Quotes from Desmond Morton

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.

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.

The young profession of social work sold its expertise in detecting fraud and waste.

Even at the depths of the Depression, editors and business leaders insisted that jobs were available if men would only hunt for them.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

A powerful, if misleading, impression that the wealthy were self-made discouraged egalitarian yearnings.

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.

pressured the city of Berlin to rename itself Kitchener.

Barriers of racial prejudice were lowered to recruit Aboriginals and Japanese Canadians, though black Canadian volunteers were referred to a construction unit.

The conservative view was less literary: its proponents were too busy running businesses and the country to write much.

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.