Political turmoU in Ottawa, an independence movement in Quebec, even Expo ’67 itself, were symptoms of an age of liberation from old fears, constraints, and experiences. Canadians were slowly coming to terms with the changes in post-war Canada. The 1948 message of Borduas’s Refus global was finally in fashion. Twenty years of almost unbroken prosperity had persuaded a generation that there was almost nothing they could not have soon and without sacrifice. A generation whose parents had doubled their incomes and which itself could slip into comfortable middle-class jobs felt no fear for the future. If young Quebecois believed that they could unload the incubus of Confederation, they unconsciously echoed their counterparts in Toronto or Vancouver who demanded economic independence from the United States, or young Native people whose dream of “Red Power” promised their own liberation.
In any age, wealth is the basis of freedom; in every age, youth seeks a separate identity. Never had so many Canadians come of age at a single time and never had they been so affluent. By the late 1960s, Canada was dominated, as never before, by its young. The long prosperity that still struck their elders as a lucky accident seemed to them a normal state of affairs. At the universities and colleges that more and more of them attended, young Canadians were taught that economists had solved the old problem of recurring depressions; the swift departure of the Diefenbaker recession proved the point. The Economic Council of Canada, created in 1963, would provide even better Guidance in the future. Limitless natural resources guaranteed that the Gross National Product (gnp) would continue to grow at an effortless 5 per cent a year. The venerable disciplines of self-denial, frugality, and hard work seemed as obsolete and tiresome as the bickering between Pearson and Diefenbaker.
Many Canadians in the 1960s believed that they could look forward to anything their hearts desired. Governments did their best to oblige. The bounty from the Canada Pension Plan Fund was poured into new universities and community colleges on the claim, echoed by educators, that education paid a bigger dividend than any other investment. Good times made for buoyant revenues. Federal-government income doubled between 1957 and 1967, but Ottawa’s share of the gnp actually fell. Only the provinces, responsible for meeting most of the voters’ demands, seemed greedy as their tax bite grew. The new money supported scores of programs, from student loans to the promotion of physical fitness and amateur sport. After eight lean years of living on its endowment, the Canada Council was granted millions to prepare for the centennial in 1967. By the 1970s, public funds had created a large and powerfully articulate “cultural industry.” Thousands of artists, actors, poets, and playwrights lived, albeit meagrely, on the bounty of the state. Another centennial event was Medicare, a federally-funded, provincially run system of universal health insurance. Pioneered by Saskatchewan’s CCF government in 1962, in the face of a bitter doctors’ strike and efforts to frighten voters away from “socialized medicine,” prepaid health care had become an irresistible national demand by 1967. Though the Liberals had promised such a system in 1919 and 1945, they needed pressure from the New Democrats, fast rising in the polls, to implement an old pledge. The resistance was not so much financial as
In the 1960s, expanding universities struggled to reconcile staid academic tradition with the rising counter-cultures and protest movements. Here, two professors congratulate the winner of a Governor General’s medal, at the University of Toronto’s brand new Erindale campus.
“Topping off” the Toronto-Dominion Centre at the 56th floor, in April 1966, gave construction workers a chance to cheer. Most were new Canadians but some were aboriginals—Mohawks with a tradition of expertise in high steel. With office towers mushrooming in all the major cities, such skills were much in demand.
Professional: doctors went on fighting for their total control of health care, including its price. In the mood of the liberation era, patients’ rights now mattered more than those of a guild of affluent professionals.
