Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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regarding possible threats to Canadian sovereignty. The two nations

extended their joint military commitments in 1958 by signing the

North American Air Defense (NORAD) agreement, which placed con-

tinental air forces under an American commander and a Canadian

deputy.

Concerned about being viewed as merely an American satellite,

Canada was careful to preserve its national identity and to fulﬁ ll its

diplomatic responsibilities even if it meant occasionally upsetting its

continental neighbor and ally. Indeed, the determination to maintain

independence from American foreign policy was evident in Canada’s

active participation in the UN. After winning recognition as a “middle

power,” Canada went on to perform distinguished service in numerous

UN food, health, education, and welfare agencies concerned with the

elimination of hunger, disease, ignorance, and poverty throughout the

world. Moreover, as a leading supporter of the UN principle of collec-

tive security, Canada gained an international reputation for its peace-

keeping role. During the Korean War, Canada made the third-largest

contribution of troops to support UN efforts to resist North Korean

aggression against South Korea. In 1954 Canada served with Poland

and India in an International Control Commission to supervise the

peace in Indochina.

Recognition of Canada’s peacekeeping and peacemaking acumen

reached a climax during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Egypt’s nationalization

of the Suez Canal incited Israel to invade the Sinai Peninsula, while

Britain and France launched their armed intervention to regain control

of the Canal Zone. With the possibility of American and Soviet military

intervention looming, Lester Pearson, who had succeeded St. Laurent

as minister of external affairs in 1948 and had been elected president of

the UN General Assembly in 1952, introduced a resolution calling for

an immediate cease-ﬁ re to be supervised by a multinational UN Emer-

gency Force. Pearson’s plan was adopted and a Canadian-led UN Emer-

gency Force was stationed in the Canal Zone to act as a buffer between

the Egyptians and Israelis until a lasting peace could be negotiated.

Through its decisive role in the Suez Crisis, Canada bolstered its status

as a middle power unaligned with either Britain or the United States,

while Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.

Despite its decision to oppose British military intervention during

the Suez Crisis, Canada generally maintained a signiﬁ cant relationship

with the Commonwealth as a means of balancing its closer ties with the

United States (Creighton 1976). As partners in the UN and NATO,

Canada and Britain were major supporters of the American crusade to

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check the spread of communism. Moreover, the multilateral General

Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which Canada signed in

1947, included provisions for lower tariffs with its two principal trad-

ing partners, the United States and Britain. Canada also encouraged a

reconceptualization of the Commonwealth to accommodate the former

British colonies in Asia and Africa that gained their independence after

World War II. Canadian initiative helped to replace the concept of

common British and Commonwealth citizenship with one based on

nationality. The Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947 was the ﬁ rst nation-

ality statute to deﬁ ne the people of Canada as “Canadians” rather than

“British subjects.” As a result of Canadian efforts, the predominantly

white British Commonwealth gave way to the multiracial Common-

wealth of Nations. The new Commonwealth included not only the

Dominions like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which maintained

allegiance to the Crown, but also those new republics like India, Paki-

stan, Ghana, and Nigeria, which merely wished to continue their asso-

ciation with Britain and the Dominions.

In encouraging the acceptance of new Asian and African members

into the Commonwealth, Canada rationalized that it was important to

persuade these overpopulated nations that their interests were better

served by association with the Western democracies rather than with

the communist world. Accordingly, Canada joined seven other nations

of the Commonwealth in 1950 to formulate the Colombo Plan, a com-

prehensive program of economic and technical aid to the countries of

South and Southeast Asia, a region considered fertile ground for the

spread of communism. By the early 1960s, Canada had provided almost

$400 million in foreign aid under the Colombo Plan. In essence, the

Commonwealth offered Canada the opportunity to retain its traditional

“family” ties while it endeavored to inﬂ uence the broader international

order through its middle power diplomacy.

