True Patriot Love

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command

The words quoted above are the first stanza of “O Canada”, which Parliament declared to be our official national anthem, thirty-three years ago today. (1)

It had been used as an unofficial national anthem since 1927, the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.In elementary school we began each school day with the singing of O Canada, and closed each day with the royal anthem, “God Save the Queen”. I have quoted the words as they were when I learned them as a child. Parliament may have subsequently revised them. (2)

The last five words of the third verse have been the subject of much controversy in recent decades. (3) It is the first three words of the same verse, however, that I wish to make the launching pad for our discussion today.

In these words, the “patriot love” which Canada is said to command in all her sons is described as being “true”. “True patriot love” is quite a verbal construction. It takes one of the Platonic transcendentals, (4) and a civil virtue, (5) and ascribes them to the highest of the three Christian virtues. (6) The resulting concept must surely be worthy of our contemplation.

What better way could there be, therefore, to celebrate our country on its national holiday, than by remembering examples of Canadian “true patriot love”?

For our first example, we must look back to the eighteenth century.

“How is that possible?” you might ask. “Canada was founded in the nineteenth century. How could there possible be an example of Canadian ‘true patriot love’ in the eighteenth century?”

One of the great and interesting things about our country, the Dominion of Canada, is that her roots go back further than July 1st, 1867, the day she became a country. The same thing could be said about our neighbour, the American republic. No competent American historian would claim that American history began with the signing of the Constitution of the United States of America or even with the Declaration of Independence. The period from the establishment of the Jamestown and Plymouth Bay Colonies in the seventeenth century to the Declaration of Independence in the eighteenth century is an essential part of the history of how the United States was established and founded. So the history of the settlements that were confederated into the Dominion of Canada starting with the initial four provinces in 1867 is an essential part of the history of Canada.

There is another way in which Canada’s roots go further back than Confederation. Most countries founded in the Modern Age were founded upon some kind of break with the past, some kind of revolutionary rejection of tradition. The United States, for example, was formed when liberal republicans led several colonies to secede from the British Empire. The first French Republic was born out of a violent revolution in which egalitarian radicals seized the apparatus of the modern bureaucratic state that had been built up by the Sun King in the previous century with the intention of using it to restructure French society from the top down. Later the Soviet Union would be established in a similar sort of revolution in Russia. Compared to the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, the American Revolution was rather mild and moderate. Canada, however, must be contrasted with all of these other modern countries because she was not founded upon a revolutionary break with the past. Actually, it was quite the opposite. The Dominion of Canada was consciously founded as a country within a pre-existing tradition, a country that rejected modern revolution and embraced tradition. She is arguably, the only conservative modern country.

This brings us back to the eighteenth century. In the sixth and seventh decades of that century the powers of Europe fought the Seven Years War. At the time the term Canada referred to a territory in what is now Quebec and Ontario that had been settled by the French and was under the authority of the French Crown. In 1759, British troops led by General James Wolfe defeated the French force led by General Montcalm in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City. As Alexander Muir put it, in the lyrics of a song (7) composed in the year of Confederation that would later become the main contender against “O Canada” for the role of Canada’s national anthem:

In days of yore,
From Britain’s shore,
Wolfe the dauntless hero came
And planted firm Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain.

The war came to an end with the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Among the other provisions of this treaty, France ceded Canada to the British Crown. In the decade that followed a rift arose between the British government and many in her American colonies, over the Crown’s liberal, gracious, and magnanimous treatment of the French Canadians and the tribes that had been France’s allies in the war. Many of the American colonists were Puritans, i.e., followers of the form of extreme Calvinism that in the seventeenth century had sought to strip the Church of England of bishops, vestments, and liturgy, to severely persecute Roman Catholics, to rob the labouring classes of the one day of leisure that was available to them, and overthrow the British constitution by seizing the Crown’s entire prescriptive prerogative for the House of Commons.(8) At the end of the Seven Years War they hoped to be able to eliminate Catholicism in Quebec and to expand to cover the entire North American continent. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, however, which followed up on the treaty with the Iroquois Confederacy negotiated shortly after the French defeat at the Plains of Abraham, placed limitations on their expansion that they regarded as both unreasonable and as a slap in the face after their service to the Crown in the war. Then, in 1774, in the Quebec Act, the Crown guaranteed the French Canadians the right to retain their own language and religion. This was the last straw for the North American Puritans who had already begun to pour out propaganda against Parliament and, especially, the Crown, filled with all sorts of hysterical and absurd accusations of tyranny against what was the most liberal government in the world.

