On This Day in 1867 Canada was Born
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Blackadder1916
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Born? Not quite. Not even the day it was conceived; that happened months and years previously. Not even the day of a positive pregnancy test. Maybe compare it to the date that one makes a public announcement of an impending birth. So, in other words, not a date that is actually remembered or commemorated. Canada considers 1 July our birthday. And even the celebration of that event has been uneven over the years, especially for "later" Canadians (like myself) whose separate country (Newfoundland) joined with Canada much later. The event we remembered on July 1 (at least when I was growing up) was not the birth of a country but the loss of many sons in war.
As for March 29 being a date of note, it was also the day (in 1982) that the Queen (a different one than who signed the BNA) gave royal assent to the Canada Act 1982, the UK legislation that "patriated" our constitution, however it wasn't until 17 April that the Canadian Constitution Act, 1982 was proclaimed by HM while she was in Ottawa.
daftandbarmy
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There are those in the USA who continue to muse about the possibility that they, too, might have been part of Canada:
We Could Have Been Canada
Was the American Revolution such a good idea?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canada
And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America—what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior—less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.
The thought is taboo, the Revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda. One can grasp the scale and strangeness of this sanctity only by leaving America for a country with a different attitude toward its past and its founding. As it happened, my own childhood was neatly divided between what I learned to call “the States” and Canada. In my Philadelphia grade school, we paraded with flags, singing “The Marines’ Hymn” and “Here Comes the Flag!” (“Fathers shall bless it / Children caress it / All shall maintain it / No one shall stain it.”) We were taught that the brave Americans hid behind trees to fight the redcoats—though why this made them brave was left unexplained. In Canada, ninth grade disclosed a history of uneasy compromise duality, and the constant search for temporary nonviolent solutions to intractable divides. The world wars, in which Canadians had played a large part, passed by mostly in solemn sadness. (That the Canadians had marched beyond their beach on D Day with aplomb while the Americans struggled on Omaha was never boasted about.) Patriotic pageantry arose only from actual accomplishments: when Team Canada won its eight-game series against the Russians, in 1972, the entire nation sang “O Canada”—but they sang it as a hockey anthem as much as a nationalist hymn.
We Could Have Been Canada
Was the American Revolution such a good idea?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canada
And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America—what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior—less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.
The thought is taboo, the Revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda. One can grasp the scale and strangeness of this sanctity only by leaving America for a country with a different attitude toward its past and its founding. As it happened, my own childhood was neatly divided between what I learned to call “the States” and Canada. In my Philadelphia grade school, we paraded with flags, singing “The Marines’ Hymn” and “Here Comes the Flag!” (“Fathers shall bless it / Children caress it / All shall maintain it / No one shall stain it.”) We were taught that the brave Americans hid behind trees to fight the redcoats—though why this made them brave was left unexplained. In Canada, ninth grade disclosed a history of uneasy compromise duality, and the constant search for temporary nonviolent solutions to intractable divides. The world wars, in which Canadians had played a large part, passed by mostly in solemn sadness. (That the Canadians had marched beyond their beach on D Day with aplomb while the Americans struggled on Omaha was never boasted about.) Patriotic pageantry arose only from actual accomplishments: when Team Canada won its eight-game series against the Russians, in 1972, the entire nation sang “O Canada”—but they sang it as a hockey anthem as much as a nationalist hymn.
FJAG
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And don't forget the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which set the limit of western expansion of the 13 colonies and reserved the territory to the west of the Appalachian mountains essentially as an Indian reserve. That greatly p****d off many colonists who saw it as their God given right to expand west and take whatever they wanted. The intent behind this was the stopping of the French and Indian Wars that had pretty much consumed the west during the Seven Years War that had ended in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris.
That, of course, blew up all over again in 1774 with the Quebec Act which in effect gave much of that territory (including parts of southern Ontario, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota) to be part of the province of Quebec.
The Quebec Act became one of the "Intolerable Acts" and not only angered the American Patriots in the thirteen colonies but also English Loyalists there and English Canadians living in both Upper and Lower Canada.
The Paris Treaty ended up giving the colonies all land south of Quebec, north of Florida and east of the Mississippi, notwithstanding which, the treacherous buggers attacked Canada in 1812 (some piffle about sailors at sea) which much to their surprise didn't work out so well. ;D
:cheers:
That, of course, blew up all over again in 1774 with the Quebec Act which in effect gave much of that territory (including parts of southern Ontario, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota) to be part of the province of Quebec.
The Quebec Act became one of the "Intolerable Acts" and not only angered the American Patriots in the thirteen colonies but also English Loyalists there and English Canadians living in both Upper and Lower Canada.
The Paris Treaty ended up giving the colonies all land south of Quebec, north of Florida and east of the Mississippi, notwithstanding which, the treacherous buggers attacked Canada in 1812 (some piffle about sailors at sea) which much to their surprise didn't work out so well. ;D
:cheers:
