William Watson: Our discontent is about freedom

Increasingly, governments like Canada have become much more involved in the lives of their citizens, telling them what they can and, more and more, cannot do. Photo by TIM KROCHAK/Postmedia

Article content

I learn from Wikipedia, a magical resource I hope children will still be able to use even after we’ve banned them from “social” media, that in 1958 the Diefenbaker government allocated $14,000 to what were then still Dominion Day celebrations. (Canada Day didn’t become Canada Day until 1982, when 12 MPs snuck a private member’s bill through the House of Commons — a cultural coup whose most astonishing aspect was that it took place eight days after that year’s Dominion Day. Attendance was clearly low but the Commons was actually in session in mid-summer.)

Article content

Article content

Fourteen thousand 1958 dollars translates — disgracefully — to $155,761.59 today, which is pocket change to today’s federal government, which — also disgracefully — spends our money at the rate of a little over $1.1 million per minute. In real terms, Canada Day celebrations now typically cost Ottawa about 30 times what 1958’s did.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Such things as the nation’s mood are obviously hard to judge but despite the big increase in celebratory spending my guess is the country doesn’t feel as good about itself as it did back in 1958, when the baby boom was filling up new neighbourhoods, migrants were flooding in and the prideful afterglow from World War II was still being felt.

Article content

As we approach Canada Day 2026 (No. 159 in the series), the Confederation whose birth we observe is in question again. A leading party in Quebec favours a secession referendum, while Alberta has scheduled a referendum about having a secession referendum. A country that used to rank fifth in the world happiness survey is now 23rd, while in the world development reports we are down from first in the 1990s to 16th today.

Article content

Article content

Our discontent is not unique. Britain, having just devoured another prime minister, is on to her fourth in four years, a span during which Italy, traditional homeland of political farce, has had only the indomitable Giorgia Meloni. The United States is still digesting whether it won or lost a war in which it helped kill most of the adversary’s leaders in the first minutes, lost almost no combatants itself but somehow ended up legitimizing Iranian control over the Straits of Hormuz.

Article content

Article content

But best not overstate our current gloom. Dominion Day 1958 marked peak Diefenbaker. Three months earlier he had won almost 80 per cent of the seats with almost 54 per cent of the popular vote in an election in which voter turnout was almost 80 per cent. But just five years later he was out as prime minister, replaced by Lester Pearson, who himself lasted not quite five years.

Article content

Canadian politics in the 1960s were so addled, off-putting and scandal-ridden that journalist Peter Newman titled his best-selling 1968 history of the Pearson government “The Distemper of Our Times.” And it was published in January of that year, before the Americans lost two leaders to assassination (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy) and suffered the military victory but propaganda defeat of the North Vietnamese Tet offensive in Viet Nam, in which 246 Americans died on the battle’s worst day (Jan. 31) — many times more than in the Iran war, so far at least.