IT IS HARD to believe in this era of interminable constitutional bickering that just 25 years ago Canadians joined as one and wished themselves a happy 100th birthday. There were Centennial events from coast to coast: reunions, new buildings, tree plantings, arts tours, canoe races, and Expo 67 -- the centrepiece of the celebrations -- a world's fair staged in Montreal that was by far the best fair the world had ever seen.
Sixty-two nations built pavilions on a 400-hectare site in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. Fifty million people came to see them. There was stunning new architecture, brilliant new films, things of beauty and pleasure and enlightenment at every turn, and overall a sense of confidence and progress, the promise of a bright and happy future for Canada and the world.
No wonder we're nostalgic now. The "promise" of Expo never materialized. It caused no revolutions in education or architecture, no drop in the number of despots and depressions. And the first hundred years of Confederation did not create what was described by Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh in the official guide to Expo 67 as "a foundation of nationhood on which we can build an even richer and more bountiful Canada." Expo was "neither a beginning nor an ending," as the Montreal urbanist Jean-Claude Marsan has observed, "but only a spectacle for the moment."
But maybe that is all that could be expected. We did it once. We had an idea and we worked hard at it and we worked together. And we created something beautiful and successful that the whole world admired. And now, when the nation is mired in a language and constitutional debate that seems endless, Expo remains a reminder of what we can do and a sign that sometime in the future, somehow, we could do it all again.
The idea of holding a world's fair in Canada to coincide with the centennial of Confederation was first put forward in the late 1950s by the federal government headed by John Diefenbaker. It had been proposed by a Montreal cabinet minister, Pierre Sévigny, who in turn credits a Monsieur Barthe, an organizer of county fairs, with hatching the idea. The mayor of Montreal at the time, Sarto Fournier, was enthusiastic. And the idea was announced in Paris in 1958 by a Quebec senator, Marc Drouin. A year later, Diefenbaker dispatched a team to make application to the Bureau international des Expositions, the Paris-based body that oversees world's fairs. But alas, the nod went to the Soviet Union, the 50th anniversary of its glorious revolution also occurring in 1967.
But then the Soviets bowed out. Diefenbaker reapplied, with the support of Quebec premier Jean Lesage and the newly returned Montreal mayor, Jean Drapeau. This time Canada won. A crown corporation was set up to run the fair, and a series of conferences in the early 1960s mapped out its theme and content. Pierre Sévigny suggested the theme of "Terre des Hommes," elegantly translated as "Man and His World," from the title of a book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French novelist and aviator whose works (as one text puts it) "explore themes of duty, love and human brotherhood." The fair was initially intended to be modest, but in 1963 Lester Pearson became prime minister and under his government the purse strings loosened.
Later, following the fair's great success, not everyone was sure he had received his fair share of glory. John Diefenbaker, for instance, noted in the House of Commons in 1969 that, "When the opening proceedings took place, Premier Lesage, no longer premier (it was Daniel Johnson by then), and myself, both of whom had done their part to bring it about, were seated so far back in the audience that an ordinary telescope was not sufficient to enable us to see what was going on."
The mid-river site for the fair was a late addition to a list of Montreal locations considered. Successive planning documents in the Expo archives show increasing favour being given a spot alongside the St. Lawrence near Montreal harbour. The spot grew in size from one diagram to the next, and then suddenly leapt out to Ile Sainte-Hélène, a natural island in the middle of the river and a city park since the 1870s.
Then Ile Sainte-Hélène itself grew bigger, until a second island appeared beside it. And that was where the fair was held: partly on the riverbank, an area called Cité du Havre, and mostly on two islands in the river, a much-enlarged Ile Sainte-Hélène and a brand new island called Ile Notre-Dame.
About 14 million tonnes of fill were dredged from the river bottom or trucked across the Jacques Cartier Bridge to create the islands. But this is how well things worked in Montreal in those days: the subway was being built at the same time, and the debris from digging the Métro tunnels was used to make the "magic isles." Each truck that carried fill from the city to the fair site had a blue plywood plaque on it that said "Expo 67." It was exciting.
Bear in mind, too, that these were good times. The postwar economic boom steamed right into the 1960s, and politically there was peace. In Quebec, the Révolution tranquille was just then unleashing the energies of French Canada, fostering a renaissance of which Expo was a central part.
Still, in the summer of 1963, when the fair site was a riverbed and opening day was less than four years away, doubters were everywhere. "Call it off," was a common sentiment. And Lester Pearson was at his diplomatic best that August day when he tipped the first bucket of fill into the river and spoke of his "concern over the magnitude of the tasks."
But clearly the doubters were not considering the quality of the team that had been assembled to get the fair going. Jean Drapeau stepped aside (unlike the Olympics a decade later, when he ran the show and both construction schedules and budgets went through the roof). Pierre Dupuy, formerly Canadian ambassador to France, was named Commissioner General. He became the fair's salesman extraordinaire, circling the globe several times and lining up the 62 countries that took part.
Construction was entrusted to Deputy Commissioner Robert Shaw, head of the Foundation Co., and among the foremost construction engineers in Canada. His assistant was Colonel Edward Churchill, a Winnipegger who had been chief of construction for the Canadian army in World War II. They built Expo on a "critical path" system: every detail was planned in advance and scheduled to the minute. They are also said to have made it plain that they would bulldoze any unfinished pavilions into the river before opening day.
And so Expo grew, from riverbed to rock pile to hopeless jumble of construction equipment and materials to -- on opening day, April 28, 1967 -- a landscaped little world of beautiful buildings interlaced with walkways, canals and efficient mass-transit systems.
