Past As Prologue

The year 1961 marked the launch of the Massey lectures. “Each year,” ran the official announcement, “the CBC will invite a noted scholar to undertake study or original research in his field and present the results in a series of half-hour radio broadcasts.” Naming the series in Vincent Massey’s honour was not just an acknowledgement of his public career; it was also a recognition of his role as sympathetic eminence grise at key points in the CBC’s history. As far back as 1928, for example, when Mackenzie King’s Liberal government set up a commission to look at the country’s nascent radio industry, Massey used his political weight to recommend two of the three commissioners, each known to be sympathetic to the idea of a government-owned network. He even personally defrayed the travel costs of the commission’s most important witness—a Canadian-born director at the BBC—whose...