By Conrad Black
Upon the approach of July 1, it is always a temptation to collapse into maudlin platitudes and wave the maple leaf flag around somewhat thoughtlessly.
Regular readers will be aware of my frequent remonstrations about the failure of most Canadians to develop much awareness of our history. This is an abundant country with a neighbour that has not seriously bothered us for over 200 years, and did so at that time only because it had a legitimate grievance against the British but had no other way to take it out on them except to attack us. Because of that, it has been easy to think it has been a simple and uneventful progress through the centuries to our present condition. This severely shortchanges previous generations of Canadians and a sequence of our outstanding statesmen.
The reason that these facts are less well known to Canadians than they should be is a combination of the natural reticence of our nationality and the influence of the unceasing and overwhelming spectacle of vivid personalities and world historic events generated by the great American project adjacent to us.
Starting with Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Americans have had a remarkable gift of showmanship that has never deserted them. Jefferson’s declaration effectively disguised what was essentially a somewhat grubby tax dispute as the sudden emergence of a world nation based on the equality of all men and their inalienable rights to liberty and its benefits. The fact that the author of this declaration was a slaveholder who had seven children with a woman whom he owned was beside the point. The real issue was that largely thanks to the brilliant lobbying of Benjamin Franklin in London, the British agreed to banish the French from what is now Canada, where they were a threat to New England and New York.
In doing this and in other endeavours of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the British more than doubled the national debt and logically concluded that since the Americans were the wealthiest English citizens in the world, and the late war was largely conducted on their behalf, it was fair for the Americans to pay the same taxes as the English to get the debt under control. It was clumsily executed, badly timed, and King George III and his principal advisers were inept. But the American theory of “No taxation without representation” was effectively bunk: If the British had imposed the tax prior to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759), the Americans would have accepted it without a peep.
From that time, all eyes have been on the United States, and the growth and fecundity of that country has no parallel in all the history of the world. Going from several million colonists and their slaves in 1783 to half the entire economic product of a war-ravaged world and an atomic monopoly in 1945, was an astonishing and unique sequence of events.
One of the reasons that Canadians do not grasp the proportions of our national achievement and yet tend to be disgruntled that we are not more widely recognized as an outstanding country and society in the world, is that we do not recognize what an immense achievement it has been to keep pace with the growth of the United States, while avoiding by a combination of luck and national disposition some of the less salutary limitations of that country.
Canada had to be founded by the French, or it would, from its beginnings, have been administratively assimilated into the American colonies. Because the effective strategic division in Europe for several centuries was that the French had the greatest army and the British the greatest navy, in overseas activities the British essentially took what they wanted and the French were confined to the British leavings. So Canada was bound to become English, but this had to occur quite close to the point at which the Americans ceased to be English—otherwise, again, Canada would have been assimilated into the United States.
In 1760, there were approximately 3 million Americans and about 90,000 Canadians. Between the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of World War I in 1914, the U.S. population almost tripled from 31 million to 91 million and it began to operate economically on a scale that the world had never imagined to be possible. At the same time, Canada’s population grew from just over 3 million to about 7.5 million, and today there are around 41 million Canadians and 330 million Americans, reflecting a slightly narrowing ratio with an English-speaking neighbour. Canada has more people than France had at any time prior to 1950. These are not the sort of facts that lead to gifts of the Statue of Liberty or monuments such as those in Washington to that nation’s greatest presidents, but it is a great achievement; survival could not be taken for granted—not because America was imperialist, but because it is magnetic.
Although Canada was originally a group of jurisdictions scattered across the northern border of the United States, we have enjoyed growth entirely proportionately equivalent to the greatest and most rapid progress that any people on earth have ever attained. And at times when our dollar is not unduly devalued against the U.S. currency, our standard of living has approximately kept pace with theirs until recently. I’ll spare readers partisan comments on why our recent economic growth has been inadequate, but my faith is undimmed that this is a temporary state of affairs.
We may also recall that as our present political institutions were created in 1867, they are the oldest of any country in the world with a population of over 20 million, except the United Kingdom and the United States. The UK lost the province of Ireland a century ago, and as Canada confederated, the United States was just concluding a horrible civil war with casualties which, if replicated in Canada today, would mean the death of more than 1 million people.
We had the comparative advantage that slavery was never economically justifiable in this country, since the purpose of it was to take advantage of the greater ability of Africans to harvest tropical crops like cotton or tobacco. We have not had to deal with the terrible legacy of slavery. And we have never engaged in an unjust war. We have never sought anything in war except advancement of the cause of human freedom, and almost our entire participation in the world wars was voluntary. Canada itself was never under threat.
It is not too late to take advantage of the fact that we have two of the leading civilizations in the world as our official languages, and we are only beginning to make the most out of the fact that Canadians are probably more welcoming to immigrants of any nationality and our citizenship is now very widely derived. For reasons that need not be laboured here, Canada has been a somewhat underachieving country recently. But all countries are like that at times and there is no reason to believe that we will not snap out of it soon. It is a matter of government, and in democracies people get the governments they deserve.
On this Confederation Day, we may take some comfort from the fact that on balance we deserve reasonably good government, and if we receive it, we will continue to have a great deal to celebrate in this country. Happy July 1 to everyone.
First published in the Epoch Times
