Maybe, but more realistically for the time is that Pierre Trudeau wanted to battle separatism in Quebec for lots of reasons, and as demonstrated in the Canadaland podcast, also succeeded in creating another (internal) boundary to be more dismissive of Quebec hate crimes in the rest of Anglo Canada. So we get..."That is not who we are"....comparisons to America, and Quebec. This naive mindset is consistent across much of Canadian media, and is more properly translated as, "We don't want to believe what we are...and have been".