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day Canadians were virtually foreigners; there was rather less sympathy and
community of interest between them than there is now between Canadians
and Australians.
But they did have one thing in common—a dream. There were a few men
in each of these poor and primitive and widely separated communities who
could and did look forward to a time when one station would reach from sea
to sea in this land. They looked at what we had in common—loyalty to one
Crown, affiliation to the same two European languages and cultures. They
felt intuitively that we could and should get together, and we did.
It wasn’t all idealism, of course. Goldwin Smith once said that the real
father of Confederation was deadlock, and he was right—up to a point. The
united Province of Canada, now Ontario and Quebec, had been trying for 27
years to run its affairs and had failed. No election ever broke the deadlock
between English Ontario and French Quebec. Neither side would consent to
a change of system that would break that deadlock by giving the other side
a permanent majority. It could only be broken by someone else coming in
from outside.
Another element was fear—fear of the United States, and the mutual
determination not to be swallowed up by the United States. There’s a remark-
able letter from John A. MacDonald to a friend in India, written just before
‘he sailed from England with the British North America Act in his pocket:
“A brilliant future would certainly await us”, he said, "were it not for those
wretched Yankees, who hunger and thirst for Naboth’s field. War will come
some day between England and the United States, and India could do us
yeoman service by sending an army of Sikhs, Ghurkas, Beloochies, etc., across
the Pacific and holding that beautiful and unusual city and the surrounding
California as security for Montreal and Canada.”’
These neurotic compulsions, as well as the vision of a great country, drew
us together 83 years ago. There were other elements, some of them equally
neurotic, that tended to keep us apart—and there has been plenty in the short
history of Canada to keep those divisive elements alive. The English-speaking
majority had the blind folly to insist, in 1900, that Canada take part in the
South African war; French-Canadians could hardly be expected to believe,
after that, that English-Canadians were fighting for Canada’s interest in
two world wars.
We’re still a long way from full organic unity. Between the Federal and
Provincial Governments, conference after conference has been held to seek a
method of amending our own constitution. All have broken down except the
one held last January, and even that has not yet succeeded—the most we can
say is that it has not yet failed. Provinces are still so jealous of their rights,
so distrustful of the central power, that any tampering with the B.N.A. Act
is extraordinarily difficult.
Canadians often get discouraged at this; perhaps if we read our own history
oftener, we wouldn’t. However imperfectly, we have built a nation here out
of very scattered, very different communities; however slowly, we are welding
that nation into the unity of mature strength.
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