Antony Anderson

November  21, 2022

They planted bombs in mailboxes. They stole weapons from government armouries. They toppled a statue of Queen Victoria long before statue toppling was de rigueur. They cheered when Charles de Gaulle proclaimed their rallying cry to the world. In the 1960s, another nation within the Canadian state was demanding equality and recognition, truth and reconciliation.

Whether we recognize it now or not, we are striving through another one of our collective reinventions. Once again, we are re-imagining this country.

At this latest juncture, we confront the enormous task of how to shape a meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous peoples from sea to sea to sea. At times, the undertaking seems too vast, too complicated, too hopeless. To maintain a sense of perspective and even optimism, it’s worth looking back to when we last embarked on such a profound re-confederation of identity and accommodations, back to the 1960s when the majority finally began to engage with another nation within Canada that had endured a marginalized, second-class place inside the body politic.

For those born since the turn of this century, it might come as a surprise to learn that francophones were long sidelined from the country’s centres of economic and political power; that, at one time,  most prime ministers couldn’t speak French and were not expected to do so; that the federal government operated almost exclusively in English; that appointing a finance minister from Quebec was simply not done. Prominent Quebec MP Gérard Pelletier — former editor of La Presse, and one of the “Three Wise Men” from Québec, along with Pierre Trudeau and Jean Marchand, who took their political capital to Ottawa — summed up living in the national capital in the mid-1960s: “In order to represent a French speaking riding in a French speaking province in the Parliament of my country, I am forced to live in a unilingual city where I get unilingual summonses when I disobey unilingual traffic signs; where I have to appear before an English speaking court if I were to plead not guilty; where there is not a single public school where in which my sons and daughters could pursue their studies in their own language.”

No wonder Quebec unleashed a social, political and cultural rejection of this secondary status. It was called the Quiet Revolution, but it was loud, passionate, convulsive and occasionally violent.

Presiding over the initial tremors, the unilingual anglophone Prime Minister John Diefenbaker offered up overdue, modest gestures. In 1958, Diefenbaker introduced simultaneous translation in the House of Commons. In 1959, he recommended the appointment of the first francophone governor-general, Georges Vanier. His cabinet ministers spent years fretting about whether to implement something as simple yet provocative as a bilingual standard government cheque, which they did in 1962.

In July of 1963, just three months after assuming office, Pearson launched the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. In an angry uncertain climate, it took real political courage to open such a contentious national conversation.

That same year, the editor of Le Devoir, André Laurendeau called on Ottawa to launch a royal commission on the state of affairs between French and English Canada. Diefenbaker considered it briefly but lost power in the spring of 1963. Years later, he recalled defiantly, “I was pressed strongly in 1963 to set up a [bilingualism] commission. I refused. I said such a commission would split Canada asunder, can do no other.” Many anglophones shared that view and preferred to take refuge in a self-serving status quo. Fortunately for the survival of Canada, Diefenbaker’s successor did not.

Unilingual and anglophone as well, Lester Pearson understood the existential threat facing Canada: “My most passionate interest when I was in government, apart from the ultimate question of peace and war, was national unity,” he later told the CBC. “And I was convinced from the beginning, as I remain convinced now, that a key factor in national unity is the recognition of the French language.” Pearson didn’t know exactly how to bridge the chasm but more importantly perhaps, he was guided by a generosity of spirit and imagination as he attempted a meaningful reconciliation with Quebec. One of his ministers, and a future PM, John Turner judged: “Mr. Pearson had a better feel for the Quebec situation than virtually any other English-speaking politician of his time and he took a lot of heat on that.”

In July of 1963, just three months after assuming office, Pearson launched the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. In an angry uncertain climate, it took real political courage to open such a contentious national conversation. The commission was co-chaired by Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton, president of Carleton University. Thousands of citizens attended public hearings from Victoria to St. John’s and displayed our best and our worst. These voices of moderation and generosity, of complacency and blunt prejudice are preserved on grainy black and white kinescopes in the Library and National Archives in Ottawa. Some of it is difficult to watch. For instance, one genteel elderly woman in a fur coat blithely dismisses the whole idea of bilingualism: “I don’t see why there is such a terrible emphasis put on French. I can’t see what good it is to us. I think this whole thing could be settled so easily if they would teach their children English in school in Quebec.” She was not alone in her sense of entitlement. But thankfully, she did not speak for the majority. One man in Vancouver stated in a thick Scottish accent: “The French-Canadian people were here quite a long time before some of we were, and English-speaking Canada with its chauvinism has never permitted French Canada to forget that it is a conquered nation.” A francophone man at the same meeting urged, “I think that a French-Canadian wishes outside of Quebec the same treatment as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant receives in the province of Quebec. This is all. We don’t want any privilege. We just want exactly the same rights.” An earnest young anglophone woman anxiously pleaded: “We can’t just pretend that the French aren’t here. We gotta mix with them…why shouldn’t we learn both cultures? We’re Canada. We’re Canadians!” It was a relief to hear her remarks applauded by the audience.

