Giving Thanks For Canada

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there as well as here:

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving Day. Britain’s real special relationship across the North Atlantic is with Canada. Canada fought in both World Wars from the start. As one of the 16 Commonwealth Realms, she retains the monarchy. Any of them can abolish it, as many others have done, or change her own Law of Succession. Canada freely chooses not to. She cherishes her ties to us and to the other 14 sisters. Likewise, we cherish our ties to her. Or, at least, we should. Not least because Canada’s vast resources of fuel, fresh water and other key commodities make her a coming superpower of the 21st century.

Canada is the land of John G Diefenbaker, the morally and socially conservative rural populist who established the Canadian Bill of Rights, the Royal Commission on Health Services, the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act, and the National Productivity Council (Economic Council of Canada), and who extended the franchise to all Aboriginal peoples. He campaigned to save the Canadian Red Ensign, with the Union Flag in the corner and thus making Canada a nation under the Cross. He opposed official bilingualism in the English-speaking provinces. He denounced apartheid, and blocked the Commonwealth readmission of the new Republic of South Africa. And he refused to have American nuclear weapons in Canada. But, alas, he subordinated Canadian to American air defence, one of the effects of which was to put 30,000 Canadians out of work. A salutary reminder that One Nation politics must always place an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.

And Canada is also the land of Tommy Douglas, voted the Greatest Canadian by CBC viewers in 2004. Born in Falkirk, and therefore an embodied link between Canada and the United Kingdom, this Baptist minister led a party of unions, farmers and co-operators with that splendid name, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. He gave Saskatchewan the publicly owned Saskatchewan Power Corporation, its extension of electrical services to remote villages and farms, and the Saskatchewan Government Insurance Office. He gave Saskatchewan many Crown Corporations in competition with private sector interests, the unionisation of the public services, and Canada’s first programme of universal free hospital care. He delivered the Saskatchewan Bill of Rights, with its groundbreaking protections against private no less than government abuses. He laid the ground for the province’s Medicare programme, which soon afterwards became nationwide. And he became the first Leader of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s main party of the Left. Did I mention that he did all this while a Baptist minister?

Canada is a fully North American country with close ties to Britain, including both the monarchy and the Keynes-Beveridge model of social democracy. Canada is a fully North American country where a lot of people speak French, but have a monarchist rather than a republican French flag, and are devoutly Catholic accordingly. Canada is, well, a fully North American country which is not the United States. Indeed, Canada is the only such country. Complete with the Queen and the Westminster model, complete with a few retained British variations on the English language, and complete with a British-style social democracy, yet sharing with the United States a continent and the longest land frontier between any two countries on earth. I mean, how dare they! Who do they think they are?

They will indicate exactly who and what they are by withdrawing from Afghanistan. And we should be right behind them.