Dominion Day (for so it was called, until the vandals got into the attic) is traditionally the occasion for lengthy thumbsuckers on "what it means to be Canadian." This is usually unsatisfying, since most of us haven't a clue. Oh, we know what we love about this place. But we labour under any number of delusions about what our nation is, and what nationhood means -- false assumptions, buried deep, that doom our endless quest for self-definition from the start. A review of some first principles: We are not a new republic, we are an ancient kingdom.

With the Queen on hand to celebrate the landing of John Cabot 500 years ago, this year's celebration of our national day is more freighted with a sense of history than most. Yet our national mythmakers tend to dwell on our youth and insecurity, as an adolescent among nations. And taking the nation's consciousness to be a blank slate, they feel entitled to write and rewrite upon it whatever suits their fancy.

A nation with a sense of its own historical weight would think twice before abandoning cherished national symbols -- did I mention Dominion Day, tried, convicted and hanged after all of fifteen minutes' debate? -- or redrafting the constitution every six months. But in the land of the eternal now, there is no history to erode.

We are not a compact among the provinces; we are a covenant between the generations. Why are we so peculiarly vulnerable to provincialist ambitions?

Because, having erased our history, we have no collective memory of ourselves as a nation. A country is not located only in space, but in time. A nation may be, in Ernest Renan's classic formulation, a plebiscite of all the people every day. But the voting does not ordinarily take place in a historical vaccum. Perhaps we should remind ourselves of another classic definition of a nation: a body of people who have done great things together in the past, and wish to do great things together in the future.

Were we to take seriously our obligations to generations past and generations yet unborn, we should be more conscious of ourselves as one nation, less susceptible to calls to narrower allegiances. For the constituency of those who are alive today would itself seem but a small and insignificant part of a much larger assembly.

Our nation will be preserved not by distancing ourselves from our neighbours, but by connecting ourselves to our ancestors. No debate on any

matter in Canadian political life would be complete without reference to the need to distinguish ourselves from the Americans. Any proposal, no matter how foolish, may be justified by appeal to the profound differences said to exist between Canadians and Americans: or where such differences do not exist, it is enough to promise to create some.

What is in dispute here is not whether we are in fact distinct from the Americans. It is whether mere differentness suffices, either as an end in itself or as a justification of our nationhood. If, to take one example, the U.S.

ever does get around to providing universal health care, I would hope that would not be an argument that Canada should get rid of it. Yet take away the distinctiveness argument, and many people feel adrift, unable to articulate a reason for their nation to exist.

Need we always define ourselves in opposition to the Americans? Can we not simply say: Our fathers left us this country. They built it; they had such high hopes for it. We owe it to them to carry on. We do not merely wish to exist, in other words; we ought to. The existence of our country is not a mere geographical fact: it is a moral argument.

We are not a confederacy of provinces or a league of nations; we are a union of free citizens. If we can think of ourselves as a nation, with a history and a future and a moral right to exist, that carries with it certain important constitutional implications. It means, among other things, that the government that represents that nation, the federal government, is legitimate in its own right. It does not have to answer to the provinces, or to take whatever powers they might deign to leave to it. Each level of government is equally the creation of a sovereign people, and each has only such powers as the people give it.

It means, further, that neither the provinces nor the federal government may decide the fate of the Canadian nation. If Canada is not a deal between governments, then neither is it up to governments, singly or collectively, to revoke the contract. The agreement at Confederation was to create a people, and only the people may dissolve it.