This is the destiny, and the vocation, Canada could have, not in the next century, but in the next five years of imaginative government. For over four hundred years Canada has toiled, in the shadows of its potential, and to a grudging or indifferent recognition of a smaller status than it has now achieved the ability to claim in the world. Since Lincoln abolished slavery and restored the American Union and let America be America, earning for himself the profound and permanent admiration of the whole world and of all posterity, the United States has been the most prominent of the world’s nations. For a time one or two empires were more powerful, but the United States, just eighty years after winning its independence, was the premier country in the world’s imagination after a revolution, electrifying growth, and an excruciating self-purification. There have been rivals, some of them evil, some quite transitory, and America is not excused from the duty of vigilance and the avoidance of complacency and misgovernment, as recent decades have shown. China approaches, the first Great Power to recycle itself, and there are also on the scene fading nationalities of the old world, rising nationalities, with changing groups and blocs, assembling and dissolving. But assertions that the United States is now a hegemon in decline are untrue on the visible facts.
Chipper, patient, and courteous, Canada has waited its turn, having tenaciously pursued an improbable destiny—a splendid nation in the northern section of the new world, a demi-continent of relatively good and ably self-governing people, engaged in the world, gamely, often admirably, and never discreditably. French and British and other Canadians have preserved the magic thread that has led from the time of Champlain through four hundred years to the present, connecting the Canada of ultimate flowering to its rugged and noble origins. And Canada kept pace in the shadow of America, which is why it remained in that shadow and did not fall behind. But after all the political disorientations, needless wars, economic disasters, and internecine strains in the post-Reagan years in the United States, Canada has come forward out of the shadow of America, if we can adjust to running without trainer wheels, and to lead more than we follow.
All Canadians, not least those so frustrated by the sluggishness of the country’s progress at developing a vivid national personality that they contemplate seceding, sense an impatience that we are not moving fast enough and far enough up the ranks of the benign powers. It has never been a question of any form of aggression to propel us further or faster, only a desire for the world to see we govern well and that as we have learned from many other countries, we can teach them something, too. So we can. It isn’t just peace, order, and good government, though that is a fine context, if unrevolutionary and neither dramatic nor heroic.
Our main chance is in advancing the art of government by applying some new techniques to a field worn down by the plough-horses of convention. The silent unhurried fruitfulness of Canada’s experience is ready to produce for the world a new harvest of better government and a better society. We have no excuse not to be the best, and when we are, we will have no need, any more than we have the inclination, to boast about it. Mainly unspoken and with thoughts not fully formed, Canadians wonder, why not the best? Answer has come there, none; it is waiting, now impatiently, to happen.