Article content
Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s 1864 pitch to Nova Scotians was simple: Joining Canada was their last shot at not becoming Americans.
Sign In or Create an Account
or View more offersArticle content
McGee, the acknowledged hype man of Canadian confederation, had spent most of his life assuming that the scattered colonies of British North America would eventually be absorbed by the United States. At one time he had even favoured it.
Article content
Recommended Videos
We apologize, but this video has failed to load.Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.We apologize, but this video has failed to load.Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.Article content
Story continues below
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
But now, he told a skeptical Halifax audience, they had a “golden moment of opportunity” to prevent it from happening. A moment which, “if neglected, may never come again.”
Article contentArticle content
“Rest assured, if we remain long as fragments, we shall be lost,” he said. Only a united Canada could head off the “Northern storm” that was sure to come.
Article content
Canada is often derided for a national identity that seems to exist only in opposition to the United States. In early 2025, then prime minister Justin Trudeau was roundly mocked for a CNN interview in which he defined Canadian identity as merely “not American.” Just this week, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal called out Canada’s “weakness for defining itself in terms of America.”
Article content
But Canada’s founders likely wouldn’t have disagreed with the characterization. Their grand project was always about roping off a corner of the continent that would be forever untouched by the American Revolution, to forge an alternative nation that would avoid both America’s sharpest edges and its worst mistakes.
Article content
And for the most part, that’s exactly what they did.
Article content
Story continues below
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
When Sir John A. Macdonald first presented the outlines of what would come to be called the “Dominion of Canada,” he made a point of stressing that it avoided all the worst mistakes of their American neighbour.
Article contentRead More
- Canada’s living standards ‘languishing’ behind U.S. as gap in economic performance widens: study
- Majority of Canadians now see U.S. as an enemy, and Trump is the reason: poll
- Story continues belowThis advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
“We are happily situated in having had the opportunity of watching its operation, seeing its working from its infancy till now,” Macdonald said in 1865.
Article contentArticle content
As such, they’d been able to avoid the “defects which time and events have shown to exist in the American Constitution.”
Article content
The Americans, said Macdonald, had made the mistake of declaring their constituent states to be “sovereign” entities constantly at odds with federal authority. Canada did away with this by a stronger central government.
Article content
“We have thus avoided that great source of weakness which has been the cause of the disruption of the United States,” he said.
Article content
Best of all, Canada’s head of state would be a monarch beholden at all times to elected ministers. The U.S. president, by contrast, was effectively an elected “despot.”
Article content
“A one-man power, with the command of the naval and military forces … and with the veto power as a branch of the legislature, perfectly uncontrolled by responsible advisers,” he said.