Quote:
Originally Posted by Pinion
What a weird rant. No one cared about the west coast when the border was made, not even Canadians. The only reason they even bothered with a border was because of the gold rush - before that there was no clear division between USA and Canada. It's not like there were hundreds of thousands of people that lived here and failed to get a good border because of our lack of a bloody civil war.
Borders meant a lot less back then to regular people. You crossed it if you wanted to.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pinion
Most of us read about that in high school. Of course there were border disputes, but Bellingham and Point Roberts were not the focus. We got slaughtered in negotiations because no one cared about the west coast back then and hardly anyone lived here before the gold rush. We're still an afterthought to most Canadians to this day.
I wonder if Richard Pakenham ever got closer to BC than Washington DC. It seems like he hated his job and/or North America, gave up early on our border, then said "fuck it I quit" when given the task of negotiating with/about Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pakenham
|
- No one cared about Vancouver, no one really lived in Vancouver back then? Maybe the British in England (where the political power was located) didn't care about it. How about Seattle just 200km south of the border? Were there just so much more people living in that part of Cascadia region? Why did Americans care and passionate so much about drawing a line so far north, if "borders were meaningless for regular people because they could just cross it"? I think it was because it was to be part of THEIR LAND, while Canada was just some colony for resource extraction and as a strategic military post where of course some good loyal dogs live over there across the ocean.
- I don't hate the Royals, but let me talk about the Royal visits (Kate and William). They didn't even visit Vancouver of "British Columbia". They, instead, visited Los Angeles of the amazing United States with their own money (as you know, Canadian tour and entertainment was all paid by Canadian tax payers money).
Also, speaking of the West or East, I'll tell you one thing happened in the Eastern Canada that you might already know. The reason why Montreal, the mighty and beautiful former heartland of Canada, is taken over by French-only-and-only lunatics (long after the war of plains of Abraham) and Canadians had to build their new central in Toronto, the former hogtown, is because the British didn't sincerely care and look at what was happening in that distant place called Canada. Canada got its full political power to take care of itself in the 1970s in Ottawa, but it was too late to take preventative measures.
Why did this happen? Of course, the British in the homeland (England) must have thought Canada (the Province of Quebec to be exact) was a French language zoo at a corner of the British world, not everywhere. So that is fine and cool (division of those people's communication? possible separatism and struggle? who cares. It's an "interesting" zoo that we can visit). Would they have allowed the same thing even begin to take place in London? Hah!