Canada [antikvár]

""•rr INTRODUCTION Facing Page. Alternating layers of limestone and shale show the action of glaciers at Tangle Falls, in Jasper National Park, Alberta. The armorial bearings of Canada. Heraldic devices are drawn from France, England, Ireland and Scotland. Canada can best be understood not as a nation-state in the traditional sense but as a kind of empire. The thirty million people who live In Canada are as racially various as those of any great empire of history, and Canada governs territories on a truly imperial scale: some 9.9 million square kilometres, thirty-three times the area of Italy. Canada today resembles the Roman Empire in Its late stages. A relatively weak centre, Ottawa, tries to control, over tenuous lines of communication and power, a series of different, distant, and increasingly fractious provinces, almost any one of which may abruptly declare that it refuses to accept the authority of the central power and demands greater Independence. At a given moment two or three regions of Canada are involved in fierce economic-political disputes with each other or with the federal government, usually about control over some part of Canada's resources, such as the oil beneath the land and the nearby oceans. Politically, Canadians are like the children of a rich man who made a faulty will: their destiny is to quarrel 13