Culture is the greatest wealth of the nation, a French-speaking witness told the Massey-Lévesque Commission on the arts in 1951, while a more cautious anglophone suggested it was of equal importance to bathtubs and automobiles.
Whether peopled by poetic idealists or phlegmatic pragmatists, Canada must have been popping cultural fertility drugs back in those years because the era that brought you John George Diefenbaker, nuclear bunkers and episodes of The Honeymooners beamed across the border also saw the birth of a national arts scene.
"They were halcyon years," recalled George Crum, the National Ballet of Canada's first musical director and producer of both opera and ballet on CBC Television in its early days.
They must have been: Just witness all the institutions that are now turning 50. National Ballet alumni were floating balloons and taking bows at their 50th birthday party back in November, while the Stratford Festival launches its 50th season in June. Then in September, CBC Television will mark the 50th anniversary of its first broadcasts with 26 hours of new programming.
In Montreal, the Théâtre du Rideau Vert and the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde celebrated 50 in 1998 and 2001 respectively, while Les Grands Ballets Canadiens turns 50 in 2008.
The National Library of Canada will be 50 next year, while the Royal Winnipeg Ballet will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its royal charter. The Canada Council, currently marking its 45th birthday, looks forward to the big 5-0 in 2007.
What caused this joyous explosion half a century ago?
The short answer could be the Massey Commission itself. From 1949 to 1951, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences co-chaired by Georges-Henri Lévesque, a liberal Dominican priest and sociologist committed to the modernization of Quebec, and Vincent Massey, Canada's former ambassador to the United States and Britain and its future Governor-General, held public hearings in 16 cities in 10 provinces, received 462 briefs and listened to 1,200 witnesses before handing down its famed report.
Today, The Canadian Encyclopedia suggests the Massey-Lévesque Report will be remembered as much for the beauty of its language as for its recommendations. It begins by quoting St. Augustine, defining a nation by considering the things it cherishes, and continues to speak eloquently of the role culture will play in Canada.
"The work with which we have been entrusted is concerned with nothing less than the spiritual foundations of our national life. Canadian achievement in every field depends mainly on the quality of the Canadian spirit. This quality is determined by what Canadians think, and think about, by the books they read, the pictures they see, the programs they hear. These things, whether we call them arts and letters or use other words to describe them, we believe to lie at the roots of our life as a nation."
The commission questioned everything from the existence of a national literature and the likelihood of a national theatre to the quality of Canadian university education. It suggested that it was through culture that francophones and anglophones might find some essential "Canadianism" and that, for Canada, culture is "what can make it great and what can make it one."
Determined that culture could only survive in this fragmented country if it was publicly funded, it made several historic recommendations: that government create a council for the humanities and the arts, a national library, and a public-television broadcasting system to be run by the CBC, an organization that was also to be given regulatory control over private broadcasters. Fifty years later, the Canada Council funds thousands of artists across the country while the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the sister organization split off from it in 1978, funds the academics; the National Library boasts a collection of more than 16 million items; and the CBC provides many hours of Canadian television programming, although it relinquished its regulatory functions years ago.
Massey waved his hand and there was Canadian culture.
Or did he? There is still much debate about the environment that gave birth to his report and whether it reflected what Massey himself wanted or what the people demanded.
"The Massey Report was pretty much an elitist report: what was good for the country," said Knowlton Nash, the former CBC news anchor who wrote a history of the network entitled The Microphone Wars. "It was what he had been advocating since the 1920s."
Massey had been influenced by both his time in Washington -- where President Franklin Roosevelt warned him of the dangers of letting broadcasting fall entirely into private hands, as it had in the U.S. -- and in London, where he admired the way the British used culture as nationalist propaganda during the war and noted the establishment of the British Council of the Arts afterward.
But the common notion that his report was a top-down solution for Canadian culture is hotly disputed by many who were involved at the time.
"It was not something dreamed up at the elite top to be imposed on the masses," said Mavor Moore, the actor, director, broadcaster and producer who sat on Stratford's first board of directors and helped launch CBC-TV. "It was the reverse. . . . The feeling after the war was we can do anything. It's all within our grasp . . . It was this push that forced the government to do something. It was from the ground up."
