Would the world stop reading Anne of Green Gables when it discovered Lucy Maude Montgomery was Canadian? Would diabetics the world over stop taking insulin because Drs. Banting and Best were Canadians?

Then The Globe and Mail lifted the clouds of gloom and doom with a banner front-page headline that proclaimed: "Canada Sending 700 Troops To Conflict." At last, Canada now had a role in Afghanistan peacekeeping just as large as Krakotoa and larger than the Fiji Islands.

There is something about Canadian military history and keeping the peace that makes Canadians want to shake up our Canadian identity. This first happened at the turn of the 20th century when the armchair generals and Colonel Blimps demanded a vigorous Canadian participation in Britain's nasty colonial war with the Boers of South Africa.

Like the Taliban, the Afrikaner Boers were not liked in English Canada. It was said the Boers had too many wives and beat all of them regularly. The Boers often replaced their oxen with their many wives when they plowed the dusty, untilled fields of the veldt. When the Boers decided to travel, they used their wives as beasts of burden for miles and miles on what the Boers called Long Trekks.

To fight the wicked Boers, Canada's Conservative politicians and Conservative journalists called for conscription and a holy war against the godless chauvinist Boers. There was, however, one big fly in the ointment.

The Quebecois regarded the Boers as astute family planners and managers and fellow simple peasants like themselves. The Boers' constant trekking in the gooey veldt only reminded the Quebecois of their beloved coureurs de bois trekking through the gooey Canadian woods. The Quebecois also took note of how the Boers, a small people, were willing to take on the British army and the whole British Empire.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada's first French prime minister, was in a box but not for long, when he announced Canada would send an expedition to South Africa to quell the wife-beating Boers. But there would be no conscripting of anyone.

The Boer War became Canada's first voluntary peacekeeping effort. Laurier had saved the Canadian Identity - to live to keep the peace another day.

The slaughter of Canadians in the trenches of the First World War, plus the conscription crisis of 1917 with its rioting and bloodshed in Quebec City, should have taught Canadians the merits of forever shunning major military efforts that bitterly divided the country. But the armchair press and the gung-ho Conservatives saw things differently.

The 1917 federal election was fought strictly on universal military conscription. That election left Quebec entirely outside a massive Canadian Anglo by jingo collective cry for Kaiser Willy's blood

Surely the despicable Hitler, the conqueror of innocent Poland, France and Denmark and then all of Europe, should have been provocative enough to keep all of Canada united and ready aye ready to slay the Nazi beast. Instead, Canadian troops were bottled up in British camps for years. The only action they saw was the fiasco at Dieppe. Canada had to beg to be mentioned in the official announcement of the Allied landings at Sicily.

All this defeat and shunning simply spurred on the Canadian jingo press and their Tory allies. They had a solution. Conscript every able-bodied man in the country and the Fuhrer would shake and quake in his boots.

Somehow the jingos missed Pierre Elliott Trudeau wearing a German helmet and riding around Montreal on a motorcycle. Nor did they know about the emotional rallies of la jeunesse canadienne-française led by Andre Laurendeau. Surprisingly, Laurendeau and Trudeau hated conscription more than they hated the fascism of Hitler.

Suddenly there was a reinforcement recruitment crisis in the Canadian army. In the name of keeping Canadian divisions 100% Canadian, in the name of Canadian military honour, the call for universal military conscription was launched once again by the jingo press, the Colonel Blimps and the Conservative party. It seemed Canada's military honour demanded two full-fledged conscription crises that poisoned national unity for decades to come.

Canada's nasty conscription politics makes one wonder how Canada got its reputation as a peacemaker in the first place. Globe< military analyst Marcus Gee says Canada's peacekeeping "image is a myth." In today's peacekeeping, says Gee, we are outnumbered and outgunned by Ghana, Bangladesh and Nepal.

Still, Gee says nothing about the strange way Canada became the founder of peacekeeping in the first place, earning a Nobel Peace Prize for Lester Pearson. Pearson's peacekeeping plan brought peace to the Suez and was a definite historical first. But politically in Canada, Pearson's peacekeeping plan turned out to be a real fizzle.

When Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent dismissed England and France as has-been meddlesome "super powers," he certainly shocked the pants off the Canadian Colonel Blimps and the by jingo press. But many more Canadians were outraged as well. After all, St. Laurent had just insulted two of the founding nations of Canada.

That was how the leader of the Opposition, John Diefenbaker played the issue. National pride, Diefenbaker insisted, depended on Canada sustaining the pride and integrity of its two mother nations. St. Laurent's speech, Dief suggested, was a slap in the face to all the Canadian boys who had died to save England and France from the clutches of the Kaiser and der Fuhrer. Pushing this particular spin on peacemaking hard and never letting go, Diefenbaker defeated St. Laurent in the 1957 general election.

In the one-party state that is Canada today, arguments over the size of the Afghanistan peacemaking contingent are not likely to topple the government. But some adroit political manoeuvring on the part of the Liberals is called for in this latest Canadian peacekeeping-Canadian identity crisis.

The Chrétien Liberals should conscript the Canadian Alliance en masse as a special peacekeeping unit in Afghanistan. That Alliance peacekeeping unit could exchange views on abortion, divorce and gay rights with the remnants of the Taliban still left in Kabul and the surrounding mountains.

If the peacekeeping Alliance contingent in Afghanistan should not prove to be sufficient, then how about conscripting the Sun newspaper chain's reporters and writers, all forever ferociously outraged at Canada's woeful defence and peacekeeping postures. With the Alliance and the jingo press busy keeping the peace in Afghanistan, temper tantrums over peacekeeping and the Canadian identity are bound to cool domestically, and quickly.

Then once again we can all go back to calling Canada – the Peaceable Kingdom.