The Politics of Prosperity

Canada’s sense of national conﬁ dence in the postwar era was bolstered

not only by a prolonged economic boom and a growing stature on the

world stage but also by the completion of the transcontinental vision of

Confederation. After ﬁ nally rejecting Confederation in 1894,

Newfoundland remained a British colony with responsible government

until it was granted Dominion status after World War I. Although the

Quebec-Labrador boundary dispute was settled in favor of Newfoundland

in 1927, Labrador was still only valuable to the island as a mainland

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coastal strip with whaling and ﬁ shing stations. Not for another two

decades would the rich iron ore deposits of the interior of Labrador be

discovered and developed. During the Great Depression, Newfoundland

had to be rescued from bankruptcy by Britain, which suspended

responsible government in 1934 and appointed a governor and a com-

mission to rule the island. Prosperity returned during World War II as

Newfoundland became a strategic location for American and Canadian

military bases. By the end of the war, Newfoundland was in a position

to decide whether it would remain under commission rule or return to

responsible government under Dominion status. In 1946 the British

government arranged for a popularly elected convention to decide the

island’s future political direction.

Joseph R. Smallwood, a local journalist, introduced a third option for

the convention to consider—union with Canada. After initially receiv-

ing little support, the Confederation movement began to gain momen-

tum when Britain refused to promise continued ﬁ nancial assistance to

restore self-government. In a referendum held in June 1948, 44 percent

of Newfoundlanders voted for responsible government, 41 percent for

Confederation, and 15 percent for commission rule. A second referen-

dum the following month resulted in a victory for Confederation over

responsible government by 53 percent to 47 percent, a margin of fewer

than 7,000 votes. The Canadian government then negotiated ﬁ nal

terms of the Confederation agreement, and on March 31, 1949, New-

foundland, with a population of about 350,000, became Canada’s 10th

province. The next day, Smallwood, the leader of the Confederation

movement, was ﬁ ttingly appointed Newfoundland’s ﬁ rst premier; as

leader of the Liberal Party, he went on to win the inaugural provincial

election in the following month (Neary 1988).

With Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation conﬁ rmed, the aging

Mackenzie King retired in November 1948 after completing 22 years as

prime minister, the longest such service in Canadian and Common-

wealth history. King’s successor, Louis St. Laurent, proved to be a

popular choice as the Liberals captured an unprecedented 190 out of

262 parliamentary seats in the election of 1949. The St. Laurent admin-

istration presided over the further clariﬁ cation of Canadian national

sovereignty. The Supreme Court of Canada replaced the Judicial Com-

mittee of the Privy Council as the ﬁ nal court of appeal and thus the

ultimate judicial interpreter of the Canadian constitution in 1949. The

same year, a British statute conferred on the Canadian Parliament the

right to amend the British North America Act in matters of purely fed-

eral jurisdiction. The right of constitutional amendment, however, did

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not extend to the alteration of the distribution of powers between the

federal and provincial governments and the protection of fundamental

rights. For more than three decades, the federal and provincial author-

ities would continue to search for a mutually agreeable formula for a

complete repatriation of the Canadian constitution. Another vestige of

British colonialism ended in 1952 when Vincent Massey became the

ﬁ rst Canadian appointed governor-general.

The overwhelming reelection of the Liberals under St. Laurent in

1953 reﬂ ected not only voter satisfaction in prosperous times but also

the sense that the opposition parties offered little alternative. The Con-

servatives had changed leaders three times since 1935 and had been

reduced to little more than an Ontario party, while support for CCF

and Social Credit did not extend much beyond Saskatchewan and

Alberta, respectively. Only the Liberals could claim to be a national

party with support from all parts of Canada. At the provincial level,

however, voters were more inclined to express their political opposi-

tion. In 1943 George Drew inaugurated 42 years of Conservative ascen-

Joseph (Joey) Smallwood (1900–91) became a Father of Confederation in 1949 when under

his leadership Newfoundland became Canada’s 10th province. He ruled over the province for

almost three decades.

(Library and Archives Canada PA-128080)

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dancy in Ontario before leaving to lead the national party in 1948. The

Conservative resurgence continued with triumphs in Manitoba and the

Maritime Provinces during the 1950s. Meanwhile, “third party” success

was manifested by Social Credit in Alberta and British Columbia, CCF

in Saskatchewan, and Union Nationale in Quebec. Only in Newfound-

land did the Liberals under Smallwood manage to hold on to power.

The tendency for voters to support one political party nationally and

another provincially reﬂ ected the strained ﬁ nancial relations between

the two levels of government after World War II. Quebec’s continuing

feud with Ottawa was reﬂ ected in the province’s Royal Commission of

Inquiry on Constitutional Problems (the Tremblay Commission),

Tommy Douglas (1904–86) (at left) formed the ﬁ rst socialist government in Canada when his

CCF party came to power in Saskatchewan in 1944. Pictured here with Weyburn mayor Jun

Staveley in 1958, Premier Douglas inaugurated North America’s ﬁ rst government-run medical-

care insurance plan. A CBC poll recently named him the “greatest Canadian.”

(Photographer:

Ernie Neufeld. Special thanks to Darryl Ward, publisher of the Weyburn Review)

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which in 1954 called for an end to federal “imperialism” and return to

“true federalism.” In 1957 the federal government introduced a pro-

gram of equalization payments in an effort to redistribute the national

wealth more evenly among the provinces. The federal transfers were

designed to ensure that the per capita revenues of all provinces from

shared taxes matched those of the wealthiest provinces, at that time

Ontario and British Columbia. Negotiations over the extent to which

the various provinces were “haves” or “have nots” would become

another source of tension in federal-provincial relations.

The constant wrangling with the provinces did not prevent the fed-

eral government from extending a variety of health and social services

as a safety net against misfortune (Guest 1997). A national health pro-

gramme enacted in 1948 provided federal grants to the provinces to

improve hospital care facilities. In 1951 a universal old-age pension

scheme was instituted to provide a $40 monthly payment to all citizens

over 70 years of age (65 if they were deemed needy). The needs of the

unemployed who had exhausted their unemployment insurance bene-

ﬁ ts or who were not qualiﬁ ed to draw them were addressed in the

Unemployment Assistance Act of 1956. The federal government also

passed the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act in 1957 to

provide ﬁ nancial assistance to provinces that established a publicly

administered hospital insurance program with universal coverage. Sas-

katchewan, whose CCF government had introduced Canada’s ﬁ rst

universal and compulsory system of hospital insurance in 1947, and

British Columbia, which had adopted a similar plan in the following

year, immediately qualiﬁ ed for federal assistance. By 1961 all provinces

had inaugurated hospital insurance plans and had entered into cost-

sharing agreements with the federal government. Aside from these

signiﬁ cant advances, postwar prosperity, during which the national

unemployment rate ranged from 3 to 6 percent, tended to slow down

the popular demand for the expansion of the welfare state.

With a huge majority in Parliament, a popular leader in St. Laurent,

and an apparently weak opposition, the Liberals seemed destined to

remain the governing party. Heading into the election of 1957, the Liber-

als had been in power for almost 22 years, the longest unbroken tenure

of any national government in Canadian history. But the Liberals had

already sown the seeds for their unexpected defeat during the infamous

“pipeline debate” of the previous year. Minister of Trade and Commerce

C. D. Howe had introduced a bill in Parliament to provide ﬁ nancial assis-

tance to Trans-Canada Pipe Lines to transport gas from Alberta to central

Canadian markets. While Howe compared the pipeline to the Canadian

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Quebec’s View of

Federal-Provincial

Relations as Expressed

Through the Tremblay

Report, 1954.

Act to Institute a Royal Commission of

Inquiry on Constitutional Problems

Assented to, the 12th of February, 1953

Whereas the Canadian confederation, born of an agreement between

the four pioneer provinces, is ﬁ rst and above all a pact of honour

between the two great races which founded it and each of which makes

a most valuable and indispensable contribution to the progress and

greatness of the nation;

Whereas the constitution of 1867 grants to the provinces, and to

the Province of Quebec in particular, rights, prerogatives and liberties

scrupulous respect for which is intimately bound up with national unity

and the survival of confederation, and it imposes on them responsi-

bilities and obligations which imply correlatively the necessary corre-

sponding means of action;

Whereas the Province of Quebec intends to exercise and discharge

these rights and obligations, to which end it must safeguard the ﬁ scal

resources which belong to it and preserve its ﬁ nancial independence as

well as its legislative and administrative autonomy;

Whereas, since 1917, the central power has invaded important ﬁ elds

of taxation reserved to the provinces, thereby seriously limiting the abil-

ity of the provinces to exercise their ﬁ scal rights in those ﬁ elds: . . .

