1- The end of English Canada

How is Canada distinct? How does this country's existence make a difference in the world? The problem with this fundamental question (really a new version of the old search for the Canadian identity) is that Canada and visions of Canada have been changing constantly. The country has evolved from the still very British nation that influenced my generation, through dalliances with northern, socialist and bicultural identities, to emerge as the multicultural hotel in the American suburbs that we are today. While this has been a coherent, probably inevitable and not necessarily unwelcome development, it may not leave us with a particularly coherent, distinct, or important country. One wonders if the next generation of Canadians will debate the possibility of moving on to create a greater North America.

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Here is a measure of how much we have changed: At the beginning of the 21st century we can no longer take it for granted that Canadians under 40 even remember the British connection.

But of course England gave birth to the old Dominion of Canada. Before Confederation the provinces were known as British North America. Canada became independent from Britain only in 1931. Well into the 1960s, the British influence, which today lingers only in the oddity of the monarchy, gave Canada much of its un-American character. The country's political institutions, its economic orientation, its flow of immigrants and its dominant culture were all shaped by the Mother Country.

The Thirteen Colonies had exited the British Empire in violent revolution, and had developed distinctive political and social institutions, leading the world in the evolution of democracy and individual liberties.

Canada stayed British. Its aboriginal peoples were marginalized early in its history, its original French settlers seemed content with the survival of their language and their church. Immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland were like Americans in being restlessly determined to better themselves in the new world, but it was to be a better life in the framework of Britishness and the Empire. "Such fine specimens of men" a relative wrote of the high-achieving sons of an immigrant Anglican clergyman, Featherstone Osler, about the time of confederation. "They are English gentlemen with American energy." Explaining his resistance to free trade with the United States, our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, talked of his determination to live and die as "a British subject."

By the mid-20th century Canada had most of the trappings of nationhood. We were Canadian citizens, formally independent, a middle power with significant military and economic clout, literally sending CARE packages home to the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, from the CBC to Stratford, from the mores of the Masseys to our veneration of the Mounties, we prided ourselves on our conservative, old world values: high culture, law and order, respect for tradition. We studied British history in our schools and stood to attention to ask God to save King George VI and then his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. Our brightest students won Commonwealth or Rhodes scholarships to study at Oxford and Cambridge. Our welfare state, including our approach to health care, was modelled mostly on the Mother Country.

Canada kept in touch with its old world roots. That largely explains our being involved from the very beginning of the 20th century's two World Wars. Such a contrast to the isolationist, parochial United States, which sat on the sidelines at the start of both conflicts while Canada sent great armies over to Europe. The British country of Canada fought long and well in the century's wars for democracy, coming of age in battle. In the heady boom years of the 1940s and 1950s Canadian politicians and diplomats saw the country as a crucial arbiter between the United Kingdom and the United States. Canada's future might be as the essential link, the hypotenuse, in the great North Atlantic triangle.

In those years it seemed important to the world that there should be a rich and powerful North American nation relatively untouched by the hang-ups and excesses of the United States. The Canadians could be honest go-betweens, brokers of such deals as the one that defused the Suez crisis of 1956 and won the Nobel Peace Prize for Lester Pearson. Canadian diplomats were important players, abroad and at home. The unilingual, Oxford-educated Pearson parlayed his career in the old Department of External Affairs all the way to the prime ministership.

He turned out to be the last prime minister of British Canada. During the Pearson years in the 1960s, Canada had begun to shrink in importance on the world stage, its cultural and economic axes were shifting inexorably from a trans-Atlantic to a continental orientation, and ethnic groups whose native language was not English were clamouring for meaningful legitimacy. The British Empire had disappeared; Britain itself seemed headed for absorption in the new Europe. The American superpower paid little attention to Pearson or any other Canadian. The hypotenuse could not hold. The supposed North Atlantic "triangle" was little more than a widening circle, centred on Washington.

Even as the Pearson Liberals gave Canada more trappings of independence, such as the maple leaf flag and the end of "Dominion" status, they found they had lost control of the possibility of shaping a distinctive national purpose or identity. Canada was changing in ways that most of its founding fathers, from Macdonald through Mackenzie King and Lester Pearson, had never envisaged. British Canada, the Anglo-American middle power of the North Atlantic that aspired to blend Britannic culture with American energy, was passing into history.

Michael Bliss is an author and a professor of history at the University of Toronto. His books include Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney.; Tomorrow: Three different visions of Canadian distinctiveness.