Canada Is Older Than the USA
A History Lesson to Expose the Depth of "the Totally Unacceptable Insults and Unprecedented Threats" Made by President Donald Trump to "Our Very Sovereignty."
“…. the totally unacceptable insults and the unprecedented threats to our very sovereignty from US President, Donald Trump.”
Jean Chretien, former Prime Minister of Canada
Jean Chretien is a great Canadian. He stood up to US President George W. Bush’s war machine in 2003. Now he is standing up in 2025 to the bullying of US President Donald Trump on another vital issue, one where the stakes are much larger than most people realize.
In 2003 Jean Chretien wrote one of the best chapters in Canadian history when he refused to authorize the Canadian Armed Forces to join George Bush’s Coalition of the Willing in the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Jean Chretien stood up to the squadrons of hysterical war mongers, including the Canadian Parliament’s Opposition Leader, Stephen Harper. Chretien said NO to a classic US psy op based on a very BIG LIE. I saw Chretien’s stance at the time as the crowning culmination and justification for his many years of public service in the Canadian government.
Chretien refused to go along with the concocted narrative that the government of Saddam Hussein was on the verge of getting weapons of mass destruction. Beneath that surface lie was the even bigger foundational lie characterizing the 9/11 attacks as the work of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
The CIA-cultivated mercenaries of Al-Qaeda are in the news again. This time around the supposed culprits of 9/11 have been cast in the role of prominent actors in the US-Israeli-backed proxy forces providing a veil of deception to hide what is really going on in the remaking of Syria. The US and Israeli governments are leading the way in yet another shit show rivalling NATO’s war of mass destruction in Libya. The Global War on Terror is an ongoing scam designed to poison minds against manufactured “Islamic terrorists” in order to enable the continuation of US wars for Israel.
Now Jean Chretien has intervened to call out the verbal excesses of Donald Trump as he wanders deeper and deeper into a rhetorical swamp of his own creation. Says Chretien,
As one old guy to another…. give your head a shake.. What could make you think that Canadians would ever give up the best country in the world…. to join the United States?
The poorly schooled Donald Trump probably sees Canada as just a pale version of the United States. In making that assumption, he is far from alone. Many Canadians probably think the same thing. Now after the massive institutional destruction done by the COVID debacle, Canadians cannot blithely refer to “free health care” as the all-purpose justification for Canada’s existence.
After a decade of the Justin Trudeau government, many of the main features of the Canadian Dream lie in tatters. But that need not be the end of the story.
In fact Canada is in internal disarray as the Donald Trump comes to office with his big talk about altering the economic and geopolitical status of northern North America, the site of the second biggest country in the world. As part of his inauguration ceremony on his first day as US President, Trump announced his intention to go ahead, probably on Feb. 1, with imposing 25% tariffs on all Canadian exports. He alleged Canada is “a very bad abuser” failing to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and fentanyl into the USA.
This development should come as no surprise. It comes on top of Trump referring to Canada as the 51st state and our worse-than-lame-duck PM as the “Governor” of the imaginary polity. There is nothing clever, knowledgable or apt in this drab presidential put down of Canada.
Trump’s intervention is coming at a time when Canada is without any effective and legitimate national government whatsoever. Trudeau’s Liberal Party lacks the backing of the Canadian people as well the majority of MPs in Parliament.
Trudeau continues to pathetically grasp onto power with the claim that he “intends” to resign once he has arranged the outcome of the forthcoming leadership contest within the moribund Liberal Party. Trudeau’s preferred successor, it seems, is Great Reset operative, Mark Carney.
This convergence of dire circumstances has the hallmarks of a grave crisis in the making. The aggressiveness of the Trump government serves as reminder that the US government has a long history of wanting to annex Canada beginning with the War of 1812.
In the forefront the crisis is being fomented by Trump’s efforts to ridicule Canada as some sort of welfare bum ripping off the noble United States. As I see it, however, the biggest danger is that the Canada-US turmoil will bring to the surface severe manifestations of the profound existential divisions within the troubled Canadian polity. These divisions have been long in the making and have NOT been addressed seriously in a remedial way. Now the divisions within are becoming a sensationalized spectacle on the world stage.
Any consensus we might once have had about what our country should stand for, has broken down. The result is increasing animosity among Canadians. Those of us who are not apathetic or homeless and addicted on the streets… those of us who are paying attention are at odds on many subjects. We are especially confused right now when it comes to the issue of where to point the unharnessed potential of this vast and resource-rich county.
Increasingly many aspects on the clash of visions revolve around competing strategies about how to treat, manage and export Alberta’s vast oil and gas resources. This controversy is unfolding as hundreds of millions of people in the world are awakening to the climate change scam transacted at the highest level by the predator class of bankers epitomized by the vile career of Mark Carney.
The perfect storm of coinciding difficulties comes at a time when the whole world is being turned upside down by the Everything Crisis. The Everything Crisis includes the global menace of many-faceted warfare, financial collapse especially in the West, the loss of credibility by all our major institutions, and the conspicuous failure of law enforcement agencies to hold accountable those culprits responsible for the most diabolical forms of international crime, including the unleashing of bioweapons and genocidal atrocities
Even members of our judiciary, who used to provide some check on the authoritarian tendencies of government and its corporate extensions, have turned against the mission of their professional calling. For the most part they have become apologists and weaponized agents whose priorities seem to be to protect some of the most predatory incursions menacing our lives, our health and our economic viability.
