ALAN FILEWOD
Canadian theatre history has tended to look at the theatre as a hermetically isolated cultural artifact with little concrete reference to other aspects of Canadian national life. This essay examines the development of the theatre as an index of post-colonial nationhood with reference to parallel developments in the Canadian Navy.
L'histoire du théâtre canadien a toujours eu tendance à regarder le théâtre comme phénomène culturel isolé, sans rapport concret à d'autres aspects de la vie canadienne en général. Cet article examine l'évolution du théâtre comme indice de la maturation postcoloniale du pays, tout en la comparant avec des dévéloppements parallèles dans la Marine canadienne.
First Tableau: 1968
A Navy colour party lowers the White Ensign and raises the new
Canadian Forces flag; a woman cries.
A group of actors perform a revolutionary American play
in a Toronto basement.
At the 1992 conference of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, at the University of Prince Edward Island, there was considerable discussion of the need to develop new historiographies in our study of the development of theatre in Canada. One of the most commonly vetted terms was 'postcolonialism,' which seems eminently appropriate to Canadian studies, but which is also the site of great debate. Because colonialism is a complex process which must be considered in context, the term 'post-colonialism' rewards vastly different readings and applications, most of which express a process of emergence from an historical situation of imposed order and displaced identity.1 It is my plan here to examine one application of the term in order to suggest its usefulness. In the present case, post-colonialism is used in the context of the development of nationalism and nationhood in Canada, from its imperial origins to its present constitutional crisis. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which the theatre has been both a site of post-colonial definition, and the institutional expression of changing ideologies of nationhood.
In narrowing my field, I am helped by another discussion at the recent ACTR meetings, in which we were challenged to situate our personal attitudes and ideas in the histories we trace. That discussion set my mind to questioning why I am interested in the subjects of nationalism and postcolonialism in the first place. That led me to the subject of this essay and the proposal that the development of the Canadian theatre as an institution of nationalism might usefully be compared to a parallel development in the Canadian Navy.
To date, Canadian theatre history has tended to look at the theatre as a hermetically isolated cultural artifact with no concrete reference to parallel expressions of Canadian nationhood. The choice of the navy as the object of reference is to my mind particularly appropriate because both theatre and navy have developed as markers of Canadian nationhood. But other comparisons are equally valid. Why the Navy and not the Air Force? Why choose the military and not (say) federal tariff policies? It is precisely because theatre and navy at first glance seem to occupy very separate realms of experience that I am drawn to them. It is an indication of the unstable pluralism of postcolonial nationhood that a similar comparison with the army might well offer very different, indeed contradicting, conclusions. This essay is therefore an inquiry into one particular tendency in the history of Canadian nationhood.
My choice of the navy may have been inevitable because the Royal Canadian Navy and its traditions were formative influences on my own cultural experience. I grew up in a navy family; my father was a regular force officer who had risen from the lower deck, and who retired the year I went to university to study theatre. He was the son of a petty officer who had come to Canada as one of the British Royal Navy crews that brought Canada's first warships to this country in 1911 and elected to stay to build the RCN. Growing up in a naval family, I was imbued with the traditions of a service that prided itself on its British roots. More importantly, the navy was my hometown, and perhaps for that reason I have never felt a deep attachment to any one geographic region of Canada.
This juxtaposition begins at a late stage, in the 1960s, when the Liberal government of Lester Pearson integrated the armed forces into a single command structure and uniform..2 That move coincided with the unveiling of the maple leaf flag, Expo 67, and the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism as concerted actions to promote a post-colonial nationhood. It also coincided with the beginnings of what would become known as the 'alternative theatre movement,' but I was not to realize the significance of that until much later.
The integration of the armed forces was in retrospect an inevitable development as the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy met the administrative demands of the electronic age. But the unification of the forces into a common green uniform was not, and it had a critical effect on my family. I recall vividly the day the armed forces their new uniforms still several years away-paraded in Ottawa to witness the lowering of the old service ensigns and the raising of the new. My mother was a naval vet, a former WREN, and at this transformative moment of national symbolism, she wept; with the lowering of the White Ensign something disappeared from her history. Sometime later my father came home demoralized in his new army-style uniform with an army rank. Like many other naval officers, he retired soon thereafter.
