Forget yesterday's election for a moment. We don't do instant history here.
Your Beaver magazine should be arriving any day now -- you do subscribe, I hope. My column this issue is about China and how China has been a part of Canada's history.
On November 9, 1885, as part of its coverage of the last spike, driven the previous day at Craigallachie, B.C., the Toronto Globe noted that Canada was not the only place building railroads. Europeans were building railroads and ports and factories in China. And surely the same prosperity that railroads and industry were bringing to Canada must also blossom in China.
Therefore, said the paper, as railroads and industry transform China, “ the laborious, sober, ingenious Chinese will become penetrated with modern industrial civilization, and then Chinese will not need to emigrate. They will have but to stay home and manufacture for export and manufacture on such terms as Europeans and Americans workmen could not even look at.”
Does that sounds like what all the experts are predicting in 2006?