If governments could afford almost anything, so could the governed. Winter holidays and foreign travel became routine experiences for the middle class. The first volunteers for the Canadian University Services Overseas went abroad in 1961. They became a vanguard for thousands of young Canadians who wandered the world, carefully distinguished from Americans by the maple-leaf flags sewn on their knapsacks. Canadians clamoured for new homes and then furnished them in the costly ascetic style set by Scandinavian designers. In the post-war years, larger cities had been transformed into sterile collections of upturned glass and concrete bricks, symbolized by the B. C. Electric Building in Vancouver or the Toronto-Dominion Centre. In the mid-1960s, there were signs of revolt at such a bleakly utilitarian international style, and architects began to show a grudging concern for heritage and humanity. The first covered shopping malls admitted the extremes of Canada’s climate; a conservationist movement insisted that communities could also afford to keep their old buildings. Politicians and publicists began talking of “people places.” After two decades of building super-highways, the Ontario government won votes in 1971 by scrapping a billion-dollar Spad-ina Expressway that would have threatened Toronto neighbourhoods. Who cared about the money? Haligonians briefly struggled to protect their historic skyline from the usual monotonous clump of high-rise offices. Federal and provincial governments built historical parks and recruited college students to masquerade as pioneers or soldiers. Tourism was only part of the motive; pride mattered too.
In a country hitherto dominated by the middle-aged and elderly, the young forced The pace. Their styles, as usual, were borrowed from elsewhere: Liverpool’s Beatles, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, the urban black culture of Memphis or Detroit. A Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, proclaimed the age of the global village. Young Canadians wanted to share in the American civil rights crusade, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the environmental movement. They did so vicariously by applauding the Travellers, Gordon Lightfoot, and Ian and Sylvia, or more obscure folksingers in smoky coffee houses. They sometimes participated directly; travel to Selma, Woodstock, or Chicago was easily arranged. Parents who had dreamed of swooning to Frank Sinatra in the 1940s were disturbed at offspring who screamed at the Beatles, Mick lagger, and other visiting rock stars.
Social passions eased into the individualist doctrine of “doing your own thing.” A counter-culture borrowed largely from California sanctified liberation from almost every traditional constraint: clothing, language, and human relations. A dependable and seemingly safe birth-control pUl, devised in 1960, provided the material basis for a sexual revolution. Women could control their own fertility. In the decade from 1957 to 1967, Canada’s birth rate tumbled from 29.2 per thousand women to 18.2; the fall was even more precipitous in a once-fecund and Catholic Quebec. The change in family size was not due solely to sexual inhibitions: in the same ten years, Canada’s illegitimate births doubled. Old taboos against public nudity, homosexuality, and premarital cohabitation faded.
Affluence inspired a vast expansion of spectator sports. The competitive elegance of the six-team National Hockey League dissolved as a welter of American and Canadian cities campaigned for franchises. Both available talent and the playing season were stretched beyond reason by the thirst for entertainment dollars. Canadian football
Edmonton in 1978. A hundred years before, it had been a furtrading post with a few scattered houses. The Alberta capital flourished in the oil boom, and its championship football and hockey teams were among the signs of regional self-confidence. Photo by Egon Bork.
If anything dented Canadian pride in the 1960s, it was a succession of international hockey humiliations. But what if professionals from the NHL could match the best? In 1972 Canada and the U. S.S. R. face off in a tense series of eight games. In the last game, in the last minute of the last period, the series is tied. Paul Henderson shoots; the Soviet goalie stops it. Henderson shoots again— he scores! Canada 6, U. S.S. R. 5.
Faded before the heavily televised American alternative. By the 1970s, two American major
League baseball franchises seemed firmly established in Toronto and Montreal.
Yet affluence also inspired individual excellence and collective exertion. A jogging Governor General, Roland Michener, led a sedentary and often overweight nation into a quest for personal fitness that soon pervaded all ages and classes. Canadian men and women achieved world-class standards in a seemingly endless variety of sports, from trap shooting to lawn tennis. Steve Podborski won a world championship in downhill skiing as one of the “Crazy Canucks,” Sylvie Bernier won Olympic gold as a high diver, and there were hundreds more. Few athletes caught the nation’s imagination more than Terry Fox, who, having lost one leg to cancer, ran halfway across Canada in 1980 in his “Marathon of Hope.” His physical collapse and early death from the disease created a drama not equalled when his feat was completed, two years later, by another one-legged runner, Steve Fonyo.
