Jonathan Kay: Canada’s cultural elites have seen the enemy — and it is Canadians – National Post

The idea that Indigenous political agitation would lead to Canada’s break-up is not new. The shocking thing now is that the main threat doesn’t actually come from Indigenous peoples

If you’re interested in history, there’s no better podcast than Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions,” which takes listeners through detailed accounts of the great historical upheavals of the last 400 years. Canada gets scant treatment, of course, since this country never truly witnessed a real revolution. But we do get a significant cameo during Duncan’s 15-episode arc on the American Revolution. And seeing Canada (or, more accurately, what would become Canada) through the eyes of late 18th-century American revolutionaries is instructive.

In America’s northern borderlands, “Canadians” — as we now call ourselves — broadly consisted of three separate groups: Indigenous societies, French Catholics in what would become Lower Canada, and (largely) English-speaking Protestants in what would become Upper Canada. For their own reasons, some First Nations participated in the American Revolutionary War, while French Catholics largely sat it out, having no particular interest in setting out from Montreal and Quebec City (which were already substantial towns with a well-developed civil society) to help two groups of anti-Catholic Anglophiles fight each over parochial trade and fiscal grievances.

Read More: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jonathan-kay-canadas-cultural-elites-have-seen-the-enemy-and-it-is-canadians