Diefenbaker was a "one-Canada" man. He didn't believe in hyphenated Canadianism. He didn't like people thinking of him as a German-Canadian, but he failed to realize that French-Canadians were in a somewhat special place in Canada and that Canada was and had to be a bi-cultural state, a two-nation state with French Canada and English Canada as equal or near equal partners. He assumed that French-Canadians were much the same as Ukrainian-Canadians or German-Canadians or Italian-Canadians. He didn't understand, somehow, that French Canada, because its forebears had been here for three hundred years, had a special place in the country as founding peoples. And I think that was his fatal flaw.
