Last summer I spent the first day of July in the leafy town of Stratford, watching boats drift down the gentle river Avon. But Shakespeare never walked these streets, nor did he, as a child, absent-mindedly cast pebbles into the water. Just the night before — and barely 50 miles away — I had wandered through a still woodland lit by blinking fireflies and, in the near distance, a coyote had howled up at the bright and swollen moon.
I was not in the Old World, but the New. The red-brick township of Stratford, Ontario.
Sitting by the river under the dappled shade of some willows, the clattering together of the many contradictions around me was almost audible. A tall yellow school bus rolled by — as if off a film set — panelled in riveted metal and weirdly reminiscent of a military vehicle. Its pistons hissed as it came to a halt. What was this alien place that masqueraded beneath the names and associations of my home? A land far-off, across the sea.
Stratford is but one example encapsulating the peculiar blend of the ancient and the novel that makes North America unique. There is no ancient rootedness — no quirks of landscape and structure and boundary, the origins of which are long since lost to memory. The birth of the country is a relatively recent affair, and its streets and buildings carefully planned.
For a British person, Canada is even more uncanny — where the United States is, in many ways, a direct challenge to and repudiation of the traditions of the nation that spawned it, the great frozen kingdom to the north retains, dotted about, many of the sights, sounds, and habits of home. Driving along the rather erratic highways of southern Ontario — as one passes by London and Windsor, Pickering, Whitby, and Scarborough — the route numbers are each emblazoned within a shield shaped after the Crown of St Edward.
The hints are so subtle they almost escape notice. But just as it is the small differences that can make a place seem utterly alien, so the near-imperceptible similarities can equally serve to soften a feeling of foreign-ness. I did not quite feel at home, but I was comfortable. The sense of being “abroad” was far less than I have experienced in the near Continent — say, France, or Belgium — just a few hundred miles away. Canada was not a stranger, she was family.
The Crown pops up a lot — sometimes unexpectedly — and was, for me, always soothing: on buildings, in documents, on logos, in placenames. Just as one would begin to grasp the distance, a feeling of Europe being left far behind and of drifting off into endless plains and prairies, it would reappear — a thread that connected this distant outpost to its far away ancestor; cues that hinted at a shared heritage stretching beyond the history of Canada itself, across thousands of miles and years. It was as though an umbrella of tradition and convention — stability, perhaps — had extended across all that distance, and all that time, to cover this new land.
But some things are certainly not the same. In front of us, as we sat overlooking the Avon, perhaps fifteen yards from the shore, a small barge draped in bunting drifted down the river. On it, two old men—one perched at a keyboard, the other attempting to both steer the boat and play an accordion—precariously sang “Tiny Bubbles” in duet. Try as I might I cannot imagine this spectacle on the Trent or the Water of Leith. Not without the local youths pelting stones from the nearby bushes. We have our own absurdities, it is true, but in many ways North America preserves an innocent quaintness that we have lost. It was almost sad that the spectacle amused me.
On the Monday of our visit, even though Stratford baked under the midsummer heat, the streets and parks were full by midday. Canadians suffer from a more American attitude to work, while we have drifted towards the more sensibly relaxed, European outlook. A meagre fifteen days annual leave is very typical for the average Canadian worker — and less is not unusual.
But today was the finale of a long weekend. Flags hung cheerfully from the streets and shops; families wore red and white and picnicked at benches or on the cool grass.
It was Canada Day on the 1st of July.
American cultural imperialism ensures we have all heard of the “Fourth of July” — for some reason, the only occasion they can say the date correctly. But how many, outside of Canada, know of the national holiday of a country whose history has for far longer, and far more deeply, been intertwined with our own?
American progressives who despair at the endless Trump soap opera will often wistfully eye their liberal northern neighbour and imagine what the United States might have been, had history gone another way. Beyond the fleeting political fashions of the moment, there is a deep truth to this. Laid side by side, the two English-speaking North American nations are like historical counterfactuals, with their shared origins in the British Isles and the radical, permanent break from one another in 1776. To the south, forged in revolutionary fervour, the United States is the archetypical — and most successful — product of Enlightenment reason enshrined as the basis of government. The American founders sought to rationally systematise the liberties they claimed by natural right as Englishmen, but in so doing rejected the historical framework and traditional structures that gave those liberties life.
Canada’s history is quite different. It is neither as glamorous nor as exciting as the struggle of a small band of plucky but united rebels against a sprawling global empire (never mind the loyalists, for now). And yet, Canada’s slow, steady, peaceful march towards responsible government and independent nationhood is all the more remarkable for being so unusual in the long, erratic, violent history of the world. It is a juxtaposition that finds its physical embodiment in the gothic parliament of Ottawa and the neoclassic rotundas of Washington.