The liberation era undermined many of the institutions that once had bolstered a socially conservative Canada. In the 1950s, most people went to church; in the 1960s, attendance fell by half. Divorces had averaged six thousand a year. In 1967, when Trudeau liberalized the law, the rate promptly doubled. By 1974, there was a divorce for every four marriages, and by 1990 the rate had doubled again. City streets were still relatively safe, but drug use, one of the saddest enthusiasms of the counter-culture, transFormed criminal statistics. In 1957, 354 Canadians were convicted of narcotic-related offences; in 1974, the total was 30,845.
The police struggle against the drug traffic was unpopular, largely unavailing, and unusual. Most of the demands of the liberation era were met with at least a shuffling acquiescence. Rebels, often with “non-negotiable” demands, pushed against open doors. Universities, expanded out of recognition in enrolments and wealth, accepted student demands for a share in their management and even in determining academic priorities, although the rise in satisfaction, scholarship, or even relevance was often hard to discern. Governments had traditionally refused civU servants the right to strike or even to negotiate collectively. Only Saskatchewan, thanks to the CCF, was an exception. Between 1964 and 1968, virtually all provincial and federal employees won bargaining rights, and most were entitled to strike. Clergy, faced with empty pews, preached “situational ethics” and opened coffee houses in church basements. Denominations promoted ecumenicism, like shaky corporations seeking a merger. Faced by the 1967 changes in the law on abortion, divorce, and homosexuality, Catholic bishops explained that they would not impose their views—though they discreetly worried
Northrop Frye—biblical scholar, literary critic, and moral eminence—was an intellectual whose status in the firmament is broadly suggested by Douglas Martin’s 1972 acrylic.
How the “health” of a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy might be defined. Governments tried to outflank the drug culture by lowering the drinking age. A royal commission contemplated the legalization of marijuana but retreated when it realized that “pot”
Wyndham Lewis’s 1944 drawing of Marshall McLuhan cruelly leaves him without a cranium. While some wondered whether McLuhan’s Delphic assertions about the media were part of a giant intellectual confidence, most were reassured once he had been given his due by American television and news magazines.
Usually led users to more virulent narcotics. A Vancouver mayor and Toronto’s police attracted national ridicule by well-publicized attempts to uphold traditional morality by closing art galleries and hip newspapers. In most provinces, censorship retreated to mere classification.
Pornography and drug addiction were ugly side-effects of a process that, on the whole, made Canada a more civilized, creative, and interesting place to live. The millions of dollars poured into the coffers of arts organza-tions, orchestras, publishers, the CBC, and universities generated far more talent than Canadians had ever believed they possessed. Most provinces created counterparts of the Canada Council to encourage the study and enjoyment of the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and burgeoning public patronage spread cultural activity beyond the great urban centres. In the spirit of the times, a robust regionalism pitted local talent against the alleged pretensions of metropolitan centres; nationalism demanded safeguards against American cultural invasions, and governments and their granting agencies nervously obliged. Cultural and academic politics sometimes proved as nasty and selfserving as any other version of the form.
The bonanza of art, music, writing, and every other form of cultural expression included much that was mediocre, self-indulgent, and derivative, but what else could be expected from an adolescent growth? An older generation of authors, artists, and performers finally found the Canadian audience they had always deserved: Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Maureen Forrester, Christopher Plummer, Mavis Gallant, and Anto-nine MaUlet, to name only a few. The more talented newcomers disciplined themselves to the demands of excellence. Margaret Atwood’s precise language and humane instincts made her the most respected young writer of her generation. Out of scores of new dramatists, Michel Tremblay stood out for the dynamism of his plays and their
Left; Jazz pianist and composer Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) was performing on radio at the age of fifteen and was among the world’s leading jazz kings for more than fifty years. His compositions include the Canadiana Suite and the African Suite.
