Contemporary history gains in texture and loses in certainty. Evidence multiplies out of control; confidence that we know what happened or what matters fades. Barred from sources by security or privacy regulations or by their proliferation, historians share their strengths and limitations with journalists. Among the major sources for the period, particularly in its earlier, less pretentious years is John Saywell et seq. (eds.) The Canadian Annual Review (various) not to mention the continuing Canada Year Book from Statistics Canada, which also grows lovelier but more laggard and much less comprehensive. Maclean’s, le Magazine Maclean, and its heir, L’Actualite are also invaluable.
Two volumes of the McClelland and Stewart Centennial Series cover part of this period: D. G. Creighton’s The Forked Road, Canada, 1939-1957 (1976) is shaped by the author’s despair at American influence and Jack Granatstein’s Canada, 1957-1967: The Years of Uncertainty and Innovation (1986) stops midway. Other survey texts go farther: Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, History of the Canadian Peoples (1998) conscientiously avoids politics to promote social and cultural themes; J. L. Granatstein, 1. M. Abella, David Bercuson, Craig Brown, and Blair Neatby, Twentieth Century Canada (2nd ed., 1986), preserve the political issues that united and divided Canadians. The postwar history of a province “unlike the others” is sensibly summarised in Paul-Andre Linteau, Rene Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and Francois Ricard, Quebec Since 1930 (1991). Valuable chiefly for what most historians bypass is Norah Story’s Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature (1967) and William Toye’s Supplement (1973).
Post-war Canada is described by Desmond Morton and Jack Granatstein, Victory 1945: Canada from War to Peace (1995) and Barry Broadfoot’s collected memories The Veteran Years: Coming Home from the War (1985). Veterans’ policies are recalled in Peter Neary and J. L. Granatstein, The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada (1998). A splendid recent book on life in the 1950s is Valerie Korinek’s Roughing it in Suburbia: Reading Chatelaine Magazine, 1950-1969 (1999) while and Joy Parr describes the material background of a more affluent life in Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Postwar Years (1999).
Canada’s post-war birthrate quietly transformed its history. The case initially made in The Big Generation and echoed by David Foot’s best-selling Boom, Bust and Echo: How To Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift (1996) took historical share in Doug Owram’s Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (1996). A major post-war outcome of Foot’s “boom” and “bust” was the feminist revolution which began in 1970 with publication of the Report of Florence Bird’s Royal Commission on the Status of Women. See Dawn Black, Twenty Years Later (1990) and Susan Trofimenkoff and Alison Prentice, The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women’s History (19S5). An institutional consequence began in Saskatchewan with Medicare. The best account of its evolution is Malcolm G. Taylor, Health Insurance and Canadian Public Policy: The Seven Decisions that Created the Canadian Health Insurance System and their Outcomes (1987). Working lives led in post-war industrial struggle are described individually by Bob White, My Life on the Line (19S7) and collectively by Charlotte Yates, Prom Plant to Politics: The Autoworkers Union in Postwar Canada (1993). A wider history of workers and unions is Desmond Morton, Working People: An Illustrated History of Canadian Labour (4th ed., 2000).
A major lifestyle change came with television. See Frank Peers, The Public Eye: Television and the Politics of Canadian Broadcasting 1952-1968 (1979) and Paul Rutherford’s When Television was Young: Primetime Canada, 1952-1967 (1990). Its advent coincided but hardly intersected with a revival of high culture. See Paul Litt, The Muses and the Massey Commission (1992).
In Louis St-Laurent: Canadian (1967) Dale Thomson introduced his chief. In True Patriot: The Life of Brooke Claxton, 1898-1990 (1993), David Bercuson presents one of several able ministers; even better known was the subject of Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, C. D. Howe: A Biography (1979). See also Reg Whitaker, The Government Party (1977) in their period of most assured power. The most engaging memoir of politics in the 1950s is Dalton Camp’s Gentlemen, Players and Politicians (1970), a good preparation for Peter Newman’s devastating biography, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (1976), now replaced by Denis Smith’s Rogue Tory: The Life and Legend of John Diefenbaker (1995).
Newman tried to repeat his feat with Lester Pearson but the Liberal leader found a more sympathetic biographer in John English. See The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, vol. II, 1949-1972 (1992). The best known premier of the period found a serious biography from Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, vol. I, The Magnificent Obsession (1990); vol. II, The Heroic Delusion (1994); and a mid-life biography, Richard Gwyn’s The Northern
Magus (19S0). The Mulroney and Chretien years still offer little more than campaign biographies and memoirs, notably Ian MacDonalds Mulroney (1994) and Jean Chretien’s best-selling and ghosted Straight from the Heart (1985). Filling some of the gap is Jeffrey Simpson’s The Anxious Years: Politics in the Age of Mulroney and Chretien (1996).
