Canada

Precontact aboriginal history

North America’s first humans migrated from Asia, presumably over a now-submerged land bridge from Siberia to Alaska sometime about 12,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age; it has also been argued, however, that some people arrived earlier, possibly up to 60,000 years ago. Unknown numbers of people moved southward along the western edge of the North American ice cap. The presence of the ice, which for a time virtually covered Canada, makes it reasonable to assume that the southern reaches of North America were settled before Canada, and that the Inuit (Eskimo) who live in Canada’s Arctic regions today were the last of the aboriginal peoples to reach Canada. There is general agreement that Native American peoples are related to Asian peoples and that the closest resemblances are between North American Arctic peoples and their counterparts in Siberia.

Although there are no written records detailing the history of Canada’s aboriginal society prior to the first contact with Europeans, archaeological evidence and oral traditions give a reasonably complete picture of the precontact period. There were 12 major language groups among the peoples living in what is now Canada: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan, Athabascan, Kootenaian, Salishan, Wakashan, Tsimshian, Haidan, Tlinglit, Inuktitut, and Beothukan. Within each language group there were usually political and cultural divisions. Among the Iroquoian people, for example, there were two major subgroups, the Iroquois and the Huron. These subgroups were further divided. At the time of contact, the Iroquois had organized themselves into the Iroquois Confederacy, consisting of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples. A sixth group, the Tuscarora, joined later.

Considerable variation in cultures, means of subsistence, tribal laws and customs, and philosophies of trade and intertribal relations existed in precontact Canada. The Eastern Woodland Indians, such as the Huron, Iroquois, Petun, Neutral, Ottawa, and Algonquin, created a mixed subsistence economy of hunting and agriculture supplemented by trade. Semipermanent villages were built, trails were cleared between villages, fields were cultivated, and game was hunted. There was a high level of political organization among some of these peoples; both the Huron and the Iroquois formed political and religious confederacies and created extensive trade systems and political alliances with other groups. Peoples living in the far north do not appear to have formed larger political communities, while those of the west coast and the Eastern Woodlands formed sophisticated political, social, and cultural institutions. Climate and geography undoubtedly were major factors affecting the nature of the societies that evolved in the various regions of North America. The one characteristic virtually all the groups in precontact Canada shared was that they were self-governing and politically independent.

European contact and early exploration

At the beginning of the 9th century ad, seaborne Norse invaders pushed out of the Scandinavian Peninsula to Britain, Ireland, and northern Europe. In the mid-9th century a number of Norse craft reached Iceland, where a permanent settlement was established. Near the end of the 10th century the Norse reached Greenland and ventured to the coast of North America; at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland are the remains of what are believed to be as many as three Norse settlements. According to available evidence, the Norse settlers and the Inuit (whom the Norse called Skraeling) initially fought each other but then established a regular trade relationship. The Norse settlements were soon abandoned, probably as the Norse withdrew from Greenland.

Earth exploration: Cabot landing on the shores of LabradorThe Granger Collection, New YorkEuropeans did not return to northern North America until the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, known in English as John Cabot, sailed from Bristol in 1497 under a commission from the English king to search for a short route to Asia (what became known as the Northwest Passage). In that voyage and in a voyage the following year, during which Cabot died, he and his sons explored the coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and possibly Nova Scotia and discovered that the cold northwest Atlantic waters were teeming with fish. Soon Portuguese, Spanish, and French fishing crews braved the Atlantic crossing to fish in the waters of the Grand Banks. Some began to land on the coast of Newfoundland to dry their catch before returning to Europe. Despite Cabot’s explorations, the English paid little heed to the Atlantic fishery until 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert laid claim to the lands around present-day St. John’s, probably as a base for an English fishery. The French also claimed parts of Newfoundland, primarily on the north and west coasts of the island, as bases for their own fishing endeavours. The fishery ushered in the initial period of contact between the Indians and the Europeans. Although each was deeply suspicious of the other, a sporadic trade was conducted in scattered locations between the fishing crews and the Indians, with the latter trading furs for iron and other manufactured goods.

Jacques Cartier

Cartier, JacquesStock Montage/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesFrenchman Jacques Cartier was the first European to navigate the great entrance to Canada, the Saint Lawrence River. In 1534, in a voyage conducted with great competence, Cartier explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence and claimed its shores for the French crown. In the following year Cartier ascended the river itself and visited the sites of Stadacona (modern Quebec city) and Hochelaga (Montreal). His reports were so favourable that the French king, anxious to challenge the claims of Spain in the New World, decided to set up a fortified settlement. Internal and European politics delayed the enterprise until 1541, when, under the command of Jean-François de La Rocque, sieur (lord) de Roberval, Cartier returned to Stadacona and founded Charlesbourg-Royal just northwest of Quebec. Cartier had hoped to discover precious gems and minerals, as the Spaniards had done in Mexico and Peru, but the mineral specimens he sent home were worthless; indeed, “false as a Canadian diamond” became a common French expression. Disappointed in his attempt to reach the mythical “Kingdom of Saguenay,” the reputed source of precious metals, Cartier returned to France after a severe winter, deserting Roberval, who had arrived in Newfoundland with reinforcements. Roberval also failed, and during the remainder of the century only two subsequent attempts were made at exploiting the French claim to the lands of the St. Lawrence. But the French claim remained; it had only to be made good by actual occupation.

Samuel de Champlain

Saint Lawrence River: “Histoire de la Nouvelle France”Library of Congress, Rare Book DivisionIn 1604 the French navigator Samuel de Champlain, under Pierre du Gua, sieur de Monts, who had received a grant of the monopoly, led a group of settlers to Acadia. He chose as a site Dochet Island (Île Sainte-Croix) in the St. Croix River, on the present boundary between the United States and Canada. But the island proved unsuitable, and in 1605 the colony was moved across the Bay of Fundy to Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia). The colony was to be a trading post and a centre of settlement, but the rugged, forested inlets of the Nova Scotian peninsula, the heavy forests of the St. John River, and the many bays and beaches of Cape Breton and Prince Edward islands made it impossible to enforce the monopoly of the fur trade against enterprising interlopers.

In 1608 de Monts and Champlain left Acadia and made their way to the St. Lawrence. At “the place where the river narrowed” (Quebec), they built a “habitation” (i.e., a fur-trading fort, or factory) to control the great river and to be the entrepôt of its fur trade. Already in 1603 Champlain had noted that the Iroquois, whom Jacques Cartier had found there, had withdrawn from the St. Lawrence under pressure from the Algonquin Indians of the north country. The French then became the allies of the Algonquin in the rivalry that began for control of the inland fur trade. In 1609, in accordance with this alliance, Champlain and three companions joined an Algonquin war party in a raid against the Mohawk, the easternmost group of the Iroquois Confederacy. The party ascended the Richelieu River toward Lake Champlain. In an encounter with a Mohawk band, Champlain and his men killed some Iroquois, and the Europeans’ firearms panicked the remainder. This skirmish signaled the initial commitment of New France to the side of the Algonquin andand the Huron (the latter being Iroquoian but hostile to the confederacy) in what became a century-long struggle for control of the output of furs from as far away as the western Great Lakes. That commitment deepened in succeeding years. The conflict between the Iroquois and Huron was based on trade rivalries that had existed before European settlement. Although the French supported the Huron, the Dutch and later the English sided with the Iroquois.

The company of de Monts and his frequent successors, for whom Champlain remained the lieutenant in New France, had the obligation to bring out settlers, as well as the exclusive right (seldom enforced) to trade in furs. Their efforts at settlement were even less successful, partly because settlement was not easy in a country of heavy forests and severe winters and partly because the fur trade had little need of settlers beyond its own employees. Moreover, the company had scant funds to bring out and establish colonists on the land. Champlain, who encouraged missionaries—first the Recollects (Franciscans), then the Jesuits—to come to Quebec to convert the Indians, was most interested in exploration. Already in Acadia he had surveyed in 1606 and 1607 the coast southward and westward to Stage Harbor, only to be rebuffed by hostile Indians.

In 1613 Champlain set out from Quebec to explore the upper St. Lawrence basin. He passed the island of Montreal, not settled since Cartier’s time but used by traders who bypassed Quebec. In order to avoid the heavy rapids of the St. Lawrence, he ascended its great tributary, the Ottawa River, only to be turned back at Allumette Island by Algonquin middlemen who were trading for the furs of the Huron and other people farther inland and who wished to retain that trade. At Allumette Champlain learned of an “inland sea” (Hudson Bay), the existence of which he had divined before he could have heard of Henry Hudson’s discovery of it in 1610. Undaunted, he ascended the Ottawa again in 1615, traversed the Mattawa River, Lake Nipissing, and the French River to Georgian Bay, and turned south to “Huronia” (the land of the Huron). Champlain wintered with the Indians and went with a Huron war party to raid an Onondaga village south of the St. Lawrence. He was slightly wounded and the party was repulsed, but Champlain had once more confirmed the alliance of the French with the northern tribes and the Huron against the Iroquois and, by the opening of the Ottawa route, had secured the mid-continent for the French fur trade.

The discovery of this inland, central region was perhaps Champlain’s main achievement. However, from 1616 to 1627 he had little success in maintaining the fur trade. The fault was not entirely his, for the enterprise itself was very difficult. The coupling of trade and settlement was somewhat contradictory, and it was impossible to finance both out of annual profits, especially as the French government failed to uphold the monopoly.

The Company of New France

New FranceEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The French government supplied more active support after the remarkable revival of royal power carried out in the 1620s by Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal et duc de Richelieu. Richelieu sought to make French colonial policy comparable to that of England and the Netherlands, joint victors with France in the long struggle in Europe against Spain. These countries had found a means of both raising capital and enforcing trading rights through the medium of the joint-stock company. Richelieu used his power to create such a company—the Company of New France, commonly called the “Hundred Associates” from the number of its shareholders—to exploit the resources and settle the lands of New France. The company was given broad powers and wide responsibility: the monopoly of trade with all New France, Acadia as well as Canada; powers of government; the obligation to take out 400 settlers a year; and the task of keeping New France in the Roman Catholic faith.