The same cultural impulse of nationalism that eradicated the traditional symbols of the Canadian Navy-that ended the Royal Canadian Navy-was also the defining ideological force in my university studies in theatre; at York University in the early 1970s Mavor Moore was teaching what may have been the first course in Canadian theatre history, and Don Rubin was founding Canadian Theatre Review. This was the time of The Farm Show and the Mummers Troupe, the vanguard of the collective movement that seemed to be turning the theatre into an authentically national art. Only in retrospect is it possible to see that movement as the result of the same government policies that brought about the crisis in the armed forces, and only now is it possible to see the nationalism of the 1970s-which many celebrated at the time as the final realization of national identity-as merely one more stage in an unstable post-colonial narrative that can never be fully finished.
Second Tableau: 1911
B.K. Sandwell addresses the Canadian Club on the perils of American
drama.
The cruiser RMCS Rainbow arrives in Esquimalt Harbour.
The nationalist imperative that seems to run through the histories of the theatre and the navy during this century is the construct of what may be a post-colonial fallacy: that Canada is a youthful nation which has grown from political and cultural infancy to autonomous maturity. This was the thesis of the colonial nationalists of the late Victorian age, and although the biological determinism that supported it has long since been refuted, it has been materialized in the subsequent history of Canadian state institutions, of which the theatre may be considered an informal one.
In his study of the ways in which we memorialize and reconstruct the past, David Lowenthal refers to this construction as the 'organic metaphor,' according to which 'nations like individuals invariably moved from infancy and youth to maturity and old age.'3 He adds that
Literal belief in the world as an organism and society as a body politic faded out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the rhetoric endured and even intensified [ ... ] in conflicts between imperial and colonial 'fathers' and 'sons.'4
Canadian nationhood is configured as both male and female, son and daughter, in this rhetoric. In poetry, popular cartoons and dramatic pageants, Canada was frequently personified as a young woman coming of age, loyal to her mother and wary of her 'cousin Jonathan'; submissive and obedient but spirited and robust.
In political and social analysis, following the tendencies of contemporary moral philosophy, national traits were more commonly projected in terms of masculinity. The colonial Dominions were frequently represented as young men ready, as Richard Jebb wrote in 1905, to 'put on the armour of national manhood-in no metaphorical sense.'5 Charles Mair, the playwright whose Tecumseh is one of the most revealing representations of Canadian colonial imperialism, looked to the day when the dominions would assume the responsibilities of adulthood:
Then shall a whole family of young giants stand 'Erect, unbound, at Britain's side-' her imperial offspring oversea, the upholders in the far future of her glorious tradition, or, should exhaustion ever come, the props and supports of her declining years. 6
The image of the loyal son took on a parodic verdigris as the ideology of Imperialism was secularized after the First World War but the organic trope that equates national 'growth' with a maturation from dependent infancy to autonomous adulthood is still very much part of the rhetoric of Canadian nationhood. Following the failure of the imperial narrative, successive generations sought a defining national principle to replace it. In his study of the Massey Commission, Paul Litt has argued that in the inter-war period such a principle emerged in the ideology of what he terms 'liberal humanist nationalism':
Liberal humanism requited cultural nationalism's desire for identity with a set of moral values and aesthetic standards that were coherent enough to serve as the basis for national unity and distinct enough from those of American mass culture to provide a unique Canadian identity.7
Liberal humanist nationalism is a flexible ideological posture, which has made it extremely attractive to successive governments. It relocates the sense of nationhood from economics and political structures to the public signifiers of culture and identity. In the post-Second World War period, this has meant a widespread reform of the emblems of nationhood; in those terms, the integration of the Canadian military was an inevitable attempt to eradicate the symbols of a national ideology that was no longer pertinent to the realities of most of the country's population. Although integration, along with the new flag and systematic changes in the signage and rhetoric of government might seem to have been a process of decolonization (and was promoted as such), that could only be the case if we accept the organic metaphor of maturation as historical fact. But a comparison of developments in the theatre and the navy suggests that these changes can be seen more usefully as readjustments in an ongoing process of colonization.
