Books, Volume 13 #4

Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 425 pp. $35.

Even more than Pierre Trudeau, the Cold War shaped and continues to haunt Canadian society. It was the period when Canada passed from the British to the American empire, when Canada took on many of the trappings of a national security state with its attendant collection of information on the citizenry, and when national debate over the future of the postwar world ossified into an exercise in demonization. The Cold War consensus loosened in the 1960s and was only partially revived in Canada during the Reagan years--remember Farley Mowat being denied entry to the United States? Brian Mulroney was far too obviously an opportunist to serve as a convincing ideological warrior. The Cold War came to a swift and unexpected end with the collapse of the Soviet regimes at the end of the 1980s.

Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse have provided us with a surefooted and trenchant overview of the Canadian Cold War's first, and coldest, decade. The book serves in many ways as an extension of the work that has been done to revise our view of Canada during the Second World War. Irving Abella and Harold Troper brought to light our treatment of Jewish refugees, Anne Gomer Sunahara outlined the treatment of Japanese-Canadians, William Kaplan exposed the state suppression of Jehovah's Witnesses, while David Matas and Whitaker have written on the hypocritical nature of postwar immigration policy. All these books are useful reminders that any smug sense about Canada's record on civil and political rights is just that--smug.

Canadians have to a large degree viewed the American domestic Cold War with self-satisfaction. For all their efforts, Conservative leader George Drew and Social Credit leader Solon Low were unable to transform themselves into Joe McCarthys. The distasteful mechanisms of the witchhunt were not employed in Canada--there were no blacklists, no Hollywood Ten, no Un-Canadian Activities Committee.

In fact the Cold War did happen here, but we did it the Canadian way. Probably the most useful thing this book does is pull together the various strands of Canadian McCarthyism. From the persecution of innocent people caught up in the Gouzenko affair--where having one's phone number in the address book of a person accused of spying was the equivalent of a smoking gun--to the purges of the National Film Board, the trade unions and the civil service, Marcuse and Whitaker make it clear that anti-Communism disfigured Canadian public life for a decade.

Which is not to say that the book is either a simpleminded tirade directed at the Canadian establishment (although the "best and brightest" of the Ottawa men take some deserved lumps) or an apologia for the Communist Party --of either Canada or the Soviet Union. While clearly on the side of those who fought for a more open and egalitarian postwar world, the authors are quick to identify sectarian nonsense when they see it and to recognize that the Canadian government did not have an unlimited number of domestic or international policy options in the world of great power politics that emerged after the war. Their guiding insight, however, is that "Cold War debates were rarely debates in the sense of free exchanges of ideas. They were struggles for control of the symbols of legitimacy in Canadian society."

The stakes in this struggle were high, but it was often carried out in a much less dramatic manner than south of the border. One of Whitaker and Marcuse's more stimulating propositions is that Canada was not really forced by the U.S. into the Cold War. Rather, fearful that the U.S. might lapse into isolationism, our political class helped fan the Cold War's ideological flames to stiffen U.S. resolve to take on the role of world leader. Once the mandarins got their American cousins into the Cold War, they were a bit taken aback by what they had unleashed. Lester Pearson, for example, said he found himself playing Corporal Pearson to Dean Acheson's General.

And while the Canadian mandarins were sincere anti-Communists, they were alarmed by the American witchhunts, which had a nasty habit of reaching up into the liberal elite. As a result, after Canada's first brush with public witchhunting during the Gouzenko trials, the Canadian political class turned off the klieg lights and conducted its Cold War behind closed doors.

People would be fired, demoted and have their careers blighted, but they would for the most part not be subject to public persecution. This was at once more humane and less democratic. The victims of American witchhunting had the chance to clear their names. Indeed, when the U.S. came to regret the McCarthy years, it was almost a badge of honour to have been blacklisted. Many Canadians never discovered why they had been discriminated against, nor did they have any route of appeal. And as Whitaker and Marcuse note, there is little comfort in martyrdom if no one knows you've been martyred.

The authors' treatment of Lester Pearson testifies to their tough-minded approach to the knotty problems raised by the Cold War. Without bending the facts too strenuously, they could simply present Pearson as little more than a chore boy for Moloch and cite his crude and simplistic attacks on Canadian Peace Congress leader James Endicott as an example. Had they done that, they would have fallen into the sort of trap that ensnared cold warriors of the left and right as they strove to deny human complexity in favour of demonology. But despite the drubbing they occasionally administer to Pearson, they give him full marks for the way he fought to save the wrongly accused diplomat and scholar Herbert Norman from the American witchhunters.

There are many lessons Canadians can take from this book, but a heightened sense of national humility and a recognition of the dangers of Manichean schemata may be the most valuable if there is to be a truly post-Cold War world.