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Without something like this, and although predictions are hazardous more than three months before an election, there is a chance that the most conservative federal government since R.B. Bennett or even Robert Borden could bring on some sort of unpromising confection largely composed of the NDP. Even I would regard that as a stricture more severe than Harper, much less Canada, deserves.

As this is being published on the national holiday of the United States, I offer my traditional greetings to that country, which I know well, from its highest to lowest echelons (i.e. from the White House to the prisons). Americans are right to celebrate their great country, that has until recently enjoyed a rise among nations without the slightest parallel in the history of the world. The achievement of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington in persuading the British to evict France from Canada, and then France to assist them in evicting Britain from America, was an astonishing tour de force, as was Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine’s achievement in selling a grubby little tax war as the dawn of human liberty.

Americans had no more rights after their Revolution than before, other than a government in their own country, and no more than citizens of Britain and a number of other European countries already had. If the Americans had just remained within the British Empire, they would have been running it in one long life-time, would have ruled the world less than a century after Yorktown, would have made short work of any Confederate insurrection, and would have avoided the World Wars. (Not even Germany’s hyperactive Kaiser would have gone to war simultaneously against Britain, France, Russia, and the U.S.) The Declaration of Independence, 239 years ago, defamed poor old George III and even accused him of trying to impose French civil law on Americans.

But the great American mythos is no less reverently touted for being largely a fiction, and Americans are still right to celebrate the birth of so important and successful a country. It is not the America I once knew and admired, and to which the world owes the success of democracy and the free market, but I wish it well.

National Post