The menacing alignments of catastrophic circumstances will inevitably result in major changes to many facets of our world including significant alterations to our institutions and geopolitical relations. The isolation of the Western Hemisphere provided by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans no longer apply as they did in the era of the two world wars. There is no reason to anticipate that North America will be shielded from the intensification and spread of the multiple global eruptions underway.
This essay will look at the unfolding crisis primarily in North America from a Canadian perspective. From what I have seen of the coverage so far, there is a dearth of authoritative reporting giving substantial background and context to the current disruption of the geopolitical status quo which may very well be in its early stages.
As I am coming to understand it, this challenge to Canada as we have known it is a make-or-break test for our country and probably for the United States as well. If North America comes unglued, which some have long been predicting, there is nothing to say that the geopolitical map can’t be reassembled into configurations that would serve us better than what we have today.
For some of the problems that need to be solved, the devil will be in the details. At this juncture in our history, however, we also need some big picture analysis. This analysis should help implement the principle that we need to know where we came from in order to best assess where we should be headed.
It is pretty much a given that some big and powerful agencies will do their best to do the opposite; to point us in the wrong direction towards objectives to further empower the powerful and further enrich the rich at the expense of everyone else.
Canada is Much Older Than the United States
Canada is NOT now a part of the United States because there was a portion of North America’s population who opted not to become part of the revolutionary republic.
Many United Empire Loyalists of North America left the newly-created United States. They migrated to the remaining Crown lands north of the new border with the United States. This new border came into formal existence in the maps of world the with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. In 1818 the border was extended across much of western half of North America in the famous 49th parallel.
Most of the new arrivals in British North America in the late 1700s were English-speaking Protestants whose heritage was very different than that of the French-speaking Roman Catholics who dominated the Crown colony of Quebec. The British government created the colony of Quebec after the British Imperial Armed Forces conquered New France, an expansive domain sometimes referred to as Canada.
The core population of New France was settled in the north shore of the St. Lawrence River that drained the watershed of the famous inland sea of North America known as the Great Lakes. New France also extended into the watershed of the Mississippi River. The geopolitical basis of the largest part of New France lay in the networks of canoe communications devoted to the exchange of furs for European manufactured goods.
Many of the French fur traders came to call themselves canadiens, taking on the Indian name that describes Canada to this day. Much of the United States has been imposed on top of the lands of New France and Canada. That understanding likely eludes the US Commander-In-Chief whose ignorance of, for instance, the conflict in Ukraine is dangerous for the future of the world.
Following the defeat of the Armed Forces of Imperial France by the Armed Forces of Imperial Britain on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, a huge expansion of British North America occurred. After the British acquisition of New France, the largest portion of the newly-acquired territory was legally transformed on the Royal Proclamation of 1763 into a huge Indian reserve.
The eastern portion of the Mississippi Valley plus the Great Lakes were described by King George III as “lands reserved to the Indians as their hunting grounds.” The Sovereign’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 also created the British colony of Quebec.
When Trump spoke so flippantly about Canada as the 51st state, he makes it clear that he is pretty ignorant even about his own US history which is deeply integrated with Canadian history. Canada has existed in the geopolitical history of North America much longer than the United States.
The name “Canada” has adhered to a series of distinct geopolitical expressions dating back to the era of when the initial French explorer of Canada, Jacques Cartier, picked up the name in 1534 from Iroquoian people in the area of present-day Montreal. The term Canada in Iroquoian dialects basically means “meeting place.”
Before and after the British conquest of New France, Mount Royal—Montreal— remained the capital of Canada’s far-flung fur trade empire with the Native peoples throughout much of North America. Of all the various frontiers of European colonization throughout the Indian and Inuit lands in the Western Hemisphere, the fur trade of Canada provided the most collaborative and reciprocal middle ground of early interactions with Indigenous peoples.
In response the arrival of British settlers in what remained of British North America after the founding of the United States, the British Imperial government created New Brunswick in 1784. Then in 1791 it divided Quebec in two, creating Upper and Lower Canada.
Upper Canada formed the seed of Canada’s biggest province, Ontario. Upper Canada was established to accommodate a mostly English-speaking and Protestant populations whose members were familiar with the free hold system of individual land tenure. This individualist approach to the ownership of land was different from the feudalistic seigneurial system that formed the basis of farming communities along the northern shore of the St. Lawrence River.
The reciprocal attachment that developed between the people of Canada and the British Empire remained an important geopolitical feature of Canada’s ability to navigate its way through the global affairs until well into the first half of the twentieth century. Canada’s military role as part of a British imperial fighting force in the two world wars during the first half of the twentieth century, reinforced the British connection. At the same time the experience of fighting the world wars caused Canadians to envisage a more independent and self-determining role for themselves in the global community.
How Many United States of America?
The name of the United States of America was calculated to accommodate the future incorporation of added states. It was anticipated that the USA might be made to extend to the whole continent or even throughout the entire Western Hemisphere. The Munro doctrine of 1823 advanced this design. In it the feisty US leadership deigned to outlaw further European colonization of the Western Hemisphere, suggesting what the authors of Munro doctrine had in mind in terms of acting on the open-ended number of states in the United States of America.
Now Donald Trump has reopened the possibility of the further territorial expansion of the USA to include Canada as a whole. Trump introduced the topic in a simplistic and rudimentary way. As flippant as he seemed with the proposal, now the topic of the USA’s annexation of all, or part of, Canada is once again on the table as it has been several times throughout the history of Canada-US relations.
