Back in the 196s the familiar Canadian identity was smashed, and as with Humpty Dumpty, no one has been able to put it back together again.

If you weren’t there, you are probably tired of hearing about the ’6s from those who were. Woodstock, Sgt. Pepper, summer of love, hash brownies, yada yada yada. Why don’t you just get over it, you want to ask those aging hippies drooling into their memories (or are they fantasies?). And you’ve got a point. But before you dismiss the ’6s as an overhyped boomer-generation acid flashback take a look at Bryan D. Palmer’s new history of the decade, Canada’s 196s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (University of Toronto Press). Palmer, a professor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, better known for being a labour historian, argues convincingly that the 196s was a turning point in Canadian history, much more important for transforming the country’s image of itself than for its much ballyhooed sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

The first thing that strikes the reader of Canada’s 196s is just how much went on during the decade. Each of Palmer’s chapters could be a book of its own. The Diefenbaker-Pearson interlude, Cold War spy scandals, the rise of political terrorism in Quebec and left nationalism in English Canada, Trudeaumania, Red Power, feminism, the Waffle—all had a role in shattering Canadians’ comfortable notions of what the country represented. Palmer quotes the poet Al Purdy: “the little eddy that is my life/ and all our lives quickens/ and bubbles break as we join/ the mainstream of history.” Purdy was reflecting on the October Crisis in Quebec in 197, but his observation that Canada had become “a different country from the one where I grew up” is the larger theme of Palmer’s book.

Looking back, one of the most astonishing changes that took place in the 196s was the transition from the jowly septuagenarian John Diefenbaker, prime minister until 1963, to the dashing skirt-chaser Pierre Trudeau, prime minister just five years later. What were voters smoking that caused them to make such a dramatic shift? Bryan Palmer blames Gerda Munsinger. Hardly anyone remembers Munsinger nowadays. She was a faded good-time girl with ties to the criminal underworld who slept with a couple of Diefenbaker cabinet ministers and who the RCMP suspected, briefly, of being a Soviet agent, our very own Mata Hari. In the normal course of things she would hardly merit a footnote in the history books. But in the context of mid-’6s politics, she was dynamite waiting to explode. Canadians moan about the low level of contemporary political debate; in 1965 the situation was even worse. It was conventional wisdom that, in the words of the Liberal cabinet minister Judy LaMarsh, “Parliament was sick.” Neither Conservatives nor Liberals could win a majority; the country seemed to mistrust both equally. The party leaders despised one another; the House of Commons was a squabbling bear pit; scandalmongering was the default setting of government. When he learned about Gerda Munsinger’s past connection to the Conservative