Posted on 07/20/2010 8:36:28 AM PDT by Willie Green
Perhaps, here in the Maritimes, you note the influence of every day Americans more than most other places in Canada. After all, they’ve been arriving here for generations, first as Loyalist refugees fleeing north to the remaining British Colonies in the days after the Revolution. Many would move on to other places in Upper and Lower Canada, setting the stage for the creation of the separate province of New Brunswick and the opening of the future province of Ontario for settlement. The influence of American settlers on the development of Canada has been profound.
With the opening of railroads after Confederation and by the later creation of highways and airlines, rather than as settlers, Americans arrived as visitors or tourists. Former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent summers on Campobello Island just off the New Brunswick coastline, one of many shoreline summer homes and estates, many of which remain the prized possessions of U.S. families.
For years, I’ve had an impression, gathered from conversations with visitors, that many of those visitors carried with them an ample chip of superiority, a rather American characteristic. I remember meeting one chap who, in classic form, began boasting about the size of his native Texas. I reminded him it would take several of his lone star states to fill Ontario, a province with about as many residents as Ohio in a country with a population about equal to California.
But now, I think you might sense a subtle shift in attitudes.
The last decade, since 9/11, has been tough times for the United States. Their financial calamities, even the recent tragedy of the BP oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, have awakened America to her vulnerabilities.
We’ve not been immune to the ripples created by the stomping of the “elephant’s” feet. Yet, while still the “mouse”, we seem to have survived the shaking with comparative ease.
In four separate conversations in the past three weeks, I have been surprised by the inquisitiveness of a young father visiting from Minnesota, a professor from Arkansas, another from Maine and a retired businessman from Maryland now living in Florida. All seemed intrigued by their Canadian summer-time adventure as if something was taking place in the great frozen north and something to which they should pay attention.
Perhaps they sense a gathering Canadian maturity and confidence generated by the globalization of the 21st century world of the Internet and commerce. Maybe we are beginning to sense America is not the be-all and end-all to our political, cultural and economic well being.
Maybe they sense, as others have suggested, that Canadians are shedding their shyness and introverted ways after discovering remarkable opportunities by looking beyond the world’s longest and still undefended border.
Maybe the father and son who rode into Nova Scotia from Connecticut on their Harley-Davidson's two years ago were the mine canaries of the changes taking place in this country. “You know something,” the father said, “this guy Tim Horton is onto something. Good coffee and good food.”
You can now buy a Tim Horton’s coffee and lunch in mid-town Manhattan.
Evidently you just skipped over the entire Cold War, you should look into it sometime, in the meantime get Canada to do something about taking on more responsibility for their own defense.
We will have a Canada, as long as we have a United States to handle and bear the financial cost of their defense.
God bless America and the liberal Canadians that depend on the blood and the taxes of America’s courageous and self sacrificing people.
After all, Texas alone sends more people into the military annually than all of Canada does.
Canada is the nation that considered the draft dodgers and deserters that they welcomed, as probably their finest immigrants.
They have permitted the Left to take fascist power over them. Now we have, too. They have not yet crashed their economy and been invaded over by committed and nasty foreigners/racists. They are not the world’s military.
The USA is the lowest of the common denominators right now. Rinos will never allow us to dig out from under Obama’s boot on our necks, either and financial “reform” loans by race quotas rather than by qualification, guarentees economic demise.
That was a reference to Pierre Trudeau’s observation that living next door to the USA is like sharing a bed with an elephant.
Not any more. The recession is over here- for the first time in my life, unemployment here is lower than it is in the USA. Thanks to Obamacare, we'll also be paying less in taxes than Americans do.
Well said! But let’s hold off unification until Sarah’s in the White House ;-)
Yep, our PM is Stephen Harper, Conservative Party of Canada, elected in 2006.
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