My Canadian friends told me something that opened my eyes into some of the differences between Americans and Canadians. My friend said, “You Americans call what you had the ‘American Revolution’. You Americans had a REBELLION. We Canadians had a REVOLUTION.”
A “Revolution” occurs when something occurs that is vastly different from what happened in the past. What he meant was that Americans engaged in a violent war against Great Britain to take their independence. Canada had a political revolution in that they engaged in a step-by-step progression that was peaceful and achieved the same independence, but over a period of time. It was different from the violent break-ups that had occurred in the U.S., Haiti, France, Italy, the German principalities and the Ottoman Empire of the 18th and 19th centuries.
For the most part, Canadians never felt the need to break away violently. They engaged in a process that by-passed the usual bloodletting that accompanied a political break-up.
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