It's Canada Day up Canada way...

What I would do for a Caramilk bar right now. And an A&W hamburger from a real Canadian A&W.

On this day 138 years ago, a plan to save the fledgling Grand Trunk Railway created by a group of investors went into effect. These investors also happened to be some of the most prominnent politicians of the day in the colonial government of Britsh North America, so if the plan also happened to advance their own political careers, all the better. Originally hatching the plan at Charlottetown in 1864 and killing two birds with one stone, the investors decided that traffic on the railway could be increased by breaking down the trade barriers between the struggling colonies and promoting travel by uniting all of the colonies as a single Confederation, to be called the Dominion of Canada. Although the agreement would be passed by the British parliament in February 1867, the plan, known as the British North America Act was not set to be enacted until July 1st, which is now marked as the day the "Fathers of Confederation" created the independent nation of Canada with it's own parliamentry system of Government. Though like a dog with one end its leash firmy tied to the British throne, Canada would not truly be independent from Britain for some time and to this day the official head of the Canadian government is the reigning British monarch. The plan worked as traffic on the Grand Trunk boomed, rewarding its politician investors handsomely. The creation of Canada eased fears of Western annexation or a complete invasion by the United States which was still stirring from the end of the Civil War in 1865, during which the confederacy attempted to use the British Colonies in Canada as a base to stage raids against the North.

A historical footnote is that Canada was originally to be called the Kingdom of Canada. Fearing that this title would anger the United States, the British denied this request. An alternative, "Dominion," was suggested by Samuel Leonard Tilley, from a line in Psalm 72 of the Bible: "He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." And thus the Dominion of Canada came to be, with the ideo of "dominion from sea to sea" serving as a point of national pride and leading to a focus on western expansion and an ambitious plan to build a railway to the Pacific Ocean that would bring down one government in scandal and bankrupt another before being completed on November 7, 1885, which some view as Canada's true independence day.

With that I close today's history lesson.

Long live Stompin' Tom.