Third Tableau: 1949
An admiral refuses to wear a 'Canada' badge on his uniform.
Vincent Massey convenes the Royal Commission on National
Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences.
The dialectic of post-colonialism explains how the RCN could be seen at its founding as the proof of nationhood, by localizing the most visible sign of British power and tradition, and could later be seen as an obstacle to national identity. Comparing the development of the navy with Canadian cultural policy offers several conjunctions that illustrate the contradictions of colonialism and the perpetually elusive nature of the essentialist principle of nationhood.
Both the Canadian Navy and English-Canadian theatre as public expressions of national sentiment date their origin to the first decade of the twentieth century, when the Canadian Naval Service was implemented in the Naval Bill of 1910, and cultural critics advocated the institution of public subsidies to counteract the dominance of American touring theatres on Canadian stages. Both developments were acknowledgements of American hegemony.
In his essay 'The End of Pax Britannica and the Origins of the Royal Canadian Navy: Shifting Strategic Demands of an Empire at Sea,' Barry Morton Gough points out that the Fisher reforms of British naval strategic policy in 1904 acknowledged the primacy of American interests in the Americas:
The United States, emerging as the predominant power in the Americas and adjacent seas, freed Britain from obligations there and allowed Britain to bequeath to Canada two bases as well as obligations for local sea and shore defence.8
Despite the complex politics surrounding the establishment of the Canadian Naval Service (whether it be part of a British-controlled Imperial fleet or an autonomous service), the implications of American military power were clear. The RCN began as an autonomous Canadian service subject to British operational control, and both Wilfred Laurier and Robert Borden resisted British proposals for a united Imperial fleet. Nevertheless the RCN was founded on the Royal Navy model, and not until after the Second World War were its traditions, ensigns and uniforms distinguishable from the British service. Canadian midshipmen, although destined for service on small ships, trained in British capital ships, and indeed the original complement of the RCN was recruited from the British crews who sailed HMC Ships Rainbow and Niobe to Canada in 1910. The cultural identification with the British service remained a defining characteristic of the RCN for decades, which may in part explain the disproportionately small francophone presence in the navy. In the 1980s the Liberal government moved to rectify this by designating certain ships as French-language vessels, but there has been no attempt to establish a fleet base in Québec waters; to this day the navy uses the two bases it inherited from the Royal Navy. The lingering identification with the British service was in a small way responsible for several mutinous incidents on Canadian vessels in 1949. According to the Royal Commission assigned to investigate the incidents,
There was amongst the men a very real and almost universal opinion that the Canadian Navy was not sufficiently Canadian. [ ... ] While in general the officers of the Canadian Navy were satisfied with their uniforms and the lack of Canadian identification thereon, the men were vehement in their demands that they be identified as Canadians. 9
L.C. Audette, a civilian member of the commission, later recalled that,
The extent of the dichotomy between the lower deck and the very senior officers became painfully apparent when the chief of the Naval Staff appeared before the enquiry. In an attempt to circumvent the issue, he pointed out the recent approval of a maple leaf as a distinguishing badge. When he objected that much-sought-after 'Canada' shoulder flashes or badges spoiled the appearance of the uniform, he was asked if the contribution to morale would not be worth the sacrifice in aesthetic value. This question was a mistake. He declared angrily that he had always refused to wear the flashes and would never wear them in the future.'10
The admiral's cultural identification was British, but his strategic identification was increasingly American-to the extent that in the 1960s and beyond Canada's NATO role resulted in a naval service that was effectively under American strategic, and often operational, control: significantly, when the Mulroney government reintroduced separate service uniforms for the Canadian Forces in the 1980s the naval uniform was modelled on the United States Navy officer's dress. The reversion to separate uniforms was a bow to popular sentiment and an attempt to appease the military, but it did not change the direction of military policy that had been nurtured through decades of Liberal government, during which the armed forces were increasingly 'Canadianized' in appearance and increasingly integrated into American strategic policy and operational procedures. In that sense, the development of the navy as a national expression reveals the transition from Imperialism to Americanism; or from the perspective of post-colonialism, from the gradual repudiation of British Imperialism to the concurrent acceptance of American colonialism.
