Canada finds itself in a political situation and a crisis of identity in which any consideration, royal or otherwise, of the native question must of necessity lead at once to a consideration of the question of the nature of Canada as whole. It is on this aspect, therefore, that I wish to comment.

In this paper, I will try to put forward queries, rather than proposals, concerning the geopolitical history of this territory within America - and its destiny - in order to clarify the key questions
which we are all confronting so closely.

But first of all I would like to make several fundamental points clear.

I admit that I was somewhat hesitant about deciding what kind of contribution could most appropriately be in some sense "tabled" before this Commission.

We are going through a key period in our history and in the history of the Americas. We are beginning the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the New World - that is, of course, the New World of the Europeans - and at the same time a vast process of questioning is going on concerning the nature of America and an American destiny from which Canada can never be excluded. This is so, despite the desire Canada has had to view itself almost exclusively, in the  past, as a Commonwealth country - or today as a member of the Francophone Community - rather than, in the first place, as part of America. The native dimension restores to Canada and its 
history their inherent place within the concert of American nations. This aspect seems to me essential, above and beyond any other.

From Tierra del Fuego to Baffin Land the year 1993 will, moreover, place its symbolic stamp on everything that has gone unnoticed about the "Year II" and therefore on the celebration of a native America in which Canada is both a participant and a partisan. This is an inescapable fact. The time has gone by in which this country could engage in a closed-circuit reflection on its heritage, its future or even its break-up. The time is no more in which Canada could claim to exercise exclusive control of its international image, without consulting, so to speak, with its own past, or even its own reality. All the countries of the Americas and the entire Western world know very well that behind the facade of a certain official Canada there has always lurked a Canada which is native.[1]

Of the four great colonial powers - Spain, Portugal, France andEngland - which participated in the formation of the New World only the French colonial empire failed to give birth to an independent country in the l9th century. And from that colonial empire Canada alone was taken over by England and was to appear, indeed, like a French-Native "construction" continually liable to break up and be superseded. It is therefore in the logic of the situation that it is at this point that the triple question has suddenly become acute: the question of political evolution, native and Franco, and of the global identity which may emerge from that destiny in Anglo America, at the dawn of the year 2000.