In Canada it is no small matter to decide how to live beside what has sometimes been the world’s most dynamic and powerful polity. The quest for positive relations with our neighbour to the south, whose population tends to be about ten times greater than that of Canada, has formed an essential part of our deliberations concerning national meaning and purpose.
The question of how to benefit from our proximity to the superpower without being drawn in by the magnetic pull of the USA forms a major part of the discourse about the nature of, and the limitations to, Canadian sovereignty.
It is entirely possible that the discussion Donald Trump has opened up a discussion which might set in motion processes that could alter the map of North America in a variety of ways. After all, the USA like Canada and many other polities in the world are works-in-progress. They are not immune from significant geopolitical alterations. We do not live at the end of history as Francis Fukuyama announced we did, when he responded to the demise of the Soviet Union resulting in the Cold War’s closure.
Of all the Canadian provinces, the people and government of Alberta are the most uneasy and ill-served by the institutions of Canada as presently structured. Indeed, the prospect of Alberta independence has surpassed, it seems, the prospect of Quebec independence.
Ironically, the new comfort level of the Quebecois living within Canada can be traced in part to the sizeable transfer payments financed by the royalties emanating from the extraction of Alberta’s oil and gas resources. Already the oil-rich province of Alberta where I live is playing a unique role in the unfolding of the Canada-US drama.
This drama of possible territorial alteration is arising from the threat of economic warfare as wielded by the sabre-rattling Donald Trump. As verified by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, all indicators point to the fact Trump intends to go through with his threat to impose a 25% tariff on all exports into the United States from Canada.
But will the tariff apply to the flow of crude oil to the USA? My sense is that some sort of exemption may be in the works for the government of Alberta that exports almost 4 million barrels of crude oil to the USA every day. The government of Danielle Smith may continue to elaborate its own relationship with the Trump government outside the crippled sovereignty of Canada. The national sovereignty of Canada has been driven into the ground during a decade of federal mismanagement, malfeasance and decadence.
Pop Star financier, Kevin “O’Leary, has jumped into the business circle of Trump insiders. He has been using his influence to promote the Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to Trump and others as a major potential ally in furthering the “economic union" of North America.
Danielle Smith’s friendly relationship with new US President and his entourage has put her at odds with many other Canadian politicians seeking to commandeer control of Alberta’s oil and gas as a bargaining chip.
Perhaps Trump’s apparent fascination with the expansion of Israel as it continues to become “Greater Israel,” Eretz Israel, is part of the stimulus causing him to explore the possibility of furthering US territorial and jurisdictional expansion extending to Greenland, Mexico, and Panama as well as Canada.
Perhaps a future independent Alberta might be in a position to formalize a special partnership with the USA. Perhaps this relationship could be envisaged as something like the US special relationship with Israel, minus all the ugly apparatus of genocidal militarism.
Part of the internal weakness of Canada is that Canadians are in large measure quite ignorant about key facets of our own history. Unfortunately, however, temporal disorientation of the populace towards the past is not unique to Canada. Cultivated amnesia is becoming an increasingly common trait for much of the world’s population.
The phenomenon is being pushed along by many factors including the pressure on schools to cut back on the time devoted to teaching about the past. In the strange era through which we are living, a core conviction of the tiny minority inhabiting the pinnacle of economic privilege, is the perception that historical awareness forms the basis for many obstructions against the forward movement of ruinous globalist integration.
Killing historical consciousness is part of attacking the basis of national sovereignty as Trudeau did by promoting a vision of a “post-national Canada.” His trade mark wedge issue divisiveness came to include now-institutionalized bigotry against straight White Christians which he used to refer to as “Old Stock Canadians.”
For the billionaires’ club of WEF/Zionist globalists seeking to advance their top-down domination, any popular solidarity arising from shared consciousness must be opposed and dismantled. It is much easier to push around uprooted amnesiacs operating in isolation, than accommodate self-aware communities of people.
Such self-awareness, where people remember from whence they came, leads to the conditions where the same people know where they want to head in implementing their own grass-roots versions of self-determination.
Let’s continue by pushing against the creep of imposed forgetfulness being forced on much of humanity as part of the onslaught by proponents of centralizing control and the continued dissemination of injected bioweapons. The evidence is becoming overwhelming that these bioweapons were pushed especially hard by the World Economic Forum.
Like the UN which it serves, the WEF continues to advance the objectives of the Club of Rome. Those objectives include depopulating, enfeebling, impoverishing and enslaving average people. Are Trump and Trudeau really antagonists in their orientation to the WEF?
The Re-Tooling of Northern North America to Save a Valuable Asset of the British Empire
A major part of the historical legacy of Canada as an assembly of formal colonies of the British Empire, is that many of the major decisions in the genesis of our country did not emanate from within the population. Rather the decisions of the top officials in the Imperial Mother Country were often imposed on what remained of British North America after the American Revolution.
As the influence of officialdom in Great Britain eased off in the twentieth century, the expansive influence of US politics, culture and economics tended to move into the vacuum. The result has been the perpetuation of colonized attitudes of many Canadians who are are inclined to believe that all the most important decisions are made elsewhere.
As a result the people and government of Canada tend to show comfort in making day-to-day decisions that arise in the normal course of events. On the other hand, the colonial mentality that tends to persist creates problems when governments and citizens in Canada have to face big economic and geopolitical matters like those that are prominent all over the world these days.
