Canadian History: Years of Peace and Terror (1953-1970)

Having been developed to mass produce weapons of war, Canada entered the 1950's with gains in factory exports, energy concerns, and defence contracts. After seeing the horrors caused by our bombs in Europe, Canada's defence policy was to stop anyone else from bombing us. Since Nikita Khrushchev managed to trick the whole world into believing he had a huge fleet of advanced jet bombers by simply ordering one squadron to fly repeat passes over a military parade in Red Square, a high speed fighter/interceptor was commissioned for use by the RCAF, while the U.S. started building B-52's. Unfortunately, the first flight of Canada's Avro Arrow, though an aeronautical apex, was strategically surpassed by the roughly concurrent launch of Sputnik, heralding the Space Age and highlighting the need to address the new threat posed by Soviet ICBM's. Further to that, U-2 spy plane photos soon revealed that Khrushchev had been bullshitting about his air fleet. Thus, the Arrow had to be scrapped. At least Imperial Oil's 1947 oil strike in Leduc, Alberta, and British Columbia's hydroelectric dams ensured that Canada's energy supply could increase to meet the growing needs of American consumers. However, by inadvertently washing away a coastal graveyard, one of the dams was damned. As a safety measure, its whole surrounding region has been reserved for nuclear weapons tests. The discovery of a large Soviet spy ring operating in Canada five years earlier had drawn the unwelcome glare of certain paranoid U.S. authorities. Lester Pearson got into trouble for saying he thought Canada's government should not echo the fear based policies favoured by Senator Joe McCarthy's notorious House on UnAmerican Activities. He didn't even say we should reject them, just that we should not echo them. For this he was labeled 'the most dangerous man in the English speaking world' and put on J. Edgar Hoover's personal hit list. Then Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his proactive solution to the Mideast crisis and was named president of the United Nations. McCarthy, Hoover, and their agents in the media all had to settle for driving his best friend to suicide and poured everything they had left into obstructing the advance of socialized medicine by vilifying Tommy Douglas and badgering the C.C.F. until the party had to change its initials to the N.D.P. By the decade's close, Canada's independence asserted itself in the words of CBC's Joyce Davidson, who said that most Canadians were indifferent to an approaching royal visit. If she would have said it on CBC, no one would have cared, but she said it on NBC and every Canadian saw it. The Governor General, CBC's former president, demanded an apology, but Davidson explained that most Canadians were only indifferent because they were not invited to the royal ball. It was too late: several hundred Canadians had already sent angry letters to the editor. NBC eventually made it up to Davidson in the 1970's by offering her son John his very own variety show. The post war baby boom made pregnant women in the workplace tolerable by the early 1960's - as long as they weren't carrying twins. When Lester Pearson was reelected prime minister in 1963, he immediately legalized breast feeding on federal transit vehicles. He did this strictly to offend his enemies and enjoy his power. He couldn't wait for them to ask for military support in Vietnam so he could refuse them. Then Jesus came to him in a dream and told him that my miraculous birth under a perfect zodiac in 1965 would demand a new flag. Given my peculiar heritage, the colours of the Polish flag received exclusive attention for this project. The colours of the Liberal party had nothing to do with it. Pearson was nice but he may have been too soft for his time. Radical Quebec separatists were building a deadly terrorist organization right under his nose, masquerading as Montreal beatniks. The party needed a leader with the will to physically crush its opponents and Pearson may have seen this quality in one of his most outspoken critics, Pierre Trudeau. Pearson invited Trudeau to meet visiting French president Charles de Gaulle at Montreal's Expo in 1967. There in front of City Hall, de Gaulle exploited separatist passions to win loud cheers from the crowd. After the explosive speech, Trudeau asked de Gaulle what he meant by saying 'vive le Quebec libre' - a separatist slogan. The French president answered that he merely proclaimed Quebec's freedom. Trudeau pointed out that many free French Canadians freely abandoned France to German occupation during World War Two and were equally spared conscription in the Canadian army. He asked de Gaulle if splitting up Canada was any way to thank war veterans among Canada's English for fighting to liberate France for things like his presidency. He declared that Winston Churchill would most certainly have disapproved of such overt political grandstanding. At that point, the confused crowd thought Trudeau was picking on their distinguished guest and started hurling eggs, one of which struck Trudeau square on the scalp and made him furious. Even after he became prime minister in the following year, he still wasn't over it. The successful assault made Quebec's terrorists cocky. First they started blowing up mail boxes, taking care to target only those holding federal unemployment insurance cheques and not the ones used to distribute local welfare cheques. As such, they declared their lethal destruction to be symbolic. Their first kidnapping was to show the world that they knew how to kidnap. Their next was to show they could kill. Trudeau's response was to surround their cafe headquarters with tanks and spray their rooftop patio with live rounds from a helicopter gunship at the peak of brunch. The separatist movement would proceed on with no further significant violence.
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© 2007, 2016. Scripts by David Skerkowski. All rights reserved.