Canada's 1960s is a big and academically ambitious book: 430 pages of text and 175 pages of endnotes and index. On the surface, Bryan Palmer, Canada Research Chair in Canadian Studies at Trent University, has delivered a welcome update on an under-analyzed decade and a lovely adjunct to Myrna Kostash's seminal 1980 study of the decade, A Long Way from Home.
The first three chapters of Canada's 1960s are readable and frequently insightful as they run through the Diefenbaker era and Canada's transition from the British to the American geopolitical sphere. Along the way, Palmer tracks readers through the dumping of the Avro Arrow, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Gerda Munsinger scandal and the surprisingly intense mutual loathing of John Diefenbaker and his successor as prime minister, Lester B. Pearson. As historians go, Palmer is a particularly gifted storyteller, and he has put several of the early threads of the decade together with unprecedented coherence.
Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era
, by Bryan D. Palmer, University of Toronto Press, 605 pages, $35
In A Long Way from Home, Kostash's generously romantic spirit captured the decade from the inside: You could feel the élan, you could hear the music and the poetry, and you were utterly convinced by it that at decade's end, every Canadian, no matter what part of the political and cultural spectrum he or she started from, really was a long way from home.
Palmer, writing more than a quarter-century later, clearly shares Kostash's romantic view of the decade, but somewhere in the passage of time the generosity that infused and directed Kostash has become dogmatic and aggrieved. As the book moves along and the decade advances, Palmer provides readers with progressively less historical narrative and a lot more devotional, Marxist-inflected cultural analysis that is more hagiography than explication. He flubs a chapter on Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau because his radical-left focus makes him distrust McLuhan's mercantile skills and (as with nearly everyone on the left) unable to see past Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act in October 1970.
The mostly illuminating chapter on the roots of the counterculture that follows descends into a rhetoric-cluttered chapter on the trade-union movement's struggles to meet the priorities of a suddenly younger and much more vocal membership while preparing for the Glorious Revolution and Smashing Capitalism.
An image from the book: A feminist protest at York University in 1970
Then we get to the emotional heart of Palmer's project: a disingenuous explication of New Left politics during and after the mid-1960s, and their impact on both other elements of the left and on Canadian society at large – in that order. What's disingenuous is that the New Left in Canada was always the chimera of its own fevered megalomania.
After the NDP and the Company of Young Canadians (CYC) moved against the bristling-with-energy, syndicalism-influenced SUPA (Student Union for Peace Action, the organization that was ground zero of Canada's New Left) in the mid-1960s, the New Left probably never exceeded 500 active Canadian participants, although the number of those who came and left, often disillusioned, was much larger.
We see the New Left memorialized in heroic tableaux, fever-browed committees writing revolutionary communiqués and position papers beset with shadowy enemies
During the 1970s, the New Left degenerated into a tempest of self-important university-based leftist factions tragically less than the sum of their often-brilliant parts. They spent most of their energy attacking one another over who had the “correct line,” which is to say, the political position most fully justified by quotes from Marx and Lenin. The tragedy of this lay in the fact that all this hair-pulling went on while the corporations were busily taking over functional control of Canada's governments and bringing on the largely unopposed cultural tyranny of the marketplace, of which we have just witnessed the debacle.
