in Canada and the rise of the multinational corporation, which usually had headquarters in the United States and a branch- plant operation in Canada. -By 1950, more than three-quarters of total foreign investment in the country was American, chiefly in mining, manufacturing, and petroleum. -In 1959 foreign-owned companies controlled nearly 60% of assets in Canadian mining, over 60& of the oil and gas industry, and over 50% of Canadian manufacturing. -The extent of foreign ownership of all major Canadian industries in 1959 was 34%, of which 26% was owned by United States residents. -American ownership was especially prevalent in the highly profitable consumer area, where production flourished on the backs of American brand names. -American advertising and cultural values created consumer demand on a continental basis, and Canadian subsidiaries fulfilled this demand for the Canadian segment of their market.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 8

-The hard-labour aspect of Canadian criteria for immigrants caused many problems for immigration officials. -Early in 1948, for example, the Communists took over Czechoslovakia, forcing thousands to flee the country, including many of its civil servants. -But such people were not eligible under existing immigration policy to enter Canada. -One Canadian immigration official commented of the Czech diplomats clamouring for admission to Canada. -Highly trained professionals generally proved a major problem for nations receiving immigrants after the war. -Canada was not exceptional in this regard. -Local professional organizations and licensing authorities insisted on protecting the public from the unqualified, while the sorts of credentials offered by a displaced person from a European nation usually made little sense or seemed incomplete. -Most receiving nations, including Canada, insisted that the professionals, especially the doctors, either take jobs where the receiving country's own nationals would not go, such as to the north, in Canada, or else requalify for their profession. -Canada was not only unsympathetic to professionals but also to intellectuals and artists, such as those from Czechoslovakia.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 7

-The influx of displaced persons to Canada from 1948 to 1952 was distinguished by several contradictory features. -One was the inability of the Canadian authorities totally to prevent Jews from joining the flow, however hard they tried. -Canada put Jews low on the list of desired immigrants, partly for cultural reasons but also because of what the authorities thought prospective employers expected of new immigrants, chiefly robust health and considerable strength. -Most post-war Jews, it was argued, could not have coped with a regimen of hard physical labour. -What clearly was needed was an alternative program. -Jewish activists insisted that war criminals like Martin Bormann (Hitler's private secretary) could enter Canada more easily than Jews and, indeed, the immigrants of these years may well have included as many as 1,500 war criminals and Nazi collaborators. -Another feature of these years was the arrival of the first "boat people," as several thousand people from the Baltic area made their way independently to Canada aboard small and often unseaworthy vessels. -They were usually greeted sympathetically and often allowed to remain by special Order-in-Council.

French Canada after World War II Part 3

-The new nationalism was profoundly different from the old in its intellectual assumptions, however similar the two versions could sound in rhetorical manifestos. -In the first place, while often espousing Catholic values, the new nationalism was profoundly anticlerical. -It opposed the entrenched role of the Church in Quebec society. -In the second place, the new nationalism had no desire to return to a golden age of agricultural ruralism, but instead celebrated the new industrial and urban realities of modern Quebec. -It insisted that Quebec nationalism had to be based on the aspirations of the newly emerging French-Canadian working class, which meant that nationalists had to lead in the battle for socio-economic change. -While scorning international socialism because it would not pay sufficient attention to the particular cultural dimensions of French Canada, the new nationalists pre-empted much of the vocabulary and analysis of Marxism, including the essential concept of proletarian class solidarity. -In their insistence on nationalism, they were hardly traditional Marxists.

Overview of Canada (1945-1960)

-The post-World War II era, particularly before 1960, was a period of unparalleled economic growth and prosperity for Canada. -Production and consumption moved steadily upward. -Employment rose almost continuously. -Canada substantially increased its workforce. -Inflation was steady but almost never excessive. -Interest rates were relatively low. -The nation was in the midst of an uncharacteristic natural increase in its population growth rate that would become known as the baby boom. -At the same time as many Canadians took advantage of the good times by conceiving children and moving to new homes in the suburbs, both the federal and provincial governments became active in providing new programs of social protection for their citizens. -That network was not created without controversy, particularly of the constitutional variety, although the debate was still relatively muted until the 1960s. -By that time, however, Canadian governments at all levels had become interventionist in a variety of areas, including culture.