The historical experience of Canadian theatre has in crucial ways been the opposite of that process, but within the same field of colonial conditions. My concern here is not with the history of theatre as a cultural activity, but with the institutional and critical paradigms that have attempted to define 'Canadian theatre' as a national art. Elsewhere I have discussed the relationship between critical vocabulary, cultural policy and aesthetics, and have proposed that the models of theatrical organization that developed as a response to American commercial control of Canadian playhouses at the turn of the century were themselves expressions of colonial experience.11
At the same time that the Canadian Naval Service was founded, B.K. Sandwell was cautioning anyone who would listen that the theatre was rapidly becoming an adjunct of the American syndicates; a decade later Vincent Massey reiterated the dangers of New York theatrical hegemony (with the added caution that most of the producers had 'Old Testament names'12 ). The calls for a National Theatre, however defined, seem to accord with the call for a Canadian navy: both would appear to be attributes of a 'mature' state.
That Canada had a navy several decades before it had a public theatre industry may have something to do with the fact that defence policy recognized and accommodated American hegemony that much sooner than cultural policy. Theatre was perhaps one of the first economic sectors of Canadian society to have been penetrated deeply by American capital; consequently it was one of the first sectors to resist that penetration. In that sense, the theatre anticipated subsequent developments in the military. As late as the 1920s the army and navy had separate infrastructures and different strategic goals, and while the navy was finding its place in post-Imperial hemispherical strategy, the army was developing 'Defence Plan No. 1,' an operational plan for an invasion of Vermont and New York State in the event of war with the United States.'13
In the post-imperial context, the Massey Commission and the subsequent development of cultural policy in mid-century can be seen as a process of nationalizing cultural industries to legitimize the same vision of the 'mature' state that was inscribed in the RCN. And indeed, for similar reasons. As Paul Litt points out, the Massey Commission was first suggested by Brooke Claxton, Minister of Defence in the government of Louis Saint-Laurent.14 Claxton's reasons were political, not military, but the brief intersection of the worlds of art, politics and the military was no accident. Claxton, who had a genuine interest in promoting cultural funding, cautioned Saint-Laurent that the Liberal party was losing support to the left-wing CCF among the intelligentsia; the establishment of a commission to recommend cultural policy would work to reverse that trend. Vincent Massey for his part saw the Commission as an opportunity to advance an ideal of nationhood that superseded politics. The Commission's Report stressed its search for an essential definition of Canadian nationhood:
We thought it deeply significant to hear repeatedly from representatives of the two Canadian cultures expressions of hope and confidence that in the common cultivation of things of the mind, Canadians-French- and English-speaking-can find true Canadianism..15
For Massey 'true Canadianism' was an imperilled quality that required vigilance; in the Report he cautioned that Canada needed to look to 'its cultural defences' now that its military defences were secure.16 It is tempting to see the idea of cultural defence as a reference to the cold-war fear of communist infiltration, but Massey's other writings suggest that the threat of American mass culture was equally on his mind.
