Commentary
Canada’s beautiful national motto, “A Mari Usque ad Mare,” from Psalm 72:8, “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea” (Authorized Version) was adopted in 1921. But it was first identified in 1866 by Leonard “Lennie” Tilley, chief delegate from New Brunswick to the Confederation conferences, when he proposed the name of “Dominion” for the united provinces. An evangelical Anglican and a strict temperance man, Tilley was a descendant of Loyalists from New York (two Tilleys landed with the “Mayflower” Puritans in 1620), in the founding generation of the Province of New Brunswick in 1784, when it was separated from Nova Scotia.
