Americans who covet Canada always underestimate our resolve

“Boycott!” cries our premier.

“Hold steady!” counters our prime minister.

Retaliate? Retreat? All the analysis leads to paralysis.

We’re overthinking our next move. We need to think back to our first moves the last time Americans tried to hold us hostage.

Here’s something we could and should do right now, right here, to send a message that resonates within Canada and redounds across the continent:

Doug Ford should invite Mark Carney to Queen’s Park for a show and tell that will teach Trump a lesson — a history lesson — about how Canada can and did stand up to American intrusions and invasions of the past.

For we have a forgotten story to show them and share with ourselves. That historic tale is bound up in a fading, weathered monument perched just across the street from Queen’s Park in the leafy University of Toronto campus.

Tens of thousands of Torontonians walk or drive by it every day, in the shadow of the legislative buildings, without giving it the slightest glance or second thought. The sandstone and marble monument towers over the surrounding campus, yet remains camouflaged by trees and buried in the mists of time.

Its memory is hidden in plain sight — if only we’d stop and look, reflect and remember. For the Italian Renaissance-style monument tells the tale of how American intruders tried to take over this territory, yet ended up bringing Canadians together.

“Honour the brave who died for their country,” reads the inscription, “whilst defending her frontier.”

It’s called the Lime Ridge Monument, erected to honour the Toronto militia volunteers killed in the 1866 Battle of Ridgeway. They were repelling Irish-American Fenian insurgents who, with the tacit support of U.S. authorities, invaded near Fort Erie.

It all happened 160 years ago last month, when America’s leaders dreamed of swallowing up this territory, just as they covet Canada today. Then as now, they wanted to destroy us in order to retake and remake us.

The Americans had tried before to conquer us, notably when a presumptuous Ben Franklin marched on Montreal in 1776 imagining he — and his troops — need only invite the locals to join his country’s enterprise. American expansionism revisited us in 1812, and then again in 1866, when the U.S. authorities connived and contrived with the Fenians in hopes they might finally catch Canada off guard.

The Fenians coveted us as part of a conspiracy to ransom us for Irish independence from Britain. Triangulation, then as now, made us mere pawns for the ambitions and fantasies of others.

From 1866 through 1871, bands of Fenians raided our territory from New Brunswick to Manitoba. Nine Toronto fighters from the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada were killed, among them three U of T students.

In the aftermath, “the entire city shut down for the funeral procession,” according to the official Government of Canada description. But that’s only the half of it.

It’s noteworthy that the death toll was not large by the standards of contemporary battles where thousands might perish. Nine lives lost, but an invasion repelled and a country forged out of what might seem, in retrospect, a footnote to history.

In truth, the regions were divided among themselves in the early 1860s, just as the provinces today are pitted against one another from time to time. Britain had grown weary of its costly imperial role, but Confederation had yet to take root.

In 1864, delegates had convened at a founding conference in Charlottetown, and again in Quebec City, but hesitation and inertia ran deep. The invaders from America changed that equation with a bit of emotion.

“Historically, the Fenians were probably a blessing to Canada,” wrote historian Desmond Morton. “They united the country as nothing else could.”

New Brunswick, which also faced Fenian invasions, had been ambivalent about tying its future to the concept of Canada. It played a pivotal role in stitching the land mass together, binding Nova Scotia to the centre, and so when the Fenians attacked, they helped New Brunswick Premier Leonard Tilley win the 1866 elections and lead the way to Confederation.

Personally, I’ve never been remotely anti-American, perhaps oblivious to warnings of U.S. imperial designs or hegemonistic hubris. Yet when I walk past this monument, when I read the inscription from 1866, and when I reread the history of the last few hundred years, it’s impossible to ignore the recurring themes that echo today:

Some Americans never give up coveting Canada. Yet they always underestimate Canadian resolve, which somehow rises to the occasion — not just at the time of Confederation, but at this time of economic conflict.

It’s time again to tell that story and share that history.