In this, Pearson had judged correctly that the deep tide of good will in English Canada would triumph over darker undercurrents. The commission’s report marked a milestone in the country’s re-imagining of itself and would pave the way for Pierre Trudeau introducing the Official Languages Act in 1969. And there was more.

To reflect and encourage the emerging reconciliation, Pearson sought a new symbol for his divided country — one most of us take for granted. For roughly four decades in the 20th century, Canada’s flag was the Red Ensign bearing a Union Jack in the upper-left corner. For francophones, this flag, with its very British symbolism, was a reminder of conquest. For many anglophones, it symbolized a deep emotional and cultural attachment to the “mother country”. For others still, it was proof of a lingering colonial status.

Pearson laid the foundation not just for a truly bilingual and therefore more accessible federal government but ultimately for a more generous and inclusive idea of Canada.

While serving at numerous international meetings as a junior and senior diplomat, Pearson had wanted a more distinct flag to clarify and declare Canada’s presence as an independent country. Now, he wanted that clarity on home ground. Here was another act of reconciliation requiring real political courage. Pearson led a minority government facing an unforgiving, bitter Diefenbaker, unyielding in his devotion to the Red Ensign.

The beleaguered prime minister could have held back and avoided another political upheaval but in his mind, the stakes were too high. So, Pearson asked the country to imagine a new flag for a new idea of Canada. As he knew it would, all hell broke loose. During a seemingly endless parliamentary shouting match, the former diplomat stumbled, retreated, dodged, regrouped and ultimately prevailed — in no small part because enough Conservative MPs defied their leader and supported the proposed new flag, raised for the first time in February 1965.  It’s worth noting that the support of Tommy Douglas and the NDP was also essential in both committee and the vote in the minority House.

In the 1990s, while researching a documentary on Pearson, I met with former MP John Matheson, Pearson’s point man on the parliamentary flag committee. All those years later, just the two of us in his living room outside Ottawa, Matheson became passionate recalling the whirlwind: “I believed quite frankly that we had to show magnanimity and largeness of spirit in this thing, that we would win by love, not by anything else. That’s why, to me, Pearson was absolutely necessary at that time. He was the temperament, the person…who could think in terms of history and serve that purpose of reconciliation. That’s what he was all about.”

Like other inspired compromisers before him, Pearson was denounced by francophones for not going far enough and accused by anglophones of betraying his heritage. Under assault from all sides, Pearson did everything he could to contain and defuse seismic forces tearing through the country. Whatever his mistakes, he showed francophones that there was a generous, open-minded prime minister willing, not just to listen, but to genuinely reconfiguring and rebalancing Confederation. Pearson laid the foundation not just for a truly bilingual and therefore more accessible federal government but ultimately for a more generous and inclusive idea of Canada.

That trajectory from conquest to reconciliation began in 1759 on a bloody battlefield, and then twisted through rebellions, political deadlocks, two world wars, two nerve-wracking referendums, and some cut-throat constitutional shoving matches to reach the current state of equilibrium. Along the way, there were many moments when despair seemed the only response.

The current challenge with Indigenous peoples will be even more difficult and take far longer. After all, we confront a far more tangled tapestry than the relatively binary equation of English and French. Our history, however, shows we have been here before and, no doubt, we will be here again, working our way through a paradigm shift, stumbling our way towards seeing the country and ourselves in a more complex, inclusive and generous fashion. The best of our political leaders can learn from Pearson’s genius for compromise and his generous impulses — which still flow through this land.

Antony Anderson is the author of “The Diplomat: Lester Pearson and the Suez Crisis”, published in 2015. He is a Senior Fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. You can find him on Twitter @CanadaHistory1.