Picture a young couple in 1955. He served overseas in the war; she worked in a munitions plant and then married him. They have three children under eight, a new bungalow on a curving street in a brand-new suburb, a car in the driveway, a television in the living room and a mortgage backed by the federal government. Ten years earlier, many Canadians had feared that peace would bring back the breadlines of the 1930s (see Unit 3). Instead, the quarter-century after 1945 became the longest boom in Canadian history. This lesson asks why it happened, how it changed daily life, and who was left out.
Why the boom happened
Several forces worked together. Canadians had saved money during the war (much of it in Victory Bonds) and now wanted the houses, cars and appliances they had gone without since 1929. Government spending stayed high: veterans' benefits, the Family Allowance cheques that began in 1945, and loans for housing all put money in people's pockets. Around the world, rebuilding Europe and the arms race of the Cold War created huge demand for Canadian wheat, lumber, metals and energy. In February 1947, the Leduc No. 1 well struck oil near Edmonton, launching Alberta's oil boom. Iron ore in northern Quebec and Labrador, uranium near Elliot Lake and nickel at Thompson, Manitoba, drew mines, railways and new towns into the North.
| Economic trend | What happened | Who gained and who paid |
|---|---|---|
| Resource boom | Oil in Alberta (from 1947), iron ore, uranium, nickel, pulp and paper, hydroelectric dams | Jobs and high wages for many workers; but mines, dams and flooding often took place on First Nations, Métis and Inuit lands without their consent |
| American investment and branch plants | US companies built or bought factories and mines in Canada; by the 1970s foreign firms controlled a large share of Canadian manufacturing and oil | Brought money and jobs, but profits and key decisions flowed to the United States, raising fears for Canadian economic independence |
| Unions and the Rand Formula | After the 1945 Ford strike in Windsor, Justice Ivan Rand ruled in January 1946 that all workers covered by a union contract must pay union dues, whether or not they join | Unions grew stronger and wages rose; employers had to bargain with stable unions |
| Consumerism and credit | Cars, appliances, televisions, shopping malls and instalment buying; bank credit cards spread from the late 1960s | Higher living standards for many families, along with more household debt |
| Crises of the 1970s and early 1980s | Oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979, stagflation (high inflation plus high unemployment), and a deep recession in 1981–1982 | Oil-producing Alberta gained while oil-importing regions paid more; interest rates near 20 per cent in 1981 cost some families their homes and farms |
The baby boom and the suburbs
Statistics Canada dates the baby boom from 1946 to 1965. Births peaked at about 479,000 in 1959, when the average woman was expected to have nearly four children (a total fertility rate of about 3.9). The population also grew through immigration, through tens of thousands of war brides (mostly British and Dutch women who had married Canadian servicemen) and their children, and when Newfoundland joined Canada on March 31, 1949, after a close referendum in which about 52 per cent voted for Confederation. Young families flocked to suburbs built on farmland around the cities. Don Mills, built by E. P. Taylor's company on about 2,000 acres north of Toronto from the early 1950s, became a model for planned suburbs across the country, with curving streets, a shopping plaza and space for a car.
- Schools: thousands of new elementary schools in the 1950s, then high schools and new universities and colleges in the 1960s as boomers grew up.
- A youth culture: by the late 1950s teenagers were a market of their own, with rock 'n' roll, radio, dances, cars and fashions that worried many parents.
- Cars and commuting: suburbs depended on cars, which drove highway building, shopping malls and drive-ins, and left people without cars more isolated.
- Long-term consequences: the boom generation's size later shaped housing prices, the job market and today's pressures on pensions and health care as boomers retire.
Building a continent-sized country
| Project | Dates | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Trans-Canada Highway | Act passed 1949; officially opened at Rogers Pass on September 3, 1962; finished to the standard set by the Act by 1971 | Ran through all ten provinces (about 7,800 km, with ferry links to Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island) and boosted trucking and tourism |
| Television | CBC Television began broadcasting in September 1952 in Montreal and Toronto | Brought shared programs, news and hockey into homes; also spread American shows and culture |
| St. Lawrence Seaway | Built jointly with the United States; opened to ships in April 1959 and officially opened in June 1959 | Let ocean-going ships reach the Great Lakes and generated hydroelectric power; about 6,500 Ontario residents were relocated and the "Lost Villages" were flooded on July 1, 1958, and the Mohawk community of Kahnawà:ke was cut off from its river shore |
| TransCanada pipeline | Completed in 1958 after the bitter Pipeline Debate in Parliament (1956) | Carried Alberta natural gas to central Canada |
Science and technology
| Development | When | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| Cobalt-60 cancer therapy | First patients treated in London, Ontario, and Saskatoon in late 1951 | Canadian machines delivered powerful, precise radiation to tumours and were sold around the world |
| Cardiac pacemaker research | Wilfred Bigelow's team in Toronto, 1950 | Helped lead to the electronic pacemaker that keeps millions of hearts beating |
| CANDU nuclear reactors | First demonstration reactor at Rolphton, Ontario, 1962; Pickering station from 1971 | Ontario gained a major source of electricity without burning coal, but created long-lived radioactive waste; uranium mining affected communities near the mines |
| Avro Arrow (CF-105) | First flight March 1958; cancelled February 20, 1959 | A world-class jet interceptor; its cancellation cost about 14,000 Avro jobs and remains a symbol of lost Canadian ambition (see the Cold War lesson) |
| Alouette 1 | Launched September 29, 1962 | Made Canada the third country, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to design and build its own satellite; it studied the upper atmosphere to improve radio communication in the North |
| Anik A1 | Launched November 9, 1972 | One of the world's first national domestic communications satellites; it brought live CBC television and better telephone service to the North |
| Canadarm | First flew on the US space shuttle Columbia in November 1981 | A Canadian-built robotic arm that became a symbol of Canadian space technology |