French Canada after World War II Part 4

-The post-war world, however, saw many examples of similar movements that combined Marxist analysis with national aspirations. -The new nationalists, particularly the younger, more militant ones, were able to find intellectual allies and models everywhere. -The external neo-Marxism most commonly cited came from the French ex-colonial world or from Latin America. -The new nationalists had long insisted that the key to their program was an active and modern state. -The homogeneous secular state represented the highest articulation of the nation and was the best means of liberating humanity. -Traditionalist forces in Quebec had historically collaborated with forces in Canada to keep French Canadians in their place. -The active state envisioned by the nationalists was Quebec, not Canada. -Opposition to the new nationalism came from a tiny but influential group of small liberal intellectuals centred on the journal "Cité libre". -This publication was founded by Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000) and Gérard Pelletier (1919-1997), among others, at the height of the Duplessis regime, to which it was a reaction. -These liberals were as revisionist in spirit as the new nationalists, but they were simultaneously suspicious of what they regarded as simplistic doctrinaire thinking. -They were committed to the new rationalism of the new social sciences.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 9

-The post-war years were critical ones for popular culture in Canada. -While governments wrestled with aspects of a cultural policy intended to protect Canadian culture and the Canadian identity from "foreign" (read American) influence, their focus before 1960 was almost entirely on high culture. -Few Canadians appreciated that the Americans were undergoing a cosmic shift of their own in cultural terms, particularly in the way they marshalled the media and their entire entertainment industry as delivery systems of American culture. -One American scholar has described what happened as the shift from popular to mass culture. -The secret of American success was an extraordinarily prosperous home economy, based partly on the extension of technological innovation into nearly every household. -The result was a domestication of entertainment, moving it from the public arena to inside the home. -Many of the new consumer goods, such as television sets and high-fidelity equipment, required the development of related cultural products (programs, recordings) to make the new gadgets essential to every family. -The American entertainment industry was clearly up to the challenge. -All aspects of American culture, including sports, were systematically brought into the web of the new entertainment industry. -This would have a profound effect on Canadians.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 3 (Sectors of the Economy)

-The relative importance of various sectors of the domestic economy shifted in these years. -Agriculture declined from 25% of the total workforce in 1946 to 11% in 1961. -The real growth areas were in the public sector, particularly public administration and the services necessary to manage the new state. -In 1946 just over 15% of Canadians were employed in the public sector, but by 1961 that figure had increased to just over 25%. -Many of the public service employees were highly educated white-collar workers, and by 1960 over half of Canadians held white collar jobs. cipal markets. -Women in 1960 made up about 30% of the workforce, with their pay about two-thirds that of males.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 5

-The resource economy did reasonably well. -Beginning in 1947, when Imperial Oil brought in the major oil field at Leduc, in southern Alberta, there was significant expansion in western Canadian oil and gas. -Most of the risk was assumed by Americans, and the Alberta oil industry was quickly taken over by multinational firms. -Oil and gas began to be transported by pipeline from the West into the major centres of population and industry. -Potash provided a major new resource for Saskatchewan, and uranium was a short-lived bonanza for northern Ontario. -The burning of fossil fuels and the development of nuclear power were the growth areas in the energy industry. -Hydroelectric generation, which for almost 95% of Canada's electrical capacity in 1946, had dropped to just over 75% by 1960 and would be down to only half that by the 1970s, despite massive hydroelectric projects in many provinces, especially Quebec and British Columbia.

