Our Lives: Canada After 1945

Description

423 pages
Contains Photos, Bibliography, Index
$24.95
ISBN 1-55028-551-3
DDC 971.064

Year

1997

Contributor

Reviewed by Dean F. Oliver

Dean F. Oliver is Senior Historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

Review

Alvin Finkel’s delicious diatribe against the mainstream, the
establishment, the elites, the military–industrial complex, men, the
business community, the wealthy, the privileged, the “oppressors,”
and half a hundred other groups of Canadian swindlers, rogues, and
racists makes for a wonderful, rollicking read. If you like your history
with a pinch of venom and an ounce of bile, by all means shell out for
this handsome little tome. If you are predisposed to see government
agents under your bed or capitalist racketeers lurking in your tulips,
you will be delighted that your fears are real; if you are inclined to
skepticism over the scholarly credentials of the unrepentant left,
however, you will delight in having your prejudices confirmed.

A detailed, opinionated, and explicitly revisionist essay, its useful
critique of the existing literature on post–1945 Canada is marred by
overstatement, hyperbole, and selective use of facts that will elicit
derision in corners of academe where it might otherwise have been read
with profit. The text is replete with shots at traditional
historiography and its perpetrators, many of which are deserved, but the
early chapters set an uncompromising tone. The first, “Brave New
World,” is essentially a list of groups excluded, in whole or in part,
from Canada’s postwar prosperity; the second, “A Home Fit for
Heroes,” employs a popular wartime phrase to denounce the evils of
suburbia, discriminatory immigration policies, anti-Native racism, and
environmental degradation.

Moments of lucidity and balance occasionally intrude (there is a nice
punchy little section on the similarity of the Mulroney and Chrétien
foreign policy agendas) , but there are also annoying mistakes (Saint
John as the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador). Readers who marvel at
how Canada has survived the postwar period without revolution by
Finkel’s downtrodden masses find their answer in brilliant duplicity
and skilful co-option by two generations of democratic despots. The
nonsense of it all is hypnotic.

Citation

Finkel, Alvin., “Our Lives: Canada After 1945,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed July 3, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/2032.