Post-war prosperity worked an almost unnoticed revolution in the lives of most Canadians. Until the 1940s, most people had been defmably poor, unable to afford even a meanly calculated “minimum standard of decency.” Working people endured seasonal layoffs, oversized families, crop failure, cyclical unemployment, and the probability of an impoverished old age. After 1945, many of these hazards were alleviated by family allowances, unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and above aU a booming economy. At a minimum of $5 per infant, the “baby bonus,” for a large family, was the equivalent of an extra week’s wages each month. Full employment gave unions more bargaining power than conventional economists and most governments really wanted, but their influence helped double the average annual industrial income from $1,516 in 1946 to $3,136 in 1956. By 1948, men were earning an average hourly wage of one dollar; working women would not reach that rate until 1956.
Certainly some remained poor, notably Native people, the elderly, and especially families in hinterland regions where traditional industries and occupations struggled at the margins of the economy. In the decade after the war, such exceptions to the new affluence were largely overlooked. The social issues that seemed to matter most were the by-products of affluence: a pressure for decent housing, hospitals, schools, and municipal services neglected during fifteen years of war and depression.
For the most part, the demands of the newly affluent were shaped by generations of cautious frugality. Most Canadians wanted a family, a home, a little land, and savings for those rainy days that had come so often in the past. The composite answer to most of these needs could be found in the suburbs. Outside every Canadian city, vast muddy tracts sprouted monotonous rows of houses. Scores of rural municipalities grudgingly came to terms with the invasion of people who now expected running water and sewer lines as well as schools and roads. Novice home buyers learned to live with faulty fixtures, green lumber, and the tricks of fly-by-night contractors.
Beyond the cities, rural Canadians also found their lives transformed by electrification, flush toilets, and paved roads that gave easier access to big-city shopping and
Don Mills, a Toronto suburb, was the country’s first planned “new town,” but its sprawl of homes, lots, and curved streets would be reproduced outside every major city. Canadians were finding a new lifestyle focused on a house, a car, and the neighbourhood shopping centre and school.
Health services. Across the country, consolidated schools collected farm children in long, yellow school buses and graduated more of them with the skills and education that in turn drew them into the cities. Those who stayed increasingly practised scientific farming, creating an ecological time-bomb with new chemicals and genetically modified seeds, and increased yields. The greatest impact was on Canada’s halfforgotten Native people. Improved health services sent birth rates soaring on the reserves; education gave young Native people an awareness of their poverty, frustration, and of a racism that seemed to be bound up in the Indian Act and the white officials who managed its terms. Residential schools, with their harsh discipline and cultural insensitivity, created new generations of victims.
After both world wars, there was pressure on Canadian women to make room for men by leaving the workforce. Simple financial need had steeled women to resist the pressure after 1918; rising income scales from 1945 onward is the best explanation of the only period in the twentieth century when the female workforce actually shrank. For the first time in generations, a single industrial wage could support a family. Moreover, in defiance of all the standard demographic assumptions that affluence and urbanization cut birth rates, Canadian families grew to an unprecedented size. By 1951, years of falling birth rates and rigid restrictions on immigration had made Canadians a middle-aged people. It was predictable that war’s end and the veterans’ return would produce a dramatic spurt in births. In 1941, children under five formed 9.1 per cent of the population; in 1951, they formed 12 per cent. What no one expected was that the post-war baby boom would continue all the way into the 1960s.
Canadians believed that education paid material dividends in jobs, income, and opportunities. For most people, the costs of university and even secondary school had always formed a barrier that only the wealthy or the brightest and most ambitious of the poor could hope to cross. As one of the post-1945 veterans’ benefits, men and women who had served could spend as much time in further education as they had spent in uniformed service. By 1949, the veteran influx had almost tripled pre-war university enrolments. However poor the teaching by Hi-paid professors in shabby, neglected institutions, education became one of the advantages Canadians wanted in their newly affluent society.
The suburban migration and the baby boom compounded the problem of meeting the new demand for education. From 1917 to 1947, about a quarter-million youngsters annually reached school age; after 1947, that total rapidly doubled. Ugly, utilitarian buildings could be improvised from cinder-block and steel, but the overworked drudges who had taught Canada’s young found themselves armed with new status and bargaining power. Between 1945 and 1961, both enrolment and the number of teachers in Canada’s elementary and secondary schools more than doubled. Teachers’ wages tripled; operating costs rose sevenfold and capital spending tenfold. Inside, of course, little changed. In most of Canada, the 1950s were years of rigid educational conservatism: straight lines, discipline, and an old-fashioned curriculum.