Whereas, in a country as vast and diverse as Canada, only a decen-

tralized administration can meet the needs of every region and ensure

the harmonious development of the whole. . . .

Therefore, Her Majesty, with the advice and consent of the Legislative

Council and of the Legislative Assembly of Quebec, enacts as follows:

1. The Lieutenant-Governor in Council may constitute a royal com-

mission to inquire into constitutional problems, report its ﬁ ndings to

him and submit to him its recommendations as to steps to be taken

to safeguard the rights of the Province and those of municipalities and

school corporations. . . .

Source: Kwavnick 1973, 1–2.

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Paciﬁ c Railway in term of its importance to transcontinental economic

development, opposition to the bill focused on the American owner-

ship of Trans-Canada Pipe Lines. Faced with vigorous resistance and a

pressing deadline to start construction, Howe resorted to the power of

the Liberal majority to cut off debate and to push the bill through Par-

liament in the absence of the Conservatives and CCF, which had

walked out in protest over the allegedly high-handed use of closure. In

the subsequent election campaign, the Conservatives adeptly used this

incident as evidence that the Liberals had become arrogant and out of

touch with the public will after too long a time in power (Creighton

1976).

Also exploiting regional discontent in the Maritime and Prairie Prov-

inces, the Conservatives, led by Saskatchewan lawyer John Diefenbaker

who had succeeded George Drew in the previous year, edged out the

Liberals. Although neither party commanded majority support in Par-

liament, the Liberals decided to relinquish power and to rebuild the

party under the leadership of much-celebrated diplomat Lester Pear-

son. In pursuit of a majority government, Prime Minister Diefenbaker

took advantage of Liberal disarray to call another election in 1958. Dur-

ing the campaign, Diefenbaker expounded a vision of “a Canada of the

North” and called for “One Canada, wherein Canadians will have pre-

served to them the control of their own economic and political destiny”

(Bliss 1966, 332–333). Diefenbaker tended to model himself after Sir

John A. Macdonald and to view his northern vision as a 20th-century

equivalent of the National Policy. Canadian voters responded over-

whelmingly to Diefenbaker’s strategy as the Conservatives won a record

208 seats out of 265.

In contrast to the more temperate approach of the aging St. Laurent

or the eminent but politically inexperienced Pearson, the Diefenbaker

vision of Canada on the threshold of national greatness, along with his

ﬁ ery oratory and his evangelical leadership style, captured the imagina-

tion of the millions of Canadians following their ﬁ rst national election

on television. In this respect, Diefenbaker ushered in the modern age of

mass media politics in Canada. Furthermore, Diefenbaker expressed

the optimism that many Canadians felt about their personal lives and

their national destiny by the end of the 1950s.

The Roots of Cultural Nationalism

Although they were enjoying an improved standard of living and

sought to satisfy their basic material needs after World War II, Canadians

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increasingly hungered for broader cultural horizons, popular entertain-

ment, recreational amenities, and educational opportunities. In 1949

the Canadian government responded by appointing the Royal

Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and

Sciences, chaired by Vincent Massey, a noted Toronto patron of the arts

and culture. The Massey Commission’s report in 1951 offered a com-

prehensive set of recommendations covering all aspects of education,

culture, and the mass media. The commission recognized that the ama-

teur, community-oriented, and voluntary character of the nation’s pre-

war cultural life was giving way to a more urban, impersonal, and

national orientation. While mourning the passing of traditional

Canadian culture, the Massey Commission expressed enthusiasm for

the new era of professional “mass culture” that was forthcoming. In the

ﬁ nal analysis, the commission not only stimulated government support

for future national cultural development but also raised public con-

sciousness of the rich and diverse foundation of artistic and popular

cultural accomplishments upon which Canadians could continue to

build (Tippett 1990).

