In recent years we’ve read accounts of how salt, the chronometer, the mathematical constant π, map-makers, and the Scots, among other people and things, all transformed the world.
It’s a simple, but effective narrative device: Choose a subject familiar to all, shine the light of human endeavour through that prism, and admire an expansive and colourful result. What’s not to like? For the sake of a good read, we’re prepared to overlook the near certainty that the author has overstated the case. If your narrative tool is a hammer, then the history of the world becomes a progression of nails.
Accounts of a single period fall prey to a similar tendency. Inevitably the world is a far, far different place in the aftermath of the chosen era. Why else write the book?
And yet ... maybe it’s no more than a twinge in my aging boomer bones, but the 1960s still feel different from other decades. So I picked up Bryan D. Palmer’s Canada’s 1960s in hope of revisiting my youth and in fear of an overstated account of the decade’s significance.
My first surprise came in the prologue. Palmer is fond of Marxist analysis. Nothing about this in the fulsome press releases issued by University of Toronto Press and by Trent University, where Palmer is a Canada Research Chair. Hmm.
My second surprise also came in the prologue to what is billed as a “highly accessible” work: “This historicized, Marxist sense of irony is thus classically double-visioned, as is all irony: it is critically poised to appreciate the salience of disjuncture and crisis in the social order.” Maybe they mean highly accessible to graduate students.
Fortunately, things then pick up. Chapters on the economy, the Cold War, the Munsinger affair, and the Ali-Chuvalo fight of 1966 all deliver strong storylines, dramatic tension, and plenty of fascinating detail. Gerda Munsinger emerges, unexpectedly to me, as a somewhat sympathetic figure. And, heresy of heresies, it is revealed that the Avro Arrow may have been terminated for very good reason. Swept along by the narrative, you even start to buy in to the inevitable never-the-same-afterwards analysis.
The gist of Palmer’s thesis is that the 1960s (a) put paid to old notions of Canada as a compliant, white, patriarchal, British dominion, but (b) in a Marxist irony, provided no new sustaining identity. Hence the book’s subtitle: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era.
That the Canada of yore had faded away strikes me as unarguable, although Palmer’s attribution of the demise to the 1960s as opposed to some other decade seems a matter of convenience.
The motivation for the second part of his thesis becomes clearer in the last half or more of the book, where Palmer dissects the protest and dissent that characterized the 1960s. Readers will find these chapters a hard slog, unless they have a profound interest in the details of who said or did what to whom in 1960-something on behalf of, or in opposition to, RIN, CBRT, SUPA, CTCC, NARP, and a host of similar organizations.
Palmer’s preoccupation with class conflict surely explains his personal and profound interest in these organizations, their activities, and their unfinished business — i.e., the creation of a new Canadian order.
But try telling habitués of Timmy’s that we have no Canadian identity — if you can get a word in edgewise as they ponder hockey’s salary cap, their planned winter getaways, the ridiculous U.S. health care system, and the venality of politicians (both a federal and a provincial matter). They know that “Sudbury Saturday Night,” Bob & Doug McKenzie, and the Joe Canadian rant are, and always have been, incomprehensible anywhere else in the world. Rightly or wrongly, they believe the world needs more Canada and less Marxist analysis.
— Paul Jones (Read bio)
Paul Jones is a retired publisher, a family historian, and a director of Canada's History society.