Article content

Both Canada and the United States are, in different ways, enduring an assault on their national legitimacy from within. The incessant agitation by the Canadian native community, now focused on, in Stalinist terms, the repression of John A. Macdonald, is essentially an attempt to delegitimize the entire settlement and political organization of this country by those who arrived here starting in the 16th century. As I have written many times before, the natives arrived here approximately 20,000 or more years before the Europeans did, but their civilization in the 16th century was at least 5,000 years behind that of Europe by any reasonable measurement of the maturity of a culture or economy of a society. And the natives were not sufficiently numerous or attached to durable places of residence to be said to occupy the territory of what is now Canada.

The arrival of the Europeans was more legitimate than the arrival of the Frankish and Teutonic and other tribes and peoples were in Central and Western Europe at the end of the Roman Empire. But the Europeans who came to the New World, whatever their behavioural shortcomings, were gentler and more tolerant of the natives than were the Huns, Vandals, Saracens and others who flooded into Western Europe and killed, enslaved, absorbed or assimilated most of the peoples that had preceded them there. There is not, even in the most eccentric circles, an agitation today for the restoration of the rights of Picts or Etruscans, nor any suggestion that they wish to live as they did 2,000 years ago.