13
A TIME OF GIFTS, 1945–1963
The atomic age: The head shaft of the uranium mine at Port Radium in Great Bear Lake, mid-1950s.
Canadians in 1945 were mildly apprehensive. There were reasons enough: the Allies had ended the war by dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, transforming the world of weaponry and creating a new kind of danger should the wonder weapon ever fall into the wrong hands. But that wasn’t what mostly worried people. Canadians saw the world mostly in domestic terms. The war had been fought, it was won, and it was over. Life would go on, but not quite as it had been. The past foreshadowed the present, and the past was economic disappointment—the failed hopes and stalled society of the Great Depression. The past was also the organizational triumph of the war—the recent past of full employment and prosperity. Which past would now prevail?
In the nervous spring of 1945, a plurality of Canadians voted for the recent past, for Mackenzie King and the Liberals. Even a plurality of the military vote went Liberal, despite King’s well-advertised reluctance to send conscripts overseas in the last stages of the war.1 Canadians did not select the rebaptized Conservative party—Progressive Conservatives since 1942, under ex-Premier John Bracken of Manitoba. They did not opt for experimenting with socialism with the CCF party. They left the CCF mostly inside its Saskatchewan bastion, where it had won an election in 1944. The CCF still had enough support in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Ontario, and British Columbia to act as a national party.
Canada was a complex, vast, and potentially divided land. Its federal system had bent but not buckled under the economic and political strains of the Depression and the war. The federal government, and the federal government virtually alone, had the financial resources to ride out the storm. Regional, and generally provincial, politicians rose and fell during the Depression, but the impoverishment of the provincial treasuries meant they could do little but hurl verbal thunderbolts at an impervious Ottawa.
Politics in Canada were complicated by the bifurcation of Canadian society between an English majority and a French minority. Yet during the 1930s both English and French Canadians had been remarkably conservative in their attitudes to society and government. Taxes had been low, matched by the government services they funded. Free enterprise of a relatively untrammelled sort predominated, surprising visiting Americans, who reported home that Canada was definitely a conservative if not backward country compared with the United States. In Catholic and French-speaking Quebec it was the Church that managed most social services. Even among the largely Protestant English, churches played an important if not decisive role in ordering society. Canada was, after all, a churchgoing nation, and a Christian country: what the clergy said and did mattered. Those who dissented, intellectually or socially or even sexually, from majority practice did so in isolation or quietly under the cover furnished by the larger cities.
Canada’s self-image was raw, rural, and underdeveloped. The reality was urban and industrial. Canadians traditionally lagged behind other comparable countries in productivity and standard of living—behind the United States, the world’s richest country, to be sure, but also, in the 1920s, behind Great Britain, Australia, and even Argentina.
That was no longer the case in 1945. Canada did well out of the war. GDP per capita finally passed that of wealthy Australia in 1944—for the first time in 150 years.2 (It lagged substantially behind the United States, at about 60 percent of the U.S. figure.) Virtually immune to enemy attack, Canadians expanded old industries and built new ones. The federal government experimented with new forms of federalism, appropriating most of the country’s tax revenue for the all-consuming needs of the war. The government paid as much as it could raise from very high taxes, and borrowed the rest; in terms of collective sacrifice Canada’s war effort could stand comparison with the British and was probably greater, in per capita terms, than the American.
The cost could be seen in grimy transport, fraying clothes, and dilapidated housing. Though many were better off in 1945 than they’d been in the 1930s, they sustained themselves with deferred hopes rather than immediate consumption. (The government made sure that it was easier to save than spend, and enforced the policy through rigid and remarkably effective controls.)3 The war’s effects could also be seen in the “Vive Pétain” slogan painted on the cliffs at Quebec City to greet the returning troops as they disembarked.4
The government was ready: gasoline rationing was abandoned, freeing Canadians to take to the roads in their cars, if they had them. Left behind were the wartime savings plans and other restrictions. Government tax incentives encouraged manufacturers to convert their factories to civilian production, and none more readily than the automobile industry. With money in hand, Canadians wanted to consume. Automobile sales rebounded—78,000 new cars sold in 1946, 159,000 in 1947. The statisticians were amazed, not so much by the volume of car sales as by the fact that “ready cash in large amounts in the hands of the public allowed the outright buying of this commodity,” without loans.5
This was a change, and there were others. Unemployment through the 1930s was a too familiar feature of life—an aspect of normalcy. Economists feared the worst, and politicians followed in their footsteps. Active government had ended unemployment by planning and spending; it followed that government must now plan the economy to provide “full employment,” the favourite phrase of the 1945 election. In April the Liberal government produced a White Paper that laid down its policy for full employment—or almost.6 The White Paper served its immediate purpose: getting the government re-elected. And, miracle of miracles, there was full employment. The government and its friends put it all down to good planning, and in the good times that prevailed forgot that there was little or no planning at all.7
The war ended, and employment did not fall, or fall very much. A new kind of normalcy took hold. Canadians married. The new families bought refrigerators, stoves, clothes. They wanted to buy houses, but it took time to organize the supply of that particular commodity. If they were veterans, they bought education—for some the university kind, but for others, vocational training. The government paid the costs through a generous benefit scheme.
What veterans would not postpone was marriage and families. The 1930s had been a bleak time for marriage. With economic prospects ranging from uncertain to dismal for most, marriages were put off. The age of marriage rose, and the birth rate fell. The war changed things. Men and women volunteered for the armed services, but, given the assumptions and gender roles of the day, men did so in much greater numbers. Women were challenged to replace men in civilian jobs, and many did. The challenges varied, from compulsory war “service” for female university students (at the University of Toronto knitting was preferred) to driving trucks for the Red Cross, and everything in between.8 Females reached 30 percent of the non-agricultural workforce in 1944—a 33 percent participation rate overall. There was also a final challenge—the expectation that at the end of the war women filling soldiers’ jobs would quietly and happily depart. Some did; some did not.
In reaction to disruption, young men and women sought security, and found it in a vision of family.9 Hasty marriages, husbands departing for the war, and wives engaged in war work often made the experience anything but romantic. Nevertheless, throughout the war the number of marriages rose, both in Canada and overseas among the troops. (The latter event wasn’t officially encouraged, but, with 500,000 young men overseas and in garrison in Great Britain for much of the war, it took place regardless.) When the Canadian military returned from Europe they brought 43,000 war brides and 21,000 children. (And they left behind 30,000 illegitimate children.)10 They also brought the optimism that all those marriages implied.11 They had the positive experience of victory, and appreciation of the organization that had made it all possible. Expectations were great, and it was those expectations more than anything else that drove the agenda of the next twenty years.12
THE BABY BOOM
One of the most enduring images of the postwar years is children. More families meant more children, and as family formation crept up during the war years the term “baby boom” appeared.13 There were more children, and healthier children, thanks to a sinking rate of infant mortality14 and the discovery of “wonder drugs,” like the Salk vaccine that protected against poliomyelitis, until then the annual scourge of Canadian summers.15 More children meant more schools, with a million more students added to primary and secondary schools between 1945 and 1955, and 900,000 more between 1955 and 1960. The federal government, which distributed “children’s allowances” after 1945, made them conditional on school attendance; and that, coupled with the enactment of compulsory schooling in Quebec under that province’s wartime Liberal government, supplemented the birth rate as a source of enrolment.
The burden of child-rearing largely fell on women. Full employment in the 1940s and 1950s meant full employment for men. Patterns of work drew men out of the home and into the factory or office, from eight or nine in the morning until five at night. Most women, especially married women, stayed home, tending to children or other domestic chores. Female enrolment in universities grew absolutely, but as a proportion of the total remained remarkably stable, around 21 percent, from the 1930s to the 1950s. In the labour force, the proportion of women actually rose slightly from 1941 to 1951, to 22 percent. Female labour was concentrated in categories such as education (teaching in the primary and secondary schools) or health (nursing).16 Virtually all cultural phenomena and media, from women’s magazines to union halls, reinforced the pattern: where women worked, they did so in what were mostly traditionally female occupations.
