Do read all of this from Publius, a firm believer in traditional British freedoms (the abuse of which by the royal government is said to have led to the American Revolution):

Cult of Multicult
Back in 1965, the Tory philosopher George Grant wrote Lament for a Nation, prophesying the eventual absorption of Canada into a technocratic, corporatized and American led continental super state. Grant came from an older Victorian tradition of Toryism, one essentially alien to what most Canadians think of as conservative today. In modern terms he might be described as a British-Canadian paleoconservative.
Ironically, the book – with its famous blue binding – became a totem for the Canadian nationalist Left in the 1960s and 1970s, much to Grant’s annoyance. While the Left picked up on Grant’s suspicion of Americanism – a far cry from the adolescent anti-Americanism we see emanating from the MSM today – and capitalism, it rather conveniently missed the philosopher’s defence of traditional British values and customs, including Christianity.
With four and a half decades of hindsight, we can see that Grant was correct that Canada and Canadianism was under grave threat. Sadly, he failed to correctly identify the enemy…
At the same moment the wider West was tearing itself apart [in the latter 60s], Canada was quietly undergoing a major identity crisis. After a century and a half of being solidly British – with some New World variations and anxieties – Canada found itself lost with the collapse of the British Empire. The generation passing through Grant’s classes was left asking in the wake, if Canada is not British, then what are we?
Multiculturalism provided a convenient answer, or more correctly a non-answer. What is Canada? We are everyone and anything that happens to show up here…
Opposition to a multi-ethnic society was regarded – correctly – as bigoted. By insisting that multi-ethnic was the same thing as multicultural, opposition to this transformation of Canadian society could be silenced as racist. Beginning with the monarchy – traditional English speaking Canada’s legal and cultural lynchpin – a slow campaign of hollowing out our institutions was conducted. The rationale provided was that our institutions needed to become relevant to these New Canadians.
This was – and remains – a patent absurdity. It is not the job of Canadian institutions to become relevant to the immigrants, it is the immigrants who must make themselves relevant to the institutions and what they represent…
Sikhs had worn turbans in the service of the Crown for centuries, including fighting alongside Canadian forces in Italy during the Second World War [emphasis added, a Royal Canadian Sikh Regiment might not be a bad idea for this martial race (encourage Gurkha immigration?)–after all we have a Canadian Scottish Regiment (Princess Mary’s), with their own dress]. Religious tolerance has been a hallmark of Canadian identity since at least the time of Baldwin-Laftontaine. It would have been perfectly consonant with our traditions and customs to have allowed turban wearing Sikhs in the RCMP, so long as reasonable precautions were taken for public and personal safety. Another part of the gradual, peaceful evolution of a multi-ethnic society.
Instead, for the advocates of multiculturalism, it was a test case, which they won handily. The allowing of turbans was not a victory for religious tolerance, but was instead framed as a victory for cultural relativism. We were not simply allowing other people to practice their beliefs peacefully, even while wearing the uniform of our national police force, we were instead proudly asserting that our values, our traditions and customs were no better than anyone else’s values, traditions and customs. The demand was not for tolerance alone. It was for tolerance to the point of suicide.

To. The. Point. Of. Suicide.
More from Lorne Gunter on Canada and former British liberties:

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there’s no need to copy the Americans. Canadians already have the right to use force — even deadly force — to protect themselves. We need simply to return to our legal roots.
When Canada became independent at Confederation in 1867, Canadians retained the rights they had at the time as British subjects. These included three “absolute rights”: the right to personal liberty, the right to private property and the right to self-defence, up to and including the right to kill an attacker or burglar.
William Blackstone, Britain’s famous constitutional expert, argued the right to self-defence included the right to kill even an agent of the king found on one’s property after dark, uninvited…
Even in Upper Canada [now the province of Ontario, for American readers] for much of the 19th century, it was the law that all adult males be armed, at their own expense. In part, this was so a militia could be formed quickly for defence of the colony and in part so individuals were prepared to defend themselves and their property.
These rights have not been extinguished just because Canada has become modernized and urbanized, or because our officials would rather pretend they don’t exist and never have…

And note this about Britain:

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Fully automatic firearms were almost completely banned from private ownership by the 1937 Act, which took its inspiration from the US 1934 National Firearms Act…

Update thought: The Aussies, once generally considered much more tied to the “mother country” (“home”) than Canadians, have now forged a strong and independent identity. Whilst English Canada–as it once was, now simply the Rest of Canada (RoC) other than Québec–led by academic, political and media elites, just gave up the ghost and abolished itself. Suicide indeed.