The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1947–71 (review)

The Other Quiet Revolution is a study of English-Canadian national identity and nationalism in the post-war period. Drawing on Anthony Smith’s The Ethnic Origins of Nations, José E. Igartua has adopted an ‘ethno-symbolic’ approach to national identity formation, which means privileging ‘psychological and cultural components of nations to explain the persistent strength and attraction of the collective identities offered by the nation.’ His thesis is that English Canada retained a ‘British ethnic definition of itself until the 1960s,’ when it abruptly changed course and adopted a ‘civic’ nationalism based upon ‘appeals to universal values.’ Although he posits national identity as something ‘collective, contingent and fluid’ – the now-familiar claim of the post-modernists – Igartua takes as his main working assumption that, in Canada and throughout the West, ‘the intelligentsia has been the main producer of representations of national identity’ (1–6). Alas, these are not entirely compatible premises.

The evidence on which Igartua builds his case is a close reading of English-Canadian newspaper editorial content, classroom textbooks, parliamentary debates, and Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (CIPO) polls. Ever ‘on the hunt for representations of national identities that invoked values, symbols, myths, memories and traditions,’ he zeroes in on hot-button issues in post-war Canadian history – the flag debate, debates on citizenship and immigration, the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission, the meaning(s) of Victoria Day and Dominion Day, etc. It is a time-honoured approach for an intellectual historian, but it requires a scalpel-like precision coupled with a willingness to tease out semiotic nuance. Unfortunately, in Igartua’s hands, content analysis is wielded like a blunt instrument.

Content analysis – the idea that one can gauge the meaning of a text by analyzing its content – has been a discredited methodology for decades, and for good reason. The content of a text can tell us nothing about how its meanings are mediated. Two of The Other Quiet Revolution’s eight chapters, for example, are devoted to cataloguing the myriad flaws of grade-school history textbooks, including the ‘banal race-thinking’ evident in their authors’ treatment of Native people, French Canadians, and immigrants. The problem is not that Igartua describes these texts as ethnocentric and elitist – they plainly were –but that he does nothing to contextualize them within the lived experience of the young students (and teachers) who were forced by provincial ministries of education to read them. ‘These textbooks,’ Igartua tells us, ‘were for many children the only official exposition of the nature of Canada that they would encounter during their lifetimes’ (224). Perhaps, but when was the last time a grade-school student cited a history book when called upon to describe her experience of Canada? The closest the author comes to conceding that school texts may carry very little symbolic weight in the minds of young Canadians comes in the book’s concluding chapter, when he notes that ‘as Canadian classrooms become [sic] more and more heterogeneous in their ethnic composition, the assumption of a British heritage among schoolchildren became less and less tenable’ (225). Similar problems dog Igartua’s even more expansive coverage of newspaper editorial content, where virtually nothing is revealed of the men and women who produced and consumed it. The Toronto Star is cited repeatedly as a paper with a ‘Liberal’ bias, for example, but its autocratic publisher, Beland Honderich, is never mentioned. Peter C. Newman is cited only once.

Igartua rightly asserts that racism was an element of the traditional British conception of English Canada, in some instances until well after the Second World War. However, his overarching claim that Britishness was mainly an ethnic category straightjackets his analysis, preventing him from probing the diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings in the persistent attachment of English Canadians to Britain. Some, including Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, continued to cleave to British traditions because they embodied democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law, and because they had defeated...