RECONSTRUCTION AND RECONVERSION
Families and children required housing, and housing was in short supply. Housing was a social need, but it was also an economic tool, and as such fell under the government’s “reconstruction” policy. Reconstruction was a grand name for a smaller thing. It implied rebuilding, designing anew, making something different. Structurally, in terms of the economy, that didn’t happen, though plenty of alternative ideas were on the table. The biggest was socialism, the appropriation by government of the means of finance and production. Less sweeping, but nevertheless impressive, was the notion that the government should “direct” the economy using the tools that “planners” put at its disposal—a continuation in many people’s minds of what had been done so successfully during the war.
The King government rejected both alternatives. In the opinion of the minister responsible, Howe, micro-planning was beyond the ordinary capacity of government.17 Macro-planning, the idea that government should generally supervise the economy and manage economic conditions through adjustments in the levels of taxation and spending, was something the ministers could accept, though for most it was a strange and difficult notion.
The federal government approached housing with a two-pronged policy: first, as far as possible, home ownership was to be promoted; second, housing should be left to the private sector to build. The government encouraged mortgages, and passed legislation making them easier to get. It also made money for housing available to veterans and decontrolled supplies as fast as it could. C.D. Howe, the minister responsible for reconstructing the civilian economy, was deaf to protests that as often as not came from business, which disliked the short-term chaos as the housing market established itself and regretted the absence of subsidies from government. As Howe wrote to a prominent businessman, in a slightly different context, the whole idea was to place business back in private enterprise.
If the federal government after five years of war found the notion of planning strange, if tempting, the provinces were much more backward. To begin with, they had little talent in their money-starved bureaucracies. During the 1930s and especially during the war Ottawa was a magnet for the young and talented. It was where the excitement was, and the excitement continued after 1945. The provinces had no such appeal. In 1941 the federal government used its predominant power, constitutionally but more importantly politically, to chivvy the provinces into agreeing to forgo most of their revenues for the duration of the war, receiving instead a pension from Ottawa that allowed them to carry on with their most important functions. Even obstreperous Ontario, but also Liberal Quebec, agreed.
These arrangements expired with the war. Nevertheless, to Ottawa’s economists, proper economic planning demanded that the wartime structure of centralized taxation be retained for the proper macro-economic management of the country. More, the civil servants hoped to ride the wave of wartime success into a reformed governmental system, prescribing a complete welfare state, including pensions and government-sponsored health care—cradle-to-grave security. Indubitably, the constitution gave the provinces their own revenue sources to do with as they pleased, but surely that consideration could be transcended in the interests of the greater common good. Federal–provincial consultations began in 1945, and in 1946 a full-fledged dominion–provincial conference was held. The dominion government tabled a Green Paper (so-called from its cover) that invited the provinces to hand over to Ottawa the power to enact and finance a system of universal social security. It had the support of the cabinet, especially from the minister of finance, Ilsley, and the minister of justice, St. Laurent. Asked by a colleague whether Quebec would not object, St. Laurent said that it would, but Quebec could be expected to object to practically anything. He was, of course, quite right.
Mackenzie King viewed the whole enterprise as a risky business. He was no constitutional expert, though he was trained as a lawyer, and no economic theorist, though he had a Ph.D. in economics. King was, however, an expert politician, with an eye to the future as well as a wealth of past experience. He had a good sense of the strengths as well as weaknesses of the players in Canada’s political game, and he knew that the end of the war would allow provincial politicians, if they chose, to reassert their constitutional rights, against which sweeping federal social welfare policies, however well conceived and intelligently argued, could not stand.
This meant that the provinces, if they chose, would recover their taxation powers, including the power to set their tax rates at whatever level they wanted. King knew he couldn’t prevent them from legislating their own social welfare policies, and that without provincial consent Ottawa couldn’t do it for them. He also understood that he would have facing him in the conference two very strong partisans of provincial power, Maurice Duplessis of Quebec and George Drew of Ontario. Duplessis was by far the more conservative of the two, being philosophically opposed to state intervention in such fields as social welfare—something best left to charity, or to the churches, in his opinion. He was an economic liberal of the old school: markets and private entrepreneurs were best equipped to sort out wages and working conditions, and trade unions were at best a distortion of nature. Duplessis could mix these convictions with the elixir of French-Canadian nationalism; by identifying “English” Ottawa with social theories he found obnoxious, he could hope to rally Quebec opinion against the rest of the country.
Drew was fuzzier on such issues. He disliked experts and theories, especially of the kind found in Ottawa. On the other hand, he was well aware that most Ontarians expected their governments, federal and provincial, to look out for personal security. Drew therefore had to offer his electorate the idea that he and his Progressive Conservative colleagues could do better than Ottawa could, deploying arguments that Ottawa was hobbling the provinces.
United against the federal government, Drew and Duplessis derailed the Green Paper proposals. It was what Mackenzie King had expected, and he wasted no time in mourning what was for him a too ambitious and dangerous attempt to rewrite the Canadian constitution.18
What King did do was eliminate war-related expenditures as fast as possible, demobilizing the armed forces and bringing the troops home. Wisely, the government put some of the money saved directly into veterans’ benefits—into housing, education, and vocational training. Unlike the veterans of 1919, the returning soldiers of 1945 were tangibly and frequently thanked by the society they had defended. Consequently, the terrors of radicalism were avoided; a generous social program, rationally applied, made for a more conservative society as it spread security, or opportunity, very widely.
MONSTERS TO DESTROY
The Second World War was fought to ward off not so much dangers to Canada directly but dangers to Canada’s allies and associates. Alone and isolated, Canada was nothing; and so Canadians fought abroad against an enemy whose chances of reaching and landing in North America by air, land, or even sea any time soon were negligible. The only neighbour, the United States, shared Canada’s immunity from external attack, and from the platform of a perfectly safe home front both countries went abroad, in John Quincy Adams’s phrase, “in search of monsters to destroy.”
The science and technology that created atomic bombs, and the air fleets to deliver them across vast distances, destabilized the peace. Weapons of mass destruction were a twentieth-century novelty, and soon a whole industry was devoted to manufacturing fantasies about “the atomic age” and what nuclear weapons made possible. Admittedly, it was a matter of arithmetic—build enough bombs and explode them in anger and the end of civilization was nigh.
Canada was involved in atomics in two ways. During the war the Canadian government mined and refined uranium, the raw material for the bomb, and it hosted an atomic laboratory, British-run, on Canadian soil. Its purpose was military, to produce an atomic bomb, but it was overtaken by a faster American team that produced the bomb dropped on Japan in August 1945. Canada was a partner in “the atomic secret,” and as a result Canada shared with the United States and Great Britain the burden of deciding what to do with the “secret.” Should it be, could it be, truly secret? If not, should it be shared as the basis of a new era of trust and reciprocity among the nations of the world? Could other nations be trusted with the secret?
The answer to these questions was no. The person who mainly answered them was the dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, who in addition to being the national leader of his Communist empire was also pope to the international communist movement, which had its branch in Canada as in most other countries. The Canadian Communist Party had come a long way since its founding in 1921. Persecuted at home and craving support from abroad, it ended up in Stalin’s menagerie of “fraternal” Communist parties, bought and sold by the great central Communist Party in the Soviet Union. The price of support was obedience, and the Canadian party gave that in abundance, following every twist and turn of Stalin’s cynical and frequently incompetent political strategy.
