Expo 67’s lasting impact

If you were looking for a place to explore how the world has changed in the past half-century, you could do worse than venture to Montreal and contemplate the glory that was Expo 67, perhaps the greatest World’s Fair of the 20th century and certainly the most popular.

The fair, which opened 50 years ago, carried the slogan “Man and His World.” No one would ever use “man” as a synonym for “humanity” today.

Visitors wandered easily through its gates and into the pavilions of the five dozen nations that participated and the scores of companies that contributed exhibits.

Security concerns would make that inconceivable today.

The fair created, or reflected, a burst of Canadian unity. Within months that unity would be shattered and Quebec separatism would gain new urgency and passion.

“It was a special year — a vintage year — and it is probable that we will not see its like again,” the Canadian historian Pierre Berton wrote of 1967, when Canada celebrated the centenary of its confederation.

With a generational turnover in Canadian leadership looming, government commissions here dealt with sensitive issues of gender and language.

The country was convulsed in debate over social issues and the presence of American draft dodgers.

Even so, Berton concluded, 1967 “was a year in which most Canadians felt good about themselves and their country.”

A principal reason was Expo, which attracted more than 50 million people and was described by the respected Canadian writer Peter C. Newman as “the greatest thing we have ever done as a nation.”

Visitors in Montreal could see a film at the Canadian Pacific pavilion, taste one of the 60 beers at the Brewers pavilion, linger in a garden provided by the Principality of Monaco, or sample reindeer or moose steak in the Scandinavian pavilion.

South Korea displayed a 16thcentury ironclad ship; Cuba served daiquiris.

Togo offered its vision of “a smiling land of happy people.”

Expo brought the world to Canada and took Canada to the world.

Within a year, the charismatic Pierre Elliott Trudeau — elegant, intellectual, flawlessly bilingual — would become prime minister and a symbol of the country’s new mod visage.

Little of that 1967 excitement remains, though the ascension of Trudeau’s son, Justin, to Canadian leadership in 2015 added a fresh layer of stardust to Canadian politics.

But almost everything else about Expo is part of a fast-vanishing past.

Two of the more colorful visitors were the Shah of Iran and the emperor of Ethiopia, two titles that do not exist today.

Expo was the stage set for performances of “The Ed Sullivan Show” and Petula Clark, names unknown to half of Canadians, who have a median age of about 40, and who do not represent the “Canadian content” that became de rigueur a year after Expo.

The official handbook lists a full page of souvenirs from the Soviet Union, which has disappeared; nor is it still certain that, as the advertisement put it, “a garment of Russian Sable is one gift guaranteed to make a woman happy.”

Even the baseball team that was named for Expo 67 has vanished.

Now the team of Andre Dawson and Gary Carter is the Washington Nationals.

As the fair closed — and with it a shimmering moment in the history of Canada — Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson identified the legacy of Expo, and of the year 1967 in Canada:

“Expo’s lasting impact is: That the genius and fate of man know no boundaries but are universal; that the future peace and wellbeing of the world community of men depend on achieving the kind of unity of purpose within the great diversity of national effort, which has been achieved here at this greatest of all Canada’s Centennial achievements.”

For the last 50 years, Canada and its partners and friends around the world have sought to recapture that sense of purpose.

We could all use a little bit of it now, a half-century on.