A comparison between the events of 1776 in the USA and 1867 in British North America goes some distance to identifying the different in attitudes and orientations interwoven in the founding of the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada. The Declaration of Independence was conceived as a rallying point for the creation of a new form of New World polity.
The British North American Act of 1867, a statute passed in the Westminster Parliament in the Imperial capital of London, was meant to consolidate and modernize an old inheritance of empire. The Dominion of Canada was meant to preserve, not eliminate, the British Empire in the northern portion of North America.
A large portion of of the British claim to North America has it origins in the Charter granted in 1670 to “the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” The first Governor of the Company was King Charles II’s cousin, Rupert of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland.
https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/exploration/rupert-s-land
The vast Indian Country of Hudson’s Bay was henceforth known as Rupert’s Land.
The British North America Act helped set in motion a number of transformations in business and proprietary arrangements, one aspect of which was to transform the corporate structure of the Hudson’s Bay Company into the institutional structure of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. This railway was conceived by the architects of the Dominion of Canada as the primary east-west transport facility and the necessary key to maintaining a sea-to-sea presence for the British Empire in northern North America.
The BNA Act reconstituted Upper and Lower Canada as Ontario and Quebec. The relationship between these two provinces renewed the French/English, Catholic/Protestant duality of integral to Canada since the British conquest of New France. To Ontario and Quebec were added New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
The plan was to expand the Dominion of Canada in order to integrate Rupert’s Land with Vancouver Island and British Columbia, British colonies created in 1849 and 1858. The Pacific Ocean windows of the British Empire were both created to fly the Union Jack and to prevent settlers from the United States from taking over territory that had long been a part of Canada’s and Great Britain’s fur trade empire.
The government of the Dominion of Canada purchased Rupert’s Land for a nominal amount in 1869 as officials in London and Ottawa negotiated with officials on British Columbia with the prospect of consolidating most of the British possession in North America into polity. A big part of the pressure to move quickly and decisively in this direction was the movement within the United States aimed at swallowing up Canada.
The US annexation of Canada has long been a major objective of US Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a quasi-religious term indicating that God created the United States to grow and thrive by bringing Christian democracy to large parts of the world.
The expansionary ethos Manifest Destiny as currently expressed in “exceptionalism” goes back to the Old Testament preoccupation of the Puritans of New England. Their self-understanding as Israelites engaged in the creation of a New Jerusalem, formed a significant aspect of the understanding permeating US-Israel relations.
This relationship, which is about to bloody the hands of Donald Trump and his ultra-Zionist war cabinet, is culminating in the most ruthless genocidal slaughter in all of recorded history. Mass murder on this scale of an imprisoned and dehumanized population marks a new low in the contemporary implementation of Old Testament law.
For a time the US Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, was a major force of Manifest Destiny. He had served in this post throughout the American Civil War. Seward was instrumental in the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Russia was then still reeling economically from the recent war in Crimea. When the United States expanded into Alaska, the USA gained a strategic platform in the arctic. Seward saw the Alaska purchase as a means of boxing in British North America. The Crown domain was henceforth caught between a frontier in the Northwest as well as the long border in the south.
https://www.uphere.ca/articles/all-american-arctic
Seward was not alone in thinking that Canada could not forever avoid the two-sided squeeze. Seward’s channeled his designs into legislative initiatives in Congress at a time when a million Union soldiers had emerged as victorious over the Confederacy in the Civil War.
This edified post-Civil War US Army turned it sights on the final conquest of Indian Country. But who could say if wars directed at Indians might extend into a confrontation with British officials renewing the scenario in the War of 1812. In the War of 1812 the Indian Confederacy led by Tecumseh opposed the US Armed Forces in partnership with British regular soldiers? Together the Indian and British fighting forces conquered the American military and fur trade post of Detroit, strategically altering the momentum of the conflict.
US Secretary of State Seward preferred diplomacy, persuasion and behind-the-scenes intrigue. In doing so he underestimated the strength of loyalty that the Crown’s British subjects in North America gave to the people and government of Great Britain. But that was then. What of now?
What is the basis of loyalties these days to forge patriotism among Canadians sufficient to withstand the nearby attractions of the never ending onslaught of diversionary Reality TV, sitcoms, soap operas, game shows, bouts of fake wrestling and spectator sports that many people the world over have learned both to love and to hate?
Transforming Part of Rupert’s Land into Three Prairies Provinces
In the midst of all the action to secure the British North America against US annexation and aggression, a very literate Roman Catholic Metis individual came onto the main stage of North American history. His name was Louis Riel. Riel emerged in the winter of 1869-70 to assert the rights of his mixed ancestry people. The Metis were partly Aboriginal. They were also largely French-speaking and Roman Catholic.
The Metis community in Red River around the Hudson’s Bay Company Post of Fort Garry were well aware of their rights to land which they often farmed in between other activities like buffalo hunting and manufacturing pemmican, a very concentrated and nourishing food essential to the economics of the fur trade.
Louis Riel made it known that his people had been wronged by being left out altogether by the transfer of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada. They had not been consulted and they refused to acknowledge to legitimacy of the transaction. In response to their exclusion they created their own Provisional Government.
Riel was well aware that there were many people in the USA watching carefully the developments at the Red River settlement. Many interests locally in Minnesota and North Dakota as well as nationally throughout the United States, were ready to intervene if Riel chose to send them a signal.
