It is time to celebrate.
To celebrate the expulsion of the Continental Army, from a territory that, in the decades that followed, and in no small part as a result of this historical event, became the seed of our improbable country, Canada.
A country that has no desire to become His Orange Highness’s 51st state, just as it had no desire to become the 14th colony back in 1776.
The disastrous failed siege of Quebec City, on December 31, 1775, was followed by the Battle of Trois-Rivières in June, 1776, after which the remaining Continental Army troops eventually retreated. Quebec’s Catholics may not have been staunch supporters of the British Crown, but they decided that British rule — especially after the Quebec Act of 1774 that protected Catholicism and French civil law in what used to be Nouvelle France — was a safer bet than an anglophone, Protestant revolutionary Congress openly hostile to Catholicism. While the alliance between the Canadiens and British loyalists was never exactly enthusiastic, somehow it endures to this day.