What was CANADA like in the 1950s?

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Hello friends, my name is JJ and today I thought I would make another video about the beloved midcentury era, which is to say from the dawn of the 1950s to 1960 or possibly even 1970, no one seems to agree. But today I thought we would specifically talk about midcentury Canada. It was a very interesting time for this country and an era that I think is pretty important to understand if you want to get some context for why Canada is the sort of place it is today. This is a very big topic. So, I'll just try to give you a broad overview of some of the big themes that define the era in terms of culture and economics and politics. Hopefully, that will be enough to let you fake your way through a first date once the conversation inevitably turns to talk of mid-century Canada because we've all been there. So, just to start, the biggest thing that you always have to keep in the front of your mind whenever we're talking about anything to do with Canada is that Canada is overwhelmingly similar to the United States and that almost any cultural or economic or political trend or phenomenon that happens there will also happen here. Canadians and Americans live side by side on the same continent, speaking the same language.

[00:01:16]And with a border that's historically been mostly open to the free flow of goods, ideas, and people, there's a limit to how different you can realistically expect these two countries to be. Case in point, in the aftermath of World War II, Canada and the United States went through very similar boom periods of economic growth, birth rates, technological change, and suburbanization. Pop culture was similarly defined by all of the same iconic trends, including fast food, big cars, and rock and roll. While social values revolved around Christianity, traditional gender roles, and not being a communist, this distinctly North American era of peace and prosperity was in large part a byproduct of the fact that this continent had escaped the sort of brutal violence that had destroyed, killed, and traumatized so much of Europe and Asia. The only destruction that came to North America, by contrast, was the tearing up of our natural environment to harvest resources to assist the war effort, which seems like a good transition to talk about midcentury Canadian theme number one, the resource boom. Canada is a gigantic place, and basically every type of precious treasure nature has to offer can be found somewhere in this 9 million square km of land. Even before the war, Canada had developed a pretty sophisticated natural resource-based economy. But after the war, there was an unprecedented scaling up. Beginning in the late 1940s, much of the world, and especially the US and Canada, saw a huge growth in middle class consumerism, which spiked demand for natural resources far higher than even the war itself. Families began clamoring for things like cars made of steel, suburban homes made of timber, and nickelplated fridges and toasters.

[00:03:08]New mines and logging sites were accordingly opened all over Canada, yielding bigger outputs than ever. Let me read you some data I got from Statistics Canada to show you just how dramatically the Canadian resource sector grew to meet all of this increased demand. In 1945, Canada produced 243 million pounds of nickel, 4.5 billion feet of lumber, and 3.6 million tons of iron ore. In 1955, we made 349 million pounds of nickel, nearly 8 billion ft of lumber, and 16 million tons of iron ore. But even that was nothing compared to Canadian oil. Oil had been known to exist in the province of Alberta since the late 19th century, but it wasn't until after World War II that a Canadian oil industry truly developed. In 1939, the Alberta oil fields produced just 13 million barrels of oil. By 1955, the number was 113 million, an increase of over 700%. In an increasingly oilpowered world, the value of Canadian petroleum quickly eclipsed that of everything else in the Canadian mineral sector, as it does to this day.

[00:04:23]The 50s are known for being the atomic age, defined by man harnessing the power of the atom, and Canada played an important role in this as well. Enormous deposits of uranium were discovered in northern Canada in the late 40s, which made Canada a huge player in the early uranium trade. Throughout the 50s, hundreds of millions of pounds of uranium oxide were exported from Canada to other countries, which they used to build nuclear reactors for power plants and nothing else. On a cultural level, Canada's midcentury resource boom helped foster a great deal of reverence for all of the mighty resource corporations making Canada so rich and important. You read the Canadian newspapers of the time and there's so much coverage given to what's going on with Dominion Steel and Coal or Denison Mines or Imperial Oil or Dome Petroleum and all these other outfits. One of them would even produce a prime minister, Brian Maloney, who was the CEO of a firm known as Iron Ore Company of Canada, one of the most powerful and important mid-century mining corporations. But it wasn't pure celebration. the degree that so many Canadian resource companies relied on American capital for financing and then became substantially or even wholly owned by American investors as a result would become a growing source of Canadian insecurity as the mid-century era reached its end. But now, let's grow my economy with a quick word from today's video sponsor, Incogn. So, do you ever enter your personal data into a website and then like immediately regret it 5 seconds later? Like you think, who did I just give my phone number and email address to? It's a reasonable fear. So much of the data that we share online winds up in the hands of data brokers who then sell it off to god knows who. And the result is an inescapable barrage of telemarketers, spam emails, and text messages from people pretending to be in love with you. But luckily, there's a solution.

