Editorial

JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Editorial Editor Associate Editor Editorial Board Advisory Board DENIS SMITH BERNARD R. BLISHEN MAURICE J. BOOTE ROBERT D. CHAMBERS LEON DION M. G. HURTIG KENNETH E. KIDD W. L. MORTON PHILIP STRATFORD T. H. B. SYMONS MELVILLE H. WATKINS ANTHONY ADAMSON CLAUDE T. BISSELL DONALD G. CREIGHTON KATHLEEN FENWICK DAVID M. HAYNE JOHN HIRSCH JEAN PALARDY CLAUDE RYAN B. D. SANDWELL RONALD J. THOM Redacteur Redacteur adfoint Comite de redaction Comite consultatif sumed vast quantities of practically everything, they produced relatively little by the standards of international culture. There was, in fact, a deceptive double standard for Canadian culture. While talented Canadians frequently had to emigrate to pursue careers in arts or letters, those who, for reasons best known to themselves, remained within Canada were insulated behind a high tariff wall. One of the those rare interventions into Canadian intellectual life from abroad occurred during August, when the Times Literary Supplement featured an essay on "Canadian Culture in the 1960s." Despite the slightly condescending and pontifical tone, to be expected from the T LS when it looks across the Atlantic, and despite its arid range of Canadian literary references, the article is worth attention precisely because it does attempt to subject Canadian trends of thought to international criticism. The essay comments that the country may, in the 1960s, have begun to lose its artistic and intellectual isolation: In simple terms, Canadians began to realize at last that, while they conIt is encouraging to know that the author sees signs that this protective insulation from criticism is disappearing; but this neat thesis produced for TLS readers is difficult to substantiate in detail. It may be true that "during the 1960s young Journal of Canadian Studies 1 Canadians in particular began to demand that Canada become a self-sufficient country in its own right, especially in cultural affairs. They began to see Canada, contrary to the view long expressed by the social establishment, as a colony, as an emergent nation," now one in which mature social criticism and dissent should play an important part. But this judgment gives insufficient credit to the relatively long tradi'" tion - since the 1920s - of intellectual dissent and criticism expressed through the Canadian Forum, and more recently through Canadian Dimension as well. Some of those "young Canadians " have been seeking a satisfactory degree of cultural self-sufficiency for a long time; but always, unfortunately, outside the mainstream of Canadian discussion. Is the situation any different today? In the 1960s, as the TLS essay does not mention, Exchange magazine sought to bring critical discussion of Canadian issues closer to the mainstream: it survived for three issues. The more popular magazines, Maclean's and Saturday Night, have spotty records as agents of social criticism, and certainly have not notably raised the level of public debate in the last decade. There are still no Canadian equivalents of Encounter, Commentary, Atlantic, or Harper's, in which Canadian essayists might practice their art; and (hence?) there are virtually no Canadian essayists. Social criticism and dissent may occasionally surface at the political level in a Watkins manifesto or a Mathews declaration: but they never seem to remain above the surface for long, or to have much effect upon the thoughts of the inert middle. When the TLS speaks of the emergence of 2 cultural self-confidence in Canada, it does not, incredibly, mention the work of George Grant, who leaps beyond such easy optimism to prophecy the inexorable crushing of the Canadian identity beneath the steamroller of American imperial technology. And yet if anyone is the philosophical mentor of the English Canadian· consciousness these days, it is George Grant in his pessimism. If it is true (which may be doubted) that young Canadians today demand a self-sufficient culture and a self-sufficient Canadian managerial class not subservient to American interests, then the source of these impulses is George Grant's deep pessimism rather than any facile optimism such as is hinted by the TLS. Grant's point is that Canada simply cannot hope to create a self-sufficient culture sustaining any values other than those of liberal, progressive America. The Watkins manifesto and the...