Among memorable books on national politics are John C. Crosbie, No Holds Barred: My Life in Politics (1997); Thomas Flanagan, Waiting for the Wave: The Reform Party and Preston Manning (1995); and contrarians, Sidney Sharpe and Don Braid, Storming Babylon: Preston Manning and the Rise of the Reform Party (1992). On other parties, see George Perlin, The Tory Syndrome: Leadership Politics in the Progressive Conservative Party (1980); John Laschinger and Geoffrey Stevens, Leaders and Lesser Mortals: Backroom Politics in Canada (Toronto, Key Porter Books, 1992); Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (1968); and Maurice Pinard, The Rise of a Third Party: A Study in Crisis Politics (1964). Canada’s regional politics have spawned many important memoirs and analyses, among them Richard Gwyn’s Smallwood (1968); Seymour Martin Lipset’s Agrarian Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan (1968); Roger Graham, Old Man Ontario: Leslie M. Frost (1990); and Jonathan Manthorpe, The Power and the Tories: Ontario Politics, 1943 to the Present (1974).
After 1945, Canadians were conscious of their role in the world menaced by Cold War and nuclear annihilation. They could follow a deadly game in a series of annual reviews, Canada in World Affairs, published by the Canadian Institute for International Affairs and later (and under different titles) by Carleton University. Able diplomats wrote memoirs and tried to educate fellow citizens, among them John Holmes, The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943-57 (1982); Escott Reid; Time of Fear and Hope (1977); and George Ignatieff, The Making of a Peacemonger (1985). Others commented as scholars, among them Albert Legault and Michel Fortmann, A Diplomacy of Hope: Canada and Disarmament, 1945-1988 (1992).
Much of Desmond Morton’s Military History of Canada: From Champlain to Kosovo (4th ed. 1999) covers post-1945 developments. David Bercuson’s Blood on the Hills: The Canadian Army in the Korean War (1999) joins H. F. Wood’s Strange Battleground (1966), while Richard Gimblett and Jean Morin, Operation Friction: Canadian Forces in the Gulf War (1996) provides an official version of the second conflict of the period. Adequate histories of Canada’s peace-keeping experience are in progress. Meanwhile Carol Off’s The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle (2000) and David Bercuson’s Significant Incident: Canada's Army, The Airborne, and the Murder in Somalia (1996) have different views of such operations.
Canada’s relationship with Washington intensified after 1945. Joseph Jockel’s No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada, the United States and the Origins of North American Air Defence, 1945-1958 (1987) describe a vital partnership as did Jon B. McLin, Canadas Changing Defence Policy, 1957-1963 (1967). For the 1980s, see Stephen Clarkson, Canada and the Reagan Challenge: Crisis in the Canadian-American Relationship (1985). At the same time, Richard Gwyn’s The 49th Paradox: Canada in North America (1985) recognized Canada’s readiness for free trade. John H. Thompson and Steve Randall’s Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (1997) provides a comprehensive treatment of issues while J. L. Granatstein’s Yankee Go Home? Canadians and Anti-Americanism (1996) contradicts some old myths.
Canada’s relations with Quebec sometimes seemed a foreign affair. Many books appeared in French and English. Among the more influential in English were Conrad Black, Duplessis {1976); Richard Jones, Community in Crisis (1967); Pierre B. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (1968); Ramsay Cook, Canada and the French Canadian Question (1970); Peter Desbarats, Rene: A Canadian in Search of a Country (1976); and, in light of English Canada’s widespread echoing of Trudeau’s constitutional strategy, Guy Laforest’s Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream (1995). In 1970, Trudeau proposed to end an old grievance by abolishing the Indian Act. A different view of history changed his mind. See Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canadas Indians (1969). In J. R. Miller’s Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada 2nd ed. (1991) the modern chapters are useful. So is Alan B. Cairns’s Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (1999); On the North, see Robert Page, Northern Development: The Canadian Dilemma (1986).
Meanwhile, two members of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism helped push Canada into multiculturalism. On immigration, see Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (1998). On the consequences, scores of book appeared, among them. Franca lacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (1992); Jean Burnet and Howard Palmer, “Coming Canadians”: An Introduction to the History of Canadian Peoples {1988) and William Kaplan (ed).. Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship (1993).
World History