English- and French-Canadian literature came of age in the period

from the 1930s to the 1950s. From a “critical realism” perspective,

Morley Callaghan’s novels—Such Is My Beloved (1934), They Shall

Inherit the Earth (1935), and More Joy in Heaven (1937)—portray crime

and deprivation in Toronto and Montreal, while Irene Baird’s Waste

Heritage (1939) deals with labor unrest, class conﬂ ict, and unemploy-

ment in Vancouver during the Great Depression. Hugh MacLennan

raised national consciousness through his novels: Barometer Rising

(1941) focuses on the great Halifax naval explosion of 1917, which

killed 1,600 people and injured 9,000 out of a population of 50,000;

and Two Solitudes (1945), which brilliantly portrays the mutual intoler-

ance of the English and French communities in Quebec, won him the

ﬁ rst of three Governor-General’s Literary Awards for ﬁ ction (inaugu-

rated in 1936). Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House (1941) and W.

O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) capture the struggles of

living in the Prairies during the drought-plagued 1930s. Mordecai

Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) depicts the social

and moral ambivalence of a young Jewish entrepreneur in contempo-

rary Montreal, while Adele Wiseman’s The Sacriﬁ ce (1956) powerfully

captures the Jewish-Ukrainian experience in the Prairies. In a more

universal vein, Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano (1947) and Ethel

Wilson in Swamp Angel (1954) explore the psychological pressures of

alcoholism and women’s limited options in society, respectively.

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A new generation of English-Canadian poets developed in the shad-

ows of World War II. Dorothy Livesay won the Governor-General’s

Literary Award for Day and Night (1944) and Poems for Peace (1947).

Earle Birney of Vancouver also won this prestigious award in 1942 and

1945 for his collections of poems and pioneered the teaching of creative

writing in Canadian universities. The outspoken and ﬂ amboyant Irving

Layton produced numerous volumes since the early 1940s, which have

given him national and international recognition as a proliﬁ c, revolu-

tionary, and controversial poet of the “modern” school. From the 1940s

onward, the metaphysical poetry of P. K. Page and Margaret Avison

inspired modern generations of Canadian poets. Northrup Frye, a stu-

dent and colleague of poet E. J. Pratt, went on to become one of the

world’s leading literary theorists in English following the publication of

his book, Anatomy of Criticism, in 1957.

French-Canadian literature moved away from traditional rural ideal-

ism to express urban realism with the publication in 1938 of Trente

arpents (Thirty Acres) by Philippe Panneton, who wrote under the

pseudonym of Ringuet (Linteau, Durocher and Robert 1991). Unlike

Maria Chapdelaine a quarter-century earlier, the novel’s hero, Eucha-

riste Moisan, suffers for his stubborn devotion to his small farm, which

ultimately can be passed on to only one of his 12 children. His other

children must abandon their rural life for an urban existence in Mon-

treal or New England, where Euchariste ends up forlornly living out his

last days anguishing over his lost 30 acres. This Governor-General

Award-winning novel highlights the reality of the French-Canadian

fate and foreshadows the social upheaval in Quebec life that made the

Quiet Revolution necessary. Roger Lemelin’s Au pied de la pente douce

(1944, translated as The Town Below) and Les Plouffe (1950, translated

as The Plouffe Family) as well as Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion

(1945, translated as The Tin Flute) employ urban working-class settings

to convey social realism in mid-20th-century Quebec.

In the visual arts, the inﬂ uence of the Group of Seven continued to

grow with the formation in 1933 of the Canadian Group of Painters

whose members included A. J. Casson, Charles Comfort, Edwin Hol-

gate, Yvonne McKague Housser, J. W. G. Macdonald, and Carl Schae-

fer. Other artists were endeavoring to move away from the rugged

landscape nationalism of the Group of Seven. John Lyman of Montreal,

who was a key ﬁ gure emphasizing internationalism, founded the Con-

temporary Art Society in 1939. In the 1940s and 1950s, a radical group

of French-Canadian painters inﬂ uenced by Parisian surrealism, includ-

ing Marcel Barbeau, Paul-Emile Borduas, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand

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