Of course, there had been Canadian culture before the war. By the 1930s, there were symphony orchestras in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, a national movement in painting headed by the Group of Seven, and little theatre groups across the country. CBC Radio produced news programming and dramas that were considered the best in North America. The dance club that was to become the Royal Winnipeg Ballet was established in 1939, the same year the National Film Board began operations.
But the 1930s also brought great deprivation, especially in the West. Few people had money for the arts and the government certainly had no interest in funding them. If CBC Radio thrived, Canada lagged behind the U.S. in making any experiments with the new television technology, while Canadian theatre, rendered ineffectual by the rise of the talkies, was mired in amateurism.
"In the 1930s, things were pretty well a desert -- there was very little sense of continuity in Canadian culture affairs," Moore said.
It was the bleakness of the 1930s that fuelled the postwar explosion, when a generation of both men and women who had broadened their horizons serving abroad returned home with veterans' allowances that they could use to cover a university education.
"The background is in the denials of the thirties, denials of travel, of outlets, of communications," said Vincent Tovell, a former CBC-TV documentary producer and a descendant of the Massey family. "The war literally freed people. They travelled. . . . The content of the Massey Report was accepted because it reflected something that was happening in the culture. Young people were moving."
Certainly, the Massey Report assumes that serious broadcasting and high art have more value than pop culture, but its authors also wrote, ". . . we were asked whether it was our purpose to 'educate' the public in literature, music and the arts in the sense of declaring what was good for them to see or hear. We answered that nothing was further from our minds than the thought of suggesting standards in taste from some cultural stratosphere."
And if organizations like a Shakespearean theatre or public broadcaster that regularly aired opera and ballet now seem less than populist, it is worth remembering how much more popular the high arts were in those days.
"One year we played for six weeks continuously and it was always full," recalled dance archivist Lawrence Adams of his early days performing with the National Ballet in the 1950s at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. "There was enormous interest and enthusiasm.
"The National Ballet was formed by people who gathered around it and had a sense we are going to build something," he continued. "Stratford was birthed in the same era. . . . People were ready to build."
As they did so, did they set out to create a national culture, to fulfill Massey's vision of Canadian unity through the arts?
On this score, the pioneers tend to agree: They had discovered pride of place, but they weren't jingoistic in their desire to build.
"I don't remember anyone saying we're Canadian," said Timothy Findley, the novelist and playwright who was a young actor in Stratford's first production of Richard III. "What people said was it's time to declare ourselves, our territory. There was no flag-waving . . . I'm not a nationalist in that I trumpet the fact I'm Canadian. I just am Canadian. But at the same time, I don't wish I was Harold Pinter or Julian Barnes. I don't care. . . . There was a turning point when a whole mass of people said who cares what others think, we're doing this for us."
There was a new generation who wanted to make careers as professional artists, but the challenge, Findley believes, was to achieve a professional standard in a culture that still relied heavily on amateur efforts. It wasn't hard to groom Canadian stage actors -- they already had received great vocal training working for CBC Radio -- and Findley recalls that day in rehearsals for Richard III when the British star Alec Guinness heard the local talent read and looked over at actress Irene Worth in relief, saying "My God, we're safe," or words to that effect. But at the ballet, the demanding Celia Franca continually insisted on higher standards. For the Toronto launch of CBC Television, meanwhile, Moore brought in American experts to help train the fledgling producers, directors, technicians and broadcasters who would go to air Sept. 8, 1952.
It was always understood that these foreigners, like Franca or Tyrone Guthrie, the Briton who was Stratford's first artistic director, were a temporary necessity.
"We were going to have to accept people from abroad to show us how it's done," Findley said. "[But]everybody was slowly replaced by Canadian talent."
So, it was increasingly a culture created by Canadians, but was it a national culture? Looking at these institutions today, only the government agencies like the CBC and the Canada Council are truly national in scope; all the big performing-arts organizations offer more foreign than Canadian content, only attract regional audiences and seldom cross the cultural divide between Quebec and the rest of Canada.
Stratford, which was originally envisioned as much as an economic-development project for that Southern Ontario town as it was an artistic dream, has never declared itself a national theatre, but has always had to respond to critics' demands that it be one, at least for English Canada. In its earlier years, it regularly toured its productions and also had contact with Quebec, welcoming the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde onto its stage in the 1950s and appointing TNM founder Jean Gascon as artistic director in 1968. Today it never leaves Stratford, apart from a brief New York run in 1998. And if its largest 50th-anniversary project is a new studio where it will workshop new Canadian plays, it won't be the first time the festival has promised to finally offer more Canadian content.
