As a Canadian author associated with a Canadian geopolitical magazine and a book series rooted in the thesis that Canada is still under the dominance of the British Empire to this very day, the July 1st holiday known as “Canada Day” is a bit of a strange thing to celebrate.
As I have recently written in my articles The Missed Chance of 1867 and the Truth of the Alaska Purchase, July 1st, 1867 was the day the British North America Act was established creating for the first time a confederacy in the Americas devoted to “maintaining the interests of the British Empire” (as our founding constitution makes explicit).
The motive for this 1867 confederation was driven by the British Empire’s burning fear of losing its valuable possessions in the Americas during the course of the Civil War when Britain’s “other confederacy” operation against Lincoln’s union was obviously going to fail. The fact that the U.S.-Russian alliance that saved the Union in 1863 and led into the sale of Alaska in 1867 would also usher in an inevitable growth of rail development through the Bering Strait connecting both civilizations was a prospect devoutly to be feared by the City of London.
As Lincoln’s ally and father of the trans continental railway Governor William Gilpin laid out in his 1890 book The Cosmopolitan Railway, a new paradigm of win-win cooperation governed by national credit driven by rail construction and industry would soon replace the archaic system of empire forever. This project had vast support from the leadership of both the USA and Russia- including Sergei Witte, and Czar Nicholas II.
Many republican movements were alive in Canada during the turbulent Civil War years and whether Britain’s American possession would become 1) independent, 2) join the USA or 3) remain an appendage of the Empire was still very much uncertain.
Pro-Lincoln forces were found among Canada’s elite in the form of the great protectionist and nation builder Isaac Buchanan (President of Canada’s 1863 Executive Council) and a group of statesmen affiliated with Louis Joseph Papineau’s Canadian Institutes known as Les Rouges. A leading member of Les Rouges was a young Lincoln-loving lawyer named Wilfrid Laurier who later became Prime Minister from 1896-1911 where he often behaved as an uncooperative thorn in British colonial designs.
Neither Buchanan nor Laurier approved of annexation but rather desired that Canada become an independent republic free of British intrigues and friend of a pro-development version of America then much more alive than the Anglo-American beast which has run roughshod over the world in recent decades.
While Buchanan fought for a North American Zollverein in 1863 against his enemies on the Grit “left” (George Brown) and Tory “right” (Sir John A. Macdonald), his efforts were sabotaged with his 1864 ouster. When his time finally came, Laurier fought hard to revive this Buchanan’s Zollverein plan years later. Unlike the perversion of NAFTA, the name Zollverein was derived from Frederick List’s 19th century program to unify Germany into a modern nation state under American System measures of protection, national credit, rail, industrial and infrastructure growth (not dissimilar in principle to the Belt and Road Initiative today). In Germany this program was supported most ardently by Lincoln ally Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
Without understanding this dynamic, or the British operation to get rid of Bismarck in 1890, there is no way to properly understand Britain’s obsession with manufacturing what later became known as World Wars one or two.
Laurier’s Zollverein revival of 1911 (aka: ‘Reciprocity Treaty’) proposed to lower protective tariffs with the USA primarily on agriculture, but with the intention to electrify and industrialize Canada, a nation which Laurier saw as supporting 60 million people within two generations. With the collaboration of his close advisors, Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton and later William Lyon Mackenzie King, Laurier navigated a complex mine field of British intrigue active throughout the Canadian landscape.
The Round Table and Fabian Society
During this post-Civil War period, three American presidents, one French President and two pro-American Czars were assassinated as the British Empire re-organized itself under the guiding influence of two new think tanks: 1) The Fabian Society and 2) The Round Table Movement.
While one group shaped an agenda more attractive to the left, centered in the London School of Economics (LSE), the other group shaped a program more conservative right guided by a manifesto laid out by South African race patriot Cecil Rhodes in his 1877 will and centered in Oxford (the center of Rhodes Scholarship brainwashing activities for the next century).