Canada’s is a legacy not of violent upheaval, but of political evolution.
The pragmatic rather than ideological trajectory of what was known as British North America was set from the start. Ironically, this approach accounts for the enduring survival of many of the quirks that today make it unique. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, for example, and the conquest of New France, British colonial administrators were deeply suspicious of the Catholicism of the King’s new subjects, but were content to compromise with the Francophone population to maintain an easy peace. With the Act of Union of 1707 as a precedent — which created Great Britain and yet had preserved cultural and legal distinction between England and Scotland — the Quebec Act of 1774 grudgingly maintained many of the facets of French-Canadian identity, such as a separate system of civil law.
The Act was deeply unpopular with the largely protestant Thirteen Colonies, who saw it as pro-Catholic and designed to prevent their westward expansion. Layering irony upon irony, the concessions made to the French-speaking population may have worked to ensure, rather than undermine, the loyalty of large swathes of British North America. At the outbreak of the American War of Independence, the relatively tolerant Anglophone government seemed preferable to embittered Quebecers, rather than throwing their lot in with unpredictable New England revolutionaries, or even the absolutist French mother country which was soon to join the fight.
The fate of British North America would be key in shaping London’s philosophy of Empire, and particularly the attitude of the metropole to the settler colonies. After a series of rebellions in Canada in 1837 and 1838, a concerned Parliament dispatched the Earl of Durham to investigate the causes and make recommendations as to how future strife could be avoided — his report would become a founding pillar of all subsequent British imperial policy.
He argued powerfully — and convincingly — that the only way to maintain the loyalty of the colonies was to replicate the traditional Westminster style of government at a local level, and render power accountable to the population.
“It needs no change in the principles of government,” he wrote, in his Report of 1839, “no invention of a new constitutional theory, to supply the remedy which would, in my opinion, completely remove the existing political disorders. It needs but to follow out consistently the principles of the British constitution, and introduce into the government of these great colonies those wise provisions, by which alone the working of the representative system can in any country be rendered harmonious and efficient.”
Change, he asserted, was imperative — but categorically not radical change. British subjects required a British system of government: a Parliament, but set in the wild forests and plains of the New World. Popular representation, tempered by monarchy and an appointed upper house. Accountable administration, but not slavish adherence to the popular will. Responsible government.
And, somewhat counter-intuitively, to hand the colonists more autonomy would strengthen their loyalty to the Crown, not diminish it. The developed cultural sense of consensual rule through the apparatus of Parliament was a core part of their British identity. One could not expect them to remain British, yet be deprived of a sizeable chunk of what they felt that identity to mean:
“The British people of the North American colonies… value the institutions of their country, not merely from a sense of the practical advantages which they confer, but from sentiments of national pride; and they uphold them the more because they are accustomed to view them as marks of nationality, which distinguish them from their republican neighbours.”
With respect to ongoing rifts between the English and French populations, Lord Durham despaired of “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state”. Although his recommendations for colonial self-governance were embraced, the Report’s more aggressive calls to systematically “obliterate” the French-Canadian identity — however sympathetically they might be viewed — were quietly allowed to slide. Too difficult. Too unpopular. Power was instead shared with the Francophone population in a manner that would set the tone for the hushed and often hypocritical pragmatism of British imperial policy for the rest of the nineteenth century.
Impassioned ideology was for the Continentals. The nation of shopkeepers would do business with anyone.
Some thirty years after Durham’s Report, and after many months of negotiations, the various separate self-governing provinces of America that remained loyal to the Crown — then, Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick — finally decided to formally unify… but into what? The Fathers of Confederation had steered their ship into uncharted waters. Many wanted the new state christened the Kingdom of Canada. But the British government worried this might upset the republican behemoth to the south … A compromise was needed. Something new.
The premier of New Brunswick, Samuel Leonard Tilley, an avid supporter of confederation, turned to Psalm 72: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth”. Perhaps the Dominion of Canada?
Tilley’s inspiration created a novel international entity, at once capturing a sense both of shared loyalty to the Crown — the Queen’s dominion — and an expansionist destiny to unify the new country, and the continent. The idea of “Dominion status” would come to be applied far beyond Canada and marked a new step in the British imperial model of evolution toward ultimate independence.
And it was a flexible term. Adaptable. Like many of the best elements of the British Constitution. It could be stretched and moulded to meet the local particularities of an empire that encompassed deserts, tropical rainforests, and distant, isolated archipelagos.