The National Ballet boldly claimed that title from the start because it always planned to tour the country, but today it often lacks the money to do so. Its upcoming tour of the Atlantic provinces will mark the first time it has gone east in 12 years, while it still goes west every second year.
"It's in complete opposition to where people saw these institutions going," Adams said. "They thought they would be mobile. . . . If I had a million dollars that is where I would put it."
Meanwhile, the language barrier blocks the rest of Canada from experiencing much of the thriving culture of Quebec, a place that still thinks the arts are something grander than bathtubs and automobiles. Tovell believes that, paradoxically, the CBC widened that gulf, because, after a very brief period where programming appeared in both languages on the Montreal station, the corporation established separate English and French services. If TV was a public living room, then Quebeckers watching La Famille Plouffe soap opera were off in a different house than the one where English Canadians watched Don Messer's Jubilee, comedians Wayne and Shuster and, of course, a great deal of American programming.
The Massey Commission cites a university brief that says: "We have feasted on the bounty of our neighbours and then we ask plaintively what is wrong with our progress in the arts"; it quotes figures showing Canada is the only sizable country where people read more foreign periodicals than local ones; and it laughingly repeats a Western witness's amusement at an Ottawa institution that describes itself as "centrally located and readily reached by bus and streetcar." Contemporary observers of Canadian culture can all raise their voices in a single cry: " Plus ça change . . ." The problems of geography, history and politics just won't go away.
But if the debates of the 1950s are very familiar, there is one element rather obviously missing: multiculturalism. Although the Massey Commission notes "the complexities and diversities of race, religion, language and geography," in the more homogenous society of the 1950s, the arts were almost exclusively European in their inspiration, another element that may fuel the image of the 1950s cultural naissance as an elite exercise.
If the government were to set up a royal commission on the arts today, its report would surely be filled with bureaucratic platitudes and circumlocutions rather than the eloquent language of the Massey, but it would also give much detailed consideration to the challenge of creating a culture that can speak to native, Asian, black or Muslim Canadians as much as it does to those of European descent. It's not a debate that you could have in the 1950s, Tovell notes, because real discussion of race was taboo in an era where there was still a great deal of quiet segregation.
Today, the topic is central to all discussions of the future of the arts: When the Canada Council recently issued a report on the performing arts, it suggested that multiculturalism was one of the largest issues facing the symphonies, theatre companies and ballets. Where else would new audiences come from? Meanwhile, Canadian film and media executives will be gathering in Toronto next month for a conference on how to reflect cultural diversity in their products.
Apart from that issue, it is hard to know what a 21st-century Massey Report might look like: Canadians no longer enjoy a consensus on the things of which Massey was so sure: that government had a role as an arts partron and that culture must form a bulwark against American influences. While many of his contemporaries look nostalgically back at the excitement of their pioneering days, Tovell, for one, is not fully satisfied with the culture Canada has created since 1950. He cities Margaret Atwood's satiric, feminist science fiction or Glenn Gould's questioning of the future of music as exceptions on an arts scene that has tended to focus on the domestic rather than the global, the personal rather than the political, and the national rather than the international.
"I keep wondering now where we are in relationship to the big issues?" he said.
Some would reply that as the Internet and the 1,000-channel universe fracture all culture hegemony, plucky little Canada is in a better position than ever to become an international player; others might pessimistically predict that Cancon will be swamped by globalization. Either way, the certainty of the Massey years is gone for good.
The Massey Report is available on the National Library of Canada's Web-site at
1951
THE NATIONAL BALLET
'One year we played for six weeks continuously and it was always full. There was enormous interest and enthusiasm . . . The National Ballet was formed by people who gathered around it and had a sense we are going to build something.'
Lawrence Adams, dance archivist
1952
CBC TELEVISION
'The feeling after the war was we can do anything. It's all within our grasp . . . It was this push that forced the government to do something. It was from the ground up.'
Mavor Moore, arts eminence
1953
STRATFORD FESTIVAL
'What people said was it's time to declare ourselves, our territory . . . There was a turning point when a whole mass of people said who cares what others think, we're doing this for us.'
Timothy Findley, actor/writer
Kate Taylor