Now consider again, for a moment, those words from our national anthem, “true patriot love”. Do these words imply that there might be such a thing as a “false patriot love”?

No, dear reader, I have not just radically changed the subject in order to ask a ridiculously silly question. The question is actually relevant to the history we are considering. I will explain how momentarily. First, with regards to the question, allow me to point out that the opposites, “true” and “false”, have two different sets of meanings. They can refer to the difference between “genuine or real” and “fake or pretend”, or they can refer to the difference between “faithful or loyal” and “disloyal and treacherous”. When the word “true” is used of Canada later in our national anthem where it says “the true North, strong and free” it is used in the latter sense of loyalty. The other meaning simply wouldn’t make sense in the context. The “true” in “true patriot love”, on the other hand, could carry either meaning or both. The relevance of this observation will also soon be apparent

The reason all of this is relevant is because something very close to this question was being asked in London at the time. The man who asked the question about the possibility of false patriotism – and answered it with a loud, resounding, “yes”, was Samuel Johnson, the leading figure of eighteenth century English letters. Dr. Johnson, as he is universally known, the biographer of the English poets, the editor of a famous annotated edition of Shakespeare, the scourge of John Milton, the mind behind the satirical Idler and Rambler, and the lexicographer whose Dictionary was the standard of the English language until supplanted by the Oxford English Dictionary, is best remembered today as the subject of an exhaustive biography by his friend James Boswell. Boswell’s Life of Johnson includes countless examples of Dr. Johnson’s famous conversational wit – including his remark, of April 7th, 1775 that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. Boswell explains that Dr. Johnson had a false, pretended patriotism in mind when he said this

In fact, the year before he made that famous remark, Dr. Johnson, a pamphleteer of strong religious and political views, High Anglican and religion and Tory in politics, wrote a tract about the difference between true and false patriotism that was published under the title The Patriot.Addressing the electorate of Great Britain on the eve of an election, he declared that “no man can deserve a seat in parliament who is not a PATRIOT. No other man will protect our rights, no other man can merit our confidence. He then defined a patriot as “he whose public conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country”, expressed cynicism as to the possibility of finding a great number of them, and, noting that “a man may have the external appearance of a Patriot, without the constituent qualities” proceeded to distinguish the true patriot from the false.

The false patriot, according to Dr. Johnson, makes his opposition to the government the basis of his claim to patriotism. While it is “the quality of Patriotism to be jealous and watchful, to observe all secret machinations, and to see public dangers at a distance,” the false patriot rails against the government for his own self-interest rather than a sincere concern for the public good. Therefore, opposition to the government is no sure sign of true patriotism. The false patriot reveals his lack of genuine love for his country by using his accusations of corruption and tyranny to stir up the rabble, threatening the order and peace of the country. “He is no lover of his country”, Dr. Johnson wrote “that unnecessarily disturbs its peace.” He further reveals his lack of genuine love for his country when his accusations against her government are false and ridiculous. Examples of this type of accusation include “that because the French in the new conquest enjoy their own laws, there is a design at court of abolishing in England the trial by juries” and “that the Protestant religion is in danger, because Popery is established in the extensive province of Quebec”. (italics in original)

The false patriots who were the target of this pamphlet were politicians back in London who were making these kinds of accusations against the government, hoping to influence the outcome of the election. Nevertheless, Dr. Johnson’s remarks had a rather obvious application to the situation in North America at the time as well. Note that although when he described the one type of patriot as false, he used the word false in the sense of “fake”, “pretend” or “not genuine”, one of the characteristics of the false patriot that stands out the most, is his falseness in the other sense – disloyalty, and specifically to the lawfully constituted authority of the king, his ministers, and the national parliamentary assembly. It stands to reason therefore, that a trait of he whom Dr. Johnson would have considered to be a true, in the sense of genuine, patriot, would be that of loyalty.

Here at last, we can finally identify those who, almost a century prior to Confederation, displayed pre-Canadian “true patriot love” – the Loyalists.