The company was chartered and its capital raised in 1627. The next year, however, war broke out with the English, who supported the French Protestants, or Huguenots, in their struggle against Richelieu. The war was mismanaged and inconclusive, but it gave a pretext for the Kirke brothers, English adventurers who had connections in France with Huguenot competitors of the Hundred Associates, to blockade the St. Lawrence in 1628 and to capture Quebec in 1629. For three years the fur trade was in the hands of the Kirkes and their French associates, the brothers de Caën. It was a stunning blow to the new company and to Champlain, who was taken prisoner to England. At the same time, Acadia, already raided from Virginia in 1613, was claimed by Scotland. An attempt at settlement there was made by Sir William Alexander, to whom Nova Scotia (New Scotland) had been granted by the Scottish king James VI (after 1603, James I of England).

It is difficult to estimate the effect of the war on the policy of the Hundred Associates. Canada and Acadia were restored by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1632, and the company retook possession in 1633. On the surface all seemed to go smoothly. In 1633 Champlain returned as governor, the government and settlement of Acadia was farmed out to the vigorous Isaac de Razilly, and the Jesuits assumed sole responsibility for Roman Catholicism in Canada. The fur trade was resumed, and the Trois Rivières settlement was founded in 1634 to control the Saint-Maurice River. Settlement began, but the company seemed unable to recoup the losses caused by the capture of Quebec and by five years of trade disruption. Profits that would both pay dividends and provide for the costs of settlement continued to be elusive. The company remained the proprietor of New France until 1663, providing a succession of governors and other officials, but it was unable to meet its obligations to colonize. Weary of its profitless task, the company leased the fur trade to private companies and then, in 1645, to a group of Canadian residents known as the Community of Habitants (Communauté des Habitants).

The character of French settlement

Annapolis Royal: French settlement, 1609Library of Congress, Rare Book DivisionThe fur trade was not New France’s sole enterprise. By 1645 settlers in Canada and Acadia were producing provisions for the fur traders and the annual ships. A characteristic mode of landholding, known as the seigneurial system, began to evolve. Under the system, the state granted parcels of land to seigneurs, who were responsible for securing settlers (habitants) and for providing them with basic services such as a mill or a road to the nearest town. The habitants were granted large plots (averaging about 100 acres [40 hectares]) and were obliged to pay dues—cens et rentes—that included several days of service per year to the seigneur. The system appeared to resemble the semifeudal seigneurial system in France, but three factors made the system far more flexible and less feudal than its French counterpart: in New France it was not the seigneur but the local militia captain who was district military leader; the seigneur was usually not of noble blood and enjoyed no special political distinction to set him apart from the habitants; and the abundance of land and the existence of a forest frontier undermined efforts by a seigneur to impose a true semifeudal discipline on his habitants. Another important difference in the Canadian seigneurial system was that in New France the habitants effectively possessed their plots permanently and even had the right to will them to their children.

Huron: “Lahontans New Voyages to North America”Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.The great partner and sometime rival of the fur trade was the missionary endeavour of the Jesuits, who had two obligations: (1) to keep New France Catholic by ministering to its people and excluding Huguenots and (2) to convert the Indians. The missionaries made the conversion of the agrarian Huron their principal concern. Huronia was the hub of the inland fur trade. Making Huronia a Christian community would create a centre of Christianity and confirm the French commercial alliance with the Huron and their Algonquin clients. French missionaries had already visited Huronia in the mid-1620s, and in 1634 the Jesuits resumed the mission, which thrived (at least outwardly) for 10 years.

As the French-Huron alliance tightened, Iroquois hostility toward both parties increased, a case of traditional tribal trade rivalries being exacerbated by newer trade rivalries involving Europeans. The introduction of European weapons and the imperatives of the fur trade transformed the nature of Indian warfare, which once had been little more than blood sport. The Iroquois sought to eliminate the Huron and take complete control of the interior fur trade. Using firearms obtained from the Dutch in the Hudson River valley, they launched ever more devastating raids on Huronia. The French tightly controlled the firearms trade with their Huron allies, putting the latter at a tremendous disadvantage. In 1648–49 the Iroquois inflicted major defeats on the Huron, virtually eliminating them as a significant factor in the region.

These checks to both the fur trade and the missions, at least in terms of the intentions and hopes of 1627, were the result not only of bad luck and poor management but also of the economic conditions of New France, which depended almost entirely on the fur trade for profit. Settlement was unprofitable to both the company and the colonists. Thus, the population of New France grew relatively slowly, rising from an estimated 200 residents in 1642 to perhaps 2,500 by 1663. The fur trade, however, was booming, spurred by the popularity of the beaver hat in Europe. The traders brought French goods to trade with the flotillas of canoes that carried the furs of the Ottawa and Great Lakes regions and that before 1648 were usually operated by Huron middlemen. This was the sole commercial enterprise of New France at the time.

Royal control

New France, though a proprietary colony, was governed by the company, which appointed governors for Canada and Acadia, and a few dependent officers. The kings of France remained interested in the colony, both because of the vast potential wealth of the area and because the crown might have to resume the powers of government given to the Hundred Associates. Government was, in fact, very much what it would have been if the colony had been directly under the rule of the crown. In 1647 a council was established in New France that included the governor, the chief religious authority, the superior of the Jesuits, and the governor of Montreal. During the brief rule of the Community of Habitants, representatives (syndics) of the people of Quebec, Trois Rivières, and Montreal were consulted on local matters. However, this was the nearest approach to anything resembling representative government; by and large, government in New France was authoritarian and highly paternalistic.

The assumption of direct royal control by Louis XIV in 1663 and the colonial ambitions of his great finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, led to a recasting of French colonial policy and of the government of New France. Colbert entrusted commercial policy to a new Company of the West Indies. Politically, he made New France a royal province, governed much like a province of France itself. New France was to be controlled by three persons: a governor, an intendant, and a bishop. The governor was the largely titular head of this triumvirate, although he was responsible for matters of defense and relations with the Indians. He was aided in his decision making by the Superior Council (at first called the Sovereign Council), which was to advise him during the long periods when he had no communication with France. The intendant was responsible for internal matters, and the bishop administered mission work and the church. Both the intendant and the bishop were members of the council. Bitter rivalries were not unknown among these officials, particularly as the governor was an aristocrat and the intendant from the bourgeoisie.

Colbert’s reorganization generally gave New France firm and rational government, which was strongly centralized and efficient for the times. Acadia was an exception; torn by feuds among French rivals, claimed by England, and occupied by New Englanders eager to exploit its fishery, Acadia did not again become an effective part of New France until 1667–70. The strength of the royal government was in inverse proportion to the weakness of a small and scattered population. Great efforts made by the first intendant, Jean Talon, resulted in the influx of thousands of settlers (including hundreds of women) to New France in the 1660s and early ’70s. In 1666 the population reached 3,215, and a decade later it was about 8,500; thereafter, however, the population grew largely by natural increase, though at a prodigious rate. Most of the population lived in the three towns (Montreal, Quebec, and Trois Rivières) and in seigneuries along the banks of the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal. However, scores of the men went inland with trading canoes, and some of these voyageurs remained inland permanently, marrying Indian women and fathering the Métis, people of mixed French and Indian ancestry.

The frontier of New France was not a broad front of advance but, rather, a penetration of the wilderness via the rivers in search of furs and strategic position. It was necessary to continue alliances with Indians, and those alliances were constantly challenged by the Iroquois, who controlled the region south of Lakes Ontario and Erie in the 1650s. War with the Iroquois continued, as did the push into the interior, and in 1673 the explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, traveled down the Mississippi River as far as its confluence with the Arkansas River.

The growth of Anglo-French rivalry

Quebec: British attack of 1690Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.In the 1660s two voyageurs, Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre Esprit Radisson fled to New England, exasperated by the high cost of the long haul back to Quebec and by the heavy tax on fur pelts. From there they were escorted to England, where in 1668 they persuaded a group of London merchants to attempt to gain the fur trade of the mid-continent by way of Hudson Bay. The Hudson’s Bay Company, incorporated in 1670 as a proprietary company (i.e., one that owned the land outright), was given exclusive trading rights in all the territory draining into Hudson Bay. New France now found itself caught between the Iroquois, supported by the Dutch and English, to the south and the Hudson’s Bay Company to the north. After he arrived in 1672, Louis de Buade, comte de Palluau et de Frontenac, the governor of New France, made a vigorous push into the continental interior. Frontenac had been directed to concentrate settlement in areas with easy sea access to France, but he defied those instructions in search of profits from furs. For this and other transgressions he was recalled in 1682.

Over the next three decades the French struggled—sometimes with success—to improve their strategic position in America. The British failed in an assault on Quebec in 1690 and were almost completely expelled from Hudson Bay by 1700, while in the late 1690s Frontenac (who had returned as governor in 1689) finally defeated the Iroquois, who sued for peace. Much of this success was lost, however, by the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended Queen Anne’s War (1702–13) between the British and French in North America, as well as the War of the Spanish Succession. Under the treaty’s terms, France lost its claim to Hudson Bay, its hold on Acadia, and its position in Newfoundland. After Queen Anne’s War a generation of peace followed, during which the governors of New France built a line of fortified posts: Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Chambly on the Richelieu River, and Carillon (Ticonderoga) on the portage from Lake George to Lake Champlain; the trading posts of Niagara, Toronto, Detroit, and Michilimackinac extended the line to the west. At the same time, French priests and military emissaries kept the Acadians and the Indian allies of New France aware of their former ties with New France. The Acadians, claiming to be neutral, obstinately refused to take the oath of allegiance to the British crown.

New France enjoyed steady growth during the early 18th century. French défrichements (“clearings”) spread along the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal, the iron forges at Saint-Maurice produced iron for Quebec stoves and even cannons, and shipbuilding flourished. The colony nevertheless remained largely dependent on the fur trade, which, in turn, relied on keeping the west open. Access to the far west was frustrated, however, by three wars with the Fox (1714–42), who strove to close the Wisconsin portages to French traders. Then Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye turned the flanks of the Fox and Sioux by proceeding by way of Lake Superior and the Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods and the Red and Saskatchewan river country. There he found a new region for the French fur trade and also cut into the English trade in the area of Hudson Bay and the Hayes River.

