CANADA HAS BEEN GENERALLY MORE HUMANE THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER COUNTRY.

he came in an open car with M. Johnson from Quebec City along the North shore of the St. Lawrence, “reminded me of the Liberation.” I had been a Gaullist ever since I read an interview he gave my subsequent friend Malcolm Muggeridge (whom I’m sure Ms. Gray remembers with misty eyes), in 1954, when he had only a few supporters in the National Assembly. He said that undoubtedly France would ask him to take the reins of the country within a few years, as did occur when the Fourth Republic floundered to an end as de Gaulle had predicted.

And though I found de Gaulle’s comments scandalous, I was exhilarated by the fact that Canada would have to face the challenge of Quebec separatism alone. I the country, alone.

This incident helped elevate Pierre Trudeau as leader of the French Quebec federalists who were prepared to repulse the intellectual and other attractions of separatism, internally and elsewhere. (There was considerable symbolism, entirely unrecognized to my knowledge, in the nomination last month by Justin Trudeau of Richard Wagner, the son of his father’s old Conservative rival as leader of the Quebec federalists, Claude Wagner, as chief justice of Canada.) If Ms. Gray had written that the success of Canada as a federal state is a good deal more clear than it was 50 years ago, she would have been correct. Instead she implies that the 150th anniversary of Canadian autonomy