Canada: The Strategic and Military Pawn

Gerard S. Vano examines the North American implications of the geopolitical, strategic, and military roles of Canada from the seventeenth century to the end of the Trudeau era. In doing so, he stresses the spatial interpretation, as opposed to the historical interpretation, of Canada’s development. The conceptual view of the dichotomy between space and time in Canada’s history presented here is unique. The illusion of Westernized or Anglo-American Canada is a direct consequence of the country’s commercial tradition of heavy importation of technology, ideologies, and even the sense of Western modernity–which is temporal. Canada’s reduction to a strategic and military pawn can only be understood in relation to the conservatism of space as opposed to the imported liberalism of time. This dichotomy between space and time is reflected in the struggle of the super powers, and is also occurring within the Canadian polity, diminishing its very existence.