> we have a tendency to hate British people anyway.
Well, the Beatles & Monty Python are cool.
If you look at landmass, very little of what is now the USA was once a British colony. Only our 13 smallest states, actually. I know this doesn’t have much political relevance, but it shows how much we have grown out of the old colonial mode. (Dang Brits wouldn’t let us move beyond the Appalacians. We showed them… 
We should’ve conqured Quebec. Then we’d have owned everything! :D:D ) The American Revolution, as it’s called here, would be a major point for those who were opposed to our joining the Commonwealth.
Actually, I know some English-speaking Canadians who would say, in a disgusted tone of voice, that you could have Quebec… but I digress.
My English relative Rose said that when the UK joined the European Economic Community (?) (now the EU) in the early seventies that they had to let a lot of intra-Commonwealth trading preferences and subsidies end.
Presumably this explains why the first subway cars in Toronto were made in Manchester, but the later ones were made in Canada… and why GM used to sell Vauxhall, a British car, in Canada up until the early seventies.