THE EVOLUTION OF JULY 1
Historian Allan Levine describes how John Diefenbaker turned ‘Dominion Day’ into an important annual event
Long before he became the prime minister of Canada in 1957, John diefenbaker was hyper-sensitive about his German roots and name — despite the fact his father and paternal grandfather were born in Canada, and his mother was of Scottish heritage.
This was why he spent so much of his career pushing for “unhyphenated Canadian-ism,” a unifying Canadian national identity with a distinctly British character. Thus, in 1964 and 1965, as leader of the opposition, he ardently opposed the replacement of the union Jack and red ensign with the Canadian Maple Leaf flag (which he derisively compared to “a flag Peruvians would salute”). Once in power, he decided to reclaim dominion day as a national holiday supported by the federal government.
diefenbaker, who died in 1979, surely would have been disappointed, but likely not surprised, when dominion day became Canada day through what Ottawa Citizen columnist robert Sibley rightly called “a swift bit of legislative sleight of hand.” Late on a lazy Friday on July 9, 1982, with the House of Commons nearly empty, the handful of Liberals present managed to pass a private member’s bill that had languished for two years after receiving first reading. In a matter of moments, the bill, which changed the name of dominion day to Canada day, got third reading.
At the time, there were grumblings about the underhandedness of the process. yet, today with Canada’s British connection a subject mainly reserved for Canadian history lectures and seminars, no one much cares. On Monday, Canada day will be celebrated on Parliament Hill and across the country. And we owe the day, in all its various forms, to dief.
Confederation had been marked on July 1, 1867 in Toronto with the ringing of the bells at St. James Cathedral. It was a day of “bonfires, fireworks and illuminations, excursions, military displays and musical and other entertainments,” as one contemporary writer recalled it.
dominion day, however, did not officially become a national holiday until 1879. even then, and for the next five decades, as university of Guelph historian Matthew Hayday has chronicled in a 2010 article in the Can- adian Historical Review, the holiday usually was left in the hands of local communities who organized picnics (as well as the governor general, who hosted a party).
One hundred years ago, on July 1, 1913, for example, the holiday received only passing mention in the Toronto Globe, other than a sappy poem by writer and political cartoonist J.W. Bengough. Still, there was at least one event that resonates to the present day: Simpson’s department store on yonge Street, though closed for the holiday, advertised a “Maple Leaf Sale” (men’s two-piece tweed suits were a bargain for $6.50).
Soon after the 1957 election, diefenbaker halted the previous Liberal administrations’ gradual elimination of the term “dominion” from federal institutions, and tasked secretary of state ellen Fairclough, the first female federal cabinet minister, with devising an appropriate dominion day celebration for 1958.
She accessed $14,000, 70% of which went to pay for fireworks, and set in motion an exciting if somewhat formal round of activities in Ottawa. until then, it was a tradition that Parliament was in session on July 1. Fairclough convinced the prime minister and her cabinet colleagues to let MPs attend the festivities.
On July 1, 1958, in another first, Governor General Vincent Massey’s address on Parliament Hill, which emphasized Canada’s english-French roots, was broadcast on CBC television. That was followed by a concert that featured military bands and a $10,000 fireworks display.
Thereafter, dominion day in Ottawa continued to expand. In 1958, after Fairclough became minister of citizenship and Immigration, she invited folk and ethnic groups to perform; and the day became more fun, casual and family oriented.
When Lester Pearson and the Liberals ousted diefenbaker and the Tories in 1963, his government continued the tradition. In 1965, as Hayday notes, Alex Trebek and Henri Bergeron were the bilingual hosts who welcomed performers from far and wide.
One of the groups on stage was the Cariboo Indian Girls Pipe Band, “a dozen tartan-clad teenaged girls from the Shushwap First nation who performed traditional bagpipe music.” The girls’ presence in Ottawa had been supported by Father H. O’Connor, the principal of the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school they attended. “We would like the people of Canada to see the better side of our Indian people and we feel sure that there is no better means of educating our Canadian people to see this better side than to have such a fine group of Ambassadors representing the Indian people,” he wrote to officials at the secretary of state department in March, 1965.
In time, as Hayday shows, strictly British and French images of the country gave way to multicultural themes. He adds: “depictions of Aboriginal people shifted from their assimilation to euro-Canadian values to ones in which First Nations maintained Indigenous languages and traditions or created a new fusion of Aboriginal and euro-Canadian practices.”
The Harper government’s recent decision to transfer budgetary control of Canada day (and other national celebrations such as Winterlude) from the National Capital Commission to the federal heritage department as preparation for 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017 means that the manipulation of July 1 for cultural as well as partisan purposes will continue. The Chief, who liked to think he was above such blatant politics, would probably not have been impressed.