I basically agree with your assessment of the Great War...........Europe fell into a senseless slaughter, and we were pulled in simply because of our lack of status as anything but a colony of Britain.
Which does not change the fact that we quickly became a force in the war, we punched well above our weight. We became increasingly valued by the Brits, and by the end of the war were serving as a unified Canadian Army, instead of simply a branch of Britain's military. It is no accident that by the mid 1920s complete Parliamentary equality of authority with Britain was in the works.
While I sympathize with your preference that our nationality be built on a railroad instead of a huge heap of dead bodies, the railroad was purely a domestic achievement that demonstrated nothing to the world at large, and contributed to our union, not our independence.