Stalin certainly didn’t trust the Western democracies, and fearing their wealth and ingenuity, he set out to discover what they were about. It didn’t take long to penetrate the atomic mystery, using idealistic scientists to prise out capitalist “secrets.” The secrecy was in large part illusory, because the science of atomic physics was well understood from Moscow to Montreal to Madras. The technology was admittedly more difficult and much more expensive, but once Stalin learned that atomic weaponry was theoretically possible, he put every available resource in a devastated Soviet Union to work.
Some of Stalin’s information came from Canada. Officials in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa ran two spy networks seeking atomic secrets. They found some, and duly reported them back to Moscow. But their cover was blown by a defector from the embassy, Igor Gouzenko, who in September 1945 told all to Canada’s astounded government. So unused was Mackenzie King to this kind of activity that he seriously considered giving Gouzenko back; in the end he shared him with his senior allies, American president Harry Truman and British prime minister Clement Attlee, the successors of Roosevelt and Churchill, respectively.
It was the beginning of what came to be called the Cold War, a forty-five-year confrontation between the Western powers, led by the United States, and the Soviet Union. There was never any question in anyone’s mind, even Stalin’s, as to where Canada would stand in the Cold War. Canadian society was Western, capitalist, and liberal. It was relatively open, a “bourgeois democracy” in the contemptuous Soviet term. The Soviet Union, by way of contrast, was a “people’s democracy,” in which the Communist Party by definition spoke for “the people.” Communism promised progress and prosperity, enlightenment and equality, and for that reason it attracted supporters outside the Soviet Union, even in the relatively prosperous countries of North America and Western Europe, where progress and prosperity were already in residence. The key was that the Communists did not disavow violence and revolution; they understood that to turn any society upside down while installing enlightenment would require coercion, and the idea of coercion as the real and best solution to bourgeois politics found its adherents in the West, and even in Canada. In the shaky postwar years, and with the memory of economic depression fresh in people’s minds, there were many in Western Europe who were attracted by communism’s brutal directness as well as its idealism.
If communism was a menace, there was only one country that could stand against it—the United States. The war had sapped the economies and societies of Western Europe. The British had sacrificed much of the treasure of their empire, and to keep going through the war they promised that when it ended they would liberate its most advanced part, the Indian subcontinent. In truth the British could no longer afford an empire, financially or politically, and in 1947–48 they hastily abandoned India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, and Palestine. Ready or not, the British Empire was on the way to freedom, while the British concentrated on rebuilding their own society—as it happened, in a democratic-socialist Labour party model that was close cousin to Canada’s own democratic-socialist party, the CCF.
The American government, and American politicians generally, were at first uncertain as to what they should do. Once it became clear that by 1947 Great Britain was a great power only in name, President Truman nerved himself and his country to act as leader of what came to be called “the Free World.” The Canadian government did little to persuade him, though American diplomats had no doubt where Canada stood. The Canadian Liberal government, Mackenzie King’s until November 1948 and Louis St. Laurent’s after that, accepted and applauded American leadership. Its misgivings, if it had any, were that the Americans might tire or become impatient—more specifically, that the American system of government, with its balance of interests and institutions, might prove too complicated or too slow-moving to allow Truman and his successors to provide wise and timely leadership.
Some Canadians—Charles Ritchie, later a very senior and influential diplomat, was one example—lamented the decline of Great Britain. Canada was more important than ever in British terms, for a weakened Great Britain needed and relied upon Canadian assistance. The assistance was forthcoming—a $1.25-billion loan (one-tenth of Canada’s gross national product) in 1946, a wheat contract that ensured cheap grains to Britain, and cooperation, understanding, and support as the British adjusted the empire into the more nebulous Commonwealth of Nations in the later 1940s. When Ireland finally cut its constitutional ties to the monarchy and the Commonwealth in 1948, it got no sympathy from Canada; Canadian eyes were fixed firmly on Great Britain, and on shared institutions like the monarchy. It was no accident that Mackenzie King’s last overseas trip was to Great Britain, to attend the wedding of Princess Elizabeth; earlier that year he had decided to abort a project for a customs union with the United States while thumbing an old volume on the British Empire. A British subject King was born, and in a very real sense, a British subject he died, in July 1950, after a brief retirement.
King set little store in the new international institution he had helped to create in 1945, the United Nations. He had had a similarly low opinion of its predecessor, the League of Nations, and as he grew older—he was seventy when he won his last general election in 1945—some of his staff wondered if he had confused the two. The “UNO” (“O” for “Organization”), as it was mostly called then, was swiftly paralyzed by quarrels between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. All the great powers (the U.S., the USSR, the UK, France, and China) had vetoes, and the veto, or even the threat of the veto, was enough to halt UN action. King was aware that the less formal Conference of Foreign Ministers, or CFM, which brought together the ministers of Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, was also paralyzed by 1947.
The Americans understood that Europe had problems that must be solved, with Soviet cooperation if possible, without it if necessary. Germany had been thoroughly defeated, conquered and occupied, but the occupying armies couldn’t just sit there, spending money on food and welfare while they waited for something more permanent. Something had to be done to render Germany self-supporting both economically and politically. And the German problem was combined with a perceived political crisis in some of the other countries of Western Europe, where the Communist Party was politically strong and inclined to exercise its influence by disrupting the local economies while creating the impression that it and it alone had the key to Europe’s future.
The American response took the form of an $18-billion aid program, named the Marshall Plan after its sponsor, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall. It is usually thought of as a reconstruction program, literally rebuilding shattered economies. In fact what it did was to solve a dollar shortage in Western Europe, including Great Britain, while turning the actual allocation over to the Europeans themselves, who had to devise and justify their own plans for spending the American money. Canada was involved in the Marshall Plan, not as a donor, but as a supplier of products bought by the Europeans with American dollars. Canada had a dollar shortage of its own, forcing the government to place emergency restrictions on imports in the fall of 1947 and triggering the Canadian–American trade talks that King terminated in early 1948.
King presided over the first stages of negotiating a permanent and formal alliance between the countries of North America and Western Europe. An informal alliance with the United States already existed, based on reciprocal and public promises of aid and support by Roosevelt and King in 1938, and a number of joint boards and cooperative arrangements embodied it. Though King saw himself as strongly pro-American and believed he’d suffered politically because that was his reputation among the voting public, he didn’t want to see Canada absorbed in the United States, or so closely tied to the Americans that it had no independent or autonomous diplomatic wiggle room. When negotiations began with the British and West Europeans in Washington in the spring of 1948, King hoped that a new alliance would be able to solve Canada’s economic or trade problems as well as its political and military security. He considered them as part of the same package, for without economic security Canada couldn’t hope to solve its political problems as well.
King saw the negotiations for a North Atlantic treaty in, but he did not see them out. Old and tired, he knew it was time to move on, and at a Liberal party convention in August 1948 he stage-managed the selection of Louis St. Laurent as his successor.
St. Laurent retained most of the cabinet. King had already added Lester B. Pearson as external affairs minister. Pearson was known as “Mike”; with his cheery smile and characteristic bow tie he embodied a variation on the old theme of homburg hats and striped pants that still characterized the statesmen and diplomats of the day. He was a veteran of the Great War, and between the wars had served in London and Geneva, where he watched the failure of collective security first-hand. Reluctantly, he came to believe that, in the axiom of the day, “peace was indivisible,” that Canada had an overwhelming interest in the maintenance of general peace, and that his country must therefore take an activist, interventionist part in foreign affairs.
Pearson signed the North Atlantic treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Washington on April Fools’ Day, 1949, while the U.S. Marine Band played a selection of popular tunes, including “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothin’.” NATO, as originally conceived, was a political organization whose members were pledged to mutual defence. Deterrence, not combat, was NATO’s purpose, and its founders assumed that mobilization would not prove necessary.
