Ian Mckay Sarnia In The Sixties Analysis

At first glance, Ian McKay’s Sarnia in the Sixties (or the Peculiarities of the Canadians) seems like any other tale about small towns. However, as we dig deeper into the text, we unravel a complex web of laws and revolutions which influenced not only local legislature but also worldwide politics. For some the sixties are a golden age, for others a time when the old secure framework of morality, authority, and discipline disintegrated. In the eyes of the far left, it is the era when revolution was at hand, only to be betrayed by the feebleness of the faithful and the trickery of the enemy; to the radical right, an era of subversion and moral turpitude. What happened between the late fifties and the early seventies has been subject to political polemic, nostalgic mythologizing, and downright misrepresentations. If asked to explain the fuss, both survivors of the decade and observers of the repeated attempts subsequently to conjure it up again could probably manage to put together a list of its most striking features, which might look something like this: black civil rights; youth culture and trend-setting by young people; idealism,

Young people dreamed about revolutions they saw in the media and could not bear to sit around doing nothing. As McKay puts it, “Canadian leftists merely applied to their circumstances ideas and practices from elsewhere, but they often subtly changed how those learnings were activated in their particular domain” (28). Sarnia in the sixties mainly focuses on the ideologies that were brought from other regions of the world and the way they have been implanted in 1960 Canada. Nothing is forgotten, from the passive revolutions to gay rights movements. It is very interesting to point out that contrarily to other countries, the new ideas that emerged from the sixties were not bound to one generation and can still be found today in Canadian society. The liberal movement of that era never truly