As he did in the 1920s, Massey returned to the British example for leadership in the area of cultural policy, with the eventual result that although the signifiers of imperial colonialism were gradually removed from Canadian life, the cultural dependence on British models was reinforced in the 1950s. The chief recommendation of the Massey Commission was of course the Canada Council, founded six years after the submission of the report, on the model of the British Arts Council. The founding of the Canada Council has been seen as a move that superseded the immaturity of the colonized past and established the conditions for an adult future. The Massey Report itself proposes this view with its reference to 'this young nation, struggling to be itself.17 In his presentation to the commission Sandwell referred to Canada's, extreme youth as a single and self-conscious community' and to the 'unripe state of national culture.' 18 Hilda Neatby, one of Massey's appointees to the commission, wrote of Canada as 'a young country, only recently aware of its own increasing maturity among the nations of the world.'19
The liberal humanist nationalism of the Massey Commission was ostensibly a decolonizing ideology which justified its reliance on British models in terms of the trope of organic growth; as a mature branch of the imperial tree, Canadian culture could take pride in its British sources without threat to its decolonized national sentiment. This was a tenuous position to hold, and indeed it would break down in the 1960s and '70s. Massey might argue that similar pride could be taken in French sources as well, but the fact remains that the cultural institutions which resulted from the commission's recommendations were invariably modelled on British originals and were often enforced by a cadre of British and British-trained directors and cultural bureaucrats.
If the historical image of Sandwell fulminating against American hegemony in the theatre while British volunteers steam towards Esquimalt and Halifax to found a Canadian Navy represents the condition of Canadian nationalism in the 1910s, then the image of Canadian admirals resisting the erosion of British identity while Alec Guinness steps onto the Stratford Festival stage to inaugurate a new era of publicly funded culture may represent the contradictions of nationhood in the early 1950s. In the sphere of cultural policy an historical allegiance to Britain was reinforced in the name of post-colonial maturity but a more complex transition was underway in the armed forces which, with the founding of NATO and NORAD, were increasingly integrated into continental defence strategies but which held on stubbornly to the signifiers of imperial traditions. Even the unification crisis failed to eradicate the vestiges of imperial ceremony and tradition. All three 'elements' of the new unified force retained their pre-unification ceremonial dress, and while Canadian naval officers were required to wear the new green army-style uniform on board ship, when dining in NATO wardrooms senior officers often resumed their traditional RCN dress. The retention of imperial tradition may be seen as a gesture of resistance to American hegemony, just as it was in the theatre five decades earlier.
In both theatre and navy the years following the Second World War were a time of increasing post-colonial contradiction which erupted in crisis in the 1960s. Although the great surge of creativity and reorganization in the theatre of the 1960s and '70s that has since become known as the alternative theatre movement was the result of many inter-connected historical factors, in the post-colonial context it was a nationalist revolt against the perceived dominance of an imperial model. In this it had much in common with the unification crisis in the armed forces. Both were movements of ostensible decolonization which repudiated imperial traditions in favour of what was proposed as an authentically indigenous model. At the same time both revealed the changing terms of colonization as they responded to American hegemony. (Alternative theatre was heavily influenced in its formative stages by American experimental theatre; unification reordered the structures of the armed forces as they were increasingly integrated into American strategic policy). Finally, both were the product of policy initiatives by the Liberal government. That may seem more readily apparent in the case of the navy, which is of course an arm of the state. But to the extent that it is subsidized and recognized by the state, so is the theatre. The new theatre movement may have been inspired in large part by American experimental theatre but it was institutionalized out of its underground beginnings by federal cultural policy, which encouraged nationalism and provided easily obtainable grants though job-creation programs.
During the 1970s the theatre and the navy both seemed to proclaim the triumph of Canadian nationalism and express the new essentialism (culturally diverse, free of foreign symbology) promoted by the Liberal government. Equipped with obsolete ships and struggling to retain its traditional identity, the navy was profoundly demoralized. The theatre seemed to flourish, until it too began to suffer the consequences of reduced funding in the latter years of the decade. By then, the nationalism that inspired the new theatre movement no longer seemed adequate, except in Quebec. And even the rise of Québécois nationalism merely confirmed the collapse of the essentialism of the Trudeau years. In terms of the theatre, Quebec and (English) Canada were obviously separate. Outside of Quebec nationalism no longer seemed to define cultural difference; in fact it seemed to obscure it.
Fourth Tableau: 1991
An actor counts the take at the Fringe.
The Canadian Navy steams to war in the Persian Gulf.
