José E. Igartua - The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71

José E. Igartua

The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71

Vancouver, UBC Press, 2006

pp. viii + 277, ISBN 978-0-7748-1088-3 (hardback), 978-0-7748-1091-3 (paperback)

In 1945, English-speaking Canadians were in little doubt that their identity was, in some sense, British and those who wanted to distance the country from its imperial heritage were often denounced as adolescents with an inferiority complex. As late as 1952, the decision by the St Laurent Liberal government to shift Empire Day ('Victoria Day' in Canada) from May 24 on the nearest Monday before the 25th aroused widespread fury. Yet Igartua's survey of newspaper opinion finds that anglophone editorialists changed their perceptions of national identity dramatically and rapidly in the period from 1956 to 1962. It seems almost as if the Suez debacle and Britain's attempt to join the European Common Market provided welcome opportunities for detachment from a transferred patriotism that no longer made sense. The important aspect of Igartua's central finding is that this shift in perception of national identity occurred before the notorious Flag Debate of 1964-65, which saw some Canadian Tories prepared to drown in the last cliché in defence of the Union Jack ─ and before, too, English Canada had caught up with the full impact of modernisation in Quebec, the phenomenon usually known by the 'Quiet Revolution' tag. True, there were throwbacks: in 1959 the CBC theatrically fired a journalist who confessed to a lack of enthusiasm for Queen Elizabeth II's visit to open the Seaway. But the central thesis remains impressive, so much so that the study's terminal date of 1971, the year that Canada declared itself to be multicultural, seems almost a postscript.
Identifying 'opinion' is always a historical conundrum, and Igartua's methodology merits discussion. A team of research assistants assembled editorials from leading English-language newspapers, and these form the main basis of the study. The question to be asked is: how many people read these leaders? It seems more likely that opinion was shaped, or provoked, by big-name columnists, but Bruce Hutchison is mentioned only twice, and Peter C. Newman just once. Moreover, leading articles have a curious dual quality of their own. Their anonymity gives them ex cathedra authority (if anybody reads them) but they also reflect the thoughts and prejudices of a very small number of individuals ─ perhaps just a proprietor or an editor. With such major newspapers in such recent times, it ought to be possible to identify at least some of these personalities and measure their preaching against their principles. True, public opinion polling was not yet sufficiently consistent to trace attitudinal changes in any detail, while Igartua reasonably pleads that television programmes were usually too ephemeral to be pinned down. A second major source of material comes from analysis of Ontario school textbooks, which form two often-hilarious chapters. It is certainly amazing to note just how much patronising and even racist rubbish was unleashed
upon innocent children, especially about Aboriginal people, while it is a compliment to average English-Canadians that so many of them were capable of adjusting at all to the emergence of a modern society out of a French Canada that, as Igartua notes, had often been portrayed in their school texts as a theme park. Overall, however, the newspaper material and the textbook evidence co-exist uneasily, as two monographs wearying within the bosom of a single book. The quarter-century time period covered also prompts a depressing thought: people do die. Citizens in their sixties in the final years of Mackenzie King would largely have formed their world views in the Edwardian period, when the Empire loomed large. Young Canadians entering the political community in the Pearson-Trudeau era would have had less reason to define themselves by a British yardstick. To put it bluntly, Canadians who were in their late forties in 1945 were dead by 1971. The impact, if not the pivotal importance, of Suez suggests that sentient beings did indeed modify their outlook during their own lifetimes but ─ even without the diluting effects of immigration ─ English-Canadian opinion changed because there were new guys with new ideas.
Perhaps the most poignant example of the decline of British influence is to be found in a rare factual error. It was not the two year-old Prince Charles who speechified about Canadian identity in 1951, but his father, Philip.