The expansion of New France in these years was challenged, however, by the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe in 1740 (the war’s American phase is called King George’s War [1744–48]). Fighting broke out again in Acadia, on Lake Champlain, and among the English and French Indian allies in the Great Lakes region and the Ohio River valley. It was a confused conflict of raids and reprisals marked by only one action of major significance—the capture of Louisbourg (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia) by an expedition from New England. Holding the St. Lawrence River valley, the Great Lakes, and the mouth of the Mississippi River, the French commanded the better strategic position in America, though the English colonies were far wealthier and more populous.

All this was understood by Roland-Michel Barrin, marquis de La Galissonière, the exceptionally able governor of New France (1747–49). He declared in a memorandum to the French court that New France must restore its position by a bold advance into the Ohio River valley, which theretofore had not been claimed by New France or its Indian allies. His policy was adopted by his successors, and in 1749 Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville led an expedition down the Ohio to claim the valley for France and to confine English colonists and their fur trade to the east of the Allegheny Mountains. The British colonists from New York to Virginia immediately felt the threat to their trade, expansion, and settlement. In 1749 the Ohio Company was formed in London with English and American support, and the fortress of Halifax in Nova Scotia was built to counter the French fort at Louisbourg, which had been restored to New France by the peace of 1748 ending King George’s War. In 1753 an American expedition under George Washington (later the first president of the United States) was sent to the Forks of the Ohio to make good the English claim.

The French and Indian (Seven Years’) War

The French had also been active on the Ohio and had opened a line of communication from Lake Erie to the Forks. The rivals clashed on the Monongahela, and Washington was forced to surrender and retreat. This clash marked the beginning of the Anglo-French war known in America as the French and Indian War (1754–63) and in Europe and Canada as the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).

At the start of the war, the two sides seemed grossly mismatched. The English colonies contained more than 1,000,000 people, compared with the 70,000 of New France, and were prospering, with strong agricultural economies and growing trade ties with the West Indies and Britain. Their location along the Atlantic coast, the size of their population, and the large area they encompassed meant that the best France could hope for in the war was the maintenance of the status quo. New France was economically weak, dependent on France for trade and defense, and strategically vulnerable with but two seaward outlets to its continental empire, New Orleans and Quebec. Nonetheless, the French and the local militia were excellent soldiers, experienced in forest warfare and supported by several thousand Indian allies. They also received military help from France in 1756 in the form of 12 battalions of regular troops (about 7,000 soldiers), a contingent of artillery, and the command of the Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Grozon, marquis de Montcalm, who was an excellent field general.

Quebec, Battle ofHulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe conflict was pursued around the globe, with fighting in India, North America, Europe, and elsewhere as well as on the high seas. Britain, which was primarily a sea power, initially did not have the land army resources to overwhelm the French in America, and instead it was forced to rely heavily on the colonial militia. However, the colonies were politically disunited, and their militia forces were neither as well organized nor as well trained as those of New France. Thus, early victories went to the French, who captured Fort Oswego and Fort William Henry in 1757 and sternly repulsed the British at Fort Carillon (Fort Ticonderoga) in 1758. Then greater numbers of troops and supplies and more skillful British generalship began to turn the tide. In 1758 the British captured and razed Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, and the following year Sir Jeffrey Amherst began a cautious but irresistible advance from Fort William Henry by way of Fort Carillon to Lake Champlain. Also in 1759 an expedition under General James Wolfe sailed up the St. Lawrence and besieged Quebec, which fell to the British after the celebrated Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Sir William Johnson took Niagara, and John Forbes took the Forks of the Ohio. New France was caught in cruelly closing pincers. In 1760 Amherst closed in on Montreal, and New France capitulated. By the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, all of French North America east of the Mississippi River was ceded to Britain, with the exception of the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off Newfoundland.

The British victory produced three major results. First, the danger from New France to the American colonies was ended, thus weakening their dependence on Britain. Second, the British (largely Scots with some Americans) took over and expanded the Canadian fur trade. And, third, Britain now possessed a colony populated almost wholly by persons of alien descent and Roman Catholic religion.

The Quebec Act

Quebec: 1774Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.At first New France was to be governed by the Royal Proclamation (October 7, 1763), which declared the territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi to be Indian territory and closed to settlement until the Indians there could be subdued. New France became known as the Province of Quebec, which was to have a royal governor who had the authority to call an assembly. However, the 70,000 French inhabitants of Quebec could neither vote nor sit in the assembly by virtue of their Roman Catholicism.

Few British Americans moved to Quebec (there were perhaps 500 migrants in all), and those who did were attracted primarily by the prospect of taking control of the fur trade. Their bourgeois mentality and repeated demands for the “rights of Englishmen” tended to alienate the conservative British officers who administered the colony. Among the latter was General James Murray, who was appointed the colony’s first governor in 1763. Murray sympathized with the condition and difficulties of the French and ignored the demands of the recently arrived Protestants for an assembly, with the result that an agitation by the Protestants led to his recall. He was replaced in 1766 by General Guy Carleton (later 1st Baron Dorchester), who was expected in Quebec to carry out the policy of the proclamation. However, Carleton soon came to see that the colony was certain to be permanently French. He decided that Britain’s best course was to forge an alliance with the elites of the former French colony—the seigneurs and the Roman Catholic church.

Carleton returned to England in 1770 to press his new policy for Quebec on the government of Lord North. The trouble the imperial government continued to have with the colonies to the south secured official acceptance of Carleton’s policy. The result was the Quebec Act of 1774, which marked a radical departure from the manner by which British colonies in America were governed. It granted permission for Roman Catholics in Quebec to hold public office; stipulated that an appointed council, rather than an elected assembly, would advise the governor; and legitimized French civil law, though English criminal law was to be in force. The Quebec Act also recognized the legitimacy of the French language and the Roman Catholic faith, gave the church power to enforce the collection of tithes, and formalized the authority of the seigneurs to collect cens et rentes. In addition, Quebec’s territory was greatly expanded, its western border henceforth stretching to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Carleton had sought to cement French loyalty to Britain. As the American Revolution would demonstrate, however, the Quebec Act did not do that. Instead, it brought about a virtual revolution in Quebec society. The Quebec Act gave the seigneurs, the church, and the clergy a degree of authority and influence they had never enjoyed even under the French regime. Prior to 1763 many of the clergy’s edicts had been ignored by the larger society, while the political power of the bishop had been inconsequential compared with that of the governor and intendant; the latter two officials often circumscribed church authority in matters such as relations with the Indians. After 1774, however, the bishop and the church reigned supreme in their own sphere, especially since British governing authorities were loath to interfere in religious matters. The Quebec Act also enhanced the status of the seigneurs by giving them unchallenged legal authority to set the terms and conditions of settlement on their lands. Magnifying this important change, some seigneurs sold their holdings to members of the newly arrived English-speaking merchant class. These new seigneurs, with no understanding of the informal habitant-seigneur relationship under French rule, frequently thought of themselves—and acted—as landed gentry in their dealings with the habitants.

Carleton had erred, either misunderstanding or ignoring the underlying realities of the social structure and class relations he found when he arrived in Quebec. He imposed his own vision of what Quebec ought to be, an action that earned the British the support of the church and the seigneurs but the distinct dislike of the habitants, who soon realized just how much their position in society had been eroded. As the years went by, that erosion would have a dramatic impact on their living standards.

The influence of the American Revolution

To the American colonies, the Quebec Act was menacing—it reestablished to the north and west an area despotically ruled, predominantly French and Roman Catholic, with an alien form of land tenure. Instead of intimidating the American colonies, the act helped push the Americans to open revolt. Indeed, the first act of the American Continental Congress in 1775 was not to declare independence but to invade Canada. The failure of that invasion ensured that the continent north of the Rio Grande would, on the recognition of American independence, be divided between the Americans and the British.

Not all American colonists had supported the cause of independence, and many had resisted it in arms. At the conclusion of hostilities, these loyalists had to make their peace with the new republic, though many went into exile. The refugees, known as United Empire Loyalists, were the object of considerable concern to the British government, which sought to compensate them for their losses and to assist them in establishing new homes. Some went to the United Kingdom, others to the British West Indies, but the majority emigrated to Nova Scotia or Quebec. Nova Scotia, which to a great extent had been recently settled by American colonists, had not, except for an ineffectual rising or two, joined the revolting colonies. Overawed by British sea power and by the fortress of Halifax, Nova Scotians at first kept quiet, and later many of them even made fortunes privateering against American commerce. Easily reached by sea from New York, Nova Scotia became the chief refuge of the loyalists. Some settled in the peninsula itself, some in Cape Breton and in the separate colony of Prince Edward Island. A large number, however, settled along the St. John River, north of the Bay of Fundy. Dissatisfied with tardy government from Halifax, they promptly agitated for a government of their own, and equally promptly the new province of New Brunswick was created for them in 1784, with its own governor and assembly.

In Quebec the loyalists simply crossed the new frontier and settled along the St. Lawrence River to the west of the old French settlements. Their impact in Quebec was even greater than in Nova Scotia and led to the creation of the Constitutional Act of 1791. The loyalists who settled in Central Canada were for the most part quite different from those who went to what were soon to be called the Maritime colonies (later the Maritime Provinces). The latter had possessed an elite of government officials and professional men, often loyalist regiments with their officers and men, from the long-settled seaboard areas. The Central Canadian loyalists, however, were largely from upper New York, especially the Mohawk valley country, and from Pennsylvania and were almost wholly simple frontier folk and recent immigrants, driven from their homes by neighbours who often used the Revolution to dispossess them of their lands (thus explaining the bitter fighting along the frontier and the long loyalist hatred in the new province for all things American). Their coming transformed the character of the population of Quebec. That province had been given a government much like that of New France, except for the important office of intendant, and the province was in population almost wholly French, as it was in civil law. Most loyalists had one desire, to hold the land granted them in simple ownership, something the civil law of Quebec did not allow. Some of them—how many is uncertain—also wanted representative government, which was denied by the Quebec Act. Their representations reached London and were listened to with respect.

