THE EMERGENCE AND EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL FAULT LINES WITHIN NORTH AMERICA: ENGLISH-FRENCH/EAST- WEST MEETS BLACK-WHITE/NORTH-SOUTH AT THE JUNCTION OF NATIVE/NON-NATIVEHere in North America, as elsewhere, the countries on this continent emerged in such a way as to leave them both with what appear to be permanently-ingrained ‘fault lines’ based on language, race, geography and ideology. It caused panic and damage to buildings. The British eventually settled for a compromise and negotiated a primitive Free-Trade Agreement, called the Reciprocity Agreement, which gave Canada access to US markets to fish, grain and timber. Here, the plate boundary between the giant Pacific and North American plates is changing from one of transform (sliding past one another), to subduction (where the Pacific plate is being forced beneath the Aleutian Islands to the northwest). There is an interactive map application to view the faults online and a separate database search function. So Canada had an interest in firming up its links on the east-west axis as a result of this and also to open up new markets for goods, services and immigration for the business class in Montréal.So what resulted was the idea of constructing a Trans-Continental Railroad, which became known as the Canadian Pacific Railroad, or CPR. All Rights Reserved. Of this number, perhaps four will exceed magnitude 4, thirty will exceed magnitude 3, and about twenty-five events will be reported felt. The Quebec College of Physicians is calling for no-fault insurance for patients, claiming it would guarantee compensation to victims of malpractice. This earthquake, larger than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, caused nearly … Canada's largest historical earthquake- a magnitude 8.1, occurred along this fault on August 22, 1949. Strike-slip faults are the fault lines resulting as a movement of rocks in a horizontal direction, involving little or no vertical movement. However, it soon became clear that the white man’s intentions were to take over and occupy the land and to dispossess the original inhabitants of it and to develop the massive potential for temporal wealth which lay in it to their advantage.This ultimately led to the first ‘fault line’ in the history of our continent, that is to say that of ‘native/non-native’, which is actually common to both countries, but which for many generations played second fiddle and often still does, to the other ‘fault lines’, which emerged in the wake of this first one, as a result of the ensuing colonial rivalries which exploded due to the aggressive economic development of the continent’s material and human resources, pitting mostly the Empires of France and Britain against each other, with that of Spain figuring prominently at a later date.With regards to Canada’s ongoing English-French ‘fault line’, it essentially emerged after the 151 year struggle for supremacy for the eastern half of the continent, waged between Britain and France, was categorically decided by the result of the Seven Year’s War, or French and Indian War as the Americans like to call it, wherein France was expulsed from North America by the Treaty of Paris of 1763, trading her colony of New France for the sugar island of Guadeloupe and the two fishing islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland in the process.Where the ‘fault line’ really took shape, though, was that Britain inherited a colony which was essentially intact from the point of view of its social fabric, laws and language, despite the horrific property damage which had been inflicted upon the colony due to the summer-long siege of Québec and General Wolfe’s merciless ‘scorched earth policy’ of torching and pillaging many of the Canadiens villages along the coast of the St. Lawrence River in an attempt to break the spirit of the enemy.Also complicating British attempts at assimilating these newly-conquered subjects was the fact that they were pretty attached to the Roman Catholic religion, despite its slip in popularity in the 18th century, it still remained a bulwark against Anglicization, the Roman clergy being a well-educated and erudite elite capable of defending the linguistic, cultural, legal and economic interests of their subjects to the British Colonial authorities.Another mitigating factor was the fact that this newly-terminated war was risking to touch off another one, which it did: The American Revolution, or War of Independence, due in no small part to the taxation which George III imposed on the Anglo-American commercial interests, through their legislatures, without their consent, to pay down the tremendous war debt recently incurred to expulse their French arch rivals.Therefore the British were keen to mollify their French-speaking subjects in Québec by passing the Québec Act in 1774, re-instating French Civil Law and the Roman Catholic religion, thereby guaranteeing the survival of the ‘French Fact’ in Canada, and ensuring that it would not fall prey to the Republican blandishments of the Continental Army, which inevitably invaded in 1775-76, being stopped dead in their tracks by a mostly indifferent Canadiens populace and one very blinding snowstorm at Québec on New Year’s Eve 1775, unleashed by none other than General Winter himself, on the eve of the termination of the hapless Continental soldier’s contractual obligation, their commanders fearing the worst of them, behaviour-wise, if they were to have attacked the morning after on New year’s Day, in less inclement weather, but no longer under contract to the Continental Congress and not likely to be paid their wages, thereby augmenting considerably the risk of looting, pillaging and other sundry ungentlemenly behaviour in the process.Therefore, to this day, the Crown has created a state of raised expectations as well as a sense of entitlement amongst French-Canadians concerning their status within Canada, which has oscillated between a state of cordial elite accommodation during some periods of our history, progressing towards a more confrontational, nationalistic tone after WWII, due to the longstanding disparities of income and socio-economic status and opportunities for social mobility which still afflicted the bulk of French-Canadian society in post WWII society.This national ‘fault line’ took on the shape of a national crisis in the 1960s-70s and early 80s and has only truly abated significantly since the second independence referendum was only narrowly defeated in October of 1995, leaving most Canadians, on both sides of the equation, with a serious case of battle fatigue and exhaustion, resembling the kind of ‘let’s get on with it, put it behind us and move on’-type of attitude which many countries in the developing world experience after a particularly nasty civil war or inter-ethnic bout of blood-letting or genocide.We experienced several decades of constitutional crises, including two referenda on independence, one in May of 1980 the other, as mentioned on October 1995, a hostage crisis in October of 1970, where a provincial cabinet Minister was assassinated, and the British Trade Commissioner kidnapped and released by secessionist radicals, a long and drawn-out wrangle over reforming the Constitution in 1981-82, to make the process of amending it ‘made in Canada’, and two other fits of constitutional hand-wringing in 1987-90 and 1991-92, mostly in an attempt to recognize Québec’s distinct nature within Canada in the first case, and in the second case, to mollify the rising tide of western Canadian discontent and the desire for Aboriginal self-determination.So essentially, as Brian Mulroney our former Prime Minister said, a lot of the bad blood has been bled out of Canada’s system due to all of this conflict, and although we still haven’t categorically settled the issue of the English-French ‘fault line’ from an official juridico-legal method of constitutional amendment, most people in Canada, both French and English, are now essentially just happy to get along with each other and to not have to talk about the issue as an ongoing source of media histrionics.