Events belied the hopes of NATO’s founders. In September 1949 the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb, breaking the American monopoly over the weapon. In October a Communist “People’s Republic” was proclaimed in China, under Mao Zedong. In January Mao signed an alliance with Stalin. Mao and Stalin next gave their approval to Communist North Korea to invade anti-Communist South Korea (the former Soviet and American occupation zones, respectively). Stalin and Mao assumed that the United States wouldn’t react, and that Communist victory would be a foregone conclusion.
Observers in Washington in the spring of 1950, including the Canadian ambassador, Hume Wrong, would not have disagreed. The United States, like Canada, had demobilized at the end of the war. The American armed forces were so reduced as to be largely ineffective—as were Canada’s. But the calculation that the United States would do nothing reckoned without President Truman, and when the North Korean attack took place, on 26 June, Truman reacted. He sent planes and ships, followed by ground troops, to North Korea. He did more, going to the United Nations and denouncing North Korean aggression. Truman reasoned by analogy: Germany, Japan, and Italy in the 1930s had been encouraged by the passivity of the Western democracies in the face of their provocations. And so, assisted by Stalin’s diplomatic stupidity—Stalin was boycotting the UN, thereby negating the Soviet veto—the United States secured a UN mandate to repel North Korea.
The Canadian government was surprised but pleased. This was what the UN was for, after all, even if ordinarily it was paralyzed. The UN afforded a platform for smaller countries like Canada to speak and bring influence to bear—in theory. The fact, however, was that the United States was overwhelmingly the largest contributor to the UN army in Korea, followed by South Korea, which was entirely dependent on the U.S. for support and supplies. Other countries gave only a fraction of the troops and, as it turned out, the size of one’s participation was the barometer of one’s influence.
In Canada there was a moderate divergence between the diplomacy and the politics of participation in the Korean War. Politically, the Canadian public wanted Canada to respond. The cabinet hesitated. Many of its members recalled the conscription crises of the Second World War, and what had happened in the Great War. But this was a war against aggression and, more important, against communism. The Roman Catholic Church, dominant in Quebec’s public life, was strongly anticommunist, and the premier of Quebec, Duplessis, was himself a fulminating anti-communist and could hardly complain when the government of Canada sent troops against the common enemy. When St. Laurent called for volunteers to fight in Korea in August 1950 they were forthcoming in abundance, and in Quebec criticism was spotty and muted. Canada sent planes, ships, and troops to Korea; eventually 10,600 served there, and 403 were killed.19 But that wasn’t the entire, or even the most important, part of the response to the war.
The Korean War was unexpected, and upset most Western calculations of Soviet intentions. The Canadian government viewed Stalin and his regime as a very unpleasant but not directly dangerous phenomenon. Stalin’s main interest, Canadian diplomats argued, was the preservation of Communist rule in Russia and after that the reconstruction of an economy and society devastated by war and the consequent loss of twenty million dead. If that wasn’t the case, and Korea suggested it was not, then it became necessary to provide against Soviet aggression elsewhere. Korea was a sideshow, poor, underdeveloped, isolated—and dangerous, if the Americans allowed themselves to be sucked in too far, or became unduly panicked by the course of the war.20 Europe was the prize in any East–West contest, and it was there that Western efforts should be concentrated.
Starting in the summer of 1950, the Canadian government began to mobilize. The armed forces were more than doubled in size, new equipment was bought, and $5 billion budgeted for rearmament. In cooperation with the United States, radar lines were built across the Canadian north to warn against incursions by Soviet bombers. A reinforced army brigade was sent to Europe to serve as the nucleus of a future Canadian overseas army. An air division was also sent, and during the 1950s would be a significant part of NATO’s military establishment in Europe. The navy was strengthened to include an aircraft carrier and accompanying ships. All this required a great deal of money, which meant that the Canadian budget was militarized too: throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, defence was always the main budgetary item.
Foreign affairs were in a kind of permanent crisis, and this had an effect at home. The consequences in terms of domestic public opinion were clear enough. Canadian anti-communism, present ever since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, was confirmed, even institutionalized. Communists were a tiny minority, but they were suspect, as potential agents of the Soviet Union. There was no need to worry about their political impact. The Canadian Communist Party was never outlawed, though it was kept under surveillance. There was no danger that Canadians would turn to communism, and indeed communism’s political support dropped steadily during the 1950s. Resistance to communism, especially as embodied in NATO, proved enduringly popular.
NATO was different from what its founders had intended. It was militarized, and from its headquarters in Paris, under an American general, it planned the defence of Western Europe against Soviet attack. The Soviet attack did not come, and today there is some doubt that it would ever have materialized. Though there were moments of concern, even panic, over the next ten years—especially in 1961, when it appeared that the Soviets might move on the isolated Western occupation force in Berlin— the Soviet danger in Europe appeared to recede. But as it diminished in Europe, it seemed to grow elsewhere, in Asia. That proved to be a different kind of struggle, and it evoked a different kind of Canadian reaction.
CANADA AND THE END OF EMPIRE
The decline of British power transformed Canada’s relations with the outside world, and eventually had an impact on Canada’s own institutions and political balance. Canada had always been part of some empire, French or British or Roman Catholic, and Canadians’ identities were bound up with the identity, real or assumed, of their empire.
At first there was some optimism that the “British Commonwealth of Nations” could take the place of the British Empire. There was a new queen, Elizabeth II; Britain had begun to recover economically from the war; and some of the old reliable figures of British politics, especially the revered Winston Churchill, were still on the scene. Canada participated for the first time in development aid, through the Colombo Plan, devised at a Commonwealth conference in that city in 1950. From an early date Canada assigned real importance to influencing the newly independent states of the Commonwealth, especially India. From the standpoint of population alone, it was hard not to see the newly independent nations21 as an important factor in the world balance; and if the West didn’t help them and secure their interests, the Communists would.
Some Canadian diplomats were aware that the senior Western powers, Britain, France, and the United States, were widely disliked or at least mistrusted in many of the countries of independent Asia. As one of them put it in a memorandum of August 1947, “The Western powers may have the great majority of the colonial and coloured peoples hostile or unfriendly to them in the event of war with the Soviet Union…. [The] longer independence is delayed the greater are the chances that the colonial independence movements may come under Soviet influence or control.”22 Canada should do what it could to hasten the end of empire, and to tidy up the mess that empire left behind. This was admittedly a great change to the world that Canadians had grown up in, but the transition was eased by the re-invention of the British Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth was founded in part on the pretence that its members shared a common and valuable British inheritance, and indeed the antagonism between ex-colonials and ex-masters inside the organization was highly nuanced and often contradictory. The fact that Commonwealth prime ministers sat down in conference every few years on a basis of equality was not entirely displeasing to the recently ruled, to be sure, but there was a romance to the Western point of view that wasn’t present in the Asian.
That said, some circles in Canada held the view that colonial rule, especially as applied in Asia and Africa, was inherently unjust.23 The prime minister, Louis St. Laurent, had a strong anti-imperialist streak, which most of the time he kept to himself.24 St. Laurent combined anti-imperialism with a much more traditional sense of missionary charity, which for him was a large part of the justification for giving modest amounts of Canadian aid to underdeveloped countries, although at first merely to those in the Commonwealth.
