Maclean’s devoted an issue, that of November 2, 1963, to the question of Quebec nationalism and independence. Peter’s article, “This Is the True Strength of Separatism,” was based on the first-ever poll on the subject.6 The previous summer he had helped to conduct the survey of a thousand people, 13 percent of whom had opted for independence, either through a referendum or by nominating separatist candidates in the next provincial election.7 When asked which provincial politician most favoured separatism, most of those polled named René Lévesque, minister of natural resources in the Lesage government.
Peter also contributed short pieces to Maclean’s on topics such as reactions in Quebec against the Quiet Revolution, especially against the anticlericalism promoted by Cité Libre and Mouvement laïque de langue française. His last short piece in the magazine appeared on October 17, 1964. In “Open Letter to French-Canadian Nationalists,” Peter described his frustration at the ongoing political crisis in Canada. He was no longer so sympathetic, he admitted, to the constant stridency in Quebec. After all, he pointed out, French Canada had already won its revolution, and English Canada was now paying attention. On the other hand, French Canada seemed unwilling to listen to English Canada. “Virtually anything you can do in Quebec,” Peter concluded, “short of killing people, can be done with the sympathy of at least a sizeable body of English Canadian opinion.”8 The open letter was translated and published in Le Magazine Maclean in November 1964. No one, least of all Peter, could have predicted that six years later those four words, “short of killing people,” would take on new meaning.
As well as Quebec, Peter was interested in its neighbour, Labrador. In the November 2, 1963, issue of Maclean’s, Peter’s article “New Soft Life on the Last Frontier” compared the old and new Labrador. In Wabush, which was only three years old, Peter could enjoy an extra-dry martini on the rocks, snails, pea soup, beef tenderloin with mushrooms, fresh bread, and Mexican corn, all washed down by a bottle of Beaujolais. Wabush’s malls, restaurants, and new houses made it no less comfortable, Peter thought, than the suburbs of any Canadian city. He and photographer Don Newlands stayed at the Sir Wilfred Grenfell Hotel where the hostess was “curvy” and the waitresses “pretty.” The standard of living among construction men and miners was much better than it had been a decade earlier when Peter had worked on the railway from Sept-Îles into Labrador. In 1963, when Peter visited the company cafeteria, he discovered an appealing menu of fried chicken legs, corn on the cob, fresh bread, and ice cream. Nevertheless, the working men still had to put up with monotony and isolation and long days of work. “Life in the camps of the north,” Peter wrote, “has some things in common with the life of Ivan Denisovich,” the Siberian prisoner in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s newly translated novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
In the next issue, that of November 16, Peter wrote about the Quebec, North Shore, and Labrador Railway, in “Journey Down the Railway That Couldn’t Be Built.” Once Don Newlands and Peter had concluded their visit to Wabush, they travelled south from Labrador City to Sept-Îles on the railway Peter had helped to build. En route, he talked to the dining-car steward, a North Shore old-timer, who recalled the boom years of Sept-Îles in the 1950s when the construction companies found it next to impossible to keep women working in cafeterias and offices because prostitution paid so well. It was a sentimental journey, and Peter marvelled at the convenience of travelling southward at fifty miles per hour. “What a pleasure to be able to stretch back on a railway carriage seat,” he noted in his best lyrical, romantic style, “and enjoy the scenery of a country whose beauty I had forgotten, first in the monotony and discomfort of camp life and then in the city years between.”
Peter also continued to be keenly interested in the Canadian West, particularly Saskatchewan, where the NDP government of Woodrow Lloyd, successor to Premier Tommy Douglas, was defeated in the spring of 1964. Soon thereafter, Peter was in Regina to examine reasons for the defeat of a party that had pioneered state-supported hospital insurance and Medicare, and that in the 1940s and 1950s had created what was arguably the best-trained bureaucracy in Canada. Peter’s “Report from the Changing Heartland of Canada,” published in Maclean’s on July 25, 1964, remains one of the most insightful articles on the province during the two decades from 1944, when Douglas was first elected premier, to 1964, when Ross Thatcher’s Liberals gained power. Peter met most of the important architects of the CCF revolution, including Tommy McLeod, who, along with Tommy Shoyama,9 had helped to make the Douglas government the most innovative of its day. In 1956, in order to investigate agriculture and rural life, sociologist W.B. Baker had set up a royal commission, which, according to Peter, was the model for the federal government’s Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism, established in 1963. Peter admitted that, over time, the superb bureaucracy had grown too large, and voters had begun to feel that the right thing was being done for them “whether they liked it or not.”
When Peter visited Saskatchewan in 1964, he was surprised to discover cocktail bars that hadn’t existed in 1957, and he dined at three restaurants in Saskatoon and Regina that ranked with the best, in his estimation, in Toronto.10 In a drugstore, he bought two copies of Fanny Hill, a novel that was banned in Ontario. He liked the handsome new Regina headquarters of the Saskatchewan Power Corporation, a building whose curvilinear form was an architectural wonder then, and he marvelled at the Wascana project, which, under the direction of internationally acclaimed landscape architect Minoru Yamasaki, would become, Peter predicted, an international showpiece. On Wascana Park, and so much else, Peter was more than astute. On a flat plain, Yamasaki was creating one of Canada’s most attractive urban parks.
Natives of the Prairies drew Peter’s attention, too. His Maclean’s editorial on July 6, 1963, “Last Chance to Head Off a Showdown with the Canadian Indian,” was a preamble to his feature in the same issue on discrimination and violence against Natives in Saskatchewan. In May 1963, a Saulteaux named Allan Thomas had been murdered in a village north of North Battleford. Most of the murderers were ordinary farmers and businessmen. “This is Canada’s Alabama,” Peter contended, and trouble was brewing. “If Canada can afford to spend $70 million on foreign aid,” he argued, “we can afford to spend a small fraction more to prevent giving to the West and to ourselves another list of Birminghams and Little Rocks.”11 Once again, Peter was on the cutting edge, and it would take more than a few years for journalists and academics to catch up to him.
On May 2, 1964, under the title “Portrait of a Beautiful Segregationist,” Peter wrote the first of a two-part feature on the Native activist Kahn-Tineta Horn, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old model who worked in Montreal and lived on the Caughnawaga Reserve near that city. Horn was one of the first leaders to emerge from the Native community, and Peter was one of the first journalists to write about her. In speeches she scoffed at the so-called superiority of Western civilization. In “How Kahn-Tineta Horn Became an Indian,” the second part of the article, published in the May 16, 1964, issue, Peter sketched a history of the Caughnawaga Mohawks and how the Horn family fitted into that chronicle.12
In March 1957, when Peter was heading for Moose Jaw, Cathy Breslin had claimed that he could regale an audience by describing a trip to the dry cleaners. In Maclean’s of April 20, 1963, under the pseudonym Peter N. Allison, the names of his two eldest children, Peter entertained his readers by writing about a catalogue. His “Life in Eaton’s Catalogue, or How I Wrestled My Uncle Ernest in My Medium-Weight Thermal Underwear” dealt with a catalogue that was first published in 1884 and that by the 1960s had grown to 40 million copies per annum, resulting in about fifty thousand orders each weekday. Peter loved the “slick, glossy handsomeness of the cover” and even the “sweet, and somehow secure” smell of a new catalogue. In these catalogues, Peter glimpsed Canadian identity: since their inception, Eaton’s catalogues had always reflected “our way of life,” and the products that they advertised, Peter argued, had helped to build Canada.
He concluded with a flight of