One of America’s leading newspapers on this date in 1911 said the era of a timid Canada existing solely in the shadow of the British Empire was over. In discussing a possible free trade (known as reciprocity back then) agreement between the U.S. and Canada, the Los Angeles Times argued a Canadian “is not a staid Britisher with a slipped-down chest and a checker-board vest, who is shy of his h’s and who is cheated by a beaver-hatted, chin-goateed, nasal-voiced stage Yankee. The Canuck has grafted upon his British stock the alertness and snap of his American neighbour, and if he gets the worst of it in any trade with Uncle Sam it will astonish those who know him.”
This is definitely an editorial worth recalling, even today, particular as we have now entered the Trump age once again!
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.