Like other western societies, Canada endured profound and irrevocable changes during its period of modernization. Starting in the late Vic torian period, modernization was a slow and inexorable process that altered physical appearances and, more important, influenced the fundamental outlooks of Canadians. In its most general sense, modernity was the replacement of Victorian society – agrarian, religious, adhering to a rigid set of philosophical and moral codes – with the modern age: industrial, secular, and anti-philosophical. From an economic standpoint, it pertained to the arrival of an urban and industrial society that replaced a hoary agrarian-merchant system. Closely related to...

Canada in the late nineteenth century was in a period of transition. The traditionally rural and agricultural existence of many Canadians had begun to change rapidly, owing to the introduction of new technologies and industrial mass production. Despite an economic depression, production in the key sectors of the economy, especially that of Ontario, Canada′s most populous and industrially advanced province, increased considerably from 1870 through to the early 1890s. In Ontario, for instance, coal consumption increased more than 2,000 times over the years 1869-1900. Toronto, one of Canada′s leading industrial cities, rapidly developed in the 1880s. In that decade ′the...

During the years from 1890 to 1920 the university in English-speaking Canada underwent considerable change. Until the late nineteenth century, universities had been cultural outposts responsible for inculcating the values of British civilization in students living in North America. They were denominational institutions whose main duty was both to help to develop a ′dutiful, morally sound social order′ and to allow a certain class of individuals within society ′access to the ″higher″ forms of learning.′ Although applied and pure sciences had gained in importance by the end of the century, the liberal arts still dominated curricula. The study of the...

Before 1939 the modernization of Canadian universities had been an evolution, beginning around the turn of the century and building momentum throughout the interwar period. The Second World War provided an additional impetus to changes that had already been well under way. The war accentuated existing trends away from the traditional liberal arts orientation of higher learning towards a greater pragmatism. The applied sciences and practical disciplines flourished, while the humanities and other studies deemed non-essential to the war effort seemed to languish. Once social critics and purveyors of cultural values, by war′s end the universities had become renowned for...

With academic modernization, social critics in Canada preoccupied themselves with the development of culture. Concern mounted among these intellectuals that culture – defined broadly as the social, political, and artistic activities of a society and in more narrow, Arnoldian terms as the pursuit of moral and social perfection, truth, and beauty – had reached a crossroads. After 1945 the nation achieved significant diplomatic recognition for its role in the war, and became one of the world′s most prosperous countries. Yet despite its military-diplomatic and economic triumphs, social observers realized that Canadian culture had not developed along with the material and...

To social critics like Walter Lippmann¹ the period after 1914 was a time of revolution unparalleled in the history of the west. The Second World War and the post-war years were the culmination of decades of unprecedented social chaos and strife. Juxtaposed to the old order, the modern age was characterized by human tragedy and moral malaise. The world that had emerged from the Great War constituted a sharp break with the traditions and outlooks of the old order. For Lippmann and others, the social order of the pre-1914 period seemed lost for all time.

Facing the extraordinary exigencies of...

When in 1965 Dalton Camp became president of the Progressive Conservatives, the end of the old-style conservatism of the party was near. Camp was elected on the strength of his desire to review the leadership of John Diefenbaker. At the subsequent leadership convention, held in Toronto in September 1967, Diefenbaker went down to an ungracious defeat. After ranting at his detractors and vigorously defending his policies and political visions, he finished a humiliating fifth on the first ballot. Diefenbaker continued to sit in the House of Commons as a bitter critic of Liberalism and in defiance of his own party...