The British were remedying their imperial problem, for which anglophile Canadian public opinion gave them some credit. The Canadian public preferred to believe that Asian countries like India were evolving as Canada itself had done—or was believed to have done—and that consequently there was a natural affinity between Canada and, especially, India, “the world’s largest democracy,” in the journalistic cant of the time. There was also a sense that India, as a democracy with a similar British heritage, subscribed to the same “international norms” as Canada, and in this perception there was the kernel of what much later became a pronounced trend toward human rights in Canadian diplomacy.25
The core of Canadian foreign policy in the 1950s was resistance to the immediate danger of the Soviet Union, though Canadian attitudes on communism included a strong affinity for the human rights of East Europeans suffering under Soviet hegemony and Communist dictatorship. To that end, Canadians strongly backed NATO and the American alliance, and resisted situations that might have destabilized Western solidarity. Pearson and St. Laurent stoutly defended to the sceptical and neutralist Indians the good intentions of the United States, even when it meant that the Americans were arming India’s neighbour Pakistan—in the interest of anti-communism.26
Canadian solidarity with the Western alliance continued even after relations with the Soviets began to thaw with the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the end of the Korean War soon after. St. Laurent and Pearson, supported by an exceptionally competent diplomatic service, remained firmly orthodox in their approach to the Cold War. But for Pearson it was by no means clear that “frozen now” in terms of Soviet policy meant “frozen forever.”
The best example of St. Laurent’s and Pearson’s diplomacy occurred in the fall of 1956, when two simultaneous crises occurred. The greater, or at any rate the longer-lasting, was a dispute between Great Britain and France on the one side and Egypt on the other over the ownership and management of the Suez Canal. The second was the November invasion by the Soviet Union of its satellite Hungary to suppress a rebellion against Communist rule.
The Canal had been an imperial property for seventy-five years, linking Britain and Asia through a waterway owned by British and French investors and garrisoned by British troops. Yet the Canal had once belonged to Egypt, and traversed Egyptian territory populated by Egyptians. That was what necessitated the British garrison, whose purpose was to defend the Canal and themselves against local guerrillas. In 1956, however, the garrison was withdrawn—it was needed elsewhere, and it was expensive—and the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser took over the defence of the Canal, promising to let the British back in if ever there was trouble.
In July 1956, after a British and American refusal to finance a major development project, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. He promised to pay off the investors, and otherwise to maintain the waterway just as it was. Britain and France, and especially the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, took the nationalization as a challenge to their hitherto undoubted supremacy as imperial powers in the Middle East. Eden and the French decided to invade Egypt and retake the Canal. For Eden it was a last chance to prove that Britain was still a great power, and he wouldn’t listen to contrary advice from anyone.
That included Canada, whose government thought it high time that Britain got out and stayed out of Egypt, and the United States, whose president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was doubtful of the justice and the practicality of Britain’s reassertion of empire. The Canadians were sensitive to the damage a British invasion of Egypt would do to the image of the West in the underdeveloped world—“neo-imperialist” and “neo-colonial” were words to conjure with in the Third World, and Eden seemed determined to prove that they described a real phenomenon. The Canadians also began to worry that a quarrel between Britain and France on the one hand and the United States on the other would disrupt the Atlantic alliance, and possibly destroy NATO. For Canada this was unimaginable.
Eden responded to differences with his North American allies by attempting to deceive them, right up to the moment of his invasion of Egypt. His plans also featured a secret alliance with Israel, which invaded Egypt a few days before British and French troops were scheduled to land. No sooner had the Anglo-French invasion landed than things started to go wrong, not so much in the fighting as in the diplomatic context that surrounded it. The Americans ostentatiously stood apart, but more to the point they refused to assist the British and French with oil and money. The oil was needed to take the place of Middle East supply, cut off by Arab suppliers in sympathy with Egypt, and the money to prop up the British pound and French franc, threatened by panicky sell-offs in the world currency markets. The British and French didn’t have the resources to save themselves, and from that moment their adventure was doomed.
The Third World now took centre stage. Led by India, whose prime minister, Nehru, had close ties to Nasser, the Third World countries proposed to condemn the British and French at the United Nations. This would be a tremendous propaganda defeat for the Western powers, the more so because it was occurring just at a point when the Soviet Union was making plain that its dominance of Eastern Europe did not depend on the consent of its allies, but on its own military force, ruthlessly deployed against Hungary. It proved impossible for Western diplomats to secure the Third World’s support against this particular atrocity while the British and French were invading Egypt. The Canadian high commissioner to India, Escott Reid, was particularly frustrated, but he need not have been especially surprised. Pearson, his minister, had already decided that remonstrating with the Indians, or with any other Third World country, was pointless. The support wouldn’t be forthcoming because the interests weren’t the same.27
On the other hand, at the United Nations, Pearson proved skilful in representing the views of an improbable coalition that included both the United States and India. He masked a diplomatic defeat for the British and French by the creation of a UN “peacekeeping” force that would at first stand between the combatants around the Suez Canal and then take the place of the departing British, French, and Israelis. Canada contributed to the force, called UNEF (United Nations Emergency Force), which was initially commanded by a Canadian general. It was a diplomatic triumph for Pearson, who got the Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements. The Nobel committee recognized Pearson’s unusual diplomatic skill, which had cobbled a coalition and a solution out of practically nothing. There probably wouldn’t have been a major war had he not succeeded, but both the United Nations and the Western alliance, as well as relations between the West and the Third World, would have suffered.
The Soviet attack on Hungary in November 1956 also had consequences for Canada. The federal government admitted an influx of Hungarian refugees who were fleeing the Soviet invasion and the revenge of the Soviet-installed puppet government in Budapest. At the same time the Canadian Communist Party entered a state of terminal decline. Already weakened by its complete subservience to the Soviet Union, the Communists found their claim to moral authority undermined by the very public, and widely televised, Soviet invasion of Hungary. The Communists lost many of their most promising members over Hungary—some of whom later proved quite successful as capitalists, given the opportunity.
If political dissent was subsiding on the left, it rose on the right. The Progressive Conservative opposition had waged ineffective political warfare against the governing Liberals for decades, only to be deflected time and again—losing a record five elections in a row from 1935 to 1953, inclusive. But thanks to Suez, St. Laurent, and Pearson, the Conservatives’ spirits revived in the fall of 1956. The imperial spirit rose once more in Canada, as Conservative orators condemned Pearson’s betrayal of Britain. Canada’s place in 1956, as in 1939, was at Britain’s side, they argued, whether to fight against Hitler or “the Hitler of the Nile,” as Nasser was called. English Canada was divided on the issue (French Canada was not), and Conservative speakers kept returning to the theme, a sure sign that they were having an impact. Canadians, it turned out, were uncertain about where their country stood, or where it should stand. The government’s unexpected weakness in public opinion over foreign policy now combined with its weakness in another area—energy, or more properly, the secure supply of energy.
ENERGY POLICY
Heat and light are or should be close to the heart of Canadian politics. Canada could be settled because heat sources grew alongside the settlements, but as the population increased, heating by wood became impractical. Nineteenth-century Canada mined coal in Nova Scotia and later Alberta or imported it from Pennsylvania, and coal and steam power fuelled the growth of cities and the spread of railways. Electricity allowed the cities to grow up as well as out, as cheap urban transport spread and suburbs expanded. It also powered the factories and thus made possible the employment of a large urban workforce. Canadians liked to believe that electricity was the product of the nation’s mighty rivers and waterfalls, and much of it was. But even at the best of times there wasn’t enough water power to go around, and much of Canada used coal to heat the boilers that made the electricity, or converted coal into artificial gas. Canadian cities in the first half of the twentieth century were dirty from coal grime and industrial waste, but they always had been—pollution was a fact of life and a condition of progress and prosperity.
During the Great War power and fuel had to be rationed, and in the 1920s and 1930s provincial governments concerned themselves with the provision of power—electricity—for home and industry. The optimistic government of Ontario, for example, contracted to buy power from Quebec to feed its industry—just as the Depression was looming. The pessimistic government of Ontario then spent thousands of dollars in legal fees—fuelling at least one industry—to escape from the contracts, only to need the power once more as the Second World War pushed demand for electricity to new heights. The postwar government of Ontario had to cope with brown-outs as it struggled to match electricity supply with demand. The Ontario premier judged it useful to fire the head of Ontario Hydro, the provincial utility, as a scapegoat for the brown-outs. That seems to have had very little effect on the power supply, though it did improve the province’s hot-air quotient. Slowly, Canada began to build thermal electric stations—2.6 million kilowatts in thermal production capacity in 1957, 9.3 million in 1967.28
The federal minister of trade and commerce in the 1950s, C.D. Howe,29 was the same man who had presided over Canada’s war production and, consequently, its power supply. Howe disliked finding his country at the far end of American natural gas supply, or dependent on Venezuelan oil piped through Maine to market in Montreal. The Americans were good neighbours and reliable suppliers, but in case of emergency, fuel and power supply became not an issue for the international energy market but for the American government. Howe preferred to find his energy in Canada, but there was a problem of geography and geology. Geography made the waterpower still untapped in the 1940s remote and expensive, while geology had left behind only two small oil fields, one near Edmonton and the other in southwestern Ontario.30 While there should have been more oil in Alberta, no one could find it.
Until 1947, that is, when a gusher was tapped at Leduc, south of Edmonton. Howe rejoiced and so, with at least as much reason, did the provincial government of Alberta, which saw the province transformed from a have-not stretch of dry prairie to the Canadian equivalent of Texas. Once the oil and accompanying natural gas could be got to market, Canada would have a secure energy supply and, not coincidentally, a much improved balance of payments as purchases of American petroleum declined with the availability of Canadian resources.
Howe took the lead in getting Canadian oil and gas to Canada’s largest domestic market, in the central provinces. He encouraged the construction of an oil pipeline, which ran partly through the northern United States and branched off to serve Midwestern American markets.
The pièce de résistance was a natural gas pipeline to Toronto and Montreal. That project, Trans-Canada Pipelines, took time and imagination and, above all, money. It also consumed much of the government’s political capital, as it rammed a subsidy for part of the pipeline through the House of Commons in the summer of 1956. This “Pipeline Debate” gave the government a black eye politically because of the way in which Howe, the sponsoring minister, overrode opposition objections, believing them to be irrelevant and without merit (as, by and large, they were). Much of the noise centred on Canadian nationalists’ anxieties about American investment and this pipeline’s American ownership. Howe, the opposition argued, was giving away Canada’s heritage to the Americans, and it was not forgotten that the powerful minister was himself of American birth. In reply Howe promised that American investment in the pipeline would be temporary, necessary only to reassure and secure New York capital for the project. The pipeline was completed in two years, and, as Howe had promised, it came to be owned mostly in Canada.
Howe encouraged another energy source. During the war Canada had one of the few uranium mines in the world, and the most accessible uranium refinery among the Allied powers. Canada therefore participated in the race to build an atomic bomb, and along the way acquired a functioning nuclear scientific establishment, which constructed the first primitive nuclear reactor outside the United States.
In 1947 a much better model, called NRX, was inaugurated at the federal atomic research establishment at Chalk River, Ontario.31 Canada developed its own line of heavy-water, natural-uranium reactors, which were extended in the mid-1950s for power production. Howe and his advisers hoped that the Canadian model of reactor—eventually called the CANDU—would service both the domestic and export trade. Their hopes were frustrated, though not at first. Reactors became the focus for the expansion of the largest provincial power utility, Ontario Hydro, in the 1960s and 1970s; an experimental reactor was constructed in Quebec; and New Brunswick took a reactor for its own power needs. The export market remained limited: there were some sales, but never enough.32 The reactor program also proved costly, even if, based on the first decade of operation, the CANDU design was considered the best in the world.
Canadian uranium sales were the most profitable feature of atomic energy. From a small and depleting mine off Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, the industry grew to be the second-largest producer in the world in the 1950s, and eventually the largest in the 1980s and after. Until the 1960s virtually all Canadian production was sold to the United States and the United Kingdom for use in their nuclear weapons programs. Eventually, however, the United States developed a uranium mining industry of its own, and Canadian sales to that country ceased in the later 1960s. Canada’s uranium mines struggled for the next couple of decades, until, in the 1990s, they came to dominate the world market.
Canada’s energy policy cannot be seen in isolation from American economic needs and American politics. In some areas, such as the hydroelectric development of the St. Lawrence, the two countries cooperated closely. In petroleum, atomic reactors, and uranium, where there were competing American interests anxious to seal off the domestic market, they did not.
Petroleum exports moved between the two extremes of cooperation and exclusion, as the American executive branch sought a balance between its political needs—reaping votes and campaign finance in oil-producing states—and its strategic priorities—preserving domestic American oil supply and consequently security. The politics usually won, though for a time Canada was given preferred status among foreign oil suppliers, much to the irritation of the competing Venezuelans. Venezuela’s irritation at its treatment contributed to the formation of an oil producers’ association, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC. Unimportant in the 1960s, its time would come soon enough.
NATIONALISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM
Anti-Americanism is in some respects as old as Canada itself. Oscar Wilde’s quip that the United States and Great Britain were divided by a common language could be expanded and applied to the Canadian–American experience—geography, history, politics, religion, and economics both unite and divide the two countries. (The existence for many years of a substantial Franco-American community that retained its language provides, up to a point, a parallel on the other side of the great linguistic divide.)
When Mackenzie King in 1948 drew back from the idea of a customs union with the United States, he had in mind the negative reaction that Canadian public opinion (or much of it) would have probably had—even after the shared experience of war and alliance, and the generally positive view that Canadians had of American policies and political leaders (especially of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt). The sentiment expressed itself in the 1950s—so much so that when one American diplomat left Canada (and, simultaneously, the diplomatic service) he published an article upbraiding Canadians for their anti-Americanism.33 His readers were no doubt surprised, but there was an uncomfortable reality at the core of his critique.
The difficulty was all too often a clash of nationalisms. The U.S. embassy began to include a section in its reports to Washington entitled “Canadian Nationalism,” while Canadian diplomats lamented (or fulminated about, according to taste) American pig-headedness and indifference to Canadian interests. One American ambassador ascribed Canadian anti-Americanism to a fear that Canadians were at bottom second-rate Americans.
There was nevertheless a fair degree of mutual confidence between the professional diplomats who managed Canadian–American relations. The confidence would be shaken by the next turn of events in Canadian politics.
On 10 June 1957 Louis St. Laurent and his Liberal government were narrowly defeated in a general election. St. Laurent could have done what Mackenzie King once did, and waited for Parliament to assemble to see if the two minor parties, the CCF and Social Credit, could together lend the government enough votes to survive. Instead, he resigned and made way for the Progressive Conservatives under John Diefenbaker.
Diefenbaker was a new party leader, but an old parliamentarian and partisan. A prominent and successful lawyer from Saskatchewan, he had been in the House of Commons since 1940. He was three times a candidate for his party’s leadership, and he succeeded on the third try, in 1956. Diefenbaker was a man who stimulated strong reactions. Some members of his party actively disliked the leader: they believed that he had a long and vindictive memory for slights real and imagined, and they were right. What they had to admit was that as an orator Diefenbaker was second to none and, properly prepared for a speech in Parliament or on the hustings, he was a veritable weapon of mass destruction. They had to admit, too, that after twenty-one years of electoral failure the Conservatives needed a boost, and Diefenbaker was definitely that.
Diefenbaker was of course a Westerner, which eventually proved to be an electoral advantage, but his real strength was that he did not hail from metropolitan Canada. Indeed, his strength lay more in what he was not than in what he was. Ideologically, there was little that divided the Progressive Conservatives, or Diefenbaker in particular, from the Liberals. Politically, at least in terms of political tactics, his hero was Mackenzie King, whom he had studied from the opposition benches in the 1940s. King had taken his time in making up his mind on controversial issues, and Diefenbaker followed his example. Socially, there was a difference, for the Conservatives traditionally drew their strength from English speakers, Protestants, and the upper-income brackets.
