Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939-1945 (review)

This well written, concise, and thoroughly researched book, a recently minted University of Ottawa history PhD dissertation, has a narrow subject, but a very wide theme. It focuses on intellectual voices that shaped wartime government approaches to ethnic groups in Canada. But its theme is much larger, nothing less than identifying the moment of the cultural birth of modern Canada. In this respect the book offers both a new and an old paradigm. It is old in identifying the causes that led to an effect: wartime concerns about enemy aliens and insular ethnicity. It begins unequivocally: "the war effort brought to light the political significance...of the country's population... of non-British or non-French cultural origin;" (3) it ends, claiming with equal certainty, "an optimistic...view of an all-inclusive Canadian citizenship thus emerged at the end of the war...." (212) Indeed a certain teleology, a narrative of 'before' and 'after,' intertwines itself in the text: from small steps of "setting up government machinery" in order to maintain contact with ethnic groups, to the eventual embrace of the "long term objective" of "effectual integration of... ethnic communities..." ;(67) from government officials' "patronizing tactics" to the moment when immigrant groups were able to speak "publicly on their own behalf." (159) It was all progress, however "gradual and hesitant." (183) And its ultimate winners were those who held similar "classical liberal precepts of individual freedom, human perfectibility, progress, tolerance and the role of the modern state in the formation of a unified nation." (113)

As Caccia projects it, these policies were almost inevitable and had to do with the confluence of a number of variables. There was a reason that Canada's multicultural nature was born not with the coming of European 'ethnics' in the early part of the 20th century, nor with the 1970s and 1980s with their federal policies and legislation. The time of World War II was a particular moment in Canadian history that went far beyond a military exercise. The war, it is true, created the initial catalyst, for it required a unified populace and it in turn required respect and a way for Canada to find unity in a modicum of heterogeneity. But at the very moment, too, came new views of citizenship, bolstered by a Marshallesque entitlement in a state increasingly willing to offer its citizens a social safety net. At that time too, race was reconceptualized from biological to social difference. Then, too, the state itself moved into the business of culture and citizenship, increasingly seeing its role as arbiter among people and fashioner of national culture. And the 1940s marked a communications revolution of sorts, offering the state and other cultural architects an array of old and new tools. The old media included books of nonfiction such as Kirkconnell's 1941 Canadians All and John Murray Gibson's 1939 Canadian Mosaic, newspapers such as the Winnipeg Free Press and The Globe and Mail, and magazines that included Saturday Night. They in turn were embellished with public radio and public film, the National Film Board of Canada in particular. In short the book accounts for a paradigm shift, one from seeing immigrants as problematic to one in which they become the core strength of a nation.

The book itself offers a discussion of the rise of a set of ideas, but it also tells a story of people and institutions. It sets out quite simply to offer a biography of those "concrete measures (that) were implemented." (4) In fact the book develops a tight chronology, describing specific events or introducing an array of personalities, and often with more than enough minutiae. The book may be about an intellectual debate among principal actors, but it allows for the effects of personality, for personality conflicts, even for personal upheaval, divorce, or illness. An array of fascinating individuals are introduced: Tracy Philipps (British anthropologist and head of the Nationalities Branch of NWS) , Thomas C. Davis (deputy minister...