When the leaders of the Thirteen Colonies issued their Declaration of Independence from the British Crown and Empire this did not instantly and magically convert everyone living in those Colonies into a liberal republican. Not everybody believed the propaganda that said that because Parliament had passed a bill levying duties upon the Colonies that the king was therefore trying to establish autocratic rule. Nor did all members of the American Colonies believe the Puritan logic that equated toleration of Roman Catholicism with an attempt to force Protestants back into the Roman Catholic Church. Many were conservatives who had been born British subjects, raised British subjects, were content with their citizenship and national identity, loyal to their Sovereign, and who simply had no desire to go to bed British the one day and wake up something else the next. Others were sceptics who saw no reason to believe that the new government to be formed would be in any way preferable to the old one. For these reasons, when it came to war between the seceding Colonies and the British Empire, many of the Colonists sided with the Empire. These were the Loyalists.

The leaders of the American Revolution – who called themselves Patriots - considered the Loyalists to be traitors. This was a very ironical point of view when you consider that it was the “Patriots” who were engaged in insurrection against the established order and the Loyalists who were, well, loyal to the established order. From a historical point of view, the conflict between the Patriots and the Loyalists can be seen as a struggle between two patriotisms – one directed towards the emerging, new, country that would be the American Republic, the other directed towards the established, existing, British Empire. To this day, many Americans and Canadian anti-patriots, fail to understand the Loyalist perspective – and therefore to understand Canada.

Often one will hear such people claim that Canadian identity is entirely negative; that it’s only content is a desire to “not be American”. This is the equivalent of saying that only reason the Loyalists opposed the American Revolution was because they did not want to be American. That is nonsense, however. The reason the Loyalists rejected the revolution and the new liberal republic is because they were satisfied with who they already were – subjects of the Crown and British citizens.

After the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which brought the American Revolutionary War to an end, thousands of Loyalists moved north to British territory. Some re-settled in what are now the Maritime Provinces. Others re-settled in what is now Ontario. By emigrating north the Loyalists were able both to escape persecution in the United States and to continue to be what they had been before and during the American Revolution – loyal, patriotic, subjects of the British Empire.

Some might object that what I have just described is British rather than Canadian patriotism. Those who make that objection miss the point. The American and Canadian traditions are both North American branches of the British tradition with the crucial difference between the two being that the American branch deliberately and violently lopped itself off of the tree, whereas the Canadian branch, equally deliberately, chose to grow and develop as a distinct branch, still connected to and drawing nourishment from the old, deep-rooted, tree. The British patriotism of the Loyalists cannot be separated from Canadian “true patriot love”. A “Canadian patriotism” that rejects Canada’s British roots – like the “Canadian nationalism” invented by the Liberal Party of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau in the 1960s and 1970s – is a phony and fraudulent Canadian patriotism. (9)

Loyalism is the basis of the “true patriot love” displayed by all the other examples that we will – briefly – look at. This is most obviously the case of the Canadians who fought in the war of 1812. This war, fought between the British Empire and the United States of America between 1812 and 1815, arguably bore the same relationship with the American Revolutionary War that the Second World War had to the First. It was a renewal of hostilities, between the same parties, after a brief ceasefire. It was a war of particular significance to Canadians for, although it took place five decades before our country was born, it is the war in which Canadians fought, not only for the greater Empire, but for their own homes and communities which were under attack. “Those men are most likely to fight bravely”, Dr. Johnson wrote, “or, at least, to fight, obstinately, who fight for their own houses and farms, for their own wives and children” (10) and this was exactly the position the Canadians found themselves in when the American hordes, bent on conquest, invaded, to be repelled and defeated, at such places as Queenston Heights, Chateauguay, Crysler’s Farm, and Lundy’s Lane.

Alexander Muir described their patriotic stand in this way:

At Queenston Heights and Lundy's Lane,
Our brave fathers, side by side,
For freedom, homes and loved ones dear,
Firmly stood and nobly died (11)

This would not be the last time Canadians would express their “true patriot love” in combat, although it was the last time that involved a serious invasion of Canada. The threat of an American invasion persisted throughout the nineteenth century, as several American political leaders expressed their dream of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to expand throughout the entire North American continent. Confederation, which established the Dominion of Canada in 1867, was in large part a preventative measure against such an invasion. Thus, by bringing our country together with her own Parliament under Queen Victoria, the Fathers of Confederation became a sterling example of “true patriot love”.