[00:06:24]Incogn. Incogn is an app that automatically sends data deletion requests on your behalf to all of the big data brokerage firms, which they are legally obligated to obey. And in their most exciting feature of all, you can now actually manually tell Incogn to file a custom data deletion request for any website you suspect might have something on you. After just a few weeks, you'll be surprised how much of your data they're able to get out of someone else's hands. Sound intriguing?

[00:06:53]Just head over to incogn.com/jmcc or use promo code jjmcc for 60% off an annual plan. It's a great service in this privacyconscious age of ours. So don't delay giving Cognney a try today.

[00:07:08]All right. Now let's get a bit into midcentury Canadian politics. Canadian politics in the 50s and 60s was often considered a bit of a low point in mid-century Canadian life just because there was a general thinking that in contrast to places like Great Britain and France and the United States, Canada was being led by a sequence of quite mediocre men who couldn't elicit comparable reverence or respect from the Canadian public. Canada is actually unusual among allied nations in that we were never led by a World War II veteran. But this is also a realm where there's been a fair bit of historical revisionism in recent years just because I think by today's standards, we'd probably say that Canada's mid-century leaders were fine and certainly more popular than many of the politicians we have today. But that was the thinking at the time. From 1948 to 1957, the prime minister of Canada was Louis St. Lon, probably one of Canada's more forgotten prime ministers, despite the fact that he led the country through so many pivotal mid-century years, he was seen as a fairly dull and unambitious man, a guy stereotyped as just sitting in his big chair and smoking his pipe while the corporations, bankers, and bureaucrats actually ran the country. To be clear, this was not perceived in the same negative way that we would think about that sort of thing today, just because in the 1950s there was much more broad social trust for elites than there is now. St. Laurent won two terms. And when you read the papers of the time, his political success is often framed as just reflecting the general satisfaction of life that Canadians were enjoying in those prosperous post-war years. Near the end, however, there was growing concern that the prime minister was too much of a clueless puppet to powerful interests and he lost his bid for a third term in 1957. This then triggered a nearly decadel long period of pretty broad instability in Canadian politics where the next two prime ministers struggled to win a working majority in the parliament and Canada accordingly experienced five elections between 1957 and 1968. First was John Deffenbaker, who held himself up as this great populist man of the people, but others saw as this insufferable blowhard. After three terms, but only 5 years in office, he was voted out in favor of Lester Pearson, a quite nerdy, lispyvoiced man who wasn't very popular either and only served four years before resigning in 1968. His resignation is one of the great symbolic markers of the end of Canada's mid-century era. I would say Pearson was the more interesting of the two men, but more for his pre- prime ministerial career where he worked as a diplomat in what is often thought of as the golden age of mid-century Canadian diplomacy. In the late 1940s, Pearson served as Canada's ambassador to the United States, then foreign minister, and in this capacity, he was a key figure integrating Canada into all of the international organizations that had been set up to create a peaceful post-war world order, including NATO, the World Bank, and of course, the United Nations. He served as one of the first presidents of the UN General Assembly and was famously involved in the UN's efforts to negotiate a peaceful end to the so-called Suez crisis in the Middle East for which he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. All of this would be heavily sentimentalized in later years, an age when Canada was taken seriously as one of the major powers of the world and a country that could affect global affairs in substantial ways. When I was growing up, I was always taught about the glories of Pearson's Nobel Prize and how a Canadian had helped write the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But as the peaceful 1950s transitioned into an increasingly highstakes cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the diplomatic influence of so-called middle powers like Canada entered a marked decline. Anything important would now be decided by the superpowers amongst themselves. with Canada now shoved off to the side. In French-speaking Quebec, meanwhile, the midentury is defined by an era that they call the quiet revolution, which was this distinctly Quebec phase of post-war political social modernization. Quebec before the war had a lot of similarities to some of the Catholic countries of Europe, which is to say it was quite poor and rural with a social order that was heavily shaped by the Roman Catholic Church and an authoritarian government.

