Lara Campbell, Dominique Clement, and Gregory S. Kealey, Eds. Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties

Lara Campbell, Dominique Clement, and Gregory S. Kealey, eds. Debating Dissent: Canada and Sixties. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 374 pp. Notes. Index. $29.95 sc. We are now as distant from 1960s as that decade was from First World War, but past is always present. Indisputably, tumultuous 1960s were culturally transformative. In trope of Debating Dissent, the were more than a decade; they were an idea and a phenomenon that transcended a fixed period. They expressed temperaments that went against grain of conventional wisdom, challenging nostrums of established authority and refusing to defer. This collection of 13 essays with an introduction by two of editors is latest book in Canadian Social History Series under general editorship of labour historian Gregory S. Kealey. The contributors do not so much debate as they document dissent. Some of authors lived through events they dissect (although some veterans of drug-induced flower power counterculture claim that if you can remember Sixties, you were not there). The younger authors are intrigued by era's permissiveness; Sixties spawned much of contemporary academic discourse in which they engage on subjects such as environment, Aboriginals, race, and gender. Some of chapters are case studies--the 1969 and 1971 riots at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University and Vancouver's Gastown, and confrontations involving Blacks in Nova Scotia. Other chapters offer broader surveys --of wildcat strikes, English Canadian and Quebec nationalisms, drug culture, women's movement, and rise of faculty power at universities. This last story, stretching for two decades beginning in early 1950s, speaks to elasticity of Sixties as an epoch. So too do photographs that preface each chapter. Of 13 images, five are from either 1950s or 1970s. The cover illustration of a longhaired protester forcibly thrown into a paddy wagon by police officers has two children relaxing on street curb less than five feet away, their attention directed elsewhere. Students of ethnicity will find thin gruel in these studies. Unless their interest is Canada's Blacks (West Indian and Nova Scotian), Aboriginals, or Quebecois, they will encounter only a gratuitous mention of Jewishness of an American draft dodger and a brief reference to assistance extended to Halifax's Africville residents by Jewish Labour Committee. I would have welcomed a chapter that detailed rise of multicultural discourse, triggered by hearings of Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. What was termed third force in Canada spoke out. Largely located in western Canada, it was composed mainly of second--and third-generation Europeans who considered their cultural heritages denigrated by assumptive title of Commission. …

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