Immigration in Post-War Canada Part 4

-The same month as the Senate hearings, the Canadian cabinet amended PC 695, the 1931 Order-in-Council still in effect, with PC 2071, permitting the admission of refugees with close relations in Canada. -This was not intended to open Canada to a flood of immigrants. -All existing immigration regulations were to be observed, and the definition of a "first-degree" relative was narrowly limited. -Canadian immigration officials used the absence of inspection facilities as a reason for not processing first-degree relatives more rapidly. -A Gallup poll in April of 1946 had indicated that two-thirds of Canadians opposed immigration from Europe. -A subsequent poll in October of that year asked: If there were to be immigration, what nationalities would the respondent most like to keep out of Canada? -The Japanese ranked first, the Jews second. -Meanwhile, international pressure was building on Canada to help out with the refugee situation, and External Affairs became concerned that the United Nations might impose an arbitrary quota on Canada.

French Canada after World War II Part 1

-The scope of social and economic change in French Canada, especially after 1939, went largely unheralded in the remainder of the nation until the 1960s. -Pierre Elliott Trudeau began his editorial introduction to his book on the Asbestos strike of 1949, entitled "The Province of Quebec at the Time of the Strike", with the words, "I surely do not have to belabour the point that in the half century preceding the asbestos strike, the material basis of Canadian society in general, and of Quebec society in particular, was radically altered". -But in English Canada before 1960, the popular press was fascinated by Maurice Duplessis and his conservative Union Nationale. -By ignoring the changes that were actually occurring, journalists presented a distorted picture of Quebec society. -Duplessis mixed heavy-handed attacks on civil liberties and trade unions with traditional nationalism and laissez faire economic policy, while ignoring the underlying social changes and debates within Quebec. -For many English-speaking Canadians, Quebec remained stereotyped as a priest-ridden rural society inhabited by a simple people. -Because Quebec had been lagging in the socioeconomic aspects of modern industrialism, its rapid catch-up became more internally unsettling and externally bewildering. -As Trudeau pointed out, by the 1950s Quebec was no longer behind the remainder of Canada in most social and economic indicators.

The Rise of Canadian Culture after WWII Part 7

-They tuned their sets to American border stations and used increasingly elaborate antenna systems to draw in distant signals. -Most Canadians thus missed entirely the first generation of American television programming, broadcast live from the studio, and tuned in only as US television moved from live to filmed programs and from New York to Hollywood. -By 1952, "I Love Lucy" had been running in the States for over a year. -But if Canada's love affair with the tube was slightly belated, the country rapidly caught up. -By December 1954 there were 9 stations and 1.2 million sets; by June 1955 there were 26 stations and 1.4 million sets, and by December 1957 there were 44 stations and nearly 3 million sets. -Television's popularity has been an international phenomenon transcending national circumstances and socio-economic conditions. -Nevertheless, for Canadian society in the post-war years, television was the ideal technology. -It fitted perfectly into the overall social and cultural dynamics of the time.

French Canada after World War II Part 5

-Trudeau's small group was even more fiercely anti-clerical than the new nationalists, perhaps because its , members still believed in the need for a revitalized Catholic humanism and criticized the Church from within. -It was equally critical of traditional French-Canadian nationalism, which it regarded as outdated, inadequate, and oppressive. -"Cité libre" preferred to locate French Canada within an open multicultural and multinational state and society. -Not only traditional nationalism but all nationalism was unprogressive and undemocratic. -At the end of the 1950s most Quebec intellectuals had arrived at some similar conclusions, however different the routes. -The traditional nationalism in Quebec, of Catholicism, of the Union Nationale, led nowhere. -The dead hand of the Church had to be removed. -A modern state, secular and interventionist, was needed to complete Quebec's modernization. -There was some disagreement over the nature of this modern state. -The new nationalists were inclined to see it as a liberating embodiment of French-Canadian collectivities, while the "Cité libre" people saw it more as a regulating mechanism. -It only remained to persuade the general populace of the province of the need for change.

