After the War: The Baby Boom, Suburbs and a Growing Canada

A country coming home

In May 1945 the war in Europe ended, and in August 1945 the war in the Pacific ended. More than a million Canadians had served in uniform. Now they were coming home, and almost everyone was asking the same questions: Will there be jobs? Will there be houses? Will the hard times of the 1930s come back?

The answer surprised many people. Instead of a new depression, Canada entered a long economic boom. Families grew, cities spread out into new suburbs, and the population grew quickly.

In this unit you will investigate Canada from 1945 to 1982: from the end of the Second World War to the day Canada brought its Constitution home. You will meet prime ministers and protesters, scientists and singers, newcomers, First Nations, Métis and Inuit leaders, Black Canadian activists and Québécois nationalists. Each of them helped decide what kind of country Canada would become.

The baby boom

During the Depression and the war, many couples waited to marry and have children. After 1945 they stopped waiting. Births rose quickly and stayed high for about twenty years. Statistics Canada counts the baby boom as the years 1946 to 1965.

• In 1959, the peak year, about 479 000 babies were born in Canada.
• The total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman would have in her lifetime) rose to almost 4.
• By the late 1960s the birth rate was falling fast. Reasons historians give include the birth control pill (legal to prescribe for contraception after 1969), more women working for pay, and families choosing to have fewer children.

The baby boom shaped everything that came after it. Boomers filled new schools in the 1950s, new universities and colleges in the 1960s, and the job market in the 1970s. They also created a huge teen market for records, clothes and movies: one reason a separate teenage culture appeared in these years.

War brides and newcomers

Some of the first new families came from overseas. More than 40 000 war brides, most of them from Britain and some from the Netherlands and other European countries, came to Canada after marrying Canadian servicemen. They brought about 20 000 children with them. Many arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax and then rode the train across the country to meet their husbands' families. Some found a warm welcome; others found themselves on isolated farms, far from everything they knew.

After the war, Canada also accepted displaced persons: Europeans who had lost their homes in the war, including survivors of the Holocaust and people who would not return to countries under Soviet control. You will study immigration in detail in a later lesson of this unit.

Cities, suburbs and moving around

In 1945, many Canadians still lived on farms or in small towns. By 1981, most lived in cities. Three big trends were at work:

1. Urbanization: people moved from farms to cities. Farm machines meant fewer workers were needed on farms, and factory and office jobs paid more.
2. Suburbanization: new neighbourhoods of single-family houses spread around the edges of cities. Don Mills in Toronto, begun in the early 1950s, was one of Canada's first large planned suburbs. Government-backed mortgages through the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), created in 1946, helped families buy homes.
3. Interprovincial migration: people moved between provinces for work, for example to Alberta after the big oil discovery at Leduc in 1947, and to Ontario's growing factory cities.

Suburbs gave families space, new schools and backyards. They also had costs: long commutes by car, farmland paved over, and (some critics said) lonely days for women at home without a car or nearby family.

Newfoundland becomes the tenth province

Newfoundland had been a separate British dominion. During the Depression it went bankrupt and was governed by a British-appointed commission. In 1948 Newfoundlanders voted in two referendums. In the second, about 52 percent voted to join Canada. Joey Smallwood, a broadcaster and organizer, led the campaign for Confederation. Newfoundland joined Canada on March 31, 1949, and Smallwood became its first premier.

The vote was close, and many Newfoundlanders were sad to lose their own country. Joining brought family allowance cheques and other federal programs, which mattered a great deal to families in a poor economy. This is a good example of how historical perspective matters: the same event was a gain for some and a loss for others.