The Constitutional Act of 1791

The appeals of the loyalists caused a great problem for the British government. The measures taken in the Quebec Act to conciliate the French could not in honour or policy be withdrawn. Yet the loyalists could not be required to live under French civil and land law and without the representative assembly to which they were accustomed. One obvious answer was to divide Quebec into separate French and English provinces. The English province would have, of course, English common law and an assembly. The French province might have been left with the forms of government provided by the Quebec Act. But there had already been one revolution in America, and by 1789 another had broken out in France. British statesmen felt that the former had occurred partly because Americans had not been granted the British constitution in its proper forms. From this view, the thing to do was to give both the new province and Quebec the British constitution in its entirety as far as circumstances might permit. The result would be, it was hoped, to assimilate the French population.

After a fiery debate in the British House of Commons, the Constitutional Act of 1791 gave the same constitution to the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec, respectively). Nothing that had been given the French in 1774 was revoked, but the form of government was changed to the familiar one of governor with his executive council, a legislative council, and an assembly elected on what was for the time a wide franchise. The result of this last provision was that the first assembly in 1792 had a majority of French members.

Population trends

The influx of loyalists changed the composition of the population of the British North American colonies by adding elements at once American yet profoundly attached to British institutions; it also increased the population by some 6,000 in the old province of Quebec. To these were to be added the unknown numbers of “late loyalists”—settlers, primarily land seekers, who arrived from the northern states as late as 1812. Some 80,000 came to Nova Scotia, although not all remained; of these, about 20,000 settled in what became New Brunswick, and a few hundred on Prince Edward Island.

The newcomers also added to the growing diversity of the population of the colonies. In Newfoundland there were already the West Country English and a growing number of Irish—a total of more than 26,000 by 1806. Nova Scotia had, in addition to New Englanders, loyalists, and Yorkshiremen, the Germans of Lunenburg and the Highland Scots of Pictou county and of Cape Breton Island—in all, an estimated 65,000 in 1806, with 2,513 on Cape Breton Island. New Brunswick had a population of about 35,000 in 1806, mostly loyalists or of loyalist descent, but already the southern Irish, drawn by the timber trade, were beginning to appear on the rivers of the north shore. Prince Edward Island, with a population of 9,676 in 1806, had some Acadians, some loyalists, some English, Scots, and Irish. In Upper Canada in 1806 the population numbered 70,718; in Lower Canada it was estimated at 250,000.

The first Canadian population mosaic had taken shape as it was to remain for a century, a mixture of British, French, and German. The British element was to be steadily reinforced by northern English (coming by way of Liverpool), Highland and Lowland Scots, and southern and northern Irish. The result was the creation of a society in which religious liberty and a great measure of social equality were necessary for social cohesion and common effort.

Until 1815, however, the number of immigrants was small: Highlanders for Glengarry county in Upper Canada, disbanded soldiers in Lanark county south of the Ottawa River, and a straggle of Irish after the rebellion of 1798 was crushed. Nor did the numbers increase appreciably after 1815; not until 1830 did the English, Scottish, and Irish begin coming to the British North American colonies in great volume. Thereafter, thousands arrived each year. The British North American colonies became predominantly British in population, except in Lower Canada, a fact that was to determine the course of Canadian history for the next 100 years.

The Montreal fur traders

The redivision of the continent begun by the American Revolution had been intensified by rivalry in the fur trade. The French fur trade of Montreal had been taken over by British American traders who conducted the trade with the aid of French experience and skill. The British supplied the capital, and the French voyageurs supplied the skill of canoeists and the knowledge of the country and the Indians. These “Montrealers” pushed the trade with great boldness southwest from Montreal, where they had persuaded the British government not to surrender the fur posts after 1783 on the ground that debts to loyalists had not been paid by the new United States. Thus, the trade of the lands lost by France in 1763 and by Britain in 1783 was kept tributary to Montreal rather than to New York and Philadelphia.

In 1783 the Montreal fur traders established the North West Company to challenge the Hudson’s Bay Company for dominance in the northwest. They organized a regular system of canoe convoys from Montreal to the western plains and what is now Canada’s Northwest Territories, building a chain of fur-trading posts across the west and sending explorers as far as the Pacific coast. The rivalry with the Hudson’s Bay Company sometimes degenerated into violence and even murder. The fur trade was lucrative for both companies and had a profound impact on the Indians of the area. As the Hudson’s Bay Company pushed inland to meet the challenge of its new rival, contacts between whites and Indians expanded, and the Métis population grew and began to develop a distinct culture and its own national ambition.

In 1812 Thomas Douglas, 5th earl of Selkirk, who then was a coproprietor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, established the Red River Settlement in southern Manitoba along the main canoe routes of the North West Company. Acting primarily out of charitable motives, Selkirk recruited poor and indigent settlers from Scotland to farm the land. The Métis, many of whom were North West Company employees, saw the Red River settlers as rivals and the settlement as a threat to their livelihood. Tensions between the two groups reached a climax when the Métis attacked the settlers in 1816 in what came to be known as the Seven Oaks Massacre. That clash and a number of other incidents led to a truce between the two companies and subsequently to a merger in 1821. As a result of the merger (or, more accurately, North West’s acquisition by Hudson’s Bay), the canoe expeditions from Montreal to the west were terminated, and Montreal’s nearly two centuries as an entrepôt of the fur trade ended.

The War of 1812

The War of 1812 can largely be traced to the Anglo-U.S. rivalry in the fur trade. British traders and soldiers had supplied Indian tribes and afforded them moral support in their contest with the advancing U.S. frontier. Britain had surrendered the western posts by the Jay Treaty of 1794, but the cause of the Canadian fur trade and of the Indians remained the same: preserving the wilderness. Certainly, apart from single-ship actions and privateering, the war was fought for the conquest of Canada and elimination of the British as an ally of the Indians. In the end, the war was a stalemate and closed with no concession by either side. However, it did push back the Indian frontier, increase the breach between the United States and the British North American colonies, and confirm the U.S.-Canadian boundary. It also gave Canadians a stake in their land; they had fought for it, sometimes English and French together, and successfully staved off invasion.

The U.S.-Canadian border had been fixed in 1783 by a line running generally westward from the mouth of the St. Croix River to the “high lands” dividing Quebec from Maine; then by the mountains between the St. Lawrence and Connecticut river valleys to latitude 45° N; by that line to the St. Lawrence; and then by the centre line of the river and the Great Lakes and the Pigeon and Rainy rivers to the northwest angle of the Lake of the Woods. The Treaty of Ghent (1814) confirmed this demarcation, although the location of the Maine–New Brunswick boundary remained in dispute until the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. A convention in 1818 reduced the rights of U.S. fishermen along the shores of the Atlantic colonies and made latitude 49° N (the 49th parallel) the boundary from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. Beyond, the Oregon Territory was to be jointly occupied for a period of 10 years, an occupation ended, after some threat of war over the U.S. claim to the whole, by the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which divided the territory and extended the boundary westward along the 49th parallel to the coast.

The rebellions of 1837–38

Canada WestEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Political unrest developed in both Upper and Lower Canada soon after the War of 1812. Some of the causes were similar, rooted in the governing structure imposed by the 1791 constitution, while other causes developed from each colony’s particular character. In both colonies, effective government was in the hands of the lieutenant governor and an oligarchy that dominated the legislative and executive councils. In Upper Canada this ruling elite was known as the Family Compact; in Lower Canada it was called the Château Clique. A similarly tightly knit group also dominated Nova Scotia politics. Forming the inner circle of the governor’s advisers, these cliques usually included all the important wealthy men of the colony. In Upper Canada the members of the Family Compact tended to emulate the British landed gentry; by contrast, in Lower Canada the members of the Château Clique were mostly merchants, bankers, or those engaged in the shipping trade. The members of these colonial oligarchies shared religious and cultural affinities, intermarried, provided each other political support, and had similar social, economic, and political aims. In Upper Canada the Family Compact used its political power to attempt to create a class-ordered society on the British model. In Lower Canada the Château Clique wanted to use the tax receipts collected by the legislature to improve the colony’s communications infrastructure, thereby augmenting the Clique’s commercial opportunities. In both colonies only the elected legislative assembly could raise taxes, while the appointed councils advised the governor on how to spend those revenues.

In Upper Canada the basic constitutional problem was exacerbated by a number of local issues. The “alien” question arose after the War of 1812, when Compact members questioned whether former U.S. citizens should be permitted to own property or hold office. The crown-and-clergy “reserves” question concerned the existence of large tracts of unimproved lands. Some of these tracts had been set aside to support the Anglican church, angering other denominations. Other large tracts were being held by land speculators. Still others were to be sold or rented to pay the salaries of officeholders. The tracts blocked development, made communication difficult, and drove up the cost of land. There was also profound disagreement in Upper Canada as to which Protestant denominations should run the colony’s schools. The main grievance against the Family Compact was that it was using the tax revenues of the colony to strengthen its own position and enrich the pocketbooks of its members.

In Lower Canada the tensions created by the constitutional problem were exacerbated by the colony’s linguistic and religious divisions. The French-speaking and Roman Catholic majority, represented in the assembly by the Parti Canadien (later called the Parti Patriote) and dominant in the legislature, grew convinced that the English-speaking, Protestant Château Clique aimed to destroy their way of life. They strongly resented the increase in non-French immigrants and rioted when these immigrants were blamed for an outbreak of cholera and typhoid in Montreal. In rural areas the standard of living of the habitants had fallen precipitously since 1800. This was partly caused by a general downward trend in grain prices and by the continuous subdivision of the habitant farms as each new generation inherited the land; habitant farms had been further sliced into ever narrower lots, each fronting a river or a road. There also had been heavy increases in seigneurial dues, which were blamed on the British colonial regime.

Papineau, Louis-JosephCourtesy of the Public Archives of CanadaIn both colonies, reform-minded political leaders, spurred especially in Lower Canada by the rise of a professional middle class (particularly lawyers and journalists), attempted to break the power of the oligarchy. However, the oligarchies, supported by the governor and the colonial office, held their places. In 1837 armed revolts finally broke out in both Upper and Lower Canada. In Upper Canada the rebels were led by William Lyon Mackenzie, a newspaper publisher and political radical who admired American Jacksonian democracy. In Lower Canada the rebellion was headed by Louis Joseph Papineau, seigneur and leader of the Parti Patriote. In both Upper and Lower Canada farmers made up the majority of those who took up arms; in the former they came primarily from the areas to the north and west of Toronto, in the latter from the parishes to the west and south of Montreal. In both colonies, however, the vast majority of farmers joined neither rebellion.

