1950s Canada: Politics and Public Affairs

This book, written by University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman, chronicles a decade in the life of Canada. Based largely on newspaper accounts from the Globe and Mail, Wiseman weaves a meticulous account of politics and of the social, cultural, and economic factors affecting public affairs during the 1950s. “My study focusses on the what rather than the why of the happenings of the 1950s” (3), he writes. It would be hard to imagine, however, that one of the foremost Canadian political scientists of his generation could repress the urge to address, or even want to avoid addressing the “why?” of the events and developments that he recounts. And, indeed, analysis and explanation are offered throughout the book, most particularly in a concluding chapter in which Wiseman offers reflections on the significance of the decade as “a chapter in Canadian history and part of a larger historical plot” (174). But why the 1950s? Wiseman recognizes that this is a question that will immediately be asked and that requires an answer. His explanation is one that makes rather modest claims about the decade. “We cannot say of the 1950s,” he writes, “as we can of the 1940s and the 1960s, that they represented a turning point in Canadian or world history” (3). In defense of his choice, Wiseman observes that “studying the decade does contribute to illuminating some of the fault lines and axes around which Canadian politics and public affairs have always revolved” (3). The same may be said, however, about any decade of the 20 century. I think that Wiseman’s claims about the significance of the 1950s in the larger sweep of Canadian political history are too modest. It is true that the decade has neither inspired nor acquired a label, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s or the Swinging Sixties. Indeed, the 1950s are generally thought of, in both Canada and the United States, as a rather soporific decade, bookended by much more tumultuous and consequential times. “In the procession of Canadian history,” Wiseman writes, “the 1950s may be considered as both a tranquil decade in which little changed or an era of transformation and adaptation” (4, my emphasis). Readers of this book will find that the latter is the appropriate characterization. As I made my way through the year-by-year biography of this decade, I found myself thinking about Earle Birney’s 1948 poem, “Canada: Case History.” Birney portrays the country as,