Despite Diefenbaker’s own lack of identification with the large cities, the large cities voted for him and his party, especially in the snap election he called in March 1958. The Liberals in that election had a new leader, the Nobel Prize–winning Lester Pearson, who had replaced St. Laurent in January. The Nobel Prize did Pearson little good. An actual majority of the electorate adopted the Tory slogan to “Follow John” to an overwhelming victory: 208 out of 265 seats in the House of Commons. From coast to coast, Canadians voted for Diefenbaker, including Quebec, where the ex–Conservative premier Maurice Duplessis threw his support and his organization behind the Conservatives to crush the hated Liberals. It was the year of “Dief the Chief,” as he was affectionately dubbed by his followers.
Yet little changed. The Diefenbaker government did not have or propose policies that were philosophically distinct from those of the Liberals. It tackled some overdue problems, such as small and uneconomic farms, encouraging farmers to leave the land if it couldn’t support them. It increased pensions. It adjusted energy policy, ensuring a market for Alberta oil in Ontario at slightly more than the world price. It finished the St. Lawrence Seaway, a Howe project, and it promoted nuclear power, a Howe project. It tried to sell another Howe project, the Canadian-made Avro Arrow supersonic jet fighter, and failed. As a result, Diefenbaker shut down the Arrow project, for which Howe refused to condemn him. It was a lesson that not all the Liberals’ ideas were good ones. As one of Diefenbaker’s ministers ruefully reflected years later, the Conservatives had seen the Ottawa civil service make the Liberals look good all those years; now it was their turn.34 They were surprised to discover that Diefenbaker proved to be less an alternative to the Liberals than an epilogue.
This fact was masked by several factors. Diefenbaker, more than St. Laurent, made himself the very visible head of the government, seeking publicity and credit for “his” policies. Publicity—of the favourable kind— therefore came to be the barometer by which success was measured, and as time passed, other considerations were increasingly sacrificed to it. Diefenbaker depended on the press, and the press came to depend on Diefenbaker. Unlike St. Laurent, “Dief’s” personal foibles became the stuff of contemporary legend. Diefenbaker, who had made the right choice on the Avro Arrow, harvested such abuse and bad publicity, not to mention political damage, that he hesitated to make another unpopular decision. Cabinet meetings degenerated into festivals of delay as the ministers endlessly debated the political consequences of their actions. Diefenbaker proved to be an unskilful manager of his cabinet, and it did not take long for old animosities to filter out. One perceptive analyst of the Conservative party has suggested that the Conservatives had spent so much time losing that they acquired habits and attitudes that were, in a political context, pathological.35 They fed on themselves rather than the opposition.
That might not have mattered had the opposition, as so often happens, been directionless and incompetent. Pearson himself was not a born manager, nor was his personal judgment always good, but he was blessed with colleagues who respected his leadership and subscribed to the old adage, “If we don’t hang together, we’ll all hang separately.” The Liberals renovated their policy platform, brought themselves up to date with the latest liberal fashions, and benefited from a resurgence of liberalism in the United States, manifested in the victory of the youthful and very handsome Democrat John F. Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960. The works of the expatriate Canadian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, became required reading in advanced circles. Encouragingly for the Liberals, public opinion polls moved in their direction in 1960 and remained steady thereafter.
If Pearson, aged sixty-three in 1960, became identified with new ideas and renovation, Diefenbaker failed to make the necessary leap in voters’ minds. His Canada was an older Canada—not necessarily a less liberal Canada, but one that had missed the boat in adjusting to a new reality. Diefenbaker looked painfully old-fashioned, even bucolic—a hayseed out of place in a modern and shiny world. The charge was unjust: Diefenbaker was anything but a hayseed, but it was true that his habits and his outlook were ill suited to an era that was, demographically and in terms of style and culture, increasingly youthful.
CULTURE AND SOCIETY AT THE END OF THE FIFTIES
The late 1950s was the age of the teenager. Teenagers had existed before, of course, but only in the 1950s was there the right combination of numbers, leisure, and prosperity to push them to the forefront of popular culture. The leading edge of the baby boom was creeping upwards. Children’s programming became a major feature of the new television networks—the CBC in Canada, and the big three American systems, ABC, NBC, and CBS, from stations across the border. The outward sign that something was changing was the phenomenon of rock ’n’ roll, symbolized by Elvis Presley—his guitar, his ducktail hair, and his pelvic gyrations on stage. Rock ’n’ roll was strictly for teens, and parents and other authority figures fell all over themselves to condemn it.36
The new music crossed borders easily, and given television, radio, and the easy availability of 45-rpm records and cheap record players, rock ’n’ roll didn’t spread so much as flow into Canada. Some condemned rock ’n’ roll because it was immoral, some because it was American (or both), but to be American was, in the late fifties, to be stylish, up to date, and cool. Diefenbaker, to use an obvious example, was not cool, nor was his elderly contemporary, American president Eisenhower. It was hard to imagine Diefenbaker waltzing, let alone gyrating Elvis-fashion.37
Diefenbaker presided over the slippage of some of Canada’s national traits. Canadians were or had been pro-British, monarchical, and conservative. These characteristics had helped to get Diefenbaker elected in 1957, and they helped define a kind of conservative nationalism that still bore traces of the Canada of Sir John A. Macdonald, one of Diefenbaker’s heroes.
Diefenbaker also presided over two royal visits by Elizabeth II, in 1957 and 1959; by the end of the second one, which was quite lengthy, complaints were beginning to be heard. The visits were strong on parades and pageantry, which had worked so well in 1939 for George VI. Perhaps in the age of mass entertainment and easily available images a royal progress, handshakes with notables, and flowers weren’t enough. Perhaps too there was the sense that the pomp and circumstance were a charade, masking an absence of power rather than the real thing. Britain in 1939 had been one of the world’s truly great powers; Britain in 1959 was, compared with Canada, down on its luck. The memory of the Second World War was beginning to fade; just possibly the Canadian veterans of the war were content to let the British side of it fade.38 There was in any case the Cold War to fight, and pageants and heritage did not quite fit with its metallic sense of urgency. Still, it would take some time for the growing sense of disenchantment to take root, and it was easier to ignore the signs in English Canada than in the French section of the country.
AMBIVALENT QUEBEC
English Canadians in the 1950s generally believed that French Canada, especially French Quebec, lived in a kind of medieval, Catholic trance. It was hard not to believe it: Premier Duplessis embodied a view of the world that would have been old-fashioned in 1900, let alone 1950. The hand of the Church was visible everywhere in Quebec—in the big churches and high steeples that soared over town and village and city, in the classical colleges run by the clergy, in the monasteries and nunneries that dotted landscapes urban and rural. Quebec had come late and reluctantly to universal education, and the educational standard was lower there than in the rest of the country. There were fewer Quebec veterans than elsewhere, and consequently fewer French Quebeckers who had benefited from veterans’ benefits. The country was in the throes of suburbanization and home-buying, but in Quebec home ownership was lower than elsewhere; it was still a province of renters. English Canadians, including English Montrealers, comforted themselves that Quebec was backward—perhaps forever, given the apparently immutable power of the Church and the prevalence of conservative politics.
Yet there were many changes in la belle province, the motto that appeared on Quebec licence plates. Some changes derived from Duplessis. The premier had inaugurated a Quebec flag, recalling the banners of pre revolutionary France, and the flag caught on—a very visible symbol that Quebec was indeed different. Official nationalism was right-wing and repressive, but it should not be thought that it was unpopular or without effect on the younger generation. Many intellectuals drew back from Duplessis’s political practices, but that didn’t mean they had chosen Canada as the best alternative. Some did, to be sure, but others waited, using federal institutions or the provincial Liberal party—exempt from Duplessis’s bullying, up to a point—without subscribing to a pan-Canadian ideology.