The revolt in Lower Canada erupted first, precipitated by a government move to arrest Papineau and other leading members of the Parti Patriote. When Papineau and others fled to the countryside, the governor sent troops to arrest them. The first battle, in which government forces were repelled, was fought in November at St. Denis, near Montreal. The rebels were severely defeated in subsequent battles at St. Charles and St. Eustache by British professionals, and Papineau was forced to flee to the United States to escape arrest and a charge of treason.

In Upper Canada a brief clash occurred on Yonge Street north of Toronto in December, when about 800 of Mackenzie’s followers, marching south to the colonial capital, were dispersed at a roadblock occupied by militia and other volunteers loyal to the government. The rebels were routed, and Mackenzie fled to the United States. In the following months in both Upper and Lower Canada the rebels tried unsuccessfully to renew the fighting. Mackenzie and Papineau eventually returned to Canada and were pardoned, though some of their followers were jailed, executed, or deported to Australia.

The union of Canada

The abortive rebellions dramatized the need to reform Canada’s outmoded and constrictive constitution, prompting the “Canadian question” to become a leading issue in British politics. Whig reformer John George Lambton, 1st earl of Durham, was appointed governor-general to inquire into the causes of the troubles. Durham’s stay in Canada was brief, but his inquiry was sweeping and his recommendations trenchant. Durham perceived that the colonies had stagnated and that, if they were to live side by side with the dynamic United States, they must be brought into the full stream of material progress. One political means to achieve this goal was union. Durham decided the time for the union of all the North American colonies had not yet come, but he did recommend the reunion of at least the two Canadas in order to realize the economic possibilities of the St. Lawrence River valley. In Durham’s view, union would also hasten the assimilation of the French, whom he viewed as a backward people. He also adopted a proposal of certain Upper Canadian and Nova Scotian reformers for “responsible government,” which would make the colonial executive responsible to the assembly and assure colonial self-government.

The British government refused an explicit grant of responsible government but did accept the proposal to unite the Canadas. In 1841 the united Province of Canada was established under a new and dynamic governor, Charles Poulett Thomson (later Lord Sydenham). Although the French of Lower Canada (now renamed Canada East) outnumbered the English of Upper Canada (Canada West), both sections received an equal number of seats in the new legislature. The British intended that this policy would facilitate assimilation of the French, but the French, led by such astute reform leaders as Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine, took advantage of divisions among the English-speaking legislators by allying themselves with the reformers from Canada West to push for responsible government and to make themselves indispensable for governmental stability. In Britain the success of the Industrial Revolution led to the growth of free-trade liberalism and a desire to dismantle the colonial empire. The last major protective British tariffs (the Corn Laws) were repealed in 1846, and some time after that colonial governors were instructed to implement a policy of responsible government. The policy received its first real test in 1849, when the reform ministry headed by LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin of Canada West passed a law to compensate victims of the 1837 rebellions. Governor General James Bruce, 8th earl of Elgin, Lord Durham’s son-in-law, signed the law despite strong opposition from conservatives. In reaction a mob burned the parliament buildings in Montreal.

The British North American colonies achieved self-government by 1855, and their laws and institutions were remodeled to fit the individual needs of each colony. By midcentury, Canada was poised for expansion. The British repeal of the Corn Laws had deprived the colonies of imperial protective tariffs. Some fearful merchants favoured American annexation, but to no avail. In an attempt to draw the trade of the American Midwest down the St. Lawrence River valley, work was begun on the Grand Trunk Railway in 1853. The Reciprocity Treaty (1854) between Canada and the United States eliminated customs tariffs between the two, and the resulting increase in trade with the United States—which in part replaced trade with the United Kingdom—led to an economic boom in Canada. Economic growth was especially stimulated after 1861 by the American Civil War. When the U.S. government gave notice in 1864 that it wished to abrogate the treaty by 1865, colonial politicians promoted the unification of the British North American colonies to provide a substitute market. This move was also made necessary by a continuing political deadlock between conservatives and reformers in Canada, by growing fears of U.S. military power, and by a desire to annex the northwest. After the merger of the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821, direct links between Canada and the west had been cut. In Canada West, however, a shortage of good agricultural land was forcing young men to leave for the United States to homestead, and demands grew to annex the northwest to provide room for expansion.

The first significant step toward union, later called confederation, was the formation of the Great Coalition, a government that united George Brown of Canada West—leader of the so-called Clear Grits reform movement—with the Liberal-Conservatives’ John A. Macdonald of Canada West and George Étienne Cartier of Canada East. In September 1864 the three leaders attended a conference at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in which Maritime political leaders discussed Maritime union. They persuaded the Maritimes to postpone such a union and instead to discuss creating a union of all of British North America. On October 10, 1864, an agreement to establish a general federal union was reached in Quebec. The agreement was immediately approved by the British government, which was eager to allow the colonies to govern themselves and to be rid of its obligation to defend them inland from Quebec. The path to union was not without obstacles. New Brunswick voted against union in 1865, then reversed itself in 1866; Prince Edward Island refused to enter until 1873; Newfoundland (including Labrador) also refused and did not join Canada until 1949. But the Canadas and the British government applied quiet but strong pressure on the reluctant colonies. In 1867 the three colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Canadas were united as four provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario) of the Dominion of Canada under the British North America Act, which, with certain amendments, served as the “constitution” of Canada until the adoption of the Canada Act (also known as the Constitution Act) in 1982.

The British North America Act—later retitled the Constitution Act, 1867—provided constitutions, based on the British model, for the new provinces of Quebec and Ontario, confirmed the language and legal rights of the French, and divided power between the federal government and the provinces. At its origin the union was not truly federal, as the central government was given broad powers, not unlike those the British government had possessed over the colonies. Over time, however, judicial interpretation and the growth of provincial rights moved the country toward a more federal system. For the moment, a strong central government was deemed necessary in order to develop the northwest and to build a railway to the Pacific that would bind the vast new territories there to the original provinces.

The first Riel rebellion

Riel, LouisCourtesy of the Archives Nationales du QuébecThe government regarded the acquisition of the northwest as a simple real estate transaction with the Hudson’s Bay Company. But the company was not the only power in the territory. There were white settlers at the colony of Red River and also the Métis, who made up more than half the colony. Behind the Métis were the powerful Plains tribes—the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy, buffalo hunters not under the influence of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Canada had taken no account of the Métis or Indians in effecting the transfer, assuming it could take over from the company and then consider what should be done.

The federal government’s policy was rendered impossible by Louis Riel, a Métis leader educated in Montreal, who organized resistance in Red River to a transfer to Canada without the input of the people of the northwest. With the support of armed Métis, Riel seized control of Red River and forced Canada to postpone the transfer and to negotiate. The result was the creation in 1870 of the small province of Manitoba, in which equal status was given to the English and French languages and an educational system was established like Quebec’s two systems of public confessional schools, Roman Catholic and Protestant. The implication was that the northwest was to be open to French institutions and language as well as English, an assumption that was to be thwarted by the extreme smallness of the new province, which amounted to little more than the Red River Settlement, and by the dominion’s control of natural resources and of the still vast North West Territory.

Riel’s obstructionism did not block Canada’s march to the west, and the dominion at once opened negotiations with delegates from British Columbia, which then consisted of Vancouver Island (organized as a colony in 1849) and the mainland to the western watershed of the Rockies. The mainland first had been made a separate colony in 1858, when a gold rush along the Fraser River began, and had been united with Vancouver Island in 1866. The chief needs of the new colony were responsible government and connection with the east. Union with Canada might afford both, and in the negotiations the chief Canadian representative, George Étienne Cartier, promised both and more—in fact, a railway was begun within 2 years and finished in 10 years (1881). Faced with such generosity, British Columbia’s legislative council agreed to enter the union and became a province in 1871.

Having acquired title to the west, the Canadian government prepared to settle it. First, through a series of treaties negotiated from 1871 to 1877 with the Indians living from northwestern Ontario to the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the government extinguished any aboriginal title to the lands. In return for moving to reserves, the Indians were to receive various subsidies and bonuses, educational facilities, rations, and a modicum of health care. Knowing well the disasters that had befallen the native peoples in the United States who had resisted white expansion, the Indians in Canada acquiesced. In the years that followed, however, the government frequently failed to live up to its treaty obligations. As the bison on which the Plains Indians depended disappeared, poverty, starvation, disease, and disaffection spread among the western tribes.

The transcontinental railway

train: 19th century passenger trainCanadian Pacific Limited Rail Corporate ArchivesWith the addition of British Columbia, Canada extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To maintain that vast area and to ensure its independence from the United States, it was necessary to build a railway to the west coast. In 1872 an effort was made to organize a company to undertake this enterprise—one much greater than any railway yet built anywhere—but Sir John Macdonald’s government, charged with corruption in its dealing with the head of the new company, fell on the eve of the global financial crisis that began in 1873. The railway thereafter could be built only piecemeal until Macdonald returned to power in 1878. An economically revived Canada, fortified with new protectionist tariffs, incorporated the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1881, and the line was pushed ahead rapidly with government grants of land and money.

Smith, Donald; Canadian Pacific RailwayCP Rail Corporate ArchivesEven so, the railway soon needed new loans from Parliament, and its funds ran out as economic depression returned. Had it not been for the Riel Rebellion of 1885, which underscored the need for the railway in moving troops, the last loan might have been refused. Despite the victory in the creation of Manitoba, many of the Métis—finding life impossible with the influx of new settlers—sold their lands and trekked westward to the Saskatchewan River. Even there they were followed by the government land survey. The bison herds were vanishing, and the railway would supersede transport by boat and cart, from which many of them earned their living. The Plains Indians, alarmed by the depletion of the buffalo and unhappy with the government’s treaties, were also restless. The Métis again organized to claim their rights as they saw them and sent for Riel, who was then living in exile in Montana Territory in the United States. Riel returned and a new armed resistance was formed. Canada rushed a military force to the northwest, where the new railway, though not quite completed, proved its worth, as did the company’s steamers that operated on the Saskatchewan River. The rebellion subsequently was suppressed, and the railway obtained the grant that enabled it to complete its track across the Rockies. Riel, with several associates, was tried and, despite evidence that he was of unsound mind, convicted of treason, though with a recommendation for mercy. Macdonald, as minister of justice and prime minister, refused clemency. The last spike of the Pacific railway was driven on November 7, 1885, nine days before Riel was hanged at Regina.

