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The years following the Second World War marked a watershed in Canada’s maturing political culture. Two recent books examine the complexity of this period, notably the interplay between government decisions and public values. Both books look at relations with the United States — military relations, chiefly — and how these affected Canada’s sovereignty, industrial development, and sense of its national interests.

In Warming Up to the Cold War, Robert Teigrob focuses on the immediate postwar period from 1945 to 1950. He examines five major issues facing Canada and the world: nuclear arms proliferation and civilian nuclear programs; Soviet espionage following the Gouzenko affair; anti-colonial movements; multilateralism, notably through NATO; and Canada’s military role in Korea.

Teigrob’s thorough academic style does not hide his unhappiness with decisions and attitudes from that period. Surveying Canada’s posture in those early Cold War years, he asks, with evident sadness: “What led Canadians to sign on with such apparent enthusiasm to a battle, and wider global confrontation, which was built so firmly upon the discourses of American nationalism?”

The central point in this densely written study is that American media culture, carried by newspapers and radio, was the primary force shaping Canadian public opinion on international issues. Teigrob’s arguments are at times flat and mechanistic, portraying Canadians as having few opinions of their own, waiting to be guided by American mass media.

The book does draw attention to other influential voices, including traditional British-oriented elites and some social liberals. Teigrob concedes that Canadians themselves chose a firm anti-communist stance and did not support a vague alignment of international neutrality with a renewed Commonwealth in order to counter American power. He concludes that “Canada became a satellite, in part, through an act of volition.”

There is a tension in Teigrob’s study that is never resolved to my satisfaction. While he makes a valuable addition to our knowledge of media commentary in the U.S. and Canada, he remains tied to the thesis that “the Canadian public had been manoeuvred toward the pro-U.S. anti-communist consensus.” He underestimates the independent desire of Canadians to reject appeasement of communism, as well as their capacity to recognize that Britain’s place in world leadership had been replaced by America. Support here for the Western alliance was based on many factors, including the political judgment of hundreds of thousands of Canadian veterans who had just served in the war against fascism.
If the Cold War years saw Canada aligning itself closely with America’s international leadership, it was also a period of dynamic domestic changes, including major cultural initiatives, transcontinental industrial projects, and leading scientific research. This spirit of renewal culminated politically with the 1957 election of John Diefenbaker — a prairie populist who captured a mood of growing optimism — as prime minister.

Patricia McMahon’s book begins with Diefenbaker’s first victory. Her approach differs from Teigrob’s in both style and methodology. Through a close reading of Cabinet records, correspondence, and personal memoirs, she has prepared a detailed institutional study on “the essence of indecision” — why the Diefenbaker government vacillated over the course of six years on whether to accept nuclear warheads for the Bomarc air defence system.

First elected with a minority government, Diefenbaker won a landslide election in 1958, with the largest parliamentary majority ever. Anger with Liberal arrogance was an important factor in this campaign, but Diefenbaker’s popularity owed much to his brilliant oratory, which gave voice to Canada’s postwar nationalism.

However, his government soon became mired in endless dithering, incapable of choosing firm directions. Nowhere was this more apparent than in relations with the United States, particularly on defence policy.

The Diefenbaker meltdown is part of our political mythology. McMahon’s work is not a revisionist history, although she does express sympathy for the man, attributing his indecision to exaggerated political sensitivities. She notes, for example, the attention and respect he gave to anti-nuclear campaigners despite their limited numbers. And she underlines his fear that the Opposition, led by Lester Pearson, would “make use of the government’s acceptance of nuclear weapons for the Liberal Party’s political gain.”

Despite her kindly efforts, McMahon’s portrait of Diefenbaker remains unflattering.
His overwhelming parliamentary power was shattered by paranoia, confusion, and disorganization. He never successfully managed the central tension of Canada’s Cold War political culture: how to stay closely allied to a powerful America while also expressing real independence in domestic policies and modest independence as a junior international partner.

Patricia McMahon and Robert Teigrob have added colourful details to Canada’s 1950s Cold War narrative. They explore options and implications, helping us identify the contending players and cultural forces that blossomed in the 1960s and ’70s. In these later years, while the Cold War still dominated international relations, modern Canada was transformed by dramatic domestic decisions affecting our social, military, linguistic, regional, and multicultural character. The political bases for those changes took form in the underappreciated 1950s.