Right: Glenn Gould was the world’s greatest interpreter of Bach’s keyboard music when he died in 1982 at the age of fifty. The eccentric musician was a true child of the electronic age, abandoning a concert career in 1964 in favour of the technical perfection possible only from recording studios. Photo by Walter Curtin.
Brilliant use of joual, the dialect of ordinary Quebecois. The value of regionalism could be Illustrated in the Maritimes by the influence of Alex Colville’s evocative realism on such brilliant Newfoundland disciples as Mary and Christopher Pratt.
For all the predictions of doom, vital institutions survived the liberation experience with only their self-importance damaged. Churches were no weaker when their social conformists departed and only believers remained. Unions were more militant and more democratic in the hands of an educated and expectant membership. Even most schools and universities survived folly and timidity, although they found it harder to escape the consequences of Ul-advised staffing decisions and over-expansion. New curricula helped change attitudes to women, Native people, minorities, and the environment. Social science added precision to business and government, as well as self-serving jargon and an
Mon Onck Antoine, a powerful 1970 film about growing up in a modernizing Quebec, established Claude Jutras as a brilliant director. Seventeen years later, just after his tragic death by drowning, the film was judged Canada’s best movie ever, by an international panel of film critics.
Norman McLaren (1914-87) was a leading innovator in animation and produced many prizewinning films for the National Film Board; Pas de Deux, left, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1967.
Left; In her novel The Stone Angel, Manitoban writer Margaret Laurence (1926-87) gave Canadians the unforgettable image of Hagar Shipley, an indomitable, uncompromising woman who both reflected and challenged the feminist age. Laurence is most remembered for her cycle of novels set in the imaginary town of Manawaka. Photo by Peter Esterhazy.
Right: Francophone writer Gabrielle Roy (1909-83) grew up in Manitoba and was able to write about the hardships of Quebecois life with a compassionate detachment that made her novels particularly accessible to English Canadians. “Even when her work described alienation and loneliness, it also reached out in hope” (Maclean’s).
Appetite for data processing; improvements in the teaching of science and mathematics compensated for an alleged decline in the standard of literacy among the educated.
The wealthy are often scornful of the sources of their own riches. The liberation generation was no exception. Not since the very different contexts of the 1930s had corporate capitalism come under more savage and sustained attack. Disdain for mass-market affluence provided a foundation for the environmentalism of the 1970s. Young and old, conservative and radical, deplored what earlier generations had cheered: the exploitation of irreplaceable resources, including oil, soil, and fresh water, as some of Canada’s finest farmland vanished under the relentless flow of suburbia. Part of liberation was a romantic back-to-the-land movement, supported by an emotional denunciation of
Chemical pesticides and such traditional Canadian industries as the fur trade and the seal hunt. Native people, newly vocal in defence of aboriginal rights, found allies for their claims—and new enemies of their traditional livelihood as hunters and trappers.
Liberation was even more explicit when it turned to the condition of women. The earlier maternal feminism had fought to protect and enhance women’s traditional nurturing role. Liberation meant an end to all predetermined roles. If, as social scientists began to claim, women had been conditioned by dominant males to accept an inferior place in society, it was evident that women must immediately occupy enough of the positions of power—in business, government, education, or the professions—to smash the old stereotypes. What was valid for women was just as important for the other great collection of stereotypes—race. A nation that had begun the decade with self-satisfied condemnation of the racial policies of South Africa and the United States ended the 1960s with an embarrassed awareness of the bleak plight of Blacks and Native people in many parts of Canada.