The constitutional crises of the 1990s and the increasing importance of identity politics may signal the failure to define an essential principle of 'true Canadianism' even though the political and corporate arrangements of a Canadian state may remain viable. The 'Canada Clause' of the failed 1992 Charlottetown Accord was in fact a recipe for a post-national state in which the idea of an historical national mission seemed irrelevant and archaic. Perhaps the absence of an essentialist principle in the Charlottetown Accord can be read as a sign of post-colonial wisdom; perhaps the Mulroney government, in its readiness to devolve responsibility for culture to the provinces, was admitting the futility of promoting national sentiment. Such a reading seems extremely optimistic considering recent developments in both theatre and navy. Rather, the government seems to have turned its back on the liberal humanist nationalism that has defined Canadian cultural policy for the past four decades,and has accepted instead the more classical liberal laissez-faire stance that perceives nationalism as a hindrance to trade and commerce. In this positivistic stance, culture is no concern of government; there is no imperative for cultural funding because the nation is defined in economic terms of economic production and competitiveness. In the theatre the overwhelming market force of Miss Saigon and Les Misérables re-establishes what Sandwell denounced as the adjunct theatre, and the Fringe festivals and the ghettoization ofnew work in marginally funded theatres threaten the professional livelihood of the artists.
It is difficult to shake off the suspicion that the successof these two developments-the entrepreneurial, lucrative and multi-national commercial theatre, and the laissez-faire, poor and local Fringe festivals-has repudiated the humanism of the Massey Commission, and by doing so has pushed the theatrical enterprise down the road to privatization-a road it has toured before. And what of the navy? In the early 1980s the Mulroney government reintroduced separate service uniforms for the Canadian Armed Forces; the new uniforms were patterned closely on American service dress. In 1991, the Canadian Navy saw action for the first time since RCN operations in the Korean War, when three Canadian ships joined American-controlled 'Coalition' forces in the Persian Gulf. And that leaves me with my final image: of young Canadian actors passing the hat while young Canadian sailors hold position in an imperial battle fleet.
Envoi: 1910
'A magnificent stretch of scenery builded by theatre craft on railway trucks representing Queen Victoria's Memorial Statue and those beautiful "Canadian Gates" outside Buckingham Palace. They are actual size, thirty and forty feet high.... The 400 School Children form a living flag and sing Empire's songs, sing splendidly, and the wee fellows dance the sailor's hornpipe, oldest of all dances.'20
NOTES
THEATRE, NAVY AND THE NARRATIVE OF 'TRUE CANADIANISM'
ALAN FILEWOD
1 Although much of the discussion around the use of 'post-colonialism' is recent, the term itself
has been used in the context of Canadian theatre since at least 1974. Discussing the class bias
of the Canada Council TOM HENDRY wrote, 'One cannot believe that administrators as
sophisticated and civilized as those the Council has had as ornaments to its staff, were not
aware of the probable thrust in a post-Colonial situation of organizational thinking in terms of
repertoire and Canadian creation' (TOM HENDRY, 'The Masseys and the Masses,' Canadian
Theatre Review 3, Summer 1974: 8)
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2 The integration of the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian
Navy into the Canadian Armed Forces took place over several years, from the establishment of
a unified defence staff in 1964 to the passing of The Canadian Forces Reorganization Act in
1967. The RCN was terminated as a separate service in Feb 1968, amidst considerable
controversy. The new green uniform was phased in gradually over the next several years. Naval
personnel were deeply upset that while army regiments were permitted to retain their
distinctive ceremonial uniforms and customs, all signifiers, of naval distinctiveness were
eradicated
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3 DAVID LOWENTHAL The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge Univ Press 1985) p 108
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4 LOWENTHAL p 128
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5 Cited by JACQUES MONET, 'Canada,' in JOHN EDDY and DERYCK SCHREUDER eds,
The Rise of Colonial Nationalism: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa First
Assert their Nationalities, 1880-1914 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1988) p 169
