GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

18. 1961 Couchiching Conference: global warming!

THE WEBSITE OF THE COUCHICHING ('cooch', not 'couch') Institute on Public Affairs boasts that it is "a civil place to disagree". It was that when The Register sent me to cover its 1961 summer conference. I had sampled CIPA style in February, when the three-day winter conference in Toronto discussed "The price of being Canadian" after thoughtful introductory talks by Frank H. Underhill, Douglas V. LePan, and Hugh MacLennan. The week-long 30th summer meeting was held on a wooded peninsula in Ontario's Lake Couchiching, hence CIPA's name.

Both conferences were presented in cooperation with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which gave network coverage to the debates and discussions, and attracted international attention through Radio Canada International. (RCI spoke 14 languages in those days.)

The site -- the YMCA's Geneva Park, a youth camp for a maximum of 250 persons -- made CIPA's summer gatherings such an unique way to spend holidays that world-renowned speakers eagerly accepted invitations. Everyone stayed in spartan single or double rooms with unpainted plywood walls, joined in short rows to fit among old pine trees. Washrooms were shared (but not uni-sex). One rustic lodge held the camp's office, a kitchen and dining room, and another had a large room for plenary sessions, and small lounges.

Land and water sports supplies (rowboats, sailboats, motor boats and water skis, canoes and paddles) were free of charge, but most people faithfully attended sessions because they were too interesting to miss. I wrote nine articles. Speakers provided reporters with full texts, but we had to check against delivery.

The 1961 theme was "Diplomacy in Evolution". The first speaker, about "Change!", was Ritchie Calder, professor of international relations at the University of Edinburgh. The speed of travel is a determining element in diplomacy, he pointed out, "causing great stresses in international affairs because statesmen and politicians, rushing from one crisis conference to another, never have time to make the necessary psychological adjustments. Everything has a crisis-urgency which does not give time to think about the fundamental nature of the crisis itself....

"Science has helped to change the mechanics of diplomacy, but it has even more drastically changed the world with which diplomacy has to deal. The instruments of mass communication -– radio, television, films and the printing press -– have completely altered the approach to people and to problems."

In the U.K. he was Lord Calder but at Couch he asked everyone to call him Ritchie. He reminded us that "the White Man dropped the atom bomb on the Yellow Man — a fact which the White Man can never disavow to the satisfaction of hundreds of millions of colored people -– especially since, in the meantime, whenever we have wanted to test a bigger and more dangerous bomb, it has always seemed to be at the risk of colored peoples: the Americans [test] in the Marshall Islands, the Russians behind the Urals, the British in the South Pacific, and the French in Africa".

Newly independent nations had to cope with the "dangerously intoxicating effect of democratic freedom on people unprepared for it.... People discover that freedom has been robbed of its meaning; that they are just as hungry, or more hungry; just as poor, or more impoverished; just as sick, or more disease-ridden; and just as frustrated in their seeking for a better way of life, and that there are so many things which they never knew they wanted but now know that they need".

Yet "With all our scientific advances, it seems that 'unto them that hath shall be given.' The advanced countries are becoming richer and more prosperous and the underdeveloped countries are becoming poorer.... We are showing people what [riches] they could have if they had the means to get them, but we are not giving them the means. They are just pressing their noses against a plate glass window".