For that short moment Riel was strategically placed at the cross-roads between the old British Empire and the nascent American Empire. Riel had it in his power to point history towards the annexation of Rupert’s Land by the United States. He decided, however, not to do so, opening instead the way to the sea-to-sea formation of the Dominion of Canada.
How ironic that the top authorities in Canada would be involved in hanging Riel in 1885. But this execution for treason is the culmination of a long story I’ll leave for those interested in conducting some independent research.
In the winter of 1869 the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church opened up channels of communication with Louis Riel, who had studied to be a priest. This connection had great implications for the Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, John A. Macdonald. Macdonald was a Freemason and the most important point person in realizing the transcontinental expansion of the Dominion of Canada.
“A British subject I was born and a British subject I will die,” Macdonald famously declared in the course of the election of 1891.
Macdonald’s ease in equating “the Unity of the Empire” with the “preservation of the commercial and political freedom” made perfect sense to millions of Canadians in 1891 when the Prime Minister made the speech cited above. I believe that the wellbeing and stability of Canada demands that at least some of us try to understand the Canadians who agreed with Macdonald. To simply condemn them because they don’t share some of our contemporary assumptions demeans our ancestors as it demeans us.
Rather than committing travesties like pulling down statues of Macdonald or eliminating positive descriptions of him from text books, how can we best respond to the individual who did the most to institutionalize in a multiplicity of ways the founding principles on which the Dominion of Canada is founded.
Under the influence of the powerful Roman Catholic Church in Quebec, Macdonald compromised with the Metis by creating the new province of Manitoba.
This province was founded on principles that recognized Metis land rights. Moreover the school system of the new jurisdiction was structured to reflect the duality of Canada in terms of accommodating both French and English linguistic rights as well incorporating a Catholic education system to co-exist with open schools for Protestants and others.
The Metis were treated differently than their Indian relatives. The Act that created Manitoba did not make provision for negotiations with the Indians. Riel and the Provisional Government, however, implicitly opened the issue of the failure to seek Indian consent for the transfer of their ancestral lands from the Hudson’s Bay Company to Canada.
In the days of the fur trade the Indian way of life throughout much of Canada could continue in ways that would change dramatically with the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the accompany imposition of the institutions of private property. The private property system, of course, is at the centre of a vast array of personal and institutional arrangements that created the basis of an altered universe for many Native peoples.
One follow up to the Manitoba Act was the decision to make a series of Crown-Aboriginal Treaties with Indian groups starting those in Manitoba. This treaty came to be known as No. 1 of what came to be known as the Numbered Treaties carrying on the principles of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 discussed above. Recall that the Royal Proclamation declared that a very large area of North America was reserved to the Indian as their hunting grounds.
If new areas of this Indian reserve were to be opened up for non-Indian settlement, British imperial government stipulated that it was necessary for Crown officials to gain consent from the Indian people that would be affected by the coming of non-Indian settlers to their land. This principle is still being applied in Canada with the negotiation of new treaties in British Columbia and Quebec.
Below is a map I made to express the historical outcome of Crown-Aboriginal treaty making in Canada up to 2005. This map is one of many original maps created for my book, The American Empire and the Fourth World.
In exploring possibilities for some sort of alteration in the geopolitical relationships in North America, how would the US government view adapting to Canada’s system for the constitutional recognition and affirmation of Aboriginal and treaty rights? Would the USA abandon its theory that conquest forms a sufficient basis for nation building in North America?
How does the US government view Canadian accommodation of the duality of the French and English linguistic communities. Given the large number of Mestizo people throughout Latin America, how would the US government view Canadian efforts to advance a pan-America approach Metis/Mestizo solidarity?
The governmental system imposed by the British North America Act tended to be a replication of the structure of the British Empire. In the Dominion of Canada the area dominated by Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal area was treated as similar to the London area, where all the main imperial institutions are located.
The BNA Act created the Parliament of Canada whereas the provincial governments were to be based in Legislative Assemblies. Moreover, the imperial monarch’s representative to the Dominion government was named as Canada’s Governor General whereas the Crown’s representatives to the provincial governments were named as Lieutenant-Governors. The sense of a chain of command and a difference in status in very obvious.
The exception to the rule is Quebec. Because the government of Quebec represents the largest French-speaking population in North America, whose origins go back to New France and the canadiens and canadiennes of old, the legislature of the government of Quebec is recognized as the National Assembly.
The three Canadian provinces created on the Rupert’s Land have been treated as junior entities somewhat like colonies of the imperial institutions in Ottawa. This understanding inherited from the British Empire persists especially among the people of Alberta and Saskatchewan. In 1905 these districts in the then-North West Territories were expanded to become junior provinces much like Manitoba.
Manitoba was expanded in 1881 and again in 1912 to its present size. Unlike the original provinces of the Dominion, which were already old British jurisdictions in 1867, the new Canadian provinces in the former Rupert’s Land were not initially extended jurisdiction in their lands and natural resources. This arrangement was altered in 1930 when all three governments in the prairies were made subject to the Natural Resources Transfer Act.
The British Empire, the US War Economy, and the Rule of Law in Canada
Disputes over the oil and gas resources in Alberta have tended to be the locus of jurisdictional disputes embodying antagonisms in federal-provincial relations. This legacy continued in the tensions between the Trudeau government in Ottawa and the Danielle Smith government in Alberta.