The Canadian pavilion included a huge inverted pyramid called Katimavik with an orange ball beside it that was full of photographs and a stage where les Feux Follets danced. The provinces were clustered around: Ontario's opaque tent, home of two fair hits, the multi-screen movie A Place to Stand and its "Ontari-ari- ari-o" soundtrack; the comparatively dour Québec pavilion, a glass boxful of stylized exhibits that spoke of challenge, struggle and drive; the Atlantic provinces, where a beautiful two masted schooner, the Atlantica, was built during the summer; and the Western provinces, where you rode in a mine cart that almost collided with a loaded logging truck.
Everyone admired the United States' pavilion, Buckminster Fuller's 20-storey geodesic bubble, though some found the contents trivial: Elvis Presley's guitar, portraits of film stars, pop art and a charred space capsule. You rode up to the exhibits in a 38-metre escalator, which prompted Paul Krassner, the New York cynic, to crack that in Vietnam or at Expo, the U.S. was hung up on escalation.
France plugged la gloire, eight levels of haute couture, haute cuisine, belles-lettres and atomic power inside a soaring steel structure. Britain soared, too, with a white tower designed by Sir Basil Spence, but the exhibits poked gentle fun at British life. Germany's wall-less and seemingly free-form tent was much admired, and the contents bespoke accomplishment, a Gutenberg printing press, Bach manuscripts and a pioneer Daimler-Benz automobile. The beauty and cleverness of the Czech pavilion, its glassworks and carved wood and multi-screen film shows, proved enormously popular.
And on it went. Australia showed kangaroos and wool carpets. Cuba served Cuba libres and rhetoric ("The turning point of history has come"). Switzerland was full of clocks. Scandinavia showed a Viking ship and a Hasselblad camera, the Soviet Union spacecraft and caviar, India a piece of cloth woven by Mahatma Gandhi, Mauritius the bones of a dodo.
Among the private pavilions, the telephone companies offered a "circle vision" film called Canada 67, and the chemical companies a study in colours called Kaleidoscope. There was a multi-screen film on youth in the Canadian Pacific pavilion, and murals by Norval Morrisseau in the Indians of Canada pavilion.
The theme pavilions offered commentaries on contemporary society, like the haunting piles of 20th-century debris in Man in the Community, or the walk-through human cell in Man and Life. Man the Creator had Rubenses and Rembrandts, Modiglianis and Moores, a fabulous assemblage of treasures gathered globally. But then again, that is what Expo was, treasures from everywhere, evidence of humanity's best efforts, presented confidently and beautifully. People today recall Expo as a wonderful place to be. It made you feel good to be there. And no wonder. It was the good side of humanity: charming, capable, accomplished, confident. What a beautiful moment it was.
Inevitably it faded. The months and years that followed the fair saw labour strife and economic decline in Montreal, the October Crisis and the Referendum, and in all parts of Canada hardened attitudes that flew in the face of everything Expo stood for.
Mayor Drapeau, once visionary, came to appear foolish in his devotion to grand spectacles and indifference to everything else. The profligacy of Olympic spending, and the opening of the Games in an unfinished stadium a billion dollars over budget, undermined the sense of competence and accomplishment that the fair had engendered.
As for the site itself, it has changed gradually over the years from an international fairgrounds to a city park and leisure centre.
The fair actually continued for a few summers following 1967, but as years passed, fewer countries participated and fewer people came. The U.S. pavilion burned in 1976 (that is, the plastic skin of it burned, leaving the steel frame). And other pavilions fell, too, some to make way for a rowing basin for the '76 Olympic Games, others through vandalism or because they were intended to be only temporary structures. Only a handful still stand today, among them the former French pavilion, now an exhibit hall and host lately to a series of archeological displays. Of the Canadian, British, Soviet, Czech, German, African, Mexican, Australian and dozens of other pavilions, nothing remains.
Ile Notre-Dame was fitted with a grand prix track in 1978. Gilles Villeneuve, from just downriver at Berthierville, Que., won the first race there, and when he died in a racing accident in Belgium in 1982, the track was named after him. In 1980 the island hosted an international flower show called Les Floralies and some of the gardens have been maintained. And in 1990, a lake was formed in the middle of the island, creating a giant swimming hole complete with a sandy crescent beach. St. Lawrence River water is fed through a series of cattail ponds rendering it clean enough for swimming. And the beach has proved a popular attraction in an island city where pollution has kept the natural beaches closed for 40 years.
There are ski trails and picnic sites on the islands, too. La Ronde has continued as an amusement park. And a grassy amphitheatre should be ready for concerts this summer. Future plans include redoing the U.S. pavilion as an environmental awareness and monitoring centre focusing on the St. Lawrence River.
A few spots on the "magic isles" are still hauntingly familiar, like the canals on Ile Notre-Dame. The trees planted beside them for Expo are big now, and the waterways have taken on a graceful and slightly overgrown look. Visiting there, it is hard not to think of them as canals with a past, witness in a starry youth to throngs of people and important events.
Of the people who worked on the fair, Pierre Dupuy and Col. Churchill are among those who have died. Among the rest, Robert Shaw is recently retired from a busy career. He spends summers in Montreal now and winters in Hawaii. Expo's operations director Philippe de Gaspé Beaubien built a broadcasting and publishing empire after the fair. Roger Landry, in charge of Expo 67 guides and other staff, is now publisher of La Presse. And architect Moshe Safdie, who designed the playful, box-like apartment block Habitat, went on to design the National Gallery in Ottawa and a major addition to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Many of the corporation staff, and there were thousands finally, from engineers to ticket-takers, gathered in June for a 25th anniversary weekend in Montreal.
And of the millions of Expo visitors, surely some this summer will think back to the fun they had at the fair, to the cordiality of the era that made it possible, to a time when we were all 25 years younger and, perhaps, a little wiser.
