Courting "Our Ethnic Friends": Canadianism, Britishness, and New Canadians, 1950-1970

ABSTRACT/RESUME A series of political memos from the 1950s and 1960s reveal in striking detail how the major political parties competed for the allegiance of ethnic minority voters. Political courtship helped integrate new Canadians into civic life, and in particular, into Canada's British parliamentary system with its voting blocs, interest groups, and networks resembling patron-client relationships. The historiography has neglected the foundational contribution of ethnic courtship to this story. In turn, a misunderstood aspect of ethnic integration has been the role of ethnic voices in the flag debate of 1964, when the country is presumed to have adopted a more "inclusive" flag. Some Anglo-Canadian nationalists assumed that immigrants and "ethnics" could not relate to Canada's Britishness. But some could, and the record reveals a complex nexus between ethnic political participation, changes in the symbolic order, and the emergence of multiculturalism. Une serie de memoires politiques au cours des decennies 1950 et 1960 revele de facon saisissante et en detail comment les partis politiques importants ont rivalise pour se procurer la fidelite d'electeurs de minorite ethniques. En faisant la cour aux ethniques, les partis politiques ont aide a integrer les "Canadiens-Nouveaux" a la vie civique et en particulier au systeme parlementaire britannique du Canada avec ses blocs de vote, groupes d'interet et reseaux qui ressemblaient aux rapports de client-patron. L'historiographie a neglige la contribution fondamentale de cette cour aux ethniques a l'histoire. A son tour, un aspect mal compris de l'integration des communautes ethniques est le role de leurs voix dans la discussion du drapeau de 1964, quand on pretend que le pays a adopte un drapeau "plus inclusif". Certains nationalistes Anglo-canadiens ont suppose que les immigrants et "ethniques" ne pouvaient pas s'associer au "Britishness" du Canada. Mais certains ont bien pu le faire, et le record revele une relation complexe entre la participation politique ethnique, les changements dans l'ordre symbolique et la naissance du multiculturalisme. INTRODUCTION In the summer of 1961, 37-year-old Liberal Party organizer Andrew E. Thompson, the MPP for Dovercourt, Ontario, packed his suitcase and moved in for a month with a family of Toronto immigrants to discover "how the Italians live. " It was a "strange interlude" for Thompson (Toronto Star 26 June 1961)-an episode interpreted by Franca Iacovetta as typical of Anglo-Saxon condescension toward "hardworking exotics" (Iacovetta 1992, 121). (1) No doubt there was something patronizing, a touch of "British-Toronto," about Thompson's whimsical experiment. But the term "strange" had some justification, for Thompson was himself an immigrant, an Ulster Protestant from Belfast, with a ruddy complexion and a "flowing Irish accent" (Palmer 1976, 327, n. 10; Who's Who 1969, 1082; Manthorpe 1974, 67). (2) He also had an affinity for what, at the time, seemed quaint and beguiling: urban immigrant groups. More prosaically, the resourceful activist was keen to win over the votes that such liaisons might accrue for the provincial and national Liberal parties. A series of memos written by Thompson a half-century ago reveal in remarkable detail how the major political parties came to grips with ethnic voters in the 1950s and 1960s. Ten years prior to his Italian "interlude," the ambitious Ulster-Ontarian had parlayed a master's degree in social work from the University of British Columbia and his proclivity for the unfamiliar into a highly successful political career as the friend of Toronto's ethnic communities and a key mobilizer of his party's electoral base. Three weeks before the 1953 election that gave Louis St. Laurent a second majority government, Thompson raised the alarm that "the ethnic vote" was shifting to the Progressive Conservatives under George Drew. The Tories, Thompson warned, had seized control of the ethnic press. …