The architects of the BNA Act favoured the leading role of the Dominion government, one provision of that enactment made by the British Parliament favoured provincial pre-eminence in the future of Canada. The reference in section 109 of the BNA Act to the several provinces of Canada included Upper and Lower Canada, which united together into a single Canadian province after 1840. As already noted, the old Upper and Lower Canada were reconstituted in 1867 as Ontario and Quebec.
One of the original constitutional disputes testing different interpretations of the BNA Act posed the government of Ontario against the Dominion government under Prime Minister John A. Macdonald. Macdonald’s lawyers argued that the Dominion government’s jurisdiction over “Indians and lands reserved for the Indians,” as stipulated in section 91 (24), constituted a “Trust” to be protected by the Dominion government. The case, which unfolded between 1885 and 1888, is referred to as the St. Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Company versus the Queen.
The Dominion’s lawyers argued that section 91(24) of the BNA Act constituted a “Trust” limiting Ontario’s ownership to All Lands, Mines, and Minerals, and Royalties in a disputed region. This region was on the disputed border between Ontario and the federal territory underlying the junior province of Manitoba. Significantly this constitutional case was argued before the Privy Council of the House of Lords. The Privy Council was then the highest court in the British Empire.
No Oji-Cree person, whose lands were the subject of the dispute, gave any representation whatsoever to the court. In that era registered Indians in Canada were subject to the Dominion government’s Indian Act. The Indian Act treated Indian people as wards of the Dominion government not eligible to vote, stand for office in Dominion or provincial elections, sign binding contracts, or purchase or consume alcohol.
The government of Ontario won the case. The arguments of Ontario’s lawyer, Edward Blake, depended on the worst forms of social science and legal precedents from the early days of European empires declaring Indigenous peoples to be primitive savages without the capacity of making binding laws for themselves. The precedent was frequently invoked from the era of the Crusades. That precedent stated that the presence of representatives of a Christian monarch automatically pre-empted the laws of non-Christian peoples.
[See Anthony J. Hall, “The St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Company versus the Queen : Indian land rights as a factor in federal-provincial relations in nineteenth-century Canada,” in https://uofmpress.ca/books/aboriginal-resource-use-in-canada]
Because of Ontario’s win, the Canadian provinces have had a major role in enabling the exploitation of natural resources in Canada, including the oil and gas deposits extracted from Alberta. The Natural Resources Transfer Act was part of a sequence of enactments, case law, as well as the relevant amendment in the Constitution Act, 1982.
https://cbr.cba.org/index.php/cbr/article/view/3285
Canada’s position within the British Empire often acted as a protection for the Dominion. The British Empire, however, was perceived at times as provocation to the United States that has never fully recovered from the shock of the War of 1812 when the British burned down the White House.
In 1924 the US government began developing plans for a possible military invasion of Canada. These plans were approved by the US War Department in 1930 and were secretly maintained by US President, Franklin Roosevelt, in 1935. The plans involved possible bombing of major Canadian cities, the possible deployment of chemical weapons and the building of three military installations along the Canadian border. These bases were disguised as civilian airports.
The text of the plan has become public. The authors pictured the opening stages of the invasion as follows":
“First, we send a joint Army-Navy overseas force to capture the port city of Halifax, cutting the Canadians off from their British allies. Then we seize Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls, so they freeze in the dark. Then the US Army invades on three fronts – marching from Vermont to take Montreal and Quebec, charging out of North Dakota to grab the railroad center at Winnipeg, and storming out of the Midwest to capture the strategic nickel mines of Ontario. Meanwhile, the US Navy seizes the Great Lakes and blockades Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific ports.”
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/04/us-interventions-in-canada-brief-history.html
The invasion plans were put aside in 1939 when Canada entered the Second World War two years before the United States. When Great Britain came under the threat of German attack, Canadians quickly rallied to defend the imperial heartland.
The ambivalent relationship of the Dominion of Canada to the British Empire is assessed in the video Canada The Illusion.
The movie is drawn in large measure from the writings of Walter Kuhl, a Social Credit MP representing an Alberta riding from 1935 to 1949
https://rumble.com/v5x4fs5-canada-the-illusion.html
Kuhl was schooled on the subject of his presentation by Russell Rogers Smith, a member of the Native Sons of Canada. Among a range of other policies, the Native Sons sought to end any resort by the government of Canada to the Privy Council of the House of Lords in Great Britain. Russell Rogers Smith was devoted to the ideal of moving away the aura of British rule and adopting policies to advance genuine Canadian sovereignty, self-determination and autonomy.
https://www.scribd.com/document/55199125/Walter-F-Kuhl-CANADA-Without-Constitution
https://archive.org/stream/canwithoutconstkuhl1977/CanWithoutConst_Kuhl1977_djvu.txt
The work of Smith and Kuhl has been dismissed in the Walrus as “a conspiracy theory.” This lazyman’s cliche was levelled by co-authors Daniel R. Meisler and Daniel Panneton.
https://thewalrus.ca/conspiracy-theories-canada/
I found that Kuhl and Smith as well as their cinematic interpreter, Timm Stein, to have made a significant contribution to the interpretation of Canada’s legal design. A lot of the analysis is very detailed covering many technical issues. The main narrative, however is quite straightforward.