In his will Rhodes stated:
“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, and for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”
The common denominators for both organizations were: 1) world government under the control of the City of London and Britain’s global shadow empire, 2) the abolishment of independent nation states and 3) a “scientifically managed population control agenda” run by a technocratic elite. While an air of ‘left’ and ‘right’ were projected for public consumption, their operations were always interwoven as we shall see with the example of Lord Milner and Lord Mackinder.
Lords Milner and Mackinder Come to Canada
A follower of Rhodes’ vision and leader of the Round Table Group founded in 1902 was named Lord Alfred Milner who devoted himself whole heartedly to the task of creating a new church of the British Empire. In 1908, Milner persuaded Lord Halford Mackinder to quit his job as director of the London School of Economics to help resolve the problems of North America (all paid for by the Rhodes Trust).
During his dozens of public and private lectures across Canada, Mackinder laid out his clear understanding of the geopolitical importance of Canada within Britain’s ‘Great Game’ that few then or even now recognized sitting as it does as a wedge between Eurasian powers and the USA… and whose forces of attraction were still great. Czar Nicholas himself had only recently commissioned a study of the Bering Strait rail tunnel in 1906- supported by leading representatives of the Lincoln and Czar Alexander II in both countries.
Upon his return to Britain, Mackinder delivered a report to Westminster in 1911 where he laid out the terms of this threat in stark reality:
“Ultimately we have to look to the question of power…and power rests upon economic development. If Canada is drawn into the orbit of Washington, then this Empire loses its great opportunity. The dismemberment of the Empire will not be limited to Canada. Australia will avail herself of the power of the American fleet in the Pacific, and she will not long depend on a decaying and breaking Empire. Then with the resources of this island country you will be left to maintain your position in India… That constitutes, in my opinion, the significance of the present crisis. We are at the turning of the tide.”
A devout race Patriot just like Rhodes and Mackinder, Lord Milner commented on the existential threat of losing economic control of Canada to an America which had still not been re-conquered. Writing to his partner Leo Amery in 1909, he said:
“As between the three possibilities of the future: 1. Closer Imperial Union, 2. Union with the U.S. and 3. Independence, I believe definitely that No. 2 is the real danger. I do not think the Canadians themselves are aware of it… they are wonderfully immature in political reflection on the big issues, and hardly realise how powerful the influences are… On the other hand, I see little danger to ultimate imperial unity in Canadian ‘nationalism’. On the contrary I think the very same sentiment makes a great many especially of the younger Canadians vigorously, and even bumptuously , assertive of their independence, proud and boastful of the greatness and future of their country, and so forth, would lend themselves, tactfully handled, to an enthusiastic acceptance of Imperial unity on the basis of ‘partner-states’. This tendency is, therefore, in my opinion rather to be encouraged, not only as safeguard against ‘Americanization’, but as actually making, in the long run, for a Union of ‘all the Britains’.”
Milner recognized that Britain’s best choice was to cultivate a special type of British-approved “nationalism” among the “wonderfully immature” minds of the Canadian descendants of United Empire Loyalists of 1776 who were ignorant to the powerful influences of history. This insight shaped the next 110 years of Canadian cultural engineering to a tee.
A Very Canadian Coup and the League of Nations
Despite these efforts, Laurier was able to finalize his long-sought for Reciprocity Treaty with the USA in 1911- Milner’s worst fear. Before it could be acted upon however, an orchestrated overthrow of his government was affected by the Masonic Orange Order and Round Table Group with Laurier saying ominously a few years later:
“Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table”, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.”
By 1916, the Milner Group effected a coup in Britain itself, in order to shape the terms of the post-WWI order at Versailles where the League of Nations was created to usher in a post-Nation State world. This was just another way of saying “New British Empire”.
When American statesmen resisted this new imperial organization, Roundtable Groups were set up across Anglo-Saxon nations during the 1920s to coordinate a new more fascist solution to the “national problem”. This took the form of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA/Chatham House) created in 1919, with Canadian and Australian branches set up soon thereafter in the form of the Canadian and Australian Institutes for International Affairs. An American branch of this group was created in 1921 under the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and through these groups (later to be known as the Five Eyes), fascism was sold as a solution to the Great Depression triggered by the financial blowout of 1929.
