Canada And The End Of Empire

336 Pages·2005·1.458 MB·English

by  Phillip Buckner

Canada and the End of Empire
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Edited by Phillip Buckner
Canada and the End of Empire
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© UBC Press 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying
or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Canada and the end of empire / edited by Phillip Buckner.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7748-0915-9
1. Canada – History – 20th century. 2. Canada – Relations – Great Britain.
3. Great Britain – Relations – Canada. 4. Postcolonialism – Canada. 5. Nationalism –
Canada – History. I. Buckner, Phillip A. (Phillip Alfred), 1942-
FC245.C348 2004 971.06 C2004-906056-2
UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing
program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and
the British Columbia Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications
Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, and with a grant from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
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Contents
Introduction / 1
Phillip Buckner
1 Imperial Twilight, or When Did the Empire End? / 15
John Darwin
2 Canadian Relations with the United Kingdom at the End of Empire,
1956-73 / 25
John Hilliker and Greg Donaghy
3 ‘Ready, Aye, Ready’ No More? Canada, Britain, and the Suez Crisis
in the Canadian Press / 47
José E. Igartua
4 The Last Great Royal Tour: Queen Elizabeth’s 1959 Tour to Canada / 66
Phillip Buckner
5 ‘An Objective of US Foreign Policy since the Founding of the Republic’:
The United States and the End of Empire in Canada / 94
Gordon T. Stewart
6 Britain, Europe, and Diefenbaker’s Trade Diversion Proposals, 1957-58 / 117
Tim Rooth
7 Customs Valuations and Other Irritants: The Continuing Decline
of Anglo-Canadian Trade in the 1960s / 133
Bruce Muirhead
8 Asleep at the Wheel?: British Motor Vehicle Exports to Canada, 1945-75 / 151
Steve Koerner
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vi Contents
9 Britain, Europe, and the ‘Other Quiet Revolution’ in Canada / 165
Andrea Benvenuti and Stuart Ward
10 Nostalgia and National Identity: The History and Social Studies Curricula
of Alberta and Ontario at the End of Empire / 183
George Richardson
11 The Persistence of Britain: The Culture Project in Postwar Canada / 195
Paul Rutherford
12 From Guthrie to Greenberg: Canadian High Culture and the End
of Empire / 206
Allan Smith
13 Ontario’s Agenda in Post-Imperial Constitutional Negotiations,
1949-68 / 216
P.E. Bryden
14 The Last Gasp of Empire: The 1964 Flag Debate Revisited / 232
Gregory A. Johnson
15 ‘One Flag, One Throne, One Empire’: The IODE, the Great Flag Debate,
and the End of Empire / 251
Lorraine Coops
16 More Royal than Canadian? The Royal Canadian Navy’s Search
for Identity, 1910-68 / 272
Marc Milner
17 Technology and Empire: The Ideas of Harold A. Innis and
George P. Grant / 285
R. Douglas Francis
18 Petitioning the Great White Mother: First Nations’ Organizations
and Lobbying in London / 299
J.R. (Jim) Miller
Contributors / 319
Index / 321
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Canada and the End of Empire
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Introduction
Phillip Buckner
Sir John Seeley once wrote that the British Empire was acquired in ‘a fit of
absence of mind.’ Whatever the truth of this comment, it is certainly argu-
able that the empire was dismantled in a fit of absence of mind. There have,
of course, been numerous studies of decolonization, focusing on the politi-
cal, diplomatic, and economic pressures behind the British decision to dis-
mantle their empire and on the process of negotiation between British
officials and those seeking independence.1 But only recently have British
historians begun to assess the significance to those who lived in Britain of
the rapid disengagement from empire that took place after the Second World
War. The topic remains a highly controversial one, since some British histo-
rians continue to insist that the mass of the British people had always been
relatively indifferent to the existence of the empire. Bernard Porter has even
claimed that the loss of the empire meant little to the British public because
‘the mass of the people, as they had all along, cared very little.’2 Yet it has
become harder and harder to believe in this supposed indifference as more
recent studies show the importance of the empire in virtually every area of
popular culture in Britain. Particularly influential has been the Manchester
University Press series on Studies in Empire edited by John MacKenzie.3 As
the significance of the empire to the evolution of Britain itself becomes
increasingly apparent, British historians have been forced to re-examine
the complex ways in which the ‘end of empire’ affected and continues to
affect virtually every area of British life.4
The significance of the end of empire has also become an important sub-
ject of enquiry in many of the countries that were formerly part of the
empire. Particularly relevant to Canadian historians ought to be the fre-
quently heated debate taking place in Australia. Indeed, there are many
common features between the approaches of Australian and Canadian his-
torians to the imperial connection. Stuart Ward – one of the contributors to
this volume – has recently written that ‘Australian historians have tended
to look for easily recognisable patterns of national behaviour, constructing
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2 Phillip Buckner
an innate self-sufficient Australian nationalism as the primary force under-
lying Australia’s ambiguous progression towards independent nation.’5 Vir-
tually the same could be said of Canadian historians. Until recently, most
Canadian historians were self-confessed nationalists and, though many
present-day historians would deny the label, they continue to write from a
nationalist perspective little different from that of their predecessors. Like
Australian historians, Canadian historians usually present the core dynamic
of the relationship with Britain as being based on mutual antagonism, and
assume as a given the existence of an innate and irresistible pressure to put
an end to the outmoded, unnecessary, and distracting colonial relation-
ship. To challenge this paradigm requires considerable courage, since to do
so immediately lays one open to the charge of being an immature colonial,
tied to the apron strings of the mother country. Thus, in Australia, Neville
Meaney’s assertion that until comparatively recently most Australians saw
themselves as British and therefore did not seek to break the imperial con-
nection has led to an intense and often bitter debate.6 Yet it is difficult to see
how else one can explain why Australia (and the other colonies of settle-
ment) moved so slowly to cut the umbilical cord with Britain. Not until the
1960s, Stuart Ward points out, was there ‘a major re-assessment of the core
precepts of the Anglo-Australian relationship,’ and it was events in Britain
that provided the catalyst for this re-assessment.7
In Canada we have yet to see even the beginning of a similar debate. The
empire has come to be viewed as a complete irrelevance, and its signifi-
cance to Canadians in the past is almost completely ignored. More than a
decade ago, in my presidential address to the Canadian Historical Associa-
tion, I asked the question ‘Whatever happened to the British Empire?’ and
attempted to persuade Canadian historians to return imperial history to a
central place in Canadian historiography.8 My plea fell largely on deaf ears.
One prominent Canadian historian recently told me how surprised – and
implicitly how disappointed – the audience was when I chose not to talk
about Canadian history. This comment shows how completely the audi-
ence missed the point of my address, which was to argue that Canadian
history cannot be understood without recognition of the fact that Canada
was for several centuries part of a ‘Greater Britain’ that extended around the
globe. Until well after the Second World War, most English-speaking Cana-
dians, Australians, New Zealanders, and English-speaking South Africans
were the descendants of migrants from the British Isles, and they wanted to
re-create a form of British society in the overseas dominions. They did not
want to slavishly reproduce British society; indeed, the majority probably
wished to create a ‘Better Britain’ than the one that existed at home – one
free of the class, religious, and other constraints of the mother country.9
They also demanded, and were given, local self-government. In each of the
old dominions there were those who sought some kind of closer imperial
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