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It is easy to assume … it was easy to build Canada. But it was very difficult

It is easy to assume that with half of a rich continent, and a neighbour which, whatever abrasions may occur, has been comparatively peaceable and a receptive and immense market, it was easy to build Canada. But it was very difficult. Baldwin and LaFontaine and Macdonald and Cartier had to agitate enough to gain British assent to Canada’s independence, but not to so irritate the British that they traded their interest in Canada to the United States for other consideration. It would not have been an unendurable fate to join the United States, but it would have been the end of Quebec’s French identity and there would be no election campaigns based as this past one was on the ineffable superiority of Canadian life and institutions.

No other substantial country in the world has had anything like the continuity provided to this country by Macdonald, Laurier and Mackenzie King. These three men were either the co-premier of the so-called United Province of Canada (Ontario and Quebec), prime minister of Canada, or leader of the opposition, from 1856 to 1948. One or other was the effective head of the government of Canada for a total of 65 of those years, in which time Canada progressed from a string of communities along the northern border of the United States, with little lateral relationship between themselves, to a co-founder of the United Nations and the Western Alliance and twice-victorious Allied power in the world wars. Macdonald led the Conservative party for 35 years and Laurier (1887 to 1919) and King (1919 to 1948) led the Liberal party for a combined 61 years. No one who studies it can be unaware of what feats of perseverance, imagination and diligence were required by those three men and many others to emancipate Canada from the British without succumbing to the benign embrace of the Americans, while retaining the goodwill of both and transforming Canada into an important and internationally respected country of nearly 40 million people.