MONTREAL—In the city that I’ve called home for the past 20 years, one would be hard-pressed to find signs that Saturday is a special Canada Day. A bicycle ride across town on the eve of the country’s 150th anniversary elicits no Maple Leaf flag — except at various hotel and official venues.

Quebec leases expire on July 1. Year in and year out, Canada Day in Montreal is marked by a ballet of moving vans. This year is no exception. The city has spent the past six months celebrating its 375th anniversary. And last week was the June 24 Fête nationale. It is not as if we were suffering from a deficit of history or festivities.

But for those of us who are old enough to have been there the contrast between this sedate sesquicentennial weekend and Canada’s last significant birthday in 1967 could not be more striking.

I was entering adolescence at the time of Expo 67. My family had moved from Hull (now Gatineau) to Toronto the previous fall. My English was still a work in progress. Our neighbours’ French even more so.

On our street, the family that lived next door was among the first to trek to Montreal to visit Expo. They did not know that the Quebec short form for “excusez-moi” is “scuse.” Expo 67 being the crowd scene that it was, it was a word they heard many times a day. At least one child came home wondering if the expression was a code of some sort.

My mother had relatives on the south shore of Montreal. The seven of us — two parents and five kids including a toddler — camped there for our Expo week. My aunt and uncle lived in a leafy empty nest. They shed crocodile tears when we departed.

Like many of my generation, my first passport was the Expo version. That is probably where I picked up a lifelong travel bug. But the world I encountered on the man-made islands was an artificial paradise.

A very popular pavilion belonged to Czechoslovakia. It featured leading edge multimedia presentations as well as puppet shows. It was a magic place that spoke to us of a magic land. By the following summer, Prague was under Soviet occupation for having tried to cut a hole in the Iron Curtain.

An entire section of the United States pavilion was devoted to the conquest of space. The first walk on the moon would take place two years later. There was no trace of the American civil rights movement.

In the politically correct francophone fashion of the time, my parents took us to France’s pavilion and gave the U.K.’s showcase a wide berth. We had migrated to the cottage by the time French president Charles de Gaulle generated diplomatic havoc by saluting a free Quebec. We all sat around the radio to listen to the live broadcast of his Montreal speech.

Little did most visitors know that the face Canada put forward at Expo was about to be transformed. Trudeaumania was less than a year away from seizing the country. Talks that would lead to the founding of the Parti Québécois were underway.

There are those who pine for the innocence of Canada’s Centennial Year. But it was largely based on ignorance.

If you are reading this column and/or have read me in the Star for the past number of years, know that few could have fathomed my journalistic path at the time of Expo 67 and not just because women did not take up much space in its “Man and his World” thematic environment.

On the day I was offered this column almost two decades ago, I was taken aback by the fact that a non-Quebec media organization like the Star would make a francophone one of its top national politics writers.

It was a few years later that I joined CBC’s nascent At Issue panel in a similar role.

At the time of Expo 67, competing soliloquies passed for a national dialogue. The reporting of Canadian politics took place in language silos. Today those silos are no longer as hermetic. The temptation to pigeonhole voices remains rampant but in an increasingly diverse media coop, it cannot endure.

Breaking down some of those barriers is one of Peter Mansbridge’s main contributions, not so much to broadcasting as to a more authentic national conversation.

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Saturday is Mansbridge’s last broadcast as CBC’s chief correspondent. The next time all hell breaks loose, someone else will walk us through the minefield of breaking news. As my former column-mate the much-missed James Travers would say: Fly straight, Peter . . . .

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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