[00:11:52]Maurice Duplesi was the very Catholic and very right-wing prime minister of Quebec for much of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. These days, a lot of Quebecers remember him as being basically their Franco or Mussolini, which might not be entirely fair, but there's no doubt that when he died in 1959, it marked the start of a basically new regime for the province. I really like this political cartoon from the time which is labeled quiet revolution and it shows a bunch of Quebecers noisily throwing out all of the symbols of their reactionary past like this bust of premier duply this portrait of a priest and this book labeled return to the land. Today we think of Quebec as a very secular progressive sort of place with strong unions and a very permissive social culture when it comes to things like sex and gender. And much of this was the result of reforms that were taken place during the early 1960s as post duplic administrations sought to dramatically lessen the institutionalized power of the Catholic Church over things like healthcare and education and pass progressive legislation governing things like workers rights and social welfare that were more in sync with the rest of the continent. Now, English Canada was having its own little quiet revolution, too. Mid-century Canada is usually seen as the era in which Canada shed its last lingering traces of British colonial rule. Canada had been granted full independence from the British Empire in 1931. And growing pride in Canada's wealth and international standing fostered a lot of interest in this idea that Canada should work harder to define its brand as a sovereign country in more overt and explicit ways than it had done to date. It was in this era, for instance, that the government and banks and newspapers and things stopped using the colonial phrase dominion of Canada or the dominion to refer to the country.

[00:13:48]By the 1960s, this phrase had basically completely disappeared from common use with the country now exclusively referred to as just simply Canada. In 1952, the St. Laurent administration appointed a Canadian man named Vincent Massie as governor general of Canada.

[00:14:07]Here is an elegant portrait of him taken by Ysef KH, one of Canada's most acclaimed mid-century photographers.

[00:14:15]This was big as well because it represented the end of a long-standing tradition wherein Britain would continue to appoint figurehead governors for Canada long after the country had become a self-governing democracy. Post 1952, the job was now a purely Canadian figure head. But the biggest change of all was changing the Canadian flag from this to this in 1965.

[00:14:41]This was a big initiative of Lester Pearson's government and was strenuously opposed by the Conservative Party, which was still being led by former Prime Minister Defenbaker. The so-called flag debate was one of the great midcentury Canadian dramas just because it was seen as a real test for either how seriously Canada took its independence or whether it was possible to go too far in asserting it. But despite all these changes, Canada's mid-century elite still remained quite anglophilic overall. The 1952 ascension of Queen Elizabeth II in particular was an event hugely celebrated by the Canadian government and media. Even after becoming independent, Canada had continued to recognize the British monarch as symbolic head of state. And following her coronation, mass-produced pictures of the young queen, like this one, were slapped everywhere in Canada in schools, post offices, libraries, swimming pools, hospitals, even boats.

[00:15:40]Here's a picture of another future prime minister, Kim Campbell, posing for her prom night in 1964. As Canada's other symbols of what they used to call the British connection faded away, a certain cult of personality around Queen Elizabeth emerged to take its place with the Queen becoming an object of enormous veneration by a new small but loud subculture of Canadian who became known simply as monarchists. But now let's talk about Canadian culture in the mid-century era more generally. So prior to the 1950s, Canada had been considered something of a cultural backwater, never producing much literature, art, music or poetry of note and basically having no museums or art galleries, nor any cultured rich people willing to fund such things. In 1949, the St. Laurent administration commissioned the writing of this thing, the so-called Massie report, headed by the guy I mentioned earlier, who would later become governor general. Massiey's report called for the government to start making huge investments in the arts and basically subsidize all of the cultural infrastructure that Canada was seen to be lacking. This included artists, museums, writers, orchestras, ballets, you name it. The report was enormously influential and in short order, the government proceeded to do most of the things it recommended. Because of this, a lot of mid-century Canadian cultural products tend to be thought of as being products of a specific Massie Report era, regardless of whether they were actually funded by the government or not. And this is because the anxiety embodied by the Massie report wasn't limited to just the government. A lot of other elite and even middleclass Canadians felt that culture was something that was notably missing from their lives. And in the wake of how wealthy Canada was getting in the aftermath of World War II, they agreed it was time for the country to get serious about producing highquality cultural products as a matter of national pride. And so what sort of stuff was produced? Well, typically for Canada, much of it followed the same broad cultural trends that were popular in the US at the time, particularly modernism, which was the broad idea of making art that was more sleek and minimalistic than the fussy, hyperdetailed stuff that had come before. Abstract paintings proved to be quite popular among Canadian mid-century modern artists. For instance, there was a Toronto art group called Painters 11 who were often held up as particularly iconic as well as painters from a unique Quebec abstract art movement known as le plasticens. There were a number of Quebec abstract sculptors who are quite prolific and acclaimed as well. Canadian architects embraced modernism in a big way too. that we don't think of Canada as a country that was necessarily on the cutting edge of some of that really cool mid-century modern architecture that you see in places like Palm Springs or Miami. A lot of iconic Canadian public buildings that remain used to this day were done in a strikingly modernist fashion, including the Toronto City Hall, the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, and the Hudson's Bay building in Saskatoon. And then when you went inside, you might see a bunch of tables and chairs made by Russell Spanner, better known as Rusban, who was probably Canada's most well-known mid-century modernist furniture designer. But in the end, mid-century Canadian culture would in practice be defined far less by this kind of hoidy toy high art stuff than by the emergence of a truly middle class Canadian culture centered mostly around things like magazines, consumer goods, and of course the television. Following the advice of Mr. Massie, a new government-funded television network known as CBC TV first launched in 1952.