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6 CHARLES MAIR, Tecumseh: A Drama and Canadian Poems; Dreamland and Other Poems;
The American Bison; Through the Mackenzie Basin; Memoirs and Reminiscences (Toronto:
The Radisson Society 1926) p 75. MAIR's projection of Canadian nationhood is embodied in
the character of Lefroy, a Byronesque poet who flees civilization to seek solace in nature's
genius, and who learns-tragically-from the British General Brock that natural law finds its
outward form in the monarchic principle, and from the Indian chieftain Tecumseh that nature
must be defended against the perversion of American materialism. The dying Tecumseh
legitimizes the proto- (Anglo) Canadians as the natural guardians of the land, and Canadian
manhood finds mature expression in a race of armed poets
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7 PAUL LITT, The Muses, the Masses and The Massey Commission (Toronto, Univ of Toronto
Press 1992) p 108
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8 BARRY MORTON GOUGH, 'The End of Pax Britannica and the Origins of the Royal
Canadian Navy: Shifting Strategic Demands of an Empire at Sea,' in W A B DOUGLAS ed,
The RCN in Transition 1910-1985 (Vancouver, Univ of British Columbia Press 1988), p 101
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9 CANADA, DEPARTMENT Of NATIONAL DEFENCE, Report on certain 'incidents' which
occurred on board H M C Ships ATHABASKAN, CRESCENT, and MAGNIFICENT and on
other matters concerning THE ROYAL CANADIAN NAVY. (Ottawa: King's Printer 1949) p33
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10 L C AUDETTE, 'The Lower Deck and the Mainguy Report of 1949' in JAMES A
BOUTILIER. ed, The RCN In Retrospect (Vancouver, Univ of British Columbia Press 1982),
p 247. The lower deck's resistance to the British tradition also stems from the fact that
Canadian naval life on the lower deck in the Second World War was (as my father maintained)
'more like The Caine Mutiny than The Cruel Sea.' That is, in a small-ship navy manned by
volunteers the reality of life aboard ship in the RCN was closer to the American than the British
experience
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11 See my articles 'Erasing Historical Difference: The Alternative Orthodoxy in Canadian
Theatre History,' (Theatre Journal, 41, 2, May 1989: 201-2 10) and 'National Theatre /
National Obsession' (Canadian Theatre Review 62, Spring 1990: 5-10). The idea that the
formulations of national theatre were shaped by colonial allegiances has also been explored by
DENIS SALTER in his articles 'Declarations of (In)Dependence: Adjudicating the Dominion
Drama Festival' (Canadian Theatre Review 62, Spring 1990: 11-18) and 'The Idea of a
National Theatre,' in ROBERT LECKER ed, Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value
(Toronto: Univ of Toronto Press 1991) pp 71-90
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12 VINCENT MASSEY, 'The Prospects for a Canadian Drama,' Queen's Quarterly 30 Dec 1992
p 197
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13 For an analysis of the contingency plan to invade the United States see STEPHEN J
HARRIS, Canadian Brass: The Making of a Professional Army, 1860-1939 (Toronto: Univ of
Toronto Press 1988). Although the plan was largely a theoretical operational exercise it was in
part motivated by sincere reservations on the part of senior officers. Harris cites General A
McNaughton, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, who considered the United States to be
'consistently imperialistic' and 'aimed at the hegemony of the Americas' (171). Defence Plan No
1 called for a Canadian invasion to coincide with a British invasion of the east coast, and an
Indian/Australian invasion of California.
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14 LITT pp 11-16
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15 ROYAL COMMISSION ON NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE ARTS, LETTERS AND SCIENCES 1949-1951, Report (Ottawa, The King's Printer 1951) p 271
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16 Report p 275
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17 Report p 11
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18 B K SANDWELL, 'Present Day Influences on Canadian Society,' in Royal Commission
Studies: A Selection of Essays Prepared for the Royal Commission on National Development
in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Ottawa: The King's Printer 1951) p 1
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19 HILDA NEATBY, 'National History,' in Royal Commission Studies p 211
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20 Official Souvenir Programme, Queen's Own Rifles of Canada Semi-Centennial Reunion and Historical Pageant, (Toronto: 1910) p 23
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