Reaction of Quebec

Canada had united its new and old territories, but there was a fierce reaction in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Riel, who had not gained much French sympathy in 1870, was now viewed by nationalist French Canadians as a martyr to the cause of French Canadian rights. A clerical-nationalist government was elected in Quebec by a narrow margin, producing a reaction in Protestant Ontario, which, in turn, led in 1890 to the abolition of the confessional schools in Manitoba, where the Roman Catholic schools were almost wholly French-speaking. French Canadians thereafter fell back on the provincial rights of Quebec to maintain the rights of French Canadians—a reaction with serious consequences for the Canadian federation. The Liberal-Conservative Party, hampered by Macdonald’s death in 1891, lost control of the federal government in 1896 largely because of what became known as the Manitoba Schools Question. The Liberal Party, under the French Canadian Wilfrid Laurier, came to power by virtue of a large majority in Quebec. Canada, it seemed, was not to be governed without the support of Quebec, even though the west retained only traces of French-speaking population.

The Klondike gold rush

panning: Klondike RiverThe Bettmann ArchiveIn 1896 gold nuggets were found in a small tributary of the Klondike River, itself a tributary of the Yukon River. A gold rush began in 1897 and swelled in 1898 as miners and adventurers poured in, mainly from the United States. The Klondike—the last of the great placer finds—was the most publicized of all the great rushes, exciting a world weary of economic hard times with stories of the long climb up the Chilkoot Pass and of red-coated Northwest Mounted Police keeping law and order on the gold-rush frontier. However, Klondike gold was probably the least important mineral discovery of this period. Far more significant for Canada’s economy were the copper, lead, zinc, and silver deposits in the Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia; the coal deposits of the Crowsnest Pass (bordering British Columbia and Alberta); and the gold, nickel, and silver beds of northern and northeastern Ontario and northwestern Quebec. These discoveries stimulated railway and town construction and brought thousands of permanent residents. Indeed, many of the mineral discoveries occurred as a result of the construction of the railways through the dense rock. In the decades that followed, prospectors traced the rich mineral deposits of the Canadian Shield westward from Ontario and Quebec, making major discoveries of base metals (as well as of gold and silver) at Flin Flon, Manitoba, in 1915 and finding rich deposits of radium in the north at Great Bear Lake in 1930. By the 1930s Canada had become a major mining country.

The land rush in the west

At the same time, the land rush to the Prairies widened the country’s agricultural base by the settlement of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. Their population rose rapidly, from 419,512 in 1901 to 1,322,709 in 1911. Manitoba had already been enlarged westward and northward in 1881. The territories, which had been ruled by a governor and appointed council since 1876, were now allowed to elect some members to the council and began the traditional Canadian struggle, first for representative and then for responsible government, which could only come with provincehood. Thus, between Manitoba and the Rockies the demand arose for the creation of a province, and in 1905 not one but two new provinces were formed: Alberta and Saskatchewan. The provinces, roughly equal in area, extended north to latitude 60° N.

As was often the case, the development of the west disturbed the relations of English and French in Canada. A fierce political struggle in the new provinces erupted over Roman Catholic schools, as Laurier tried to extend Catholic rights but met strong resistance. Eventually, a compromise was reached, whereby separate denominational schools were to be created, supported by the taxes of members of a denomination—Roman Catholics in this case.

The Laurier era

For 15 years Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government reflected the acquiescent politics of prosperity and progress, but it also fostered a degree of social activism inspired by the growing Progressive movement in the United States. Many Canadian religious leaders, intellectuals, journalists, educators, politicians, and business leaders concluded that government action was necessary to alleviate poverty, establish safe and sanitary working conditions, improve urban life, and moderate some of the worst excesses of what was then a virtually unbridled capitalism. Progressive policies enacted by the Laurier government and its successors included woman suffrage, the regulation or public ownership of utilities, public health programs, improved and universal education, and government action against the growing number of monopolies and trusts. Although Laurier himself showed little understanding of Progressivism, several of his ministers became convinced Progressives. W.L. Mackenzie King, Canada’s first labour minister, drew up Canada’s first labour relations legislation, adopted in 1907, and its first antimonopoly legislation, passed in 1910.

Canada entered the 20th century in a confident mood, best exemplified by a vast and extravagant expansion of the railway network in response to the settlement of the west and the initial development of the mineral and forest wealth of the nearer, or middle, north. The Laurier government built one transcontinental railway from Quebec to a point east of Winnipeg; from there to Prince Rupert a well-subsidized Grand Trunk Railway of eastern Canada built a subsidiary line, the Grand Trunk Pacific. Not to be deterred by two transcontinental railways in a country that was yet little more than a narrow corridor from east to west, two Canadian private entrepreneurs, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, built or bought the Canadian Northern bit by bit with lavish subsidies from provincial governments. By 1914 Canada had one long, established, coast-to-coast railway (the Canadian Pacific) and two railway lines from Montreal to the Pacific toiling to complete their tracks in the Rocky Mountains. In such a wealth of easy capital and easy prosperity, governments were not likely to be defeated.

Yet two factors—one as old as Canada and one relatively new—soon disturbed the smooth current of prosperity. The former was the position of the French in a predominantly English-speaking Canada, a never-quite-settled issue that again arose over participation in what some French considered Britain’s wars—first the South African War in 1899 and then World War I. As a result, a new nationalist movement, led by Henri Bourassa, arose among French Canadian clerics and intellectuals, who articulated their views in Le Devoir, a newspaper founded in 1910. The second factor was the impingement of the world on a Canada intensely absorbed in its own development and troubles. The two were to combine to end the Laurier regime and bring Canada, still troubled, into the world at large.

Foreign relations

Canada’s contacts with the world in 1900 were almost wholly through Great Britain and the United States. Indeed, Canada’s formal relations with other countries were conducted only through the British Foreign Office because Canada, though self-governing, was still a colony and thus had no independent diplomatic status.

In the late 19th century Canada’s dependence on Great Britain raised the question of whether Canada might be expected, on its own decision, to take some part in Britain’s imperial wars. The British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain was anxious that the dominion should at least be committed in principle to supporting the mother country. Laurier, at the colonial conference of 1897, remained silent on the issue; thereafter he claimed that the Canadian Parliament had the power to decide whether or not Canada would take any action. When the South African War broke out in 1899, many English Canadians actively urged participation, but some French Canadians, led by Bourassa, were actively opposed. A compromise was reached, by which Canada sent volunteers to serve under British command and with British pay, but the rift between French and English Canadians had been further exacerbated. Also, Britain’s naval competition with Germany made Britain eager to have colonial help, preferably by contributions in money or by the colonies’ assuming their own naval defense. Again Laurier sought a compromise. In 1910 he established a Canadian navy, though in time of war the navy was to be placed under British command. The measure was bitterly opposed by the nationalists in Quebec, who argued that conscription in Britain’s army would follow. Their clamorous opposition led to the defeat of the government candidate in a Quebec by-election, foreshadowing Laurier’s fall from power in 1911.

Canada’s relations with the United States were close, but there had been a long record of border disputes, the settlements of which frequently were resented, rightly or wrongly, by Canadians. Canada and the United States also clashed over fishing rights in the North Atlantic and, in the 1890s, over the sealing industry in the Pacific. Raids by the Fenians (Irish supporters of an uprising against British rule) in Canada at the time of confederation symbolized another cause of strain: the Irish American hatred of England and suspicion of Canada as a British colony. Relations worsened over the disputed Alaskan panhandle boundary. The line laid down by treaty between Great Britain and Russia had not since 1867 been marked on the ground by the United States and Canada. It became an urgent issue in 1897 with the Klondike gold rush, as the principal access to the goldfields was through the panhandle, and the disputed territory might contain gold. Canada claimed a line that would have put the heads of major inlets in Canadian territory—thereby giving Canada free access to the Yukon Territory (now Yukon). The United States claimed a boundary that would have excluded Canada from the sea. A joint commission of Americans, British, and Canadians found in favour of almost the whole of the American claim, the one British jurist voting with the three Americans. The decision was bitterly resented in Canada, though Canada’s case had in fact been weak. The episode forced Canada to recognize that it must be prepared to look out for itself, prompting the rise of a new sense of Canadian nationalism.

Two results followed. In preparation for Canadians handling their own foreign affairs, the Department of External Affairs was created in 1909. In addition, to settle long-standing disagreements with the United States, the Permanent Joint Commission on Boundary Waters was also established in 1909, and the following year the long-vexed Atlantic fisheries issues were finally settled. As the United States was beginning to turn to Canada as an outlet for investment and as a source of raw materials, particularly minerals and newsprint, relations between Canada and the United States assumed a new guise. An exchange of ideas began on a new scale, particularly in the ideas of the Progressive movement, which advocated a wide range of reforms to combat the growing social evils caused by industrialism. These ideas were influential on both sides of the border, in Canada sometimes more than in the United States, as when the publicly owned and operated Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission was created in 1906. To some degree these developments were upset by the Canadian election of 1911, when the Conservative Party under Robert Laird Borden defeated Laurier’s Liberals. The campaign was dominated by two issues: Laurier’s naval policy, which was stimulated by Britain’s defense needs in Europe, and a proposed reciprocal trade agreement with the United States. In Quebec the naval policy was denounced as imperialistic. Borden, backed by the business community and renegade Liberals, attacked the reciprocal trade agreement as a sellout of Canada’s British birthright and won a convincing victory. However, Borden’s victory did not interrupt the growth of the Canadian-American relationship.

Although burdened by demands for the distribution of patronage, Borden tried to institute more progressive policies after taking office, but foreign policy issues and defense questions dominated the first years of his government. He struggled to establish a policy of direct cash aid for Britain’s naval building program, in return for a voice in imperial policies that affected Canada. However, he was defeated by the Liberal-dominated Senate and rebuffed by the British. When World War I broke out in August 1914, Canada was almost totally unprepared.

