My monthly book blog: Canada, 1960

Summer time is book time, and for me a chance to kick back — this year, way back.

I spent my free time in August reading a range of titles that took me through parts of our country in the late 1950s and early 1960s, largely through political events of that tumultuous time.

I first focussed on The Duel, journalist John Ibbitson’s excellent dissection of the political rivalry between two prime ministers, John Diefenbaker (Conservative) and Lester Pearson (Liberal), which helped me better understand some of those two parties’ modern roots. Thanks to a rainy spell in Ontario, I then took on Diefenbaker’s three-volume memoir, One Canada, to better understand Prairie populism and what might echo in the 2020s (quite a bit, actually). I rounded it out with some riveting fiction in the form of Canada, Richard Ford’s 2012 novel about two teens in 1960 Montana who have to fend for themselves when their parents are jailed for robbing a bank, and one ends up in the isolated, distant country to the north, just across the border.

Canada’s place next to a divided and divisive America is again our national challenge, and there are lessons from the past. (Always are.)

First, to the Chief. Diefenbaker’s memoirs reveal a troubled leader who was at once pragmatic and idealistic, confident and paranoid, global and parochial. In 1958, after a year leading a minority government, he won the biggest victory in Canadian history, ending decades of Liberal hegemony, and launched a series of modern reforms. His one-term majority (followed baby another brief minority) gave Canada our Bill of Rights, which became a foundation stone for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (I have a signed copy on my home office wall from when I met Diefenbaker as a boy.) He was the first to launch a serious Arctic strategy, address reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and see international trade as a necessity.

The small-town Saskatchewan lawyer’s seething distrust of central Canadian elites is also worth reflecting on. Bay Street, the CBC, The Globe and Mail and corporate CEOs all earned Diefenbaker’s wrath.

We often think the world has never been crazier than today, but the late 1950s and ‘60s were volatile. The world came close to nuclear war, more than once. Revolutions were erupting on every continent. And racial and generational tensions were on the boil.

Faced with social and political disruption, and fast-rising technologies (TV, jet travel, computers), Diefenbaker tried to cling to a past — a British past — that was fast disappearing. But he also tried to keep Canada from being subservient to American foreign policy. The quest for a form of Canadian independence, within America’s sphere of influence and protection, continues.

Ibbitson takes us from the Diefenbaker years into a starkly different Pearsonian era, when Canada sought to be more global, more accommodating and more urban. It was the go-go ‘60s, and the country’s ambitions seemed limitless. Pearson had the intellect and charm for the times, much more than his prim Conservative predecessor, although less than his successor Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He also lacked a common touch and, more importantly, a sense of regional nuance — perhaps because of his many years in academic and diplomatic circles, from Oxford to Washington.

That tension remains in our soul today, between our dueling natures of caution and conviction, regional and cosmopolitan. It seems part of Canada wants to lock arms with the U.S., whether it’s in trade fights with China, or military resistance to Russia, while another part wants to keep a respectful distance. And our rural-urban divide seems as great now as then.

To open my aperture on that period, I turned to fiction, in Ford’s Canada. It’s actually not very much about our country, other than to present Canada as a foil to a divided, dysfunctional United States struggling with Soviet supremacy and domestic doubt. The characters knew little about their neighbour to the north, nor cared much, other than as a refuge — an insulated attic in which to hide.

I reflected on Canada’s place today in the American imagination, and if that’s still all we are. If so, how do we enhance our relevance without selling our soul, or all our resources? That was among the tensions that Diefenbaker and Pearson never fully resolved, nor have their predecessors. It’s among our existential challenges: are we one Canada or two nations, three founding peoples or a mosaic that will continue to change colours and shapes — even just enough to stay a shade and tone different from the country below, and a step ahead of the restless world around?