Canada, vacations unlimited: The Canadian government tourism industry, 1934--1959

The Canada depicted by the Canadian tourism industry is a testament to a specific period in the history of Canadian nation building. The year 1934 marked a turning point in the national tourism industry, when tourism promotion was centralised for the first time under the administration of a new federal government body—the Canadian Travel Bureau. The move to national consolidation in the industry was the result of the convergence of a number of domestic and international factors. In Canada, calls for federal intervention and assistance in an ailing tourism industry culminated in the 1934 Senate Committee on Tourist Traffic. At the same time, other western nation states increasingly sought control of their tourism industries in an effort to both rationalise and more effectively figure tourism into state administration of the economy. Combined with these state-driven imperatives was an overall expansion of citizen participation in consumer culture that saw the emergence of mass tourism as a phenomenon of mass culture. The result was a national tourism industry characterised by an intensified relationship between consumer culture and state-driven interventions in both the economic and cultural life of the nation.; From its creation in 1935 through to the end of the 1950s, the Canadian Travel Bureau enjoyed a period of steady growth. The history of the organisation in this period marks it as a fitting symbol of the mutually reinforcing relationship that emerged between the state and consumer culture. An agent of commercial nationalism, the CTB and its network of mutual interest helped transform the national tourism industry into a characteristic of mid-century nation building and helped shape the physical infrastructure of the nation. From a central government perspective, tourism made an important contribution to both GNP and the balance of payments. But national government involvement in the tourism industry also influenced the images and cultural practices of Canada through popular consumer culture. Films, television, mass advertising, and marketing campaigns formed relationships that both citizens and tourists experienced with the Canada presented for tourism.; This study examines the creation of both the administrative practices and categories of the Canadian Travel Bureau, and the many promotional materials it produced to sell its tourism product. The overtly state-driven nation building that shaped the activities of tourism development came to fruition in a political-economic climate that deliberately fostered such government intervention. The iconographic representations of Canada that the government produced to support this popular industry are read in the light of this historically specific political-economic context. The administrative and visual language created to describe the country in this mid-century period of Canadian history remains embedded in contemporary practice but owes its character to the period, explored here, in which it originated.