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José E. Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–1971 (Vancouver: UBC Press 2006)

THIS BOOK IS ordered by an elegant analytic simplicity. Igartua addresses what is too often skirted in Canadian historiography. For all the discussion of representations of nationhood that now animates historians, few have actually bothered to consider how quickly Canadian identity shifted in the middle of the last century. English Canada (which, after all, was most emphatically the dominant voice within the 'two nations' paradigm), over the course of the two-and-a-half decades following World War II, became something other than what it had once been. The assumption of Britishness pervaded the idea of Canada until the 1950s, and so routine was this association of nationhood with ethnicity and Empire that few questioned it, even as it was being assailed by various forces and developments. Igartua shows how settled was this sense of a hybrid British-Canadian identity at mid-century through scrutiny of debates associated with a new Citizenship Bill, responses to suggestions that the name of the national holiday be changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day, proposals to develop a new Canadian flag, in which national symbols such as the maple leaf might be integrated with the Union Jack, and representations of Canada in public school textbooks. By 1970, however, an ethnic national identity had been supplanted by a multicultural understanding of Canada premised, not on Britishness, but on civic citizenships of equality.

However much this Trudeauesque multiculturalism and its shedding of 'racialized' notions of nationhood might well mythologize Canadianness as, indeed, had the prior attachment to Britishness, there is no denying that something fundamental changed in terms of English Canada's self-conception as the 1960s came to an end. Igartua charts this development by looking at a series of bricks in the road to a Canada able to proclaim itself a "community of communities." (14) Among the milestones in the making of a rights-based Canadian citizenship would be post-war debates over Japanese internments, immigration policy, and espionage (the Gouzenko affair); Cold War imbroglios; the waning of Victoria Day and the increasing openness to new symbols of Canadian nationality, culminating in Lester B. Pearson's final resolution of the flag issue in 1964; growing ambiguities in English Canada's response to and reception of the British monarchy; and the longstanding 1960s Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and the final adoption of new federal policies in these areas in 1971. On all of these developments and many more, Igartua is insightful and informative.

Not without reason, Igartua regards the changing nature of English-Canadian identity in these years as the equivalent of Québec's Quiet Revolution. Just as French Canada shifted its understanding of Québec's historic identity rapidly in the years reaching from the Asbestos Strike of 1949 through the rise of Jean Lesage's Liberals in the 1960s, resulting in the implementation of a program of economic nationalism and rapid modernization, displacing the strangleholds of tradition and the Catholic Church, English Canada, too, underwent a significant "de-ethnicization." But there was a difference that Igartua really does not wrestle with: Québec's Quiet Revolution unleashed the hounds of a not-so-quiet revolutionary nationalist aspiration in ways that were not paralleled in English Canada, which perhaps suggests differences in national identity that are skirted in this book.

There is little to quarrel with in the general argument of The Other Quiet Revolution. At particular points, however, questions might well be raised. As examples only, I raise three.

First, Igartua's sense that English-Canadian identity has settled easily into the space he labels civic equality might well beg the question. Is this really an identity that English Canadians share and gravitate to in the same ways as earlier generations cultivated understandings of Canada as a northern nation, its hopes and aspirations springing eternal from the deep well of British values and Empire's advances? Or, rather, might we not see so many fissures in the multicultural edifice, and so much that is contested and problematic, that we might suggest that English Canadian remains a national identity still very much in search of itself? In this sense the loss of English Canada's Britishness is undeniable, but it might be argued that an alternative identity has yet to be realized. Much of Canada's post-1970 history, in which regional balkanization and competing, even conflicting, identities, loom large, could well suggest that the ongoing 'crisis of Canada' lies precisely in the failure of a national identity to congeal in the aftermath of the 1960s.

Second, in focusing on specific events and political debates, most of which generated considerable editorial comment in English-Canadian newspapers and in Parliament (the sources on which this book relies), Igartua has chosen a particular path of argument. It takes him in specific directions, and along the way much is revealed. Other paths would, however, have illuminated the subject in different ways, and it is surprising that so little is made of the peculiarities of the 1960s and the importance of youthful rebellion in burying an antiquated past. English-Canadian identity was destined to look very different after New Left campus revolts, wildcat strikes, and second-wave feminist manifestoes, not to mention readings of White Niggers of America and contending with the War Measures Act.

Third, Igartua relies on recent social scientific writing on nations and nationalism, especially the work of Anthony D. Smith, to claim that nations are a much older phenomenon than nationalism. Smith seems an appropriate commentator because Igartua borrows his language of ethnic and civic nationalism, and Canada is such a young nation and a truly Canadian nationalism such a late arrival, that it all seems to fit well with Igartua's concerns. Yet there is a considerable body of challenging writing that flies in the face of Smith's conceptualization, including important books on nations and nationalism by Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Geller, both of whom problematize and historicize nations and nationalism in useful ways. That critical insight, it seems to me, might well be related to the questions raised above, for had Igartua grappled seriously with the arguments of Hobsbawm and Geller he could well have been less settled in his view that a post-1970 English-Canadian national identity has indeed established itself, or that the editorial pages of newspapers and parliamentary debates provide the most appropriate entre into national identity formation.

This latter query is really something of a theoretical aside. The measure of any book is the questions it makes us ask. Igartua's pages give rise to many more than can be posed in a short review. It is a measure of his achievement that he makes us see the obvious, when it has, for so long, been anything but clear, and then allows us to rethink what he has made of it all. Authors cannot be expected to do much more than this.


BRYAN D. PALMER Trent University

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