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The Most Important Canadian |
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Lots of names appeared on the list reflecting Canadian feelings about sport with the usual names like Richard, Howe and Wayne Gretzky. How people made their vote speaks a lot about what's important to many. What criteria did they go over in their mind to decide who is the greatest? Is it fame or what they accomplished? If their top choice had never been born, would it have made a real difference? There is nothing wrong with Tommy Douglas the number one vote getter. He did the right thing. What is bothersome is to have Pamela Anderson receive more votes than SIR WILLIAM STEPHENSON. Nothing wrong with the movie and TV star, but would life have been different, if she had never been a pinup? One reason for Stephenson's low ranking at #54 is that very few people know who he was and fewer still realize that he was one of the most important people in all of world history. What would the world be like without him? There is an argument to be made that he made the crucial difference in WWII. Without him all could have been lost. If you look at 1939 and 1940, the free world's fate rested on a very few. He was one of the very few. He led a fantastic and in large part hidden life. He was of course a WWI veteran, champion boxer, promoted on the battlefield and when horribly gassed joined the flying corps becoming an Ace. Highly educated after the Great War, he became a scientist and mathematician and amassed a fortune working with another genius Steinmetz. He foresaw as few did that the key to war in the future would be communications. No Blitzkrieg could work without on the spot communications. No global war could be fought without decryption of enemy messages and absolute secrecy in the transmission of your own messages. When the British Empire was on the brink of defeat and the US was steadfastly isolationist he fought 'The Secret War" alongside Churchill and FDR all conspiring to bring in the massive forces of North America to defeat the Nazi empire and the Japanese. His story is more fantastic than any James Bond film. Ian Fleming worked for him as did the famous group at Bletchley Park
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If the criteria for the Greatest Canadian would have been, not popularity, but importance to history, Stephenson should be considered for the tile of 'The Most Important Canadian'. He embodied the following traits:
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 for
world news,
books, sports, movies ...Thursday, March 04, 2010 |
CBC
polled Canadians to select their all time top individual given the title
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