decision as to the machinery which ought to be established for proceeding with the further review of the Constitution. We shall later be advancing certain proposals to this end.
The Nature of the Canadian Federation
The Canadian people will expect us, as their political leaders, to approach this review of the Constitution with a full awareness of what Canada is, and what individual Canadians expect of their country. They will expect us to look to Canada’s future and to its potential for Canadians, not just to the theoretical or legalistic considerations which so often characterize constitutional discussions. For a constitution is more than a legal document; it is an expression of how the people within a state may achieve their social, economic and cultural aspirations through the exercise and control of political authority. We must look therefore to the essential nature of the Canadian federation in examining our Constitution.
Canadians are a free people in a free society; determined to be equal in a community where opportunity is equal. Our systems of law and of government are as free as any in the world. Our country is not beset by the class divisions or the confining traditions to be found in so many countries. Our goal of individual self-realization has not had to compete against the impositions of an authoritarian government. The very fact that we are assembled to discuss the future of our country is the best demonstration which can be given of our freedom.
Canada is a country of two founding linguistic communities, enriched by many heritages, and characterized by several regional identities. Our country is not a North American “melting pot” in which the cultures and heritages of its people are expected to be lost. Nor is it a collection of separate states striving, as in Europe, to bring to an end the destructive wars of centuries, and to find a way of submerging differences in the interest of common economic and technological growth. Canada’s identity is its diversity and its unity: we lose ourselves if we lose our two linguistic communities, our diverse cultural heritages, or our several regional identities. We lose them all if we lose the Canada in which they have been able to exist and to develop.
But Canada is more than a collection of communities, heritages and traditions. There is a Canadian personality. We are not carbon-copy Englishmen, nor carbon-copy Frenchmen, nor carbon-copy Europeans. Each of the founding societies and each of the cultural groups in this country has achieved in different ways its independence from its past, and none really wants to go back. Nor do Canadians want to become
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“[T]wo founding linguistic communities”. Nice variation on the highly incorrect “two races” theme in Mrs. Windsor’s 1964 speech in the Quebec Legislature, calling for a new constitution for Canada, in flagrant violation of the Act of Settlement.
The people of Canada did not ask for this “review”. The bombing spree of the Communist, Castro-trained FLQ terrorists, misrepresented as “nationalist” French-Canadians, has been the one and only facade for this review, and it has coincided precisely with the setup of Pearson’s “Bi & Bi” commission.
“The very fact that we are assembled to discuss the future of our country is the best demonstration which can be given of our freedom.” Who’s the “we”? No one but Pearson and his hand-picked committee of leftists, who have devoted themselves since 1963 to the task of coming up with pretexts to warp Confederation into multicultural (Communist) non-existence.