Fair enough; I'm looking at it more from the Canadian perspective with Québec thrown into the mix, which hasn't always been an enthusiastic partner with the res

Fair enough; I'm looking at it more from the Canadian perspective with Québec thrown into the mix, which hasn't always been an enthusiastic partner with the rest of Canada. If the U.S. hadn't been a single nation, I personally believe that the regional differences between east and west would have resulted in different nations being formed longitudinally split roughly along the Mississippi river in what is now the U.S. and somewhere along that same longitude in Canada.