My Canadian friends view this as "that time we beat the Yanks!" Now, I tend to agree with them that the Canadians won the war. In reality, the war was settled in Ghent where the British negotiated poorly and basically gave everything back. The only real losers were the Native Americans/First Nations. The British had offered to give territory that they possessed (Michigan and surrounding states) to the Native Americans as a "buffer state". However, the U.S. wanted more "free states" to balance the "slave states" in the south, so the British gave in. Things turned ugly for Native Americans after that.