The Story of Canada's Rise to Greatness

The tortuous history of Canada has been that it had to start as a French country or it would have been subsumed into the British colonies to the South, and it had to become British-ruled once New France was self-sufficient, because France could not maintain it in the face of British naval superiority. The British American colonies had to cease to be British, driving British loyalists into Canada, to give the British an incentive to protect the British and French Canadians from the Americans. The French and English Canadians had to work it out between themselves so they could jointly winkle self-government from Britain while retaining British protection from the Americans. And even after the First World War, where Canada’s performance was sufficiently significant that the British and the Americans had to accept Canadian independence as a substantial country, British colonial attitudes perished slowly.