As Georgetown professor Caroll Quigley pointed out in his posthumously published Anglo-American Establishment, the Canadian leader of this group was a protégé of Milner named Vincent Massey who later became the nation’s first Canadian born Governor General and led the operation to create a new synthetic Canadian Nationalism in which peaked with the 1949 Massey Royal Commission on the National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (heavily tied into a CIA/MI6 operation called the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe).
The effect of Massey’s report relieved the Rockefeller Foundation of the financial burden of funding Canadian history, humanities, arts and music by creating the Canadian Council of the Arts which it held alongside the Carnegie Foundation since their founding in 1905 and 1913 respectively.
Fascism or Freedom?
During the dark years of the Great Depression, “fascism” was sold as the economic miracle solution to desperate citizens across the trans Atlantic, and a new, harsher effort was made for a global Bankers Dictatorship under the Bank of England and Bank of International Settlements (the Central bank of Central Banks). In Canada, the groundwork for a scientifically managed society was established by a team of 5 Rhodes Scholars and one Fabian Society agent who founded the League of Social Reconstruction (LSR) in 1931. This eugenics-loving organization dubbed itself “the Canadian Fabian Society” and its leading operatives were all tied to Canada’s Round Table (The Canadian Institute for International Affairs (CIIA)). Rhodes Scholar Escott Reid, whom I introduced in my last paper on the Rhodes Scholar Roots of NATO, was the CIIA’s first Permanent Secretary and one of the leading co-founders of the LSR.
This group set up a political party known as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation which changed its name to the National Democratic Party in 1961.
While in Quebec, the fascist Nazi Adrian Arcand was set up to take power, on the Federal level the Canadian Fabian Society believed it could take charge.
The trouble here was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By rejecting fascism, FDR thwarted a bankers dictatorship and forced through a revolutionary reform in banking that put a leash on the financial elite while forcing public credit to serve the Common Good through vast New Deal megaprojects. In a certain way, the America of Abraham Lincoln was consciously revived under FDR’s leadership. These positive effects were felt strongly in Canada and soon the “Laurier Liberals” took back power and in 1937, nationalized the Bank of Canada (previously modelled on the private Central Bank of England in 1934) with Prime Minister Mackenzie King stating:
“Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.”
One can only imagine the stress felt by London as FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace moved to revive the Bering Strait connection alongside Russian Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942. Describing this plan in 1944, Wallace said:
“Siberia and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow… When Molotov was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”
The Anti-Colonial Spirit Struggles in the Post-War Years
Even though Rhodes Scholars flooded into the upper echelons of power with the untimely deaths of Skelton and Lapointe in 1941, C.D. Howe had created a strong machine committed to building large scale projects and continued to grow Canada’s scientific and technological potential in the post-war years with the Bank of Canada serving as a tool for this growth. Some of these projects included the AVRO Arrow supersonic jet program, Canada’s Atomic Energy Agency, the Trans Canada Highway and St. Laurence Seaway.
When the Liberals fell from power in 1957 and a new Conservative government took over, the commitment to scientific and technological progress continued with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s planned Northern Vision to industrialize the Arctic as a sort of “Canadian manifest destiny”. This commitment to anti-Malthusian “open system” economics did not please London.
When the Diefenbaker administration fell in 1963 (after a Roundtable-steered coup), the Liberal Party that returned to power under Lester B. Pearson was a far cry from that which had fallen in 1957. During the 1957-63 period, the Liberal Party was re-organized directly by Walter Lockhart Gordon, the British Foreign Office’s leading agent working through the CIIA.
Walter Gordon and the Rise of a New Nationalism
During this period, Gordon proved to become the most powerful man in the Liberal Party and the controller of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.
Gordon led the cleansing of C.D. Howe Liberals and transformed the Party from the pro-development machine it had been since WW II into a radically anti-American, anti-progress colony under British financial control[1].