The officials in Great Britain did a very poor job of incorporating the decision-making conference in Quebec City in 1864 into the final text of the BNA ACT. Where the delegates at the Quebec Conference had imagined they were setting in motion a genuine federal Union, sometimes known also as a Confederation, nothing of the kind was confirmed in the BNA Act’s final text. Part of the story told by the narrators tells of the inability to even find an original copy of the BNA Act in Canada.
The argument is made that the BNA Act did not significantly alter the colonial status of the four original jurisdictions. The British statute only grouped these jurisdictions together so that they now had a single legislative entity to give advice to the imperially-appointed Governor-General. There was a failure to afford the people that became subject to the BNA Act’s authority, any opportunity to welcome the new instrument; to make their own mark of approval or disapproval on some sort of ratifying process to be conducted throughout the Dominion.
Attempts were made to alter these unfortunate circumstances with a monumental change envisaged by the drafters of the Statute of Westminster in 1931. The importance of this statute is marked by the fact that the leadership of the British Empire decided to rename this polity as the British Commonwealth. The basic nature of the transformation was that the Dominions would become equal to Great Britain and independent except in areas where they chose not to be.
The aim of the drafters was to bring an end the British Empire as it had been known in the Dominions including Australia, New Zealand as well as Canada. There was at the time some confusion of whether or not South Africa was a Dominion. In the case of Canada, a procedure was set out for the people of provinces to affirm their will to assert sovereign status.
No such thing happened. No effort was made to create constituent assemblies to put the mark of democracy on self-governing provinces. If such a procedure had transpired, then the way would have been opened for representatives of sovereign provinces to authorize the transfer of some power to a central government to perform the tasks assigned to the larger polity. In this fashion a genuine federal Union or Confederation could have been achieved marking a clear break with colonial status.
The suggestion is made that the route to genuine self -determination, starting with the attainment of democratically-attained sovereignty for the provinces, could still take place. Walter Kuhl tells of how he drew on this understanding of the unfulfilled promise of the Statute of Westminster, when he wrote to Premier René Lévesque who had come to power in Quebec in 1976. Kuhl’s message was that all the constitutional ingredients for Quebec independence were already in place. The same case could be made when it comes to affirming the independence of Alberta.
In Canada the Conservative Party of John A. Macdonald was opposed to the Liberal Party whose policies have been pointed more towards intercontinental integration through ever-deeper integration with the United States of America. This process has gone so far that President Trump is inviting the people and government of Canada to become the 51st state of the USA.
The demise of the British connection pointing back to the more conservative tradition established by those who opposed the American Revolution, has been the cause for lament on the part of some people in Canada. One of them was Canadian philosopher George Grant.
Prof. Grant spoke of his sense of loss in seeing the dwindling of the conservative heritage of Canada in 1965 in Lament for a Nation. Grant’s Lament documents how the Liberal Party of Canada has been a primary agency for the assimilation of Canada into an integrated North American market as well as into the shiny glitz of ubiquitous US popular culture.
The last real voice of Canada that proudly embraced the country’s British imperial heritage was John Diefenbaker, Prime Minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963.
The White House of US President John F. Kennedy together with the spin doctoring branches of the CIA played a significant role in easing Diefenbaker out of Office and preparing the political ground for Justin’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Trudeau Sr. was PM from 1968 to 1979 and from 1980 to 1984.
The USA’s Central Intelligence Agency has often intervened covertly in the domestic politics of Canada. The decision to defame the image and destroy the political career of John Diefenbaker was just a small part of the invasive alterations targeting Canada’s institutions and public opinion.
Larry Romanoff has assembled a list of some of the CIA’s not-so-covert dirty tricks. Observing that “Canada’s vaunted RCMP have been little more than delivery boys for the CIA,” Romanoff reports on his knowledge of CIA violence and destruction in Canada over a 17 year period:
• In 1963, the CIA/FLQ exploded a bomb at the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, killing one person.
• In 1968, the CIA/FLQ placed a bomb in a mailbox next to a Canadian Tire store in Ottawa.
• In 1969, the CIA/FLQ set off a powerful bomb that ripped through the Montreal Stock Exchange, causing massive destruction and seriously injuring twenty-seven people.
• In 1966, the CIA directed a bazooka attack against the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa
• In 1966, the CIA exploded bombs at the Cuban trade offices in Ottawa
• In 1967, the CIA set off a bomb at the Cuba Pavillion at Expo in Montreal
• In 1967, the CIA exploded a bomb at the warehouses of a Canadian firm trading with Cuba
• In 1967, the CIA bombed the Cuban trade offices in Montreal
• In 1969, the CIA placed a bomb in the doorway of the Cuban consulate in Montreal
• In 1971, the CIA again bombed the Cuban trade offices in Montreal
• In 1974, the CIA exploded a bomb in the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa
• In 1976, the CIA set off an explosive device at the Cuban Consulate in Montreal
• In 1980, the CIA exploded a bomb at the Cuban Embassy and Consulate in Montreal
Diefenbaker was seen to be out of step when it came to his reluctance to put nuclear war heads on US missiles in Canada. It also seems he was subjected to extreme intimidation techniques aimed at forcing him to shut down and totally sabotage in 1959 the production facilities of the Avro Arrow fighter jet.
The effect was to shut down and destroy even the remnants of the most sophisticated expression perhaps ever, of Canada’s high-tech industrial capacity.
