The Centennial Cure: Commemoration, Identity, and Cultural Capital in Nova Scotia during Canada’s 1867 Centennial Celebrations by Meaghan Elizabeth Beaton (review)

Most published accounts of the centennial celebrations have focused on EXPO 67 and events in Ottawa but Beaton’s solidly researched and well written book is the first to show how one province – Nova Scotia – chose to commemorate the centennial. The book consists of four cases studies: the 1967 Highland Games and Folk Festival, the establishment of the Cape Breton Miners’ Museum, the construction of the Halifax Centennial Swimming Pool, and the Community Improvement Program. In each case these projects were supported by grants from the Centennial Commission in Ottawa but part of the funding had also to be raised locally and Beaton provides us with a detailed study of the interaction between the Commission in Ottawa and the provincial and local organisations. There were tensions between and within local communities but they were not over whether Confederation should be celebrated, only over how, and even these tensions should not be overstressed. The most controversial project was the building of an Aquarium in Halifax. Eventually the project was abandoned because of its cost and the centennial grant was used to expand the Halifax Swimming Pool. Beaton does not make enough of this decision. She stresses that the distribution of federal money was fair since it was based upon a per capita grant to each province. But per capita grants inevitably worked to the advantage of the larger provinces, which were also able to draw upon more private sector funds. The building of an Aquarium would have been of much greater value in the long term than a larger swimming pool and there can be little doubt that the money would easily have been found in Ontario or Alberta or British Columbia. Fortunately the Cape Breton Miners’ Museum found a champion in Nina Cohen, a respected community leader in Glace Bay, who was able to raise substantial amounts of private funding and to use her political contacts to squeeze additional funding out of Ottawa for one of the most important and lasting legacies of the centennial. The biggest public event in 1967 was the Highland Games. Beaton questions Ian McKay’s dismissal of tartanism as an anti-modern force and gives us a much more nuanced understanding of the meaning of the Highland Games for Nova Scotians, although she really does not explain why the Games were so popular, even among the majority of Nova Scotians who were not of Scottish ancestry. Beaton concludes with a useful discussion of the commemorative legacy of the centennial. She could have made more of the level of popular participation in centennial events. Except for the chapter on the Community Improvement Program, the book tends to focus on the planners and the promoters and the larger and more expensive projects. But large numbers of ordinary Canadians were drawn into the centennial events and it would have been nice to learn more about the smaller scale projects and about the response of local communities, including Nova Scotia’s Black and Indigenous communities, to the celebrations that took place in 1967.