Sovereignty didn’t just materialize on Canada’s agenda last weekend. It’s been there always. A defunct left nationalist groupuscule in B.C. used to ask coyly on what date Canada won independence. Trick question because, they said, it still hadn’t. August historian Arthur Lower wrote a book titled “From Colony to Nation.” Eminent historian Harold Innis needled, “And Back to Colony.”
The discussion took an economic turn in the 1960s from which it hasn’t recovered. In 1963, Liberal finance minister Walter Gordon, of Bay St. and Rosedale, tried legislating higher Canadian ownership of the economy but had to retreat when U.S. and Canadian big money objected.
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