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/us-interventions-in-canada-a-brief-history/
The Imperial USA’s Covert Subordination of Canadian Sovereignty. The USA is Not Respecting Canada’s Borders in the Arctic, President Trump
The founding and subsequent westward-moving expansion of the revolutionary republic has captured enormous attention in popular culture. The transcontinental integration of several British North America jurisdictions into the Dominion of Canada has remained in the shadows compared to the imagery generated by the US conquest of Indian Country. This westward expansion continued for more than a century following the issuing of the USA’s founding manifesto in the Declaration of Independence dated 4 July, 1776.
The imagery of the westward expansion of the USA coalesced in the myth-making theatrics well captured by the live performances mounted by William F. Cody, the founder and star of the now-legendary Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. These theatrics established the basis for Hollywood’s explosion of Cowboy and Indian movies frequently described as “Westerns.”
For a time the actual Sitting Bull became a featured performer in the Wild West Show after Crown officials denied Sitting Bull’s people a place of refuge in the Cypress Hills in what would later become Alberta. Sitting Bull came north of the Canada-US border, the so-called Medicine Line, after the Lakota sage helped lead a legendary Indian defeat of the US Armed Forces in 1876.
Along the Little Bighorn River, the Indian fighting forces including Sitting Bull famously vanquished the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by Col. George Custer. This Indian victory was reported throughout the world. The outcome immortalized Sitting Bull as one of the most celebrated Indian warriors to emerge from a the momentary reversal in what Theodore Roosevelt famously referred to in his series of history books as The Winning of the West.
Sitting Bull was later assassinated by an agent of the US government after the Lakota sage played a central role in the Indian resistance movement associated with the Ghost Dance religion. After defeating the US Armed Forces he stepped onto the stage of British North American history when he sought the protection in the land of his British “Grandmother,” Queen Victoria.
The brief video below makes claims about the treatment of Sitting Bull’s Indian band by the North-West Mounted Police Officers on Queen Victoria’s side of the 49th parallel boundary. Sitting Bull is shown to have remarked on the contrast he supposedly saw between the honesty of the Red-Coated Mounties and the dishonesty of the Long Knives, the Indian term for US soldiers.
The truth of the story is that the Queen’s adviser’s in Great Britain opted not to allow Sitting Bull and his people to stay in the “Grandmother’s” land. The British government opted not to risk bringing on the animosity of the US government by giving permanent refuge to an Indian band who had played an important role in beating the US Army in armed conflict.
Sitting Bull was walked back to the US border and picked up by a contingent of US soldiers. In the USA Sitting Bull was hired to become a big draw as a kind of Indian circus performer playing himself in a drama dramatizing the bloody US conquest of Indian Country
The Indian wars of the United States established an expansionary pattern that continued throughout the Western Hemisphere and then throughout the world. The US military bases created in the process of western expansion were extended to a global proliferation of many hundreds of US military bases built especially after the Second World.
In Canada the US Armed Forces essentially control all the national military bases. At the Cold Lake Base in northern Alberta, for instance, US and Israeli forces test their new flying devices and train their soldiers.
The US Armed Forces exercise authority over all the military bases in Canada. All branches of the Canadian Armed Forces have pretty much been subsumed under the Northern Command structures of the US Armed Forces. From the military perspective of USNORTHCOM, our country is already treated more or less like a 51st state but where the inhabitants are treated much as wildlife.
As the map below illustrates, the US War Machine has come to treat the whole world as its own imperial domain. No form of government will be tolerated that does not fit in with the agenda of US domination. That reality does not do justice even to the American people who, in spite of the abundant Trumpian rhetoric, are still being robbed of safe and secure circumstances at home in order to fund foreign proxy armies abroad.
This rise of this militaristic process accelerated after 9/11 with the US declaration of the bogus Global War on Terror. In the name of responding to the specious interpretation of what really happened on 9/11, Canada’s military command structures were rendered subordinate to those of the United States. The same is true of the Canadian public security apparatus, our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement branches.
Much of this process happened secretly, without parliamentary approval and without conscientious media coverage. Democratic principles were violated and transgressed in the name of a false vision of national security.
The US government has become especially aggressive in the Canadian Arctic as circumpolar waterways acquire heightened importance in global shipping. Increasingly important in emerging configuration of large-scale transport is the Northwest Passage, a waterway through Canada’s arctic islands.
The Canadian government sees the Northwest Passage as a domestic route within Canada whereas the US government sees it as an international waterway. President Trump’s get-tough-policy vis a vis Canada is also being directed at the bullying of Greenland which should become our national ally. Might US Navy access to the Royal Canadian Navy’s deep-water port of Nanisvik on the northern tip of Baffin Island, be a point of negotiation as Canada battens down the hatches for the forthcoming trade dispute?
It can be anticipated that the government and people of Canada will become increasing critical of the careless US treatment of our country’s borders in the Arctic, our sovereignty and our national security.
Excellent history lesson.
Thank you Professor Hall for a very well composed history of the land of our northern neighbors. I live only a few minutes south of the border between our countries and Donald Trump, like any politician, does not speak for me and tens of millions like me. I am disgusted by the open promotion of a return to an expansionist American stance and hope that people can begin to apply some of the discernment that they may have gained from the COnVID debacle to the black pit that is modern politics. My family and I have always cherished our many jaunts into Canada and the sterling nature of the Canadian people is matched only by the beautiful landscapes. Both of our nations are suffering under similar societal upheavals and I hope that we can continue to support each other in our fight to rid ourselves of the seemingly endless supply of parasitic, self-serving and self-proclaimed "leaders" that have usurped our governments.