By Hamutal Dotan

Photo by Lone Primate from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Does your Canadianness matter to you? And what does it even mean to be Canadian? The old joke, of course, is that Canada is NotTheUnitedStates, that we define ourselves as America’s inverse, or perhaps her kinder, gentler cousin, but have no substantive notion of what our identity is absent that contrast. On the other hand, lots of us vehemently reject that trope, arguing that Canada does have a distinct sense of itself. Just what that identity consists in though (Multiculturalism? Socialized medicine, or a broader concern for social welfare? Our climate and geography? The sheer course of historical events?) isn’t always entirely clear.
This is Not a Reading Series (TINARS) gave itself over to a discussion of Canadian identity Tuesday night at the Gladstone, in a discussion between historian Bryan D. Palmer and writer Rick Salutin. The conversation centred around questions Palmer raises in his new book, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era—questions about what Canadian identity looks like in the aftermath of the upheavals of the Sixties, and whether we’ve hit a point where the very notion of “Canadianness” can be dispensed with altogether. One of Palmer’s major aims, both in the book and in the discussion, is to argue that we are still living with the effects of those upheavals, that Canadian identity was fundamentally fractured by them, and that this isn’t really as worrisome as it may sound.

The Sixties are perhaps most famous for introducing a revolution in attitudes towards sex, a subject which Palmer spent some time on over the course of the evening. In particular, he used the events of the Munsinger Affair (usually described as Canada’s first major political sex scandal) to trace a development in our national consciousness, so that “what was a very big deal in a sinful, sordid kind of way” at the beginning of the Sixties became simply interesting and colourful by the end of the decade, as attested to in part by the election of a more frankly sexual Pierre Trudeau in 1968.

Photo courtesy of Chris Reed/TINARS.

The notion of Canada-as-not-America came up for discussion as well, with the 1966 Chuvalo-Ali boxing match serving as a case study. Because Ali was, at the time, barred from fighting in the United States, he came across the border to fight the Canadian heavyweight champion; Chuvalo went all fifteen rounds against the legend but lost on points by a substantial margin. Salutin, commenting on the “Canadianness” of this outcome, remarked that “our guy did really well, way better than anybody thought, but he didn’t defeat.”
Palmer’s left-leaning positions came out more clearly towards the end of the discussion, as issues surrounding Quebec separatism and the FLQ took centre stage. Among his book’s aims, said Palmer, was an attempt “to bring the FLQ back from the labelling as a terrorist organization.”
As the evening wound down, Salutin and Palmer wondered what lessons might be drawn from all these events. Palmer’s general view is that Sixties revolutionaries may have only halfway reached their goal: “for all the struggle…the better world wasn’t realized, the irony was that they [just] took down the world that was….” Salutin concurred, saying that “we lost the old national identity, but didn’t get the new thing.” He then went on to wonder if a national identity was actually necessary, however, maintaining we may be all the better for its dissolution. We are “immensely richer,” in a sense, if we no longer have to hew to a fixed identity which “locks you into things so you can’t move.” As he pointed out in the Q&A, when socialized medicine was first introduced it was described as “un-Canadian,” though now it is often cited as one of our hallmarks. Canadian identity, Palmer and Salutin seemed to agree, is a moving target, and no good comes from attaching ourselves to any particular idea of Canadianness too intensely.