The latent quality of Quebec came to a head in 1959–60. Duplessis suddenly died, in September. His successor, Paul Sauvé (incidentally a Second World War hero), died on New Year’s Day, 1960. His successor, Antonio Barrette, a parish-pump politician, led Duplessis’s Union Nationale to defeat in June. The victor was Jean Lesage, formerly a federal Liberal MP (1945–58) and cabinet minister (1953–57). These events coincided with a resurgence in liberalism—along with optimism and a sense that reform and progress were possible, even after Duplessis and even after Diefenbaker—that was drifting across Canada and that was soon to be mirrored in Kennedy’s victory in the United States.
Lesage stood for reform, not revolution, and his cabinet was a mixture of party warhorses and “modern” recruits. Lesage could rely on the former—after all, he came from their ranks. The latter included people like René Lévesque, a journalist and broadcaster for Radio-Canada, the French arm of the CBC, and Paul Gérin-Lajoie, a noted constitutional lawyer. Lesage may have had in mind that he was a logical successor to Lester B. Pearson, his erstwhile cabinet colleague, as national Liberal leader and prime minister (certainly Pearson thought of this). But Lesage proved not to be in control of his fate, and Pearson’s later attempts to bring the two together again proved futile. For the time being, and eventually for the foreseeable future, Canada and Quebec were on different paths.
DIEFENBAKER’S DOWNFALL
Diefenbaker had the misfortune to lead a Canada divided by generation and by language. To these cleavages he added regional disharmony and a genuine foreign policy crisis. Diefenbaker had few policies of his own, and the attitudes he brought to government were the bromides of a forgotten era. Confronted by rumblings from French Quebec, he produced bilingual federal government cheques—something that had last been a live issue in the 1930s. Aware that French-speaking MPs and some of his own ministers dozed or fretted through parliamentary debates or the sessions of the cabinet, Diefenbaker produced simultaneous translation.
He was out of synch with English Canada too. His devotion to the monarchy and his references to the past—his past—began to seem quaint, and irrelevant. In a general election in June 1962 Diefenbaker saw his parliamentary delegation melt away from 208 MPs to 116, and with it his majority in the House of Commons. Politically vulnerable, “the Chief” watched the wolves circling—not all of them on the opposition side. His own followers blamed him for the evaporation of their comfortable majority and their prospects for indefinite power. Canadians had got used to indefinite governments under King and the Liberals; now Diefenbaker’s seemed to have its future measured in months.
Even so, Diefenbaker might have survived. He still had some resources, including a diminished but still respectable contingent from Quebec, where the old forces were not yet totally vanquished. He held most of Canada’s rural seats, and dominated the Prairie provinces, which had developed affection for a man who, whatever his faults, at least came from the West. There were two minor opposition parties, the New Democrats or NDP (successors of the CCF since 1961) and Social Credit, which through a bizarre turn of fate was now mainly francophone, and from Quebec. But neither the NDP nor the Social Credit wanted to replace the wounded Diefenbaker with Pearson, whose Liberal party was a more deadly foe to their own political prospects.
Diefenbaker’s own nemesis didn’t even live in Canada. John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, had hoped for much from Canada when he was inaugurated in 1961. He immediately visited Diefenbaker to urge on him a kind of partnership in the Americas and elsewhere in the world. There was nothing wrong with the spirit of Kennedy’s suggestion, but the devil was always in the details, and they included the usual disparity in wealth and population between the two countries at a ratio of ten to one. It wasn’t hard to figure out where most of the decisions would be made, even if Kennedy fully intended to have Diefenbaker sitting in when they were taken. The more important the decision, the less the consultation.
A good example was the defence of North America against Soviet attack. In the fifties it was assumed, accurately, that such an attack would come from manned long-range bombers, which would rain nuclear bombs on the cities of the previously invulnerable continent. Soviet aircraft would have to cross Canada, which with the United States maintained radar lines and an air defence organization to detect and shoot down the Russians. The Americans took the lead, as they had to: they had the money and they had the technology. They were also determined to survive a nuclear attack, and with Diefenbaker’s assistance conducted several air raid alerts to familiarize the civilian population with what would happen when and if a nuclear war occurred.
The alerts (one had the happy name of “Tocsin”) did not have quite the desired effect. They alarmed the civilians they were meant to reassure— though how a projected casualty figure in the millions could have been reassuring was a mystery the planners did not reveal. The plans called for Diefenbaker and his chief ministers to head for a bombproof shelter outside Ottawa, a concrete-lined hole in the ground that wags dubbed “the Diefenbunker.” Even pillars of the Tory establishment began to have doubts about the wisdom of a policy that seemed to take the prospect of worldwide incineration with aplomb.39 For the first time since the inception of the Cold War, there was respectable pressure on the government to do something about a strategic impasse that offered devastation as the alternative to defeat.
The issue of nuclear weapons became more pressing when, in 1961–62, the Kennedy administration pressured the Diefenbaker government to honour Canadian commitments—some made to NATO as far back as 1954—to equip Canada’s armed forces with American nuclear warheads. (These would continue to be owned and controlled by the Americans, and would become operational only by mutual consent between Canada and the United States.) In particular, Diefenbaker had bought an American missile system, the BOMARC,40 to shoot down incoming Soviet bombers; the BOMARC would only work with nuclear weapons. Diefenbaker was caught between Canada’s international commitments and his sense that a political storm was brewing at home on the issue. Worse still, his external affairs minister, Howard Green, and his defence minister, Douglas Harkness, held diametrically opposed positions on the issue, with Harkness urging the adoption of nuclear weapons and Green opposing them.
The nuclear issue was brought to a head in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuba had acquired, through a revolution in 1959, a Communist government headed by Fidel Castro. The presence of communism 150 kilometres across the Florida Straits from Key West dismayed the American government, which under both Eisenhower and Kennedy did what it could to overthrow the Cuban dictator. Kennedy backed a hare-brained invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961 (unsuccessful) and then sponsored various schemes to murder Castro—for example with an exploding cigar. Castro resented this, but his communist faith told him that this was what good communists should expect from capitalism. He appealed to the mother of all communists, the Soviet Union, and the Soviets were delighted to help. Cuba was a beachhead in the Americas, and it altered the strategic balance, especially if the USSR were able to place missiles (with nuclear warheads) in Cuba. The Americans discovered these when the launch pads were in the last stages of construction, in mid-October 1962, and the Cuban crisis was on.
Kennedy sought solidarity from his allies, sending a senior diplomat to Canada to brief Diefenbaker on what the Soviets were doing and what he proposed to do in response. He was surprised when he learned that Diefenbaker actually questioned his evidence—that Canada was the least cooperative of his major allies. Fortunately, the crisis was solved soon enough, and Diefenbaker’s hesitations made no practical difference. But the news soon leaked, and it damaged the prime minister’s standing in Canadian public opinion, which expected him to maintain unity with the allies and especially the United States.
A few months later, in February 1963, the nuclear weapons question came to a head. Kennedy issued a statement that blamed Canada for the failure, after years of negotiation, to reach an agreement on nuclear deployments. Diefenbaker’s ministers immediately set to quarrelling, the defence minister resigned, and the government was defeated on a confidence motion in the House of Commons. Diefenbaker had accomplished the impossible, persuading the three opposition parties to vote together to defeat him when the support of only one would have been enough to preserve the government.
An election was called for 8 April 1963. Diefenbaker, his cabinet in chaos, was defeated. Pearson, the Liberal leader, didn’t so much win as harvest the fruits of Diefenbaker’s political ineptness. Diefenbaker himself seems to have found the outcome hard to grasp and harder to accept. That, combined with his natural vindictiveness, would make Canada’s political history for the next few years very colourful.