The Cambridge Concise History of Canada, Conrad - B-

                                          Canada has much in common with the US: the vast border, NATO membership, the North-American Free Trade Agreement, language, culture, entwined economies and similar demographics as a multi-ethnic transcontinental democracy.  Our respective evolutions toward modern nation-states has been considerably different, yet strongly intertwined.  Canada was first New France, and for a century and a half struggled for its place in the New World. There were 70,000 Frenchmen incorporated into British North America in 1763 after France was defeated at Quebec, on the Plains of Abraham.  A decade later, the Quebec Act broadly expanded Catholic rights, and soon thereafter, 60,000 Loyalists fled north after the American Revolution. Those francophone Catholics and the newly-arrived Protestants provided the foundation of, and an on-going fault line in,  to what was to become Canada. The American invasions during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the inherent conservatism of the population planted the seeds of anti-Republicanism deep into the Canadian consciousness, assuring their continuing place as a colony in the British Empire.  Between 1815 and 1850, a million people immigrated from Great Britain.  The United Province of Canada Act came in 1840, after small incidents of rebellion in the cause of self-determination.  The Confederation of Canada was established in 1867 and soon thereafter stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Newfoundland and Labrador remained British colonies, however, until 1949.  In 1885, the Canadian-Pacific, the longest railway in the world was completed.  Three million immigrants came as the Industrial Revolution took place toward the end of the 19th century.   Canada fought beside the British as a Dominion in both World Wars.  In 1965, it adopted the Maple Leaf flag and began issuing its own passports. Full independence did not come until the Canada Act of 1982, although the British Monarch remains the Head-of-State.   Today, one in five Canadians is foreign born.  Canada deftly avoided most of the issues occasioned by the Great Recession, is a leading exporter of fossil fuels, and is well-positioned to capitalize on the melting Polar ice-cap.