We should then have only to include the North in our confederacy . . . and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation.
While touring the United States in 2006 to promote his short biography of Thomas Jefferson, the late Christopher Hitchens mused about the sort of things that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence would be amazed at were he to somehow be transported to the present day, saying, “He would look you in the eye, with great reproach, at the fact that Canada remains unconquered.”
The room tittered, burbling at the unspoken irony around which the Marxist turned neoconservative journalist’s joke revolved. Jefferson, the third US president and giant of the American Enlightenment, had once assured a newspaper editor in 1812 that “the acquisition of Canada . . . will be a mere matter of marching.” And yet, two centuries later, any adventure, military or otherwise, to expand the territory of the United States and liberate Canada from the yoke of tyranny is plainly absurd. Canada, a modern liberal democracy, is clearly no longer under any such yoke. Further, there are arguably no two countries on Earth that are closer allies or whose cultures are more alike — the citizens of the one forever being confused overseas for the citizens of the other. (This is true even of Quebec. Tourists, whether from Europe or the United States, are often surprised to find La Belle Province less a cultural tranche of France remnant in the Americas than a land of people who are culturally American but just happen to speak French.)
And yet — and yet — there remains something very strange, or perhaps world-historically incorrect, about…
Auteur: Leigh Phillips
