Canada’s 1960s

I have just finished reading Bryan D. Palmer’s book, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, published back in 2009. It is quite a long book, over 600 pages all told, but eminently readable and chock full of pertinent information and extensive end-notes. Over the years, I have found Palmer’s numerous contributions to Canadian history very useful. I used one of his earlier books to help me remember some of the events that I was personally involved in during the 1960s and the 1970s, in order to write part of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies” (2013). A couple of his other works were also among the references that I used to write my doctoral thesis back in 1991, “The Doctrine of Economic Nationalism in Central Canada, 1846-1885”.

As the title of Palmer’s book suggests, most of his text about Canada during the 1960s is focused on the various kinds of rebellious movements that took place back then, such as the wave of wildcat strikes in various different industries across the country, the emergence of the New Left, the student movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, the rise of radical Quebec nationalism and the development of Red Power among Canada’s native peoples. Palmer did an impressive job bringing together material from a wide variety of sources on those events, including works like Myrna Kostach’s Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (1980). I am definitely going to have to read some of those other texts as well, many of which I did not even know existed.

To provide period background for his book, Palmer also decided to add quite a bit of material about such people as Gerda Munsinger, George Chuvalo, Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau. Personally, I thought that some of those references, while interesting, were not nearly as useful to his text as would have been his inclusion of the way that the Canadian justice system blundered through the wrongful condemnation of 14-year-old Steven Truscott for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper, back in 1959. The horribly botched Truscott trial was thoroughly denounced not only in Isabel Lebourdais’s 1966 book on the subject, but also in hundreds of other articles published at the time. Since then, this has become the most important criminal case in Canadian history, going all the way to the Supreme Court, a saga that includes the original death sentence, the many years Truscott spent languishing in prison, several million dollars in government compensation for wrongful conviction, and hundreds more articles, books and television programs.

Why didn’t Palmer make any reference whatsoever to that incredible story? It seems to me that one of the best ways to show how truly unjust former justice minister Pierre Trudeau’s so-called “Just Society” really was back then would have been to underline how thoroughly disgusting the official Canadian response to that rural travesty turned out to be. Even nowadays, the justice system still refuses to declare Truscott officially innocent, probably to protect a number of VIPs involved at the time, such as the junior Ontario Provincial Police officer investigating the case, who later climbed up the ladder to become the head of the force.

But my main criticism of the Palmer book has nothing to do with his decision not to include anything about Truscott. What upsets me more is the utopian socialist approach adopted by Palmer towards “the people”, that is anyone who is not part of the upper-class establishment blamed by Palmer for almost everything rotten that happens in society. As a Trotskyist scholar, Palmer builds his case for rebellion by pointing out how the world’s most important investors and politicians are constantly conspiring to make sure that they always end up on top of everyone else. They are members of what Palmer calls the capitalist ruling class and he quite correctly holds them mainly responsible for the very poor working and living conditions that many poorer, less powerful people had to put up with back then, as well as more recently. Industrial workers across Canada during the 1950s, most of the francophone population of Quebec before the “Quiet Revolution”, an even larger percentage of the native peoples in every province, most Black people throughout North America, all of those groups suffered greatly, some more than others, prior to the rebellious era of the 1960s. (For many of those same people, not much has changed since that time.)

Palmer does quite a good job documenting all of that, as well as lambasting the global geopolitical conflict of the Cold War that lay behind the amassing of huge stockpiles of atomic, bacteriological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, as well as the incredibly violent proxy wars in places like Korea and Vietnam. Most of that analysis is certainly true, relevant and pertinent to his case that much of the rebelliousness of the 1960s was appropriately directed against the big shots whose overbearing egoism lay behind all of those situations. It is also true, though Palmer leaves this out, that though they ruled many fewer countries, the state capitalists of the so-called communist countries treated their populations at least as poorly as did the private capitalists and their own stables of compliant politicians.

What I do not like about Palmer’s analysis, along with that of many of his sources, is his attempt to explain or justify every negative aspect of those rebellious movements by referring back to the ruling class. It is not a good idea, for example, to exclusively blame large anglophone companies and their political cronies for the mostly innocent people killed by the FLQ during their ten years of violent activity in Quebec. (Unless of course the rumors are true and the entire FLQ was under the complete control of the RCMP, or some other secret service, at the time.) Nor do rotten living and working conditions completely explain or justify such crimes as arson, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, and so on, not only when they are carried out by rich white men, but also when they are carried out by people from within the more oppressed communities (poorly-paid workers, most women, Blacks, natives, etc.). Just belonging to a group of oppressed people does not give any individual the right to mistreat those around him. The fact that the world’s richest and most powerful people do all of those things on a much more massive scale, all the time, does not exonerate any of the poorer and less powerful people from trying to copy them.