World War I

At the outbreak of the war, Minister of Militia and Defense Sir Samuel Hughes scrapped the carefully laid plans for a mobilization of the existing militia and instead launched a direct appeal to the men of Canada. The country was just emerging from a deep recession, and tens of thousands of British-born young men with no work and imbued with patriotism rushed to serve in the war. An initial contingent of 33,000 troops sailed for England in October 1914 to lay the foundation for the creation of the 1st Canadian Division. In April 1915 the Canadians saw their first major action in the Second Battle of Ypres (Belgium), where German forces first used poison gas as a weapon. As more volunteers came forward, Borden increased the authorized force levels. By the spring of 1917, four Canadian divisions, constituting the Canadian Corps, were in the field, with a fifth division in Britain. The entire corps fought together for the first time in April 1917, when it distinguished itself by capturing Vimy Ridge in northern France. This corps earned an enviable record in battle and represented the first authentic expression of Canada in the world; its strength and reputation meant that Canada could not be treated as a mere colony. The cost of the war to Canada was high. Out of approximately 625,000 who served, about 60,000 were killed in action or died in active service, and another 173,000 were wounded.

At home the war effort was scarcely less impressive. Canadian foodstuffs and raw materials were of first importance in maintaining the Western Allies. No less important were the millions of rounds of ammunition turned out by Canadian factories. In fact, the war was a significant step forward for Canadian industry, which had to learn complicated mass production techniques and apply them to the manufacture of everything from wooden shell crates to training aircraft. The rapid growth of the munitions industry created an acute labour shortage that brought many more women into the industrial workforce. It also promoted the growth of labour unions. At the same time, the accelerated demands of the war economy brought high inflation, which the government was unable to control despite increasingly interventionist policies. Strikes and lockouts grew to crisis proportions by the last year of the war.

At the start of the war, Borden had envisaged an essentially voluntary war effort: employers were urged to treat their workers fairly, workers were urged to curb wage demands, producers were urged to keep price increases down, and men were urged to enlist. As the war dragged on, more and more English Canadians began to view it as a Canadian national war effort, not simply as another British war in which Canadians were taking part. By 1917 the government was trying to regulate many facets of Canadian economic life. It nationalized bankrupt railways, introduced income taxes, and controlled some commodity prices, and, in the spring of 1917, it introduced compulsory military service—conscription—in response to a growing manpower crisis in the Canadian army. Conscription tore Canada apart. French Canada had never been enthusiastic about the war, and many fewer French Canadians volunteered for military service than did English Canadians. To make matters worse, French nationalist feeling had been reawakened by new troubles with respect to the use of the French language in schools in French districts in Ontario and Manitoba. French Canada, led by Laurier, opposed conscription but was overridden by the formation of a Union government—almost wholly English in personnel—and defeated in the wartime election of 1917. Canada was divided as it had not been since 1837.

Despite the rift at home, the entry of Canada into the international community continued. In 1917 the British government under Prime Minister David Lloyd George formed an Imperial War Cabinet, of which the prime ministers of the dominions were members, to conduct the war and to plan the peace. In reality, if not yet in name, the British Commonwealth of Nations had come into being, as recognized by Article IX of the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917, which stated that the British Empire was made up of self-governing nations as well as colonies, with India in a special position. Henceforth, it was hoped that a common policy would be worked out by intergovernmental conferences in peace as well as war.

Turmoil at home

During World War I, discontent had increased in virtually every region of Canada and in almost all its social classes. When the fighting ended, patriotic constraints on demands for change disappeared, and organized labour and farmers mounted a revolt that swept across Canada. In 1919 Ontario’s Conservative government was ousted by a farmer-labour alliance led by the United Farmers of Ontario. United Farmers governments were elected shortly afterward in Alberta (1921) and Manitoba (1922). In federal politics in 1921 the agrarian-based Progressive Party became the second largest party in the House of Commons. The agrarian revolt was marked by demands for farm price supports and regulation of the grain and transportation industries. At its core, however, the movement was aimed at curtailing the growth of the power of the cities.

A labour revolt paralleled the uprising on the farms. The virtual doubling of union membership across Canada during the war and the failure of the Borden government to control inflation stimulated militancy. There was an upsurge of industrial unrest despite government efforts to impose peace. In 1919 a six-week general strike paralyzed Winnipeg and sparked sympathetic strikes across Canada. The Winnipeg General Strike was eventually crushed by a federal government gripped by a hysterical fear of revolution. By 1921 the labour revolt had subsided, partly because of federal intervention and partly because of the onset of an economic downturn that brought increased unemployment and a virtual collapse of union power.

Commonwealth relations

As a result of their efforts during the war, Canada and the other dominion powers demanded separate signatures to the treaties with the defeated countries and won at least the right to sign separately as members of a British Empire panel. They also demanded and received—despite the doubts of the United States and France—membership in the newly organized League of Nations. Thus, Canada finally became a full-fledged member of the community of nations.

Between World Wars I and II Canada followed an isolationist foreign policy, mainly a consequence of the return to government in 1921 of the Liberal Party, which had come to depend on French Canadian support. French Canadians were overwhelmingly isolationist, and they strengthened the general disposition of Canadians to express their new national feelings by becoming completely autonomous within the British Empire and by resuming their material development as a North American country. The new government of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King was firmly nationalist and noninterventionist, as evidenced by its refusal to support the United Kingdom’s policy in Turkey in 1922. Canadian isolationism effectively ended the hope of a common imperial policy. Instead, there would be conferences, consultations, and information sharing but freedom of action.

King was primarily motivated by his desire to maintain national unity. Recognizing that a close relationship with Britain would further alienate French Canadians (who continued to be upset over the conscription crisis of World War I), he was determined not to split Canada over questions of foreign policy. Canada thus worked with the Union of South Africa and the Irish Free State to disentangle some of the formal ties of empire, and King was instrumental in restricting the authority and status of British governors general in the self-governing dominions. This change and others were embodied in the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which ended all legislative supremacy of the British Parliament over the dominion parliaments and made them, when they proclaimed the act, sovereign states sharing a common crown. Thus, the British Commonwealth of Nations had become a legal reality and Canada an independent nation. Taking advantage of its new independence, Canada established its own foreign service, and the country appointed ministers to Washington, D.C. (1927), Paris (1928), and Tokyo (1929). (In the United Kingdom and Canada, officers called high commissioners played much the same role after 1928, although the office was to some degree political and not just diplomatic.)

The Great Depression

With its economy so heavily dependent on natural resource extraction, Canada was especially hard hit by the Great Depression that followed the crash of the U.S. stock market in October 1929. Unemployment soared, industrial production collapsed, and prices, especially for farm commodities, fell rapidly as demand for all manner of consumer goods virtually disappeared.

The depression was devastating to Canadian farmers and workers. In western Canada prolonged drought, compounded by years of poor soil conservation techniques, devastated vast areas of farmland in southeastern Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, and southwestern Manitoba. Thousands of farmers abandoned their lands to the drifting soil and moved west to British Columbia, northwest into Alberta’s Peace River region, or into the cities. Governments and private relief agencies were unable to cope with the legions of jobless. King, seemingly oblivious to the scope of the disaster, refused to release federal funds to the provinces to combat unemployment and underwrite relief. Thus, in 1930 King’s Liberal government was swept from office, and the Conservatives, under Richard Bedford Bennett, took power with an absolute majority in the House of Commons.

Bennett faced severe economic and social tests as the depression deepened. His government undertook some modest measures to combat the slump: work camps were set up for unemployed men; federal relief money was channeled to the provinces; the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act was passed to alleviate the burden of the severe drought conditions; the Canadian Wheat Board was established to stabilize wheat prices; and various measures were taken to provide foreclosure relief to farmers. In early 1935 Bennett announced a series of sweeping social reform measures, based on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies in the United States, in what was referred to as the Bennett New Deal; however, much of the legislation that was eventually enacted as part of that program was later declared unconstitutional by the courts.

Bennett endeavoured to open foreign markets to Canadian products. He turned first to the Commonwealth, securing at the Imperial Economic Conference of 1932, held in Ottawa, a series of preferential tariffs, known as the Ottawa Agreements, among the Commonwealth countries (see imperial preference). When the Ottawa Agreements failed to produce the desired results, he approached the United States to begin negotiations for a reciprocal trade treaty, which was eventually signed in 1935 after Bennett had left office. The new agreement was much less inclusive than the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty.

Paradoxically, during the 1930s mining expanded in northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec, particularly in newly opened goldfields. Revenues in those provinces thus stayed relatively high, enabling the federal government to support the poorer provinces, which faced financial disaster as municipalities turned to the provincial governments for resources to provide welfare and relief.

The depression spawned two new important political parties, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1932 and the Social Credit Party in 1935. The former was a coalition of socialist, farm protest, and labour groups that aimed to revolutionize the economy and society democratically. It espoused a program of large-scale government ownership of primary industries, banking, transportation and communications, and even agricultural land. It also advocated strict child and female labour laws, an extensive social welfare system, and greatly expanded rights for labour unions. The Social Credit Party, founded by William Aberhart of Alberta, advocated paying social dividends to fill the gap between the costs of production and the cost of purchase.

Bennett earned a reputation among voters as hard and unsympathetic. In 1935 he refused to allow communist-led unemployed workers to march from British Columbia to Ottawa, a move that precipitated a major riot in Regina, Saskatchewan, in July 1935 when the “On to Ottawa” demonstrators clashed with police. Labour activism during the depression also included efforts by industrial unions to organize mine workers in the new goldfields and the arrival in 1937 of the American-based Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which helped striking autoworkers at Oshawa, Ontario, to force General Motors to recognize their union.

Popular disaffection with Bennett was widespread by October 1935, when voters gave King’s Liberals a resounding victory. The new government, believing that the way to end the depression was to stimulate international trade, signed the new reciprocity agreement with the United States (it was subsequently modified and renewed in 1938). U.S.-Canadian trade subsequently grew dramatically, but in the short term the depression continued. King’s government reorganized and strengthened the government-owned radio network (renamed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), assumed control of the Bank of Canada, and dismantled the work camps, but it undertook no direct action to fight the depression or its immediate consequences.