Canadians, as subjects of the British Empire, had served in the British armed forces. After Confederation, Canada began to organize her fighting men into a distinctly Canadian force. On the thee notable occasions when the Canadian military was called upon to fight for king, country, and empire – the Second Boer War and the two World Wars - they made their country proud. Since our subject is Canadian patriotism, not Canadian military prowess, it would be distracting to give a detailed description of the battles in which Canadians proved their valour. Suffice it to say they did so at Paardeberg Drift and Leliefontein, at the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, at Normandy and in the Low Countries, as well as in the air and sea.

World War II warrants special attention here. The service of Canada and Canadians in this war is a particularly exemplary illustration of the Canadian style of Loyalist patriotism at its best. Of the three conflicts mentioned, it is the only one to take place after the Statute of Westminster of 1931. Prior to this Statute, Canada was automatically at war whenever Britain was at war. After this Statute it required an act of the Canadian Parliament to put Canada at war. When the Third Reich invaded Poland in September of 1939, the Canadian Parliament issued her first Declaration of War against Nazi Germany on September 10th – one week after the United Kingdom had issued hers. This expressed two things – that the locus of the king’s sovereignty over Canada lay in his Parliament in Ottawa rather than in Whitehall, and that Canada recognized that her place in the last great war of the British Empire was at the side of Great Britain. The support of the Canadian public, for this, her largest military undertaking ever, showed that the Canadian people and the Canadian government were of one mind on this.

Canada’s military have continued to show “true patriot love” since then, in Korea, Afghanistan, and everywhere else they have been sent to fight, but Canada’s military tradition was one of the first victims of the Liberal Party’s post-WWII assault on Canada’s heritage. The Liberals gutted our armed forces until it they were a fraction of what is needed for national security and committed what was left, not to the defence of the country or the service of the greater British family of nations, but to the disgraceful task of enforcing the whims of the United Nations.

The Liberal assault on Canada’s traditions was made possible by an unfortunate consequence of the Second World War. The British Commonwealth of Nations survived the war but it was no longer the great Empire it had been going into the war. The war had brought about a shift in global power and two superpowers had emerged, each representing a rival vision of modernity and progress, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The United States represented the vision of progress under liberal, capitalist, democracy. The Soviet Union represented a vision of progress under socialism administered by politburos and commissars. Immediately after the war these two superpowers entered into a forty year struggle for global supremacy while the rest of the world fell into orbit around one or the other of the superpowers. The British family of nations, especially Great Britain herself and Canada, came into the American orbit.

This was both inevitable and greatly to be preferred over the alternative of coming into the Soviet orbit – although many intellectuals in Canada and Britain appeared to think otherwise, demonstrating that intelligence is not a prerequisite for being an intellectual. For traditional Canadian patriots and conservatives, however, who rightly saw our country’s possession, through her connection with Britain and the Crown, of pre-modern, pre-progress, roots as one of our country’s greatest strengths, the absorption of both Canada and Britain into the sphere of the United States of America, the symbol of modern progress, appeared the way the conquest of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires must have appeared to patriots in ancient Israel and Judah. As the prophet Jeremiah bewailed the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in the Book of Lamentations in the Bible so did George Parkin Grant, philosophy professor and Canadian nationalist, express his “true patriot love” by bewailing what he saw as the defeat of the Canadian project, of establishing a conservative country, with pre-modern roots, in the New World, in a short book, first published in 1965, entitled Lament for a Nation. (12)

The occasion which prompted the writing of this jeremiad was the defeat of the Diefenbaker government in 1963. The Conservative government of John G. Diefenbaker was brought down in a vote of no confidence by a coalition of the Liberals, the left-wing NPD and the right-wing Social Credit, over the issue of Diefenbaker’s refusal to accept American nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles. As Prime Minister Diefenbaker saw it, Canadian sovereignty had been at stake. He too had acted out of “true patriot love.”

As leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, he had another opportunity to express his “true patriot love”. The Liberal Party, now in power, laid waste to Canada’s traditions under the leadership of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. We have already mentioned their disgraceful treatment of our Armed Forces. They attacked Canada’s British heritage, removing as many “Royal”s from the titles of national institutions that they could get rid of and replacing our traditional national symbols. They replaced, for example, our flag the Red Ensign, which contained the Union Jack in the canton and the Canadian Coat of Arms in the fly, with the current Maple Leaf flag. They stopped referring to our country as “The Dominion of Canada”, deceitfully dismissing the full title as indicating colonial status, when it had, in fact, been chosen by our own Fathers of Confederation out of the Bible. Diefenbaker, as Opposition Leader, faithfully fought this Liberal anti-patriotism out of “true patriot love.” (13)

The Liberals, having set fire to the traditions and symbols which historically defined and expressed what it meant to be Canadian, tried to replace the old Canadian national identity that they had declared war on with a new Canadian national identity. This new, Liberal-manufactured Canadian identity consisted entirely of fatuous, left-wing drivel. There was “official bilingualism”, which referred less to the traditional co-existence of Anglo-Canadians and Franco-Canadians or even to our having two official languages, than to the Liberal dream of a Canada where everyone was equally fluent in both languages, a dream which did nothing but create mutual resentment between English and French Canadians. There was “official multiculturalism” to accompany the Liberal Party’s new policy of large-scale immigration, aggressively recruited from non-traditional source countries in the Third World. What “official multiculturalism” meant was that these new immigrants would not be presented with a Canadian identity to adjust to, but that the country would rather adjust to them, fitting them in as a new tile in the Canadian “mosaic”. There was “human rights”, which meant that if you were any race other than white, any sex other than male, any religion other than Christian, any ethnicity other than English Canadian, any sexual orientation other than straight, you were entitled to special government protection against the prejudice of your neighbours, who could now be dragged into court for mere words. There was intrusive, bureaucratic government, which micromanaged the lives of Canadians while doling out to them countless goodies which the government called “free”, even as it raised taxes through the roof to pay for them. (14)

What is the response of “true patriot love” to such inanity?

In the case of William D. Gairdner, it was to write a book entitled The Trouble With Canada. (15) First published in 1990, this book made the Globe and Mail’s Number One Bestseller list and has recently been reissued in a revised and expanded edition. In this book, Gairdner showed how these new policies, which the Liberal Party was now saying defined “Canada”, were actually harming the country.

Further harm to Canada was done by the free trade. History has shown that free trade harms the country that adopts it. It harmed Great Britain economically when she adopted it in the late 19th Century and it harmed the United States economically when she adopted it in the mid-20th Century. The countries of Western Europe entered into a free trade agreement after World War II which has gradually undermined their national sovereignty. Free trade, like the protectionism its proponents oppose, benefits some businessmen over others. The protectionism of the economic nationalist, however, benefits national producers and hence the good of a national community. The free trade of the liberal benefits large, multinational and transnational corporations, who, being responsible to the laws of no one national community, are a threat to all national communities.

Historically, free trade was favoured by the Liberals and opposed by the Conservatives who practiced economic nationalism in defence of the country’s national interests. Then, in the 1980s, Brian Mulroney, the new Conservative leader who was elected Prime Minister in 1984, flip-flopped on free trade and negotiated the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement with US President Ronald Reagan. Reagan too, was breaking with Republican Party tradition in negotiating this agreement and coming out as a free trader. (16) Within a few years the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement evolved into NAFTA and there were further talks about expanding the free trade zone even further to encompass both American continents.

Patriots on both sides of the 49th Parallel have expressed concern over how these agreements have negatively affected their respective countries. So our final example of “true patriot love” is that of those Canadian patriots, right and left, who warned against and continue to oppose, free trade. Specific examples include Saskatchewan farmer and frequent political candidate David Orchard, the author of the book The Fight For Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism, (17) and publisher Mel Hurtig.(18)

In each of the examples we have considered, the “true patriot love” that Canada commands in all her sons has been on display in one way or another. May they inspire us to follow in their footsteps and “stand on guard” for Canada.

Happy Dominion Day!
God Save the Queen!