The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society in Post-War Canada Part 2

-We do not entirely understand why this demographic blip occurred. -Pent-up deferral of expectations during the Depression before the early 1940s is part of the answer, as is the absence of so many young men during the war. -The fulfillment of deferred expectations, however, does not explain why an entire nation should suddenly decide to marry earlier and raise larger families. -A better explanation is probably to be found in the fantasy package of a better life for Canadians, fuelled by post-war affluence. -The urge affected Quebecers as well as anglophone Canadians. -Pierre Vallières described his father's post-war dream: "We'll be at peace. The children will have all the room they need to play. We'll be masters in our own house. There will be no more stairs to go up and down. ... Pierre won't hang around the alleys and sheds any more.... The owner was prepared to stretch the payments out over many years. ... Life would become easier.... He would enlarge the house. A few years from now, Madeline and the little ones' would have peace and comfort. -In 1945 the Vallières family moved to Longueuil-Annexe, one of the "mushroom cities" that grew up around Montreal.

The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society in Post-War Canada Part 3

-What Canadians thought they wanted, and what the media told them was desirable, was a detached bungalow, preferably in a nice suburban neighbourhood, surrounded by green grass and inhabited by a traditional nuclear family. -This fantasy included a wife who was a homemaker and a houseful of perfect children. -"Suburbia" was always less a geographical reality than a mental and emotional space. -It is a convenient term that can be used to describe the idealized social world of the post-war period. -After the war, a popular domestication of values extended into the ranks of the lower-middle and traditional working classes. -Post-war suburbia was not only highly traditional in its gender roles but tended to be retrogressive in its emphasis on the role of the female as child-bearer and nurturer. -In its consumer orientation, as well as in its child-centredness, it was a powerful force. -Houses became homes, easily the most expensive physical object possessed by their owners. -So much time and emotional energy could be devoted to the edifice that it often seemed to possess its owners. -The house focused the life of the nuclear family, and at the same time permitted individual members to have their own private spaces. -Ideally, each child had a bedroom, for example, and a large recreation room in the basement provided a place for the children to play and gather. The kitchen was often too small for gathering, and the living room, increasingly after 1950, was the home of the television set. -Advertising and articles in the media exalted the roles of housewife and mother as the epicentre of this world. -Radio, television, and the record player all made it possible for popular culture to be consumed without ever leaving the house.

The Growth of the State Part 3

-While we often talk about the Canadian welfare state, there is little evidence that many people in Canada, much less in the federal government, had any notion of a truly comprehensive and integrated national social security system that would include full employment, housing, and education as social rights of all Canadians. -Social protection in Canada would instead grow a step at a time through the activities of all levels of government. -Sometimes new programs responded to overt public demand, sometimes they met obvious public need. -Frequently job creation was the immediate rationale for a social program. -Often a particular program of social protection was intended to provide a platform on which a government or political party could campaign. -Political proponents of such programs hoped that the opposition would demur, thus providing a convenient election issue. -Oppositions frequently failed to take the bait, accepting the programs and avoiding electoral battles. -A patchwork of social programs thus emerged in fits and starts.

Affluence In Post-War Canada Part 12

-With bargaining rights achieved, labour unions went on to hammer out working relationships with most of Canada's traditional industries. -Improved working conditions and higher wages were the result. -The process of coming to terms with employers was hardly a painless one. -Throughout the 1950s there was never fewer than 159 strikes per year across Canada, involving between 49,000 and 112,000 workers annually. -Important strikes that achieved national prominence included the Asbestos strike of 1949 in Quebec, the Eaton's strike of 1951, and the Inco strike of 1958 in Sudbury. -A major breakthrough for public sector unionism came at the very end of the 1950s when the postal employees organized and began demanding the right of collective bargaining. -In 1956 the two largest Canadian umbrella organizations for labour, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada and the Canadian Congress of Labour, merged as one consolidated body called the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). -This merger reduced jurisdictional disputes at the top of Canada's table of labour organization, although it did not deal with the question of the domination of so-called "international" unions by their American members.