All too often Americans have taken Canada for granted — “Our Giant Neighbor to the North” has been voted the magazine headline most likely to make them turn the page — while Britons sometimes also dismiss Canadians as “our colonial cousins” with barely any more respect. Now here comes a book that proves that, for centuries, Canada has been subtly playing the Americans and the British off against each other, and in doing so has created one of the best countries in the world in which to live. It hasn’t been its sheer size that has saved Canada from the domination of its neighbor or of what it used to call its “Mother Country” (Britain), or even of France, but instead centuries of immensely impressive statesmanship.
“In order even to be conceived,” argues the author, Conrad Black, “Canada had to be, first, French so as not to be easily assimilated by the American colonists and revolutionaries, and then British, to have a protector to avoid being subsumed later into the great American project.” After that, it needed to wrest autonomy from Britain while continuing to be protected from the United States, which it managed by 1867, yet all the while “it had to be resistant, but not offensive, to the inexorably rising power of America.”
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