[00:19:34]And while it did show some uniquely Canadian shows like Wayne and Schustster or Front Page Challenge or Country Hoown, the most popular programming on Canadian TV proved to be American stuff like The Lone Ranger or I Love Lucy. And hockey, of course, being able to watch hockey games on television played an enormous role in making the sport as popular in Canada as it would become.

[00:19:58]The fact that there were just so many fewer hockey teams in the NHL back then helped a lot too since it meant less competition for the Canadian teams and less spreading around of the Canadian players. In 20 of the 26 years between 1945 and 1970, the Stanley Cup was won by either Montreal or Toronto. This helped cement the reputation of those decades as the true golden age of Canadian hockey and turn the players of the time into some of the most iconic celebrities in Canadian history. So when did Canada's midcentury era end? There are a few symbolic dates that tend to get cited a lot. Like I said earlier, the resignation of Prime Minister Pearson in 1968 is big just because that led to the ascension of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who would proceed to govern for much of the next 15 years and is usually seen as a man who transitioned Canada into a distinctly new age of policy and politics. Like many western countries, Canada's economy likewise began to enter a period of trouble in the late60s with slowing growth and rising unemployment and inflation. By the time the 1970s dawn, the newspapers were proclaiming Canada's post-war economic golden age definitively over. But I think the biggest and most symbolically rich date to site is 1967, which was the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Constitution and thus the nation of Canada itself. Not coincidentally, 1967 was also the year that Montreal hosted the World's Fair, which in those days was still considered this very prestigious thing and thus a real sign that Canada was now a member of the global A tier. Expo 67, as it was known, seen as such a culmination of everything Canada had achieved in the 50s and 60s. You had Canada's biggest city now full of all of these beautiful modern buildings showing itself off to the world, letting people from all over come and view exhibitions of worldclass Canadian art and design and industry and all under our beautiful new flag. No surprise then that when Montreal got Canada's first major league baseball team, they chose the Expose as their name. By contrast, the latter years of the 60s and early 70s were defined by growing pessimism as the naive and even smothering optimism of mid-century Canadians faded in the face of a growing tally of unavoidable social problems.

[00:22:37]It's not just a struggling economy, but French Canadian terrorism and separatism, rising crime and urban decay, and intense social divisions born from an increasingly rebellious youth culture. Today, it's easy to regard Canada's mid-century era as a deeply exotic time. And in terms of the aesthetics and politics and social values, it definitely was. But in other ways, it's also more similar to today than not. Canada's economy is still defined by a powerful natural resource sector. Canada still debates the remnants of empire, and Canada's government continues to be heavily involved in subsidizing art and culture in a country seen to be lacking it. The exact terms of the debates might have changed, but the issues remain stubbornly Canadian. So, I have now done two videos on the mid-century era and one on the 1890s. Is there a decade or era you would like to see me analyze next? Let me know in the comments and I will see you next week.

[00:23:43]Hello friends.