The Books of My Life: Our Lives

 

Canada, as Alvin Finkel shows in his superb political, economic, demographic, and cultural history of Canada since 1945 entitled Our Lives: Canada after 1945 (Toronto: Lorimer, 1997), changed dramatically after World War II, a war Canada entered eight days after the British declaration of war against Germany in 1939, flexing, if somewhat weakly, its political independence from the "mother" country. 

Between 1945 and 1997 (a second edition of Our Lives takes the story of post-war Canada up to 2012 and the prime ministership of Tory Stephen Harper) Canada, as Finkel nicely shows, briefly emerged from behind England's colonial shadow only to become an American economic, political, and cultural colony. He examines how Canada moved from a modified Keynesian economy to a neoliberal bah humbug one, though never one as bah humbugee as that of the United States. He explores the important role the New Democratic Party played in making Canada more of a welfare state and less bah humbugee than the US particularly during years of Liberal minority governments on the federal level. He investigates how English Canada developed a national literature that was read by many, at least in English Canada. There had been, of course, given the close relationship between Quebec nationalism and Quebec culture, a distinct culture in that province for some time.

He delves into how Canada cultivated an image as a kindler and gentler, compared to Imperial America, nation, an image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, a nation that was perceived, at least by some polemicists, as a golden mean between the US and Europe. He explores increasing tensions between Ottawa, the various provincial premiers, and the provinces. He examines the silent revolution in Quebec and its impacts on Quebec nationalism. He investigates the increasing power of economic elites after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, though the power of economic elites was never absent even during the Keynesian years when Keynesianism dominated mainstream economic thinking among American, Canadian, and European economic "managers" before the oil crisis. He focuses on the demographics of post-World War II Canada. Perhaps more than anything else, however, Finkel does a superb job of showing the realities of poverty and inequality--class based, gender based, ethnic based--lurking beneath Canada's carefully curated and ultimately gilded public relations image the nation presented to the world, something that makes Canada very much like other core nations around the globe unexceptional. Canadian deceptionalism in the end is no more nor less deceptional and delusional than that of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark...

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a readable, reliable, and wide ranging if selective history of post-World War II Canada.