A Short History of Canada Quotes

“Mulroney used a little-known constitutional procedure to appoint enough senators to overcome Liberal appointees. By 1990, free trade coincided with a harsh new recession. Almost a million Canadians saw their well-paid factory jobs disappear. Mulroney was to blame.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“Trudeau had stressed individual rights over group rights. By promising “no more free stuff” in 1968, Trudeau condemned social programs that shared burdens collectively. Few recognized the signs, but Canada’s affluent postwar socialism ended with Trudeau’s victory. Ten years later, in 1978, few noticed or cared when statistics showed the first decline in the real incomes of working people since the 1930s and the first increase in the number of Canadians who could not afford the necessities of life.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“A birth-control pill ended the baby boom early in the 1960s. Maternity, once defended by feminists as the highest role of womanhood, became an interlude that could be avoided at will. Quebec’s birth rate fell from the highest to the lowest in Canada, raising alarm over French-Canadian survival. Newfoundland shared the drop. Traditional barriers to the employment of women, even in mines and construction sites, crumbled. The composition of the Canadian labour force changed from one-quarter female to almost one-half female in a generation.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“Grants to universities doubled, and a federal technical and vocational training program expanded schools and kept hundreds of thousands of students from an overcrowded labour market.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“In 1957, the death of a trio of millionaires, Sir James Dunn, Isaak Killam, and Harold Crabtree, produced such a windfall of inheritance taxes that the federal government launched the Canada Council and endowed it with $100 million, half for capital grants to universities, the rest for scholarships, loans, and grants.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“Under the shabby pretext that Japanese Canadians needed protection from their angry neighbours, the government evacuated nineteen thousand men, women, and children to the B.C. interior, auctioning their property for derisory prices. It was an inexcusable act, born out of half a century of racial prejudice. Generals, admirals, and the RCMP protested that there was no military need for the internment”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“The collapse of world grain markets would have been catastrophe enough, but people would have eaten. In 1929, drought devastated much of the harvest, and for nine more years crop conditions denied the prairies a satisfactory harvest. In 1931, the wind began lifting the dry topsoil in great black clouds. In 1932, the first great plague of grasshoppers devoured every green thing, plus clothing and tool handles. In 1933, drought, hail, rust, and frost joined the grasshoppers, as though all nature’s forces had united to give prairie settlers notice to quit.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“Bred in the doctrine of self-help, individual Canadians seemed tragically willing to accept responsibility for their plight. Some literally died rather than accept relief. Slowly guilt turn to despair and then, as the depth and duration of the Depression exceeded every memory, to deep but unfocused resentment.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“Even at the depths of the Depression, editors and business leaders insisted that jobs were available if men would only hunt for them.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“The young profession of social work sold its expertise in detecting fraud and waste.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“The unemployed would eagerly have shared in the escape, but relief procedures, designed to force the idle to work, crushed self-respect. Relief officials insisted that cars, telephones, pets, ornaments, comfortable furniture, and all but a single bare light fixture be sacrificed.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“A 15 per cent wage cut imposed on civil servants by Ottawa and imitated by most provinces and other major employers left living standards undamaged. The prosperous few could enjoy themselves with an obliviousness to wider suffering that wealth seems to confer. Newspapers and radio helped. Media in the 1930s accepted a solemn duty to trivialize or ignore the misery of millions. Lush Hollywood musicals and adventure films filled neighbourhood movie theatres. Air races, professional sports, and the exotic junketing of reporters such as the Toronto Star’s Gordon Sinclair allowed the public to escape.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“The promise was kept in 1927 – Ottawa would meet half the cost of a meagre, means-tested pension for those over seventy. Compelled to pay the other half, most provinces hesitated. Nova Scotia found a novel way to raise its share: it legalized liquor sold in government-run stores, and used the profits to help its elderly. Other provinces followed suit. By ending prohibition, Ontario Tories, elected in 1923, bounced from deficit to surplus budgets.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“In 1917 the government had closed the Winnipeg Grain Exchange and created a single Wheat Board to market grain. Farmers grumbled and then rejoiced as prices soared to a record $3.15 a bushel. After the 1919 crop, the Wheat Board dissolved and free enterprise returned. Earlier rural grumbles salved the politicians’ consciences; faith in the market did the rest. Despite serious crop failure after years of declining prairie productivity, wheat prices plummeted 45 per cent in two years. Farmers who had invested in land, machinery, and comforts in the confidence of high prices now had strong reasons for lamentation.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“On Saturday, June 21, crowds of veterans and their families filled the street in front of Winnipeg’s city hall to protest the arrests. Mounted police charged the throng; special constables attacked with clubs. “Bloody Saturday” and the ensuing trials of the strike leaders (British or Canadian to a man) gave Winnipeg’s workers a bitter memory of their ordeal. Driven back to the city’s north end, they gave their neighbourhoods a durable allegiance to labour and socialist politics.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“The conservative view was less literary: its proponents were too busy running businesses and the country to write much.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“Barriers of racial prejudice were lowered to recruit Aboriginals and Japanese Canadians, though black Canadian volunteers were referred to a construction unit.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“public clamour had forced the government to intern more than seven thousand mostly harmless people.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“pressured the city of Berlin to rename itself Kitchener.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“A powerful, if misleading, impression that the wealthy were self-made discouraged egalitarian yearnings.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“. E.A. Partridge of the Grain Growers’ Guide wondered pointedly why the vote was available to “the lowest imbruted foreign hobo” but not to Canadian women.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“So did women who, at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, began to break down barriers to law, medicine, and university education. More common was faith in “maternal feminism,” the divinely sanctioned role of women as wives, mothers, and guardians of social convention against those heedless brutes, their husbands. The nurturing role grew as Victorian Canadians came to see their children not as undersized adults but as beings in a key stage of development. Nursing, teaching, perhaps even medicine became logical extensions of the maternal role. So did social reform.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“In its sensational heyday, British imperialism offered the vulgar conceit of racial superiority. Its American counterpart, triumphant in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, had a similar appeal. Sprayed by the same effusions, influential Canadians espoused a flattering “imperial nationalism.” If, as British and American imperialists insisted, northern races easily dominated those in warmer climates, who were more northerly than Canadians?”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada

“. The Underground Railway had brought thirty thousand refugees from American slavery, but many went home after the Civil War, tired of being poor, patronized, or scorned by Canada’s white majority.”
― Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada