Interesting Opinion

Harper the warmonger needs to study Canada's history: There is also a political story here that preceded the work of the Fathers of Confederation. In the 1840s, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, representing Upper and Lower Canada, English and French, worked together and achieved responsible government and a bicultural nation. They did much to prepare the way for confederation 25 years later.

 And as John Ralston Saul reminds us, there was a third party in the bui...lding of Canada – the aboriginal nations. Without their help, as he shows, especially at the very beginning and during the fur trade, the rest of us could not have done it. We have been very slow to recognize the wealth of their contribution to Canadian nation-building.

 Finally, it is surely important not to forget the settlers and their descendants who, from their first arrival in 1608 to the present, have done virtually all of the work to make Canada a nation.

http://ww1.canada.com/after-the-war/opinion-battlefields-didnt-forge-identity

Opinion: Battlefields didn’t forge Canada’s identity

The national government is spending enormous sums of our tax dollars to din into our minds the shibboleth that Canada became a nation on the battlefields of Europe – a claim that has now been confirmed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself.

Have those who promote this view thought about what they are claiming? Do we ever hear such claims coming from the United Kingdom, France, Germany or the United States? Do Canadian politicians – and I am embarrassed to say, some historians – say this because in order to become a nation there first has to be a human bloodbath?

Unfortunately, lethal conflict characterized the histories of all these countries. And since Canada has not had a civil war worth mentioning (pace 1837), do we need to grasp at the international bloodletting of the world wars as our birth conflict? Reflect, please, upon the following:
Did Canadian soldiers at Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Dieppe or D-Day go into battle with the conviction that they were finally making Canada into a nation? Is there any evidence for this sentiment in all the surviving letters and postcards penned by Canadian soldiers in the trenches or in the air or on the sea?

Did Canadian families who sent their sons to France, Italy, North Africa and Hong Kong do so in the conviction that Canada was only a colony and that their sons, by participating in these wars, would finally change Canada’s status into a nation?

And if, indeed, the Canadian engagement in the First World War turned the country from a colony into a nation because its soldiers went into action as Canadians and not simply as subjects of the Empire, what was Canada before 1915? Does 1867 count for nothing? What did the Fathers of Confederation think they were doing at Charlottetown?