This was done by essentially infusing the Fabians dominant in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (aka: the Fabian Society of Canada) into a Liberal host body (the CCF’s open connection to Marxism made it a hard sell on post-war Canadians). The recommendations that Gordon had made in his 1957 Royal Commission Report on Economic Prospects for Canada, especially those regarding restricting American investments and ownership of Canadian industry, would now, for the most part, be fully supported by the new government. A new synthetic Canadian identity would be crafted around a stark fear of the USA (then suffering its own regime change takeover, via the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy), and a new Orwellian age of endless war, nuclear terror, sex, drugs, MK Ultra and COINTEL PRO became the new norm for a generation of young baby boomers.
In his memoirs, John Diefenbaker noted the irony of Walter Gordon’s radical promotion of Canadian nationalism on the one side, yet hatred of the policies pushed by Diefenbaker which would provide the actual means of attaining those nationalist ends which Gordon apparently desired:
“One of the ironies of recent Canadian history is that Walter Gordon, a man whom I only met for a few minutes when he delivered to me his Royal Commission Report, has stated that he decided to do everything in his power to make Mr. Pearson Prime Minister because he hated me and feared that my policies would wreck Canada!” [p. 202]
Lester B. Pearson, an Oxford Massey Scholar and former assistant in London to Vincent Massey, became the vehicle Gordon selected to oversee the transformation of the Liberal Party and the purging of pro-development Liberals who would resist the isolationist monetary policies of Gordon. One of those who would suffer the purge was Henry Erskine Kidd, General Secretary for the Liberal Party who referred to the process led by Gordon as “a palace revolution”[2].
With this Palace Revolution, the Liberals swept back to power but now governed by an anti-growth technocratic ethic premised around the “scientific management of society” and a new “British-approved” nationalism was created beginning with a shiny new maple leaf flag which unlike most national flags, featured symbolism that signified absolutely nothing whatsoever.
When Pearson found himself too easily influenced by “American-styled” growth initiatives, Gordon broke with him, and as Privy Council President, worked alongside Canadian Privy Councillor Maurice Strong (then head of the Canadian International Development Agency) to promote a more effective replacement in the form of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. In Elaine Dewar’s 1995 book Cloak of Green, Maurice Strong exposed how both he and Gordon were on the selection committee in Mont Blanc that chose Fabian Society asset Pierre Trudeau as a new rising star of the reformed Liberal Party.
Another co-founder of this new Nationalism whose name is worth mentioning included a Canadian Rhodes Scholar named George Grant (a descendant of , who as I wrote in my George Grant’s Delphic Subversion of Canadian Nationalism, was little more than a Straussian follower of Aldous Huxley who drooled over a Canadian-modelled world government. Upon returning from Oxford, Grant was hired as a researcher on Massey’s 1949 Royal Commission.
Grant’s grandfather George Parkin was Milner’s inspiration as a lecturer at Oxford and co-founder of the Roundtable group in 1902.
Canada’s Future: Colonial Tool or New Silk Road?
As part of his 1908 Canada tour that led into the creation of the synthetic “new nationalism” outlined above, Halford Mackinder made a jarring forecast:
“We may picture to ourselves that Canada will not merely be an important part of the British Empire, but the very centre of that empire. Those who ask if Canada is to be loyal to the empire are forgetful of the fact, which I believe Canadians are beginning to realize, that Canada is probably to be the centre of the Empire.”
For those who want to raise a glass to Canada on July 1st, I’d recommend that in lieu of painting ridiculous maple leaves on your face, we instead celebrate those figures in Canada’s history that fought to correct the error of 1776- when Quebec failed to accept Benjamin Franklin’s offer to become a 14th member of the revolution. Instead of worshiping Maple Leaves and hockey, I suggest we take the time to raise a glass to the lives of those great statesmen like Louis-Joseph Papineau, Isaac Buchanan, Wilfrid Laurier, O.D. Skelton, C.D. Howe, W.A.C. Bennett, John Diefenbaker and Daniel Johnson Sr, who sacrificed their comfort, reputations and sometimes even their lives to bring Canada even just a few steps closer to attaining true independence of the British Empire.
As the spirit of Lincoln, Alexander II, FDR and Sun Yat-sen is revived in today’s Belt and Road Initiative and broader Multipolar Alliance led by Russia and China, Canada will again be forced to confront an existential choice: Will we make the right one?
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow, BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation
Thank you for the missing history.