The Perils of Predicting the Future

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

What’s the most important thing I hope students learn in any of my classes? To doubt the prevailing wisdom of the age, to be skeptics and contrarians, and not buy into whatever the zeitgeist of the moment insists is “obvious” and “self-evident truth.”

“Everything you now believe might be a joke in 50 years,” I tell them.

You don’t think so? OK then, let’s go back to Canada in 1960.

In that year, the “Dominion of Canada,” as we still called it, was a unilingual country outside Quebec, with no bill of rights, and with the Red Ensign, a version of the British flag, flying on Parliament Hill.

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker extolled the virtues of our British heritage. Anyone “dissing” the Queen would have been shunned.

The Governor General of the day, “His Excellency Major-General The Right Honourable Georges Vanier,” was a decorated former army officer.

Had someone stated that a half-century later, a Black woman who came to Canada as a refugee from Haiti would assume that role, they would have been laughed at as some sort of utopian.

Canada was seriously considering allowing nuclear weapons on its soil. And three years later, Bomarc warheads were indeed delivered to two sites, in North Bay, Ont. and La Macaza, Que. – placed there by Lester Pearson’s Liberal government.

Sounds unbelievable today, doesn’t it?

Quebec was governed by the reactionary Union Nationale, effectively an arm of the Roman Catholic Church. All schools in the province were denominational.

Advocates of abortion, contraception, no-fault divorce, and same-sex marriage would have been pariahs, considered completely beyond the pale. Women couldn’t even wear shorts at many beaches.

Today, Quebec may be the most secular province in the country.

On the left of the Canadian political spectrum, some people believed in “proletarian revolution.” Many more were certain that by the turn of the century, Canada would at the least be a socialist country.

The forward march of the New Democratic Party could not be halted and the party would inevitably displace the Liberals on the left and win elections in the future.

In 2010, the Soviet Union no longer even exists, Communism is discredited as an ideology, and who still talks about workers taking power?

In 1960, Canada had virtually no laws against ethnic, gender or racial discrimination, and immigration was tightly controlled and mostly limited to people from Europe.

Toronto, now arguably the most urbane of North American cities, was still a Protestant town, so much so that some called it the “Belfast of Canada.”

The words “human rights,” “diversity,” and “multiculturalism” were rarely, if ever, found in general discourse. And probably no more than 100 people in the entire country knew what a niqab or a kirpan was.

So what will Canada look like in 2060? The only thing we can be certain of is this: no one has any idea.