The suburban escape was impossible without cars and roads. The purchase of even a second-hand car was the beginning of many a family’s flight from the high costs and
Restricted opportunities of an urban slum. Between 1945 and 1952, passenger-car registrations in Canada doubled, and they doubled again by 1962. The 39,600 kilometres (24,600 miles) of paved roads grew to 112,700 kilometres (70,000 miles) by 1960. It was no
In a scientific age, many Canadians still believed in miracles. If science failed, a desperate mother could turn to a faith-healer like Oral Roberts, shown here laying on hands in a tent near Hamilton in 1956.
Longer a major adventure to cross Canada by highway. One consequence of affluence was that most Canadians could enjoy paid holidays. Vacations, a luxury before the war, became a standard annual expectation. The edge of the Canadian Shield became “cottage country.” So did the Maritimes and the Rockies. Tourism catered to Canadians all the more urgently because of the powerful lure of the United States.
Almost no aspect of post-war affluence was unique to Canada. Americans, too, moved to the suburbs, demanded schools and a college education, cherished their equity in a shrinking mortgage, and ignored the intellectual puritans who deplored the crassness of mass materialism. Canadians certainly had larger families and, at least statistically, were more law abiding and even more faithful in their religious affiliations than their neighbours. The chief distinction between a Toronto and a Philadelphia suburb, at least until 1950, would have been the absence of a forest of television aerials. ft was not a distinction most Canadians enjoyed.
Canadians focused their new-found affluence on themselves and their families. A steady stream of new products, from tape recorders to Tupperware, became tests of a family’s ability to “keep up with the Joneses” next door. The image of post-war Vienna, turning first to rebuild its burned-out State Opera House, would have seemed impossibly alien. Outside the home, most Canadians found their entertainment at a local movie theatre or in sterile beverage rooms that still segregated men and women. Only in Quebec did restaurants routinely serve wine with meals. As for orchestras, live theatre, and other performing arts, cultural life in Canada reached its nadir in the late 1940s. Without the French and English networks of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, actors and musicians would have starved or turned to what many of their fellow Canadians obviously regarded as “honest work.” Financed by a small but unpopular licence fee on receivers, the CBC served its radio audiences with more variety and imagination than ever before. For their part, consumers showed a strong devotion to “Hockey Night in Canada”—with English audiences largely restricted to the exploits of the Toronto Maple Leafs—and the succession of soap operas, variety shows, and half-hour dramas purchased from the U. S. commercial networks. The CBc’s Wednesday Night and its “Stage” series deliberately catered to a minority. Language barriers made Quebecers a more faithful audience for Radio-Canada’s programs, but outside Quebec little French was heard from a radio.
Culture may always be a minority concern. The St. Laurent government consciously cultivated its elite supporters when it invited Vincent Massey, former High Commissioner to Great Britain, and Father Georges-Henri Levesque of Laval University’s
By the 1950s, painters had moved on from the bold landscapes of the Group of Seven. The Painters Eleven show in Toronto in 1957 included some of the stars of the next generation: from the left, Alexandra Luke, Tom Hodgson, Harold Town, Kazuo Nakamura, Jock MacDonald, Walter Yarwood, Hortense Gordon, Jack Bush, and Ray Mead. Photo by Peter Croydon.
One product of post-war prosperity was the teenager as independent consumer. Here a group of teens indulge their new spending power, in 1949.
Controversial young faculty of social sciences to head a royal commission into the national development of the arts, letters, and sciences in Canada.
The issues were urgent. How should Canada enter the television age? Would Canada’s universities survive when the millions spent to educate veterans were gone? The commission’s 1951 report reflected a predictable elite concern at the vulgarity of mass culture and its U. S. sponsors, but it squarely backed federal spending on universities, CBC control of the costly new television medium, a national library, and a national endowment fund to support artists and writers, theatres and orchestras.
The Massey-Levesque Report was not welcome in Ottawa. Universities were as provincial a matter as schools. Louis St. Laurent had recurring nightmares about voter reaction if taxes subsidized ballet dancers. Yet, in the 1950s, that was precisely what
Some Canadians seemed eager to see. In 1949, Winnipeg’s ambitious dance company turned professional. So did younger ballet troupes in Toronto and Montreal. In 1951, three bold Montrealers launched the Theatre du Nouveau Monde to present Moliere in repertory. Two years later, an even bolder Stratford, Ontario, businessman, Tom Patterson, realized his impossible dream of a first-class annual Shakespeare festival. With Tyrone Guthrie as producer and Alec Guinness as star, Richard III opened in a circus tent. In the same year, Jack Bush, Harold Town, and others, who would unite as Painters Eleven, persuaded Simpsons, a Toronto department store, to stage a major exhibition of abstract art. Although Paul-EmUe Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle had taken their enormous talent abroad, some pioneers might make at least a slim living at home.
