Some things about the 1960s sound a lot like now. The similarities include disagreements between Ottawa and Washington over warfare and other military matters, plus such lesser items as crime, punishment and marijuana. The differences pitted the principles of the self-avowed Canadian "peaceable kingdom" against the self-certainties of the American superpower. The fallout typically affected the more timorous corners of the Canadian business community — increasingly dependent as was Canada's economy on cross-border commerce — with fears of becoming collateral damage. Comparable complaints afflicted like-minded politicians — or do nowadays, if not in the '60s, when bilateral transactions actually grew ever more bountiful amid exchanges of bickering, snubs and insults.

To weigh the likenesses of today with the 1960s, take the weekend peace marches against US-led war waged without UN sanction — the Vietnam War from the middle '60s, the invasion of Iraq in March. Note the marchers in the recent demos bearing the blue-on-white "Voice of Women" banner. It is a group descended from a vanguard of Canadian antiwar campaigns four decades ago. From its founding in 1960, the VOW has crusaded against war: what members like to call "the tyranny of man's oldest profession."

Take also the destructive national debate of the early 1960s over Washington's proposals that Canada should join in a US missile defence system for the whole continent. That system compares in notion to President George W. Bush's current scheme, which is known to critics as Star Wars, and has potential to infect space with nuclear weapons, thereby violating a 1963 treaty that outlaws such behavior.

The first time around, basing American Bomarc missiles with nuclear warheads in North Bay, Ont., and La Macaza, Que., ran into opposition from Prime Minister John Diefenbaker himself and objections from many other Canadians, including the Voice of Women. You almost need a program to follow the Bomarc's fallout. In the end, during 1963, Diefenbaker's minority Tory government went down to defeat in Parliament over the issue. The Voice of Women lost a prominent member, Maryon Pearson, who resigned from the group when her husband, Liberal Party Leader Lester B. (Mike) Pearson, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize six years earlier, espoused the Bomarc project, supplanted Diefenbaker as prime minister, then gave the green light to the Bomarcs for what proved to be a useless nine-year existence. Observing the Bomarc fuss firsthand in Ottawa after the April general election in 1963: rookie MP Jean Chrétien, the man at centre stage for the encore 40 years later.

On top of the Bomarc brouhaha, there was criticism of the Vietnam war. That prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson's infamous "You pissed on my rug" snarl at Pearson after the Canadian prime minister, in a Philadelphia speech, dumped on US involvement in Vietnam. Several other friction points included sharply contrasting attitudes to Fidel Castro's Cuba. As Pierre Trudeau summed up in a 1969 Washington speech: "Living next to you is like sleeping with an elephant; no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."






Still, by the end of the '60s, business had no serious beefs. On the contrary, a Diefenbaker proposal to shift the source of 15% of its imports away from the US to the UK got nowhere slowly. And in the year of the personal LBJ-LBP dispute, the two men signed what proved to be a rewarding economic stimulant for Canada, the 1965 Auto Pact, a continental sharing of motor vehicle output.

All the high-stakes drama in cross-border commercial and political activity was only part of the '60s story. There was a lot of offbeat stuff going on — reformist campus fury and pacifist flower power; Rachel Carson's environmental alert, Silent Spring, and Marshall McLuhan talking global village long before the global economy took shape. In April 1968, Pierre Trudeau became the first prime minister of Canada born in the 20th century. Premier Jean Lesage's Quiet Revolution in Quebec soon turned noisy with mailbox bombs. There were communes, the miniskirt, the birth-control pill, charge cards, the hippies, the Beatles, the pot-fueled fun — all the action that defined the '60s at home and abroad.

And, oh yes, the marijuana issue, now back to bother just-say-no Washington as Ottawa talks of decriminalizing personal possession. Some people recall the police in Ottawa during the 1960s effectively decriminalizing weed by simply ignoring its personal use only paces from Parliament Hill — or actually on it.