The “pattern of Canada,” the preface to the much-praised 1987 first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada tells us, “has been taking shape for almost 500 years and by New World standards is old.”

Just a few pages later, Plate 1 on “The Last Ice Sheets, 18,000—10,000 BC” can prompt the thought that our history goes back much further still. If this is the way the historical atlas begins, you might think, it can only mean that, very deep down, Canada is the most northerly part of North America that was entirely covered by ice 20,000 years ago. And in fact this does seem to explain much about what those of us who choose to live in this part of the world become.

In a somewhat less primeval sense, the Canada whose modern history began “almost 500 years ago” in 1987 is already more than 500 years old in 2011. The first date in what is probably still the single best study of the modern Canadian past – Harold Innis’s now more than 75-year-old local classic, The Fur Trade in Canada (also an inspiration for the first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada) – is 1497.  And if you take this date as a plausible enough point of departure, Canada (in fact also an aboriginal word of much more ancient vintage) is now 514 years old.

The Canada whose modern origins are traced in this way is a remarkable place of vast and compelling human and geographical diversity – free at last of its various European colonial pasts, and ready to contribute something interesting to the fascinating as well as very challenging new era in the wider history of the global village, that so clearly lies before us now.

We are closer to this real and authentic Canada than we have ever been before. But of course we are not quite there yet. And the present federal government is busy spreading new fears about what might happen to us if and when we finally do officially cast aside the very last of our faded colonial memories, and embrace our own democratic future in the 21st century.

Yet not too long after the end of the Second World War the die for the real and authentic independent Canada of our future was cast. It was confirmed by the subtle allusion to the “free and democratic society” in our new Constitution Act 1982. This is the place whose birthday I am celebrating today. It is the more than 500-year-old diverse Canada of the future – and not some colonial second coming that lasted for a mere several generations in a now largely vanished past (a “relic of the 19th century,” as some prime minister once proclaimed). And I know I am far from alone, whatever all the shallow-minded mass media troglodytes may be trying to say.