There's an interesting article in today's Globe and Mail about the period around the time of the War of 1812 and the resulting rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada later around 1837/38 that explains a lot I don't recall ever being taught in school about these early beginnings to our nation.
Because of their length, I won't attempt to summarize all of that here, but I do have some links for those of you who may wish to review it:-
Here is the main article.
The Upper (and Lower) Canada Rebellion(s)
The Family Compact.
The Canada Company
If you have the time, this makes interesting reading, because it explains a lot about our past, on both sides of our international border, and describes how and why we are different both politically and economically in the ways our two neighboring countries have developed. In some ways, this reads like a comedy of errors, except that its participants were deadly serious, and we've been stuck with the consequences of all that ever since. Parts of this story are a real eye-opener for anyone who assumes that the British have been the champions of freedom and democracy in the world. Evidently, their perception of freedom consisted of one's freedom to do what one was told, and smartly at that. After reading all this, I have a much better understanding of the causes of the American Revolution.
Ray as far as I can remember all our textbooks were printed in the USA in those years. Now would they want to include a British,Indian,Canadian sort of rag tag army burning down the White House.Not for morale reading in the good old USA.
ReplyDeleteDo you remember when McGraw-Hill were the recognized textbook suppliers of university texts and
ReplyDeletereference works like the series of engineering handbooks they published in the 1950s and 1960s? Those handbooks were practically complete courses in their individual fields of study, and I had several of them until I lost a box of books during a mixup while moving years ago.
But I digress - Let's not forget that a lot of people who came to Canada back in the 1800s, including, by the way, my own maternal grandparents, were from the USA. They came because the government was offering cheap land, and many of them didn't realize they were jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, so to speak, until after it was too late to change their minds. There was no 'free lunch'.
Or to put that another way, our two-faced lying bastards are every bit as capable and qualified as anyone else's. Let's remember also that Canada began as a kind of private club for the English aristocracy to use for fun and profit and some of them got quite rich from it.