The 1960s, that memorable decade of the gorgeously good, the basically bad and the truly ugly, which seems like only yesterday to this survivor, has now become history-as-usual. Which means, since history is written by the winners, that those of us who were the unwashed back then risk being taken to the cleaners one more time.
Ideas abounded in the ’60s; hard though it is to imagine now, even the universities were full of dissent and genuine debate. Nationalism reared its beautiful head even on matters economic and, with Canada at the margin of an American empire running amok— sound familiar?—the debate was joined between the economic nationalists (among whom I count myself: remember the Watkins Report of 1968 on foreign ownership and the Waffle Movement for an independent—and socialist!—Canada?) who called for a more independent, namely less dependent, Canadian economy, and the continentalists (the term is still to be found in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary) who...
Mel Watkins is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. McGill-Queen’s University Press recently published Staples and Beyond: Selected Writings of Mel Watkins, edited by Hugh Grant and David Wolfe. He remains a political activist, most recently as a member of the Maher Arar Support Committee.
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