Perhaps the most significant cultural event of the decade came in September 1952, when the cbc entered the television age—with its logo upside down. Soon Toronto and Montreal had become major television production centres, though at a cost no mere licence fee could sustain. Advertising, cheap imported shows—“I Love Lucy,” “The Honeymooners,” “The Howdy Doody Show”—drastic cuts in the quality of cbc radio, and growing parliamentary subsidies undermined CBC autonomy and betrayed the Massey-Levesque Commission’s refined expectations. On the other hand, a Massey goal was realized in 1957 after the opportune death of three millionaires gave Ottawa a windfall in succession taxes. A Canada Council, largely free of partisan and civil service control, spent the proceeds of its $100 million endowment on the arts and scholarship.
No one conscious of opinion polls and audience ratings in the 1950s could claim that Canadians suddenly embraced high culture. What affluence created was tolerance. As national income rose beyond expectations, subsidizing playwrights, composers, and even ballet dancers caused no outcry, though some politicians drew the line at poets who indulged in obscenities or blank verse. Tolerance also contributed to a more culturally diverse and comfortable Canada: The influx of 2.5 million immigrants between 1946 and 1966 coincided with the fading of legalized racism.
In the 1930s, mass unemployment had seemed reason enough to bar immigrants, even desperate Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Full employment was more than enough reason to open the gates, even to some who had shared in the crimes of the Third Reich. Inmates of refugee camps could easUy be persuaded to exchange an ocean passage and an entry permit for work Canadians had never wanted to do—farm labour and domestic service. The D. Rs, or “displaced persons,” were forerunners of a flood of skilled and unskilled who helped open new resource frontiers and transform
Between 1947 and 1967 more than 2.5 million immigrants came to Canada. While Mackenzie King had declared that the “fundamental character” of Canada’s population would be preserved, traditional racial barriers gradually crumbled. They did not necessarily disappear.
The drab, self-centred Canada they encountered. In 1947, Ontario met an acute shortage of skilled workers by launching a mass airlift from Britain.
The war and the horrible evidence of the Nazi Holocaust finally persuaded many Canadians that racism was repugnant. Change came slowly. Announcing his new immigration policy in 1948, Mackenzie King felt obliged to pledge that the “fundamental character “ of the Canadian population would be preserved. No one could pretend that government officials were colour-blind. What died were some old and vicious distinctions that found northern Europeans acceptable and southern Europeans not. A government that had interned Canadians of Japanese origin in 1942, and tried to expel them in 1946 in deference to West Coast racism, belatedly extended fuU citizenship to all Asian Canadians in 1949. There was hardly a murmur of protest. Saskatchewan and Ontario passed human rights codes that finally gave hope of redress for the insults and discrimination that Jews, Blacks, and Native people had routinely suffered for generations. Prejudice was not abolished or even dormant, but it was no longer publicly condoned. Toronto, as firmly British in its ethnicity in 1939 as Belfast or Birmingham, was transformed by Italians and Greeks, Ukrainians and Poles. By 1961, Protestants were a minority in the Queen City, but there were no riots or protests. Instead, Toronto’s citizens were persuaded that cosmopolitanism and better restaurants were among the rewards of prosperity.
Of course, old prejudices did not die. Opinion polls showed that a majority of Canadians were suspicious of the immigrant influx, and most French Canadians were solidly opposed. What anaesthetized open protest was prosperity and full employment. As ever, there were jobs most Canadians did not want to do. If newcomers would work in the mines and dusty construction sites, they were entitled to the wages. If CanadiAns preferred to educate their children for office and professional work, the products of Scottish or German apprenticeships were wanted for the skilled tasks that made an industrial economy possible. The savage competition for scarce jobs that had always underlain racial and religious conflict in Canada almost dissolved in the 1950s. Without an economic base, the old atavisms could only circle and wait.
Prosperity gave Canadians added confidence in their own identity. In turn, Canadians, new and old, began to make a contribution to the international community of science and literature. Canada’s first two Nobel laureates in the sciences, Gerhard Herzberg and John Polanyi, began to establish their reputations in this period. Northrop Frye in Toronto and George Woodcock in Vancouver began their very different contributions to the world of letters. In his cross-grained fashion, Donald Creighton encouraged and enraged a generation of young historians who would, in time, give Canadians a new sense of themselves.
Money and confidence changed the Canada those historians would describe. In 1949, Newfoundlanders voted narrowly to complete the Confederation planned in 1865. The fiscal meanness that had frustrated earlier negotiations had become absurd in the 1940s; the lure of Canadian social programs proved irresistible to many Newfoundlanders. In 1946, Canadians had established their own citizenship; in 1949, they accepted the supremacy of their own Supreme Court by abolishing appeals to the British Privy Council; in 1952, they accepted a Canadian, Vincent Massey, as Governor General. If Canadians stUl refused to take full responsibility for their own constitution, a prosperous people could be excused a quirk or two.
World History
