While Americans were preoccupied in late 1992 with the presidential campaign among Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr. and Ross Perot, Canadians were focused on their latest unity referendum – an effort to work out a deal that would keep the 10 fractious and independent provinces together in one confederation.

For years, until I was well into my 20s, my mother continued to treat me like a 12-year-old. When I flew home for a visit in my jeans and college sweatshirt, she would make my bed and pour my morning cereal, ask if I had brushed my teeth, and tell me to put my clothes in the dresser in my bedroom.

It became a family joke. The moment she asked something that seemed outside my dignity as a functioning adult, I would hold out my hands for her to inspect. I'd say, mock-serious, “Do you want to check behind my ears?” And she would wave me off, mostly laughing (but half angry) and reply, “I'm your mothšer, for God's sake.”

Even now, when she is old and frail, and has seen me work and marry, she tells me that when she closes her eyes, she sees a blond-haired boy, rolling down the hillsides of Vermont, or a Scout, crawling in dog-tired after a weekend in the mountains. I think, the more intensely you love someone or something, the harder it is to see them change. Even when the change has already taken place, right before your eyes.

I know this not just as a man, but as an American. Here in the United States, we tend to view this republic as something permanent and continuous, as solid as the marble and cast-iron of the Capitol. We have our pantheon of heroes, our statues and our myths, our sense that if any changes have taken place, they have represented only growth - the gradual working-out of truths that were implicit at the beginning.

But of course the picture is false. The federal republic of independent farmers, the vision of Thomas Jefferson, vanished long ago in the carnage of the Civil War. The founding democrat would have been sadly disappointed with the industrial behemoth that emerged, just as Abraham Lincoln would have shaken his head quizzically at the post-New Deal America, in khaki uniforms and enormous labor unions, that arose from the Depression.

The West, railroads, cars, advertising, mass immigration – each in its turn has changed everything. Surely George Washington would never have fathered this country had he known it would become synonymous throughout the world with military power, tight blue jeans and Elvis.

The only thing that's endured these past 200 years is the conviction that nothing essential has changed.

If only we could see how much we earn back by facing the flux squarely, perhaps then we wouldn't fear it. I am thinking, this year, of how much American voters owe to Ross Perot, who has rushed through the presidential season like a wild bull, as impressive and destructive a force of nature as Hurricane Andrew or a Hawaiian volcano.

He has run roughshod over the two-party system. He has been frank, when frankness was no guarantee of victory; he has given us a spectacularly uncharismatic running mate, when the spin doctors say charisma is the order of the day.

On some level I think the man has never intended to be president; that would be aiming too low. He wants to be savior of the American system. That's the only explanation I can think of for spending untold millions on the most bizarre but instructive television programs ever to grace a presidential campaign: a half-hour of Ross Perot explaining how to be a good businessman; a half-hour setting out in layman's terms what a national debt is, and what you have to do to cut it. It's been like Sesame Street for citizens, yet huge numbers of people watch and learn from it just because it's been staged by this magnificent oddity, Candidate Perot.

Last spring Americans were settling in for one more tired replay of the perpetual election – George Bush to be pegged as a poorer Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton to be pegged as another Jimmy Carter – and then along came this man who simply couldn't be pegged. He became a lightning rod, the seed of a snowball, like one of those particles a cloud needs to turn itself into a rainstorm. He drew unto himself all the unfocussed public anger at the status quo, the desire to learn, the hatred of empty partisanship, the willingness to face hard truths, giving voice to messages that might have come to nothing without him.

He is, of course, also a paranoid egotist, who would make one of the worst presidents ever. But that's beside the point: He has served the people well, the same way Larry King Live has – and electronic town meetings, Anita Hill, and all the other unknowns that have made this presidential race unlike any that's come before it: He has kept the political system off balance. He has opened up its ears and unleashed its creativity by pulling the rug out from under it.

You could probably trace each great achievement in American history to a similar uncertainty, a collapse of the world everyone knew how to behave in. We owe Lincoln to the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt to the Depression. In 1960, we owed John Kennedy to everyone's uncertainty over how to deal with TV.

Last week George Bush ticked off for a convention of Ace Hardware dealers in Denver all the changes he intends to make in his second term, if he's re-elected: health care reform, job training, school choice and the like, things he never paid much attention to when the music playing in his head was all about Iraq and the Middle East, free trade and the collapse of Communism. It's like he's seen the United States for the first time the way a 20-year-old does, freed from the shackles of a Cold War mentality. We owe George Bush's awakening to the shock value of Ross Perot.

On Monday night, when I heard the news from Canada that the unity referendum had been defeated, I was torn. On the one hand I empathized with my wife's family – Yes supporters because Yes meant a vote for their country – who were afraid of the possibility that an era in Canadian history has ended.

But at other moments I thought, Canada is no longer a blond-haired boy, rolling down the hillsides of Confederation. Now it's there for all of us to see, eyes open, in the fullness of its adulthood, unable anymore to be shoved into stale old categories and conventional wisdoms of long ago. Before us lies a time of great creativity.