and imagination. Canada’s potential is to be found in its varied social fabric — a social fabric rich in diverse communities, each of them capable of contributing to one another and to the country as a whole. Canada’s potential is to be found in its cultural and technological promise and in the training and talents of its people. Our Centennial year, and Expo, have given us a glimpse of what we can do when we work together.
If Canada is a country of two founding linguistic communities, of diverse heritages, of many regions and traditions, then it will flourish only as these communities and heritages and regions flourish — economically, socially and culturally. And their full potential will be realized only as Canada realizes its potential.
We will not achieve this goal easily. We are a country troubled with frictions and misunderstandings, with problems which sometimes are the product of our own failures. We are introspective about our present and sometimes fearful of our future, and well we might be, for we are confronted with forces that would divide us.
We are exposed to world-wide forces, as well as to internal ones. Technological change has brought pervasive automation and instantaneous world communications. Economic change has exposed us to the interdependence of world markets and monetary systems, to the competition of international corporations and of increasingly productive nations. World political change has brought us into international organizations which exist to influence the activity of all nations — including our own — in the interest of world harmony. All this has limited our own freedom of action in economic policy, in trade policy and in foreign policy. We have long been a federation living beside a larger federation; we are now a federation living within an increasingly interdependent world.
If this limits our independence as a great continental federation how much more would it limit the independence of separated parts of Canada? In a world such as this it is not possible that the destiny of Canadians will be better realized by weakening our federation, any more than it is possible that our promise will be fulfilled by diminishing the diversity which is so much a part of our identity. Canada’s promise lies in the growth of the elements of which it is composed, and in the growth of a Canada which is greater than the sum of its parts. Only a narrow or static view of our country and of the world would lead one to believe that Canada can develop by the process of subtraction: that one linguistic community or region can grow by reducing the capacity of Canada, or that Canada can
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