Originally published January 18, 1988

James Fulford writes: Pat Buchanan is not well, so instead of running a replacement column from Judge Andrew Napolitano, as suggested by the syndicate, we’re reprinting a Buchanan review of Peter Brimelow’s 1988  Canadian book  The Patriot Game

Twelve decades ago. we Americans made our last serious effort to annex Great Britain’s vast possessions to the north, Irish veterans of Grant’s Army of the Potomac,  Fenians they called themselves, decided to capture Canada, provoking a war with Great Britain, out of which would come the liberation of the Emerald Isle. Their battle hymn ran thus:

“We are the Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the art of war.

And we’re going to fight for Ire’ land, the land that we adore.

Many battles have we won, along with the boys in blue,

And we’ll go and capture Canada, for we’ve nothing else to do.”

The Fenian boys made a mess of it: after crossing the Niagara River and prevailing at “the Battle of Limestone Ridge.” Parliament, irate at the newest manifestation of Yankee greed, passed the British North America Act, creating the Dominion of Canada A little patience, and Canada, or parts of it like British Columbia, might have fallen peace fully into the lap of the United States. But the Irish-Americans blew it.

Comes now a book suggesting that the break-up of Canada, with the English-speaking Maritime and western provinces moving into close association with the United States, may be only a matter of time.

“The Patriot Game” was penned by Forbes editor Peter Brimelow, a British expatriate living in New York. who spent seven years in Canada. Brimelow’s thesis runs thus:

In recent decades, the dominant Liberal Party  has prevented Quebec from breaking free, and Canada from breaking up only through the cultural and economic appeasement of Montreal. Having adopted a constitution making Canada bilingual, Ottawa has rigorously imposed the French language on the state bureaucracy and the English-speaking provinces, while allowing Quebec to institute policies of rank discrimination against her Anglophone minority. English speaking Canada is being massively taxed for income transfers to raise Quebec’s standard of living to the national average. Given a crisis, the arrangement could collapse.

Other strains are surfacing. Ottawa’s socialist and protectionist policies have impoverished the nation. leaving Canadians with 70 percent of the standard of living of Americans (roughly the same as America’s blacks) though Canada is richer in resources, freeloads on Western defense, and has no vast urban underclass to support.

The “patriot game,” is “Canadian nationalism,” which Brimelow derides as a “fraud,” a hoax, promoted by Canada’s New Class of academics,  journalists, bureaucrats and a business elite to keep out American imports and American magazines, films, books and television shows against which Canada’s media magnates cannot compete. The average Canadian is not anti-American. Brimelow writes: America’s problem lies with the Ottawa and Toronto elites, who appease Quebec and milk the outer provinces.

Quebec is becoming more and’ more French, more and more separate In character from English- speaking Canada, which has more in common, culturally, linguistically, economically, with the Americans, than with Canada’s New Class.

“I don’t even know what street Canada is on,” Al Capone of Cicero, Ill., once observed, nicely encapsulating the attitude of most Americans. But Americans would do well to pay attention to a neighbor with one- tenth our population, who possesses as much of the earth’s surface (6 percent) as does the United States.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His most recent published book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts. His new book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? was released October 18, and is rocketing up the charts.