By Scott Taylor
When Global Affairs Canada unveiled their new passport design last week, it did not take the Colonel Blimp brigade long before they realized there is no longer an image of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France included within its pages.
This omission set off howls of indignation from those who have long peddled the notion that the Battle of Vimy Ridge is where Canada was 'born' as a nation.
The Royal Canadian Legion tabled a letter of protest, as did the Vimy Foundation, which as the name suggests, owes its very existence to the importance bestowed upon this First World War battle.
To give them credit, the Vimy Foundation have been hugely successful in promoting the Vimy Ridge myth over the past two decades.
For legions of young Canadian students, annual class pilgrimages to the Vimy Ridge Memorial have immortalized that monument into something of a Canadian Mecca.
That said, I've never understood the logic behind isolating the Battle of Vimy Ridge as the moment in which Canada emerged as a truly independent country.
The Vimy proponents argue that this was the first time all four Canadian divisions had fought together as a single army corps, and that they successfully captured a ridge which both the British and French armies had previously tried and failed to accomplish.
The fact is that, while unified, the Canadian Corps was commanded by British General Julian Byng. Furthermore the assault at Vimy Ridge was not a singular operation, but rather a diversionary attack meant to support a much larger French offensive along the Aisne River.
From April 9 to April 12, 1917, the Canadian Corps sustained a staggering casualty toll of 3,598 dead and a further 7,004 wounded.
While the Canadians did successfully capture the ridge, the victory was not a major breakthrough, as the German Sixth army simply retreated a few kilometers to the Oppy-Mericourt line and dug in again.
The subsequent French offensive was a disastrous failure. The French losses were so staggering that the Army mutinied en masse, refusing any further attacks.
If one remains wedded to the idea that Canada came of age in a First World War battle, a more suitable choice would be Hill 70.
This was fought in August 1917, just four months after Vimy Ridge, but this time the Canadian Corps was commanded by Canada's own General Arthur Currie.
The Canadians once again achieved their objective, but with fewer casualties than at Vimy.
Some of the Vimy-as-birthplace-of-Canada supporters argue that Canada's effort there were symbolic of the overall wartime effort which led to a more independent Dominion in the post-war era.
However, Canada's automatic heeding of Britain's call to arms in 1914 was a purely colonial response to what was in fact an imperial war. That we sacrificed so much to prop up and support British imperial objectives hardly signifies Canada's independence.
For my money, Canada first cut the umbilical cord to Mother Britain during the Chanak crisis of September 1922.
For those unfamiliar with this little known chapter of our history, this began with a resurgent Turkish national army emerging out of the ashes of the recently conquered Ottoman Empire.
Under the generalship of Kemal Attaturk, the Turkish army was steadily forcing the Greek army out of Anatolia.
The British were keen to enter the fray on the side of the Greeks. However, as the British people were war-weary after the First World War, UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George put the call out for the Commonwealth Dominions to commit troops to this venture.
Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King did not immediately conform to the British request and instead insisted that any decision on going to war would be made by parliament.
In a telegram to then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, King advised the British that unlike 1914, Canada's response was no longer to be considered 'automatic.' This resistance from King was soon echoed by all the other Dominion leaders within the Commonwealth.
As a result, Britain had no choice but to conclude a separate agreement with Kemal Attaturk, which awarded all of Eastern Thrace to Turkey. The Greeks were forced to abandon the territory without a fight. However, more importantly, King's expression of independent action had a lasting impact on Canada's status.
Historians credit Canada's response to the Chanak incident as the genesis for British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour's subsequent revision of the status of the Dominions within the Empire.
According to Balfour, from this point forward, the Dominions were to be "autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status and in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of the domestic or internal affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations."
Balfour's revised formula was enacted into law in 1931 through the Statute of Westminster.
Fighting in an imperial war as a colony does not make you a nation. Saying 'no' to an imperial war is when we in fact came of age.
But there are no monuments to the wars we didn't fight, so what image could be put in our passports to symbolize the 1922 Chanak Crisis?