(1) “O Canada” was originally commissioned by Théodore Robitaille, Lt. Governor of Quebec, for a celebration of St. Jean-Baptiste Day. The composer was Calixa Lavallée, who had been born in Montreal and had pursued a career in music in both Canada and the United States. The text to which Lavallée set the tune was a poem by Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier, a judge in the Quebec Supreme Court. It was first performed in 1880, one hundred years before it was declared our national anthem (not to the day, but almost – St. Jean-Baptiste Day is June 24th). The English version of the anthem is not a translation of the French lyrics but an adaptation of an English poem written to the tune by Robert Stanley Weir, a judge like the author of the original French lyrics, in 1908.

(2) That is in part a facetious remark, written in mockery of the disease of political correctness that has beset our nation in recent years due to the insidious efforts of the cult of inclusivity. It not entirely facetious, however. There were many proposals in the last decade of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st, to revise the lyrics of “O Canada” so as to eliminate militarism, references to God, sexism, and nativism. The English lyrics that were officially adapted in 1980 are themselves the result of a number of revisions to Robert Stanley Weir’s 1908 poem, some made by the original author, others made by recommendation of a government committee. Ironically, the 1908 version was in at least one place more “politically correct” than the current version. It contained the words “thou dost in us command” where “in all thy sons’ command” are currently found. The revision that produced the current reading was made by Weir himself.

(3) See previous endnote.

(4) Truth. 

(5) Patriotism. See my essay “For Queen and Country” http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2010/07/for-queen-and-country.html

6) Love. 1 Corinthians 13:13

(7) “The Maple Leaf Forever”

(8) See my essay “The Martyred King” http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-martyred-king.html

(9) For the difference between the older Canadian nationalism of the Loyalist Tories, and the newer “Canadian nationalism” of the Pearson-Trudeau Liberals, see my essay “Canadian Nationalism”, especially the second part: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/07/canadian-nationalism.html

(10) This quotation is not from The Patriot but from an essay entitled “Observations on the Treaty” that appeared in Literary Magazine in 1756.

(11) “The Maple Leaf Forever”, second stanza.

(12) George P. Grant, Lament For a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). See also the biography of this Canadian patriot, conservative, and philosopher by William Christian George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

(13) See One Canada: Memoirs of the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker: Volume Three: The Tumultuous Years 1962-1967 (Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1977).

(14) There is a kind of right-wing anti-patriotism that attributes this sort of thing to Canada’s Loyalist heritage. The way this reasoning goes, the Loyalists’ attitude was one of “submission to tyranny” that later resurfaced in Canadians’ acceptance of intrusive bureaucracy, social engineering, and heavy taxation. This is nonsense, however, of the same sort used by Nietzscheans and racial nationalists who try to pin the blame for liberalism and all the mess it has caused on Christianity. Liberalism, however, was only able to work its damage on Western Civilization, when the influence of Christianity was declining, and likewise, the Liberal Party of Canada was only able to create this new “Canadian” identity, when the foundations of the old Loyalist Canada had been shaken. Other facts which contradict this anti-patriotic point of view include the fact that neither King George III nor his Parliament were tyrants, and that the same kind of massive, intrusive, bureaucratic state developed in the United States as developed in Canada, with many important steps in the development of this kind of state actually being taken in the USA before they were taken in Canada.

(15) William D. Gairdner, The Trouble With Canada: A Citizen Speaks Out (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990). Dr. Gairdner, who gave talks on behalf of the Reform Party of Canada in its early days, has never displayed the kind of anti-patriotism referred to in the previous note. Indeed, a theme of his book is how the sort of things he is writing about display a betrayal of Canada’s founding principles. The expanded edition is entitled The Trouble With Canada…Still (Toronto: BPS, 2011)

(16) The Republican Party was built upon a foundation of economic nationalism that involved both protectionism and “internal improvements”, i.e., investment in infrastructure. Until Reagan, free trade was an idea most associated in the United States with liberal Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.

(17) David Orchard, The Fight For Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism, (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993, Expanded Edition, Westmount: Robertson Davies Publishing, 1998).

(18) Hurtig is most often remembered as the publisher of the Canadian Encyclopedia. In the 1993 election he ran as the leader of the National Party. This was the only election this party, founded on a single issue – opposition to the threat of free trade to Canadian sovereignty – ever ran in.