The British North America Act was passed in 1867. Confederation was proclaimed on the 1st of July that year, and Canada’s creation was celebrated henceforth as “Dominion Day”.
From frontier outpost to directly-ruled colony, to self-government, then Dominion.
Though unshakable in her loyalty to the governmental principles that bound her to the mother country, Canada came more and more, as was inevitable, to assert a growing — yet still hazy — autonomy. At the end of the First World War, after a sacrifice of over 65,000 men, Canada took her own seat at the Paris Peace Conference, with separate membership as a founder of the League of Nations, and signed the Treaty of Versailles in her own right—though indented under ‘The British Empire’.
In 1926, George V convened an Imperial Conference in London that brought together the prime ministers of the King’s eight Dominions: Canada, Newfoundland (then separate), Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, India, and the United Kingdom. In the summary of proceedings from the Conference, the Empire was able to formally articulate a state of affairs that had long since been envisioned, and had already come to pass: “[The Dominions and Great Britain] are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”
The Statute of Westminster of 1931 passed into law the verdict of the Conference: “Every self-governing member of the Empire is now the master of its destiny.”
With neither bloodshed nor revolution, nations came of age.
After musing by the River Avon for an hour, we walked up to the war memorial in Stratford. Unveiled in 1922, the statue by Walter S. Allward features two figures, mounted on bleak granite blocks. One, head cowed in shame, drags off a broken sabre by its blunted point. The other, with its back to the defeated opponent, stares upwards to the sky, triumphant yet etched on its face is an inescapable hollowness. On the stone beneath, carved deeply, the haunting words: “They gave their lives, to break the power of the sword.”
These common struggles are made all the more powerful for having been embarked upon freely — the trials and the suffering borne as family, not endured as vassals. No force compelled Canada, or the other new Dominions, to follow Britain into the Great War—and the one that came after—but rather a shared sense of self and of destiny.
“The British Empire is not founded upon negations,” the Imperial Conference of 1926 declared, “It depends essentially, if not formally, on positive ideals. Free institutions are its life-blood. Free cooperation is its instrument. Peace, security and progress are among its objects… And though every Dominion is now, and must always remain, the sole judge of the nature and extent of its co-operation, no common cause will… be thereby imperilled.”
Britain remains an object of consternation to the progressive left because she confounds the formulaic expectations of their prejudices. Government by a King, accountable to his people. A global empire that fosters independence and self-government as its own natural end. A belief in material progress that embraces human nature, not abstractions and “immutable dogmas”. If ever Britain ceases to exist as a country she will, like Rome, live on as an idea, in the scattered corners of the Earth where the ideals of the ancient constitution still endure.
It was under the modernising Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that Dominion Day was formally renamed “Canada Day” — a move that was somewhat underhandedly waved through an all but empty House of Commons in mid-July of 1982. Defenders argued that the meaning of “Dominion” was poorly understood, and that the concept was tightly bound up with the Canadian experience. The nation’s motto A Mari Usque Ad Mare (“from sea to sea”) is taken from the same Psalm from which Samuel Tilley sought inspiration for the new country’s status in the Empire. Though the bill was passed and the name was changed, history cannot be. Canadian nationhood is no less palpable and powerful for having been grown and nurtured, rather than violently birthed.
On that 1st of July in Stratford, among Canadians, I could not help but feel a sense of pride in the achievements of our ancestors. Not mine — ours. Little could the barons gathered on Runnymede have imagined their decisions would reverberate down the centuries, to a faraway continent they would never know existed. Charles I, in barging into the House of Commons on 4th January 1642, could not have conceived that the scene would be re-enacted over three thousand miles distant and four hundred years hence, when another Charles visited the Parliament in Ottawa earlier this year.
Canada’s history is our history — her successes and failures are ours to share
I know that imperialism and colonialism are paraded as the chief evils of our age — the original sins that stain the western world. But to say our forefathers did ill is as banal as to say they were human. For man to sink to his lowest level, to yield to his basest animal instincts, is easy. To despair in weakness and yet still strive upward — that is harder. And the achievements all the more startling for having been the product of very mortal hands. I cannot honestly look at the peaceful, free, prosperous civilisation that has somehow been scrapped from the cruel Canadian wilderness and say the world would be a better place without it.
Canada’s history is our history — her successes and failures are ours to share. Perhaps the 1st of July is a celebration Britain too could share. It is the veneration of the best of our traditions, of measured, careful change, rooted in humanity. It is testament to a deeper, more compelling vision for society than the intemperate passions of revolutionary outrage. Perhaps, reflecting on this day, we might rediscover our old sense of self-belief and a quiet satisfaction at the good and lasting achievements of our few small, rainy islands.
