Christopher Dummitt: Dec. 11 is the day Canada gained autonomy. Progressives want us to forget

It’s “Statute of Westminster Day” on Dec. 11 — and if that leaves you puzzled, you’re probably not alone.

Canada has an abysmal record of distorting and then forgetting its own history. The worst part is that this erasure wasn’t accidental. It was done deliberately — ostensibly with the best of intentions.

English Canadians in the 1950s knew where they came from. Ours was once a proud story of national distinction. Unlike almost every other nation in the Americas, we opted not to rebel against our colonial motherland. We did not take up arms against the “intolerable acts” like the 13 colonies to our south, nor did we revolt against the tyrannical power of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy as so many nations in Latin America did.

Instead, the Canadian story became one of gradual evolution — a step-by-step maturation into full nationhood. And the Statute of Westminster — which ought to be known to every Canadian schoolchild — was a fundamental milestone in that evolution. In 1931, the Statute established in law what had already been obvious in fact: that the Dominion of Canada was a full and equal partner alongside Britain and the other nations of the Commonwealth. Canada now had full legislative autonomy over all aspects of its governance including even its relation with the reigning monarch who would, in due course, become king or queen of Canada.

There were earlier steps, too — most notably the winning of “responsible government” in 1848, achieved first in Nova Scotia and then across the other British North American colonies. There, Canadians gained control over most internal affairs. We rejected the American-style republicanism of 1776 — and rejected as well the radicals whose uprisings had been crushed in 1837 and 1838 — choosing instead a British-style parliamentary democracy in, by, and for North Americans.

Confederation followed in 1867 — a moment too often misremembered as our declaration of independence. The already mostly self-governed colonies of British North America joined together as a single nation that was still — at our own insistence — within the Empire and under the Crown. Canadians earned further distinction on the battlefields of France and Belgium in the Great War, and then an independent foreign policy in the 1920s. Even after the Statute of Westminster granted complete legislative autonomy in 1931, we continued to rely on a British court — the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council — as our final court of appeal into the 1940s. And of course, because we refused to agree among ourselves on how to amend our constitution, that power remained with the British Parliament until 1982.

That story, too, is often distorted — as though the British were clinging to authority we had demanded they surrender. In reality, Canadians simply couldn’t agree on a formula, and so the matter stayed in British hands until we were finally able to sort ourselves out.

English Canadians once understood that we came from someplace — that we had inherited a tradition of British liberty and made it our own. There was nothing deferential about this. Canadian history is littered with moments when defiant locals pushed back against arrogant British toffs, only to turn around and proudly claim their British heritage the next day. You could proudly claim British heritage and yet be defiantly Canadian.

Much of that memory — this sense of who we knew ourselves to be — was stripped out of Canadian institutions from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Liberal governments in the 1950s and 1960s began dismantling symbols like the proud title Dominion, which Canadians had chosen for themselves in 1867. To Quebec nationalists, it was said to be too British, too subservient. So away it went. Almost every major institution now called “Canada this” or “Canada that” once bore the Dominion name — from our federal (Dominion) government to Stats Canada (the Dominion Bureau of Statistics), even to the national holiday formerly known as Dominion Day. The Pierre Trudeau Liberals sneakily changed it to Canada Day in 1982 during the late hours of an ill-attended parliamentary session.

The Pearson Liberals gave us a striking new flag in 1965 — but only by tossing the old Red Ensign into the dustbin of history. Why? Because in an age of rising Quebec separatism and domestic terrorism, no compromise in Parliament could permit any visible sign of our British heritage on a Canadian flag. It simply “couldn’t be done,” they said. The same impulse shaped our national anthem. In came the generic “O Canada,” and out went “The Maple Leaf Forever,” with its unapologetic lyrics about General James Wolfe, who led the British to victory at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham..

Time after time, Canadian national symbols were remade because Liberal concessionists insisted no sign of our British origins could remain. It just wouldn’t be “inclusive” — even though the loudest detractor through many of these years was a former prime minister whose surname was the very German “Diefenbaker.” Meanwhile, Quebecers proudly embraced the fleur-de-lys and made historical memory central to their identity with a motto: Je me souviens.

For English Canada, the motto might as well have been the opposite: for the ostensible greater good, I will forget.

So this year, on Statute of Westminster Day, it is worth remembering the history of erasure — and remembering who we once understood ourselves to be. It is worth recalling that fights over heritage, over the naming of schools and streets, do matter. We have seen what happens when we do not fight to preserve what is ours.

If your phone buzzed with a reminder that today is Statute of Westminster Day and you had no idea what that meant, it is because those well-intentioned progressives of decades past succeeded in erasing a shared story. They insisted they weren’t doing so. They promised nothing fundamental would change.

But it did.

As for me, on this day, je me souviens too.

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