Yorkville State of Mind

One of the great ironies of the 1960s in Canada is that conservatives understand the era’s significance better than those on the left. You do not have to remove too many volumes from the right-wing bookshelf before a trend starts to emerge: the 1960s matter to Canadian conservatives.

You could read William Gairdner, who, for more than two decades, has been madly sounding the alarm about the way the cultural revolution of the 1960s has continued to savage Canadian families. More recently, Brian Lee Crowley’s Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values does its best to show how, from the 1960s to the ’90s, Canadian society disastrously abandoned what he presents as tried and true Canadian values. Canada, he claims, had always been a small-government society rooted in the Protestant work ethic. The 1960s era threw all of this out of whack. Presumably he does not want to go back to the restricted racial covenants on house sales or the rampant...