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But this atonal passage to the sub-continent highlights the negative contribution this government is making to Canada’s identity problem. Let us not deceive ourselves that there is such a problem. Canadians have always felt an irritation and a vulnerability that the country has an indistinct personality. This was more tolerable when it was a dominion. Canada was symbolic with ample geography, wealth, healthfulness and the virtues as well as the rigours of the north, and was an unexceptionable country in its political conduct, well-known for its civility and respected for its fidelity to alliances and its brave and disinterested contributions to just wars. In my lifetime it has emerged as a major nationality. The number of independent countries has tripled, but only a few of them, such as India, Israel, and Poland (benefitting from Moscow’s compliance with its Yalta pledges to liberate that country, 46 years late) have instantly become important countries.

When I was young, whole movie theatres would burst into applause when it was announced on the newsreel (we had them still) that Canada had won a bronze medal at the Olympic games. Canadians were delighted at the recognition the country received even from ex-pats, such as “America’s sweetheart” Mary Pickford, Bonanza’s Lorne Greene, and British publisher Lord Beaverbrook. For the longest time, the national attainments were derivative. Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to the UN, gave Lester Pearson the improvised peacekeeping formula to settle the Suez Crisis, because, he said, if the U.S. proposed it, the U.S.S.R. would veto it. It worked, Pearson won the Nobel Prize, the Liberal leadership, and Canada embraced the myth that it had a national vocation for peacekeeping.