PREFACE

Anthony Westell describes Lester Pearson as "the weary and deeply worried

elder statesman who had been struggling for five years to hold

Canada together."' Certainly the years between 1963 and 1968 can be

understood only in terms of Prime Minister Pearson's one paramount

and desperate objective, the saving of Confederation. The Canadian flag

was one aspect of this objective, and the flag can be understood only in

relationship to this purpose and to the troubles of those times.

Canada's political tides were running fast and turbulently in the sixties.

All the conditions associated with a sociological explosion were

present. No military or economic threat held the nation together, and

racial strife had become fashionable. Two decades of increasing AngloAmerican

economic domination had served to nourish French Canada's

traditional sense of grievance. With thorough commitment on the part of

a resolute minority and a disinclination on the part of many Canadians

to take French Canada seriously, the country was on the road to a

political convulsion. The startling thing was that so few people seemed to

realize it.

Just a century had passed since the beginning of the troubles that

racked and almost destroyed the American Republic. Was Canada to

follow the same road? Not everybody believed that the danger was real,

for there were and are those who believe the American experience could

not be repeated in Canada. By the circumstance of political fortunes,

many of Lester Pearson's parliamentary supporters in 1963 came from

those Francophone sections of the country where the peril of separatism

was believed to be real, where it could be seen and assessed. The Interim

Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism

published in 1965 sounded a note of warning, which Westell describes as

"flashing red and clanging with alarm."2

Who was right? It is hard to say. Politics is unpredictable and history

is imponderable. What was required at that moment in Canadian history

was a manifestation of concern, a magnanimity, a nobler kinder vision

of Canada. The interplay of contingencies and human genius determines