Georgie was pitted twice: an old pitting and a young pitting.
Yeah, but the elder pitting wasn’t justified – he just reacted to the desire of other members to chat him up. (Especially that foxy young Charles James.) In any case, he was given the Bute. (You did say you’re from up North, right?) In any case, I must get back to my SCA Castlery, whyle my wife tends to her Canning.
I just realized that they may have got rid of us simply because they did not want us. Sniff . . . so sad to be so unloved and abandoned. 
If you had Canada, would you keep it?
Canada wasn’t wanting to ‘go’ , it was wanting to set up responsible self-government within the British Empire, spurred by the impetus of the Fenian Raids and the realisation that its southern neighbour might want a piece of it some day. Many Canadians were first-generation immigrants from Britain who still saw themselves as ‘British’, not secessionists.
Yes. With a booming economy and seemingly endless natural resources, you can bet I would.
You can have Canada when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands [del]you can take most of our politicians, though, really it’s okay[/del].
Yeah, we need someplace to dump our garbage at.
There are some posts that could really only be made on this board. This is one of them.
Canada was allowed to go because the calculus of strategic importance versus cost of colonization dictated that it was the right thing to do.
If you’re Great Britain in 1840, there’s not really any obvious reason to keep pumping cash into protecting Canada. Relations with the United States are, if not overly friendly, relatively cordial. The power struggle over North America, the direction of which was determined by the War of 1812, has more or less played itself out. And Canada serves no other strategic purpose, unless you’re worried about Russians in Alaska, which they weren’t.
There are, however, growing risks. Put yourself in the place of Great Britain in 1840. First, the Canadians themselves are getting hard to govern. Durham’s report has told you that the place will be hard to govern just by virtue of having two linguistic groups. Rebellions have sprung up. From Britain’s perspective, you’re thinking, “Oh, shit. We’ve heard this song before, and we don’t wanna dance.” Britain has already been involved in two major New World wars over independence - the American Revolution, which turned out badly, and the Haitian Revolution, which turned out even worse (yes, Britain was involved, and lost thousands upon thousands of men.) South America has recently risen up against Spain. The 1837 rebellions, though put down, strongly suggest the same might happen in Canada some day. So if you start to pull away NOW, you might leave yourself with a friendly government in Canada rather than a pissed off revolutionary one.
So the logical thing to do is to grant the Canadians measures of independence - or “Responsible government,” as it was called - sufficient to placate their natural desire to govern their own affairs while at the same time not abandoning their more loyalist people and sentiments. That’s why Canadian independence happened in logical, progressive stages; it was increased as it become politically possible to do so, walking a line between what Canadians wanted for themselves and what the Canadian state was politically capable of handling on its own:
1840: A basic modicum of independence self-governance
1867: Nominal, and almost total independence but allowing Britain to represent it in military/foreign affairs matters
1867-1905: Assumption of sovereignty over the rest of British North America
1931: Took over own foreign affairs
1949: Stuck with Newfoundland
1982: Formalizing the repatriation of the Constitution, which Britain hadn’t cared about for years anyway
Contrast this with the experience of India. By any logical measure India was ready to be granted its independence before Britain took it over, and to a large extent Britain hardly ran it in the first place. However, it had strategic value - it gave the UK a huge presence in Asia. It’s hard to imagine how the Second World War would have been won, at least without a lot more difficulty, if India is an independent, and probably neutral, state. So the UK held on to it long after their welcome was worn out.
Or now take, I dunno, Bermuda. Bermuda doesn’t really have a lot of strategic value, but it also doesn’t really need to be independent of Britain. It has a very small population. So it’s never really been interested enough in independence to ask for it.
In Canada, you have a combination of both decreased strategic value to the British combined with an increasing appetite for self-governance, informed by 60 years of experience in what happened to European countries who got mixed up trying to stop New World countries from becoming independent.
You are in Michigan, right?
Seems like the boot is on the other foot on that issue:
http://www.solutions.ca/Knowledge_Bank/Articles/article.asp?doc_id=141
Yup, hence my comment. More land than they know what to do with, but it’s not good enough for their own garbage.
So we send it to Detroit, on the assumption that no-one will really notice. 
What about the natural resources of Canada? Were they not deemed valuable enough to keep hold of or did they reason that they could trade favourably with a friendly Canadian government?
Britain had access to the resources of Canada by trading for them. It wasn’t all colonial exploitation you know.
Yeah just pisses me off they’ve held onto our scraggly wee isle for so long!
My west coast is scragglier than yours! 
Aye and your whisky tastes better! Wanna make something of it??!
Didn’t Ireland already have representation in Parliament?
Yes.