Canada Day 1967, the country’s centennial celebration, was considered at the time to be the best and biggest it would ever be.
Queen Elizabeth was there and 100,00 Canadians joined her. The country was in the midst of Expo 67 in Montreal, national pride was rampant and the separatist threat was still just a dark shadow of mailbox bombs and radical rhetoric.
Prime minister Lester Pearson declared it the greatest time for Canada.
Fast forward 44 years and that July 1, 1967, celebration seems paltry.
On July 1, 2011, an estimated half a million visited Parliament Hill during the day with 300,000 staying for the evening concert featuring Canadian talent.
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Of course, part of the buzz this year was the presence of William and Kate, the newly married Duke and Duchess of Cambridge who wowed the crowds.
But there is more than that. There is also a change in the Canadian psyche about patriotism.
Canada still likes to imagine itself a modest country when it comes to showing the flag and love of country.
That is so yesterday.
Canada has become a country of flag-waving, tattoo-above-the-heart patriotism that can rival any chauvinistic nation in the world — at sports events, international meetings or national celebrations.
This modern burst of patriotism really began in 1995 when the country came within a few thousands of votes of breaking up in a Quebec referendum.
The Liberal government of the day threw hundreds of thousands of dollars into pro-Canada propaganda and after the near-death experience, created a permanent fund to make sure Canada would be celebrated across the country at every opportunity.
Since 2006, the Conservative government has ramped up the patriotism, adding the country’s military record as another reason Canadians should be proud.
It surely has made Canada one of the most fervent flag-waving countries in the world.
For the record, many of those 500,000 on Parliament Hill July 1 would actually not have been from Ottawa, a city of close to a million that has figured Canada Day out.
Easily half would have been out-of-towners determined to get in on the excitement at the centre of the action.
Ottawa veterans know that Parliament Hill on Canada Day is a potential death trap with too few exits for too many people and stone walls to block emergency escapes.
A riot, a stampede, a panic at the front that had people rushing to the back to get out would create serious casualties.
So no thanks.
A mid-day stroll along the Rideau Canal half a mile from Parliament Hill with a red-and-white bedecked dog and lots of encounters with red-and-white Canadians and canal boaters doing the same thing was close enough to the action for someone who was on Parliament Hill July 1, 1967, and thought even then that it was a death trap.