Environmentalism, feminism, and awareness of racial discrimination came, like most of the other trends of the liberation era, from abroad. If Canadians grew more eager than ever to identify their own contributions to an international culture, it was not easy to find anything uniquely Canadian in a rock group like the Guess Who or a chanteuse like Monique Leyrac. Even the rhetoric of anti-Americanism that helped fuel Canadian nationalism at the end of the decade was most obviously derived from anti-Vietnam War protests in the United States. The war, and its effect on the U. S. economy and politics, helped Canadians feel a smug detachment from their neighbour. Few cared that the famous “Green Berets” were manufactured in Quebec. Prosperity, fed in part by U. S. war purchases, gave Canada an added sense of well-being. Despite his humiliating misjudgments in the 1963 budget and the 1965 election, Walter Gordon was allowed by his prime minister to launch a fresh exploration of the U. S. domination of Canada’s economy. The resulting report by Melville H. Watkins, with its statistics of corporate Americanization, inspired both Liberal and ndp policy makers in the 1970s.
As ever in Canada, the liberation movement had to feed not one nationalism but two. If Canadians felt entitled to an overdue independence, so did Quebecers. The liberation era had dissolved old safeguards of nationalism—the church, the birth rate, an anxious conservatism. It created new ones. Why should young Quebecois, surging in their thousands through new and expanded colleges and universities, have to master English as the price of mere acceptance in an Ottawa job or even in the corporate offices of their own province? A decade of the Quiet Revolution suggested that there was Nothing that Quebecers could not accomplish—unless they were barred by the rules of Confederation. If Canadians were encouraged by unending prosperity and excited by their cultural creativity, so were Quebecois, and with more reason since, in the smaller Francophone culture, Quebec’s burgeoning community of authors, singers, and artists was all the more significant.
Nationalism, both Canadian and Quebecois, posed challenges for politicians in Ottawa and Quebec City. In Ottawa, at least, the politicians were changing. In 1965, the Liberals had at least managed to elect three powerful reinforcements for their Quebec contingent. Jean Marchand, the labour leader, and Gerard Pelletier, editor of La Presse, were wanted; a third, Pierre Trudeau, was acceptable only because Marchand insisted. Within months, Trudeau’s tough mind and flair for publicity made him the star of the trio. By the end of 1967, as Minister of Justice, he had forced Parliament to accept reforms on divorce, abortion, and the rights of homosexuals that no previous Quebec Catholic minister would even have considered. “The state,” Trudeau declared, “has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” No phrase caught the values of the liberation generation more precisely.
In September 1967, the Conservatives won their struggle to dislodge Diefenbaker. Their reward for picking Robert Stanfield, the able Premier of Nova Scotia, was a prompt surge in the opinion polls. A half-dozen Liberals manoeuvred for Pearson’s mantle without perceptible national acclaim. In February 1968, buoyed by his triumphs in the year of Expo, Quebec’s Daniel Johnson joined a well-televised federal-provincial conference with high spirits and fresh demands. As Minister of Justice, Trudeau was at Pearson's side. For the first time in memory, Canadians heard a federal minister talk back to Quebec in tough, eloquent French. Perhaps, as observers claimed, the outcome was a draw. But that was not how most Canadians saw it.
Trudeau’s leadership campaign was launched. Weary after two unilingual prime ministers, Quebecers favoured the sole French-speaking candidate. Pearson, himself, endorsed the principle of an alternation between French and English leaders of his party. Canadians in and outside the Liberal party perceived in Trudeau a man who broke the stereotypes of political leadership. His victory at the Liberal convention was not a foregone conclusion; his triumph in the ensuing election was. For a few warm spring months in 1968, Trudeau synthesized the dreams, achievements, and illusions of the liberation era. Beyond such flip promises as “no more free stuff” and the offer of a “Just Society,” few admirers listened to Trudeau’s words. They warmed to his brash defiance of convention, his elegance of style, and his coolness under the jeers and stones of a separatist mob in Montreal, all mediated by television. On June 25, Trudeaumania helped achieve the Liberal majority Canadians had denied Pearson: 155 seats to 77 for the Stanfield Tories. Resentful Diefenbaker Tories in the West helped the ndp’s Tommy Douglas win 22 seats. Had the age of liberation come to Ottawa? Or was it over?
World History
