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I am apparently one of those “old Canadians” who recall 1967 with “misty-eyed nostalgia,” (though I believe I am about the same vintage as Ms. Gray). In fact, I recall the summer of 1967 with delight, as a rural Quebec newspaper editor and probably the most junior person in the extensive entourage of the premier of Quebec, the distinguished and elegant Daniel Johnson (pere), and I spent much of the summer making respectful advances on the delightful World’s Fair (Expo 67) pavilion hostesses of many countries and fetching drinks for my employer (and myself) at the bar of the Quebec pavilion. It wasn’t a celebration of the fact that the country had survived, so much as that world history’s only transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation, a completely original Canadian concept, had brought the country to some comparative prominence in the world. It wasn’t all “boosterism” as Ms. Gray cites an Ottawa museum director as asserting. There is that element in all national celebrations, including the audience singing Rule Britannia at the last night of the proms in Royal Albert Hall, or Kenneth Branagh touting Britain’s unsatisfactory National Health Service (while dressed up as Isambard Kingdom Brunel) at the opening of the London Olympics in 2012, or the Bastille Day parade on the Champs Elysées, or almost anything conducted anywhere by Americans on the 4th of July.

Photo by National Archives of Canada

The photographs that accompanied Ms. Gray’s story highlighted what was the most significant event in that year for Canada: the invitation by the French president, General Charles de Gaulle, reckoned by the French their greatest countryman since Napoleon, and at the time rivalled only by Chairman Mao Tse-tung as the most eminent statesman in the world, to Quebec to secede, although the general was in Canada as a state visitor to celebrate the centenary of Canada. It was an outrage, and I was standing only a few metres from de Gaulle when he said it. More irritating than the ending touch, “Vive le Québec Libre,” (the slogan of the separatists), was his comment earlier in his address from the balcony of Montreal City Hall that the ambiance he had encountered that day as he came in an open car with M. Johnson from Quebec City along the North shore of the St. Lawrence, “reminded me of the Liberation.” I had been a Gaullist ever since I read an interview he gave my subsequent friend Malcolm Muggeridge (whom I’m sure Ms. Gray remembers with misty eyes), in 1954, when he had only a few supporters in the National Assembly. He said that undoubtedly France would ask him to take the reins of the country within a few years, as did occur when the Fourth Republic floundered to an end as de Gaulle had predicted.