The Liberal government was deeply concerned with the devastation the economic depression wrought on government finances. In 1936 an official inquiry by the Bank of Canada revealed that the Prairie Provinces were near bankruptcy. A distinguished Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations worked on a report that amounted to a comprehensive study of the constitutional and financial development of government in Canada and of how the depression had revealed its weaknesses. The federal government, with unlimited power to tax, lacked the power to spend on important matters; the provinces possessed the necessary constitutional power, but, except for Ontario, their financial resources were inadequate. In 1940, on the principle that all provinces should have the means to maintain a minimum level of governmental and social services, the commission recommended the assumption by the federal government of provincial debts, a scheme of federal unemployment insurance, and a reallocation of revenues between the two levels of government. The first two measures were adopted, relieving the debt burden of the provinces and strengthening the federal government, but on the latter there was no agreement, as it would have involved a redistribution of income between wealthier Central Canada and the Maritime and the Prairie Provinces; both Ontario and Quebec were strongly provincialist and resisted redistribution.

Growing international tension

Domestic distress was to some degree submerged in the second half of the 1930s by the worsening outlook in international affairs. The external interests of Canada shifted from the development of the Commonwealth to the fate of the League of Nations and the first shocks of aggression in East Asia and Europe. Canada was too preoccupied with its own affairs up to 1935 to take great note of Japanese incursions into Manchuria or the growing power of Adolf Hitler in Europe. However, by the mid-1930s the fate of the League of Nations, clearly threatened by acts of aggression, drew more and more attention. From 1936 King supported the French and British policy of appeasing Germany, refused to make any public commitments to aid Britain in the event of war, and declared that Parliament would decide Canada’s course if and when fighting broke out. King adopted this course despite knowing that strong ties of culture, emotion, and nationality still bound most English Canadians to Britain and that these ties would inevitably bring Canada into war on Britain’s side—saying as much to Hitler in a visit to Germany in 1937. King’s plan, however, was to delay any commitment to the last possible moment so as not to alienate French Canada until war had actually begun.

Domestic affairs

King retired as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party in 1948, and the mantle of leadership passed to Louis Stephen Saint Laurent, a Quebec lawyer whom King had brought into the government in 1941. Saint Laurent continued most of the domestic policies of his predecessor but pursued a more activist foreign policy. His time in office coincided with the intensification of the Cold War in the late 1940s, precipitating higher defense spending. The increased defense expenditures, combined with opposition from provincial governments, eventually forced the Liberal government to curtail plans to expand existing social programs or to introduce such new ones as national health insurance. Saint Laurent was a popular leader, especially in Quebec, and was aided by a strong cabinet team and an effective civil service. He won major victories in the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, reinforcing the notion that the Liberals were destined to govern Canada forever.

Foreign affairs

The most significant outcome of World War II for Canada in its foreign relations was the relative decline of Britain and the emergence of the United States as the world’s foremost economic and military power. Canada’s relations with Britain became increasingly distant, while those with the United States became closer. The creation of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense in 1940 was a significant indicator of that shift. For the first time in its history, Canada coordinated its defense planning with the United States.

Canada’s shift in orientation from Britain to the United States did not come all at once and did not progress without hitches. In early 1948, for example, King balked at concluding a free trade agreement with the Americans, but Britain’s growing economic, political, and military weakness and the rise of the United States to superpower status led King to forge closer ties with the United States. Canadian leaders, who shared to a considerable degree the U.S. view of the postwar world, struggled to reconcile the goals of safeguarding Canadian sovereignty and integrating Canada into the U.S. economic, diplomatic, and military spheres of influence.

Quebec separatism

French Canadian nationalists favoured some form of enhanced status for Quebec: special status within confederation, a new form of association on the basis of equality with English Canada, or complete independence as a sovereign country. During the late 1960s the movement was motivated primarily by the belief, shared by many Quebec intellectuals and labour leaders, that the economic difficulties of Quebec were caused by English Canadian domination of the confederation and could only be ended by altering—or terminating—the ties with other provinces and the central government. By the late 20th century, economic conditions had begun to improve, and cultural and linguistic differences became the primary motivation for the resurgence of Quebec separatist sentiment in the 1990s. Quebec separatism was deeply rooted in Canadian history: some Québécois maintained a perennial desire to have their own state, which in a sense they had possessed from 1791 to 1841, and many French Canadians had long felt a sense of minority grievance, stimulated by the execution of Louis Riel, given substance by the Manitoba Schools Question, and given voice in the nationalism of journalists such as Jules-Paul Tardivel and Henri Bourassa.

French Canadian nationalism was also the outcome of profound economic and social changes that had taken place in Quebec since about 1890. Until that time French Canadians had lived by agriculture and seasonal work in the timber trade. The middle-class French of Quebec and Montreal acted as intermediaries between the working-class French and the English industrial and commercial leaders. The growth of hydroelectric power and the wood pulp industry helped to create manufacturing plants in Quebec and Ontario and brought French Canadian workers into the cities, particularly Montreal. The rate of growth of the French Canadian population and the lack of good workable land outside the narrow St. Lawrence and Richelieu valleys contributed to the rush to low-paying jobs in urban industries and to the growth of urban slums, especially in Montreal. By 1921 Quebec was the most urbanized and industrialized of all Canadian provinces, including Ontario, which remained the most populous and the wealthiest. The Quebec government, devoted to the 19th-century policy of laissez-faire economics, recklessly encouraged industry and did little to check its worst excesses. With few exceptions the new enterprises were owned and directed by English Canadians or U.S. businesses.

At the same time, industrialization destroyed the myths by which French Canada had survived: that of the Roman Catholic mission to the New World and the cult of agriculture as the basis of virtuous life. The clash of the traditional and the new came to a head in the last years of the regime of Premier Maurice Duplessis, an economic conservative and Quebec nationalist who led Quebec in 1936–39 and 1944–59. As leader of the Union Nationale party—a party he had helped to create—Duplessis’s first term in office ended when he lost the 1939 election after challenging Ottawa’s right to intervene in provincial jurisdictions during wartime. Reelected in 1944, Duplessis refused to cooperate with most of the new social and educational initiatives launched by the King and Saint Laurent governments. Duplessis favoured foreign investment, supported the Roman Catholic church as Quebec’s chief agency of social welfare and education, and strongly opposed trade unionism.

Quebec society was changing dramatically in the late 1940s and ’50s. Montreal and other urban centres grew rapidly after the war, and a burgeoning French-speaking urban middle class was entering business and other white-collar professions. Increasing numbers of students completed high school and entered Canadian colleges and universities. A prolonged and bitter strike by asbestos workers began a period of labour conflict and gave young idealists—one of them Pierre Trudeau, future prime minister of Canada—a chance to combine with labour in a struggle for a free society of balanced interests. A new Quebec was emerging, despite Duplessis’s best efforts to keep it Catholic, agrarian, and conservative. At the time of his death in 1959, the province was ready for major political changes.

In June 1960 the Quebec Liberal Party, under Jean Lesage, gained power in Quebec. Lesage launched several new legislative initiatives aimed at reforming the corruption that had become widespread during the Duplessis years, transforming and improving the social and educational infrastructure, removing the Roman Catholic church from most secular activities, and involving the provincial government directly in economic development. The Quebec government nationalized the province’s private power companies and consolidated them into one government-owned company. It also established a new provincial pension plan, creating a large pool of investment capital. Much was done quickly in this period of Liberal activism that became known as the “Quiet Revolution.”

After the Liberals were defeated by the Union Nationale in 1966, the range of extremes widened in Quebec. The Liberal Party was federalist, holding that the reforms needed in Quebec could be obtained within the federal system. The Union Nationale also remained fundamentally federalist, but it stressed the importance of remaining Québécois and of obtaining greater provincial power. To the left of the traditional parties, however, opinion ranged from a demand for a special status for Quebec to support for separation and independence. An active minority of leftist Montrealers broke with the Liberals and began advocating independence as a first step to social change. Their efforts resulted in the establishment of the Parti Québécois, which advocated secession from the confederation. Under René Lévesque, a former Liberal, the Parti Québécois won 24 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1970, but the Liberals still secured 72 of the assembly’s 95 seats.

Other social revolutionaries, inspired by refugees from Algeria and by events in Cuba at that time, began to practice terrorism. Bombings began in 1963 and continued sporadically. Most French and English Canadians considered these actions “un-Canadian,” but they illustrated both the social ills of Quebec and the ties of the French intellectuals with the world outside Canada. In October 1970 a terrorist group, the Front de Libération du Québec (Quebec Liberation Front), kidnapped the British trade commissioner, James Cross, and Quebec’s labour minister, Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered. Quebec’s government asked for federal intervention, prompting enactment of the War Measures Act, which suspended the usual civil liberties. Subsequently some 500 people were arrested, and troops were moved into Quebec. The Canadian public generally approved of the act, but few convictions followed, except of those accused of the murder of Laporte.

First premiership

The interregnum: Progressive Conservative government, 1979–80

By the late 1970s the glamour of the Trudeau regime was wearing off, and his policies were falling into confusion. The bilingual initiative was pushed beyond the brink of tolerance in English Canada and was hastily truncated before even the federal civil service was completely remodeled. A victory by the Parti Québécois in Quebec provincial elections in November 1976 revived the question of Quebec separatism. Although the Parti Québécois’s victory was largely attributable to the corruption and mismanagement of the Bourassa government, it took advantage of its position by pushing for separation, at least in the form of limited independence known as sovereignty-association—an arrangement in which Quebec would keep the economic advantages of federation with Canada (e.g., a common currency, central bank, and free-trade zone) but also have the cultural and social benefits of political independence.

The reasons for this slow but powerful reversal of much that Trudeau had stood for could be found in the enormous expansion of skill and power in provincial governments. There had been a steady widening of provincial jurisdiction (especially in the field of welfare), an expansion of revenues and expenditures, and a growing sense of local importance partly nurtured in the constitutional device of the federal-provincial conference. In 1975 the provinces for the first time together spent more of the gross national product than the federal government did. The federal government had now become less powerful than the provinces acting collectively, as more and more were inclined to do, and by 1979 all but one of the provinces had elected Conservative or opposition governments.

Trudeau had secured a solid majority in the 1968 federal election, but thereafter much of his power base in western Canada, Ontario, and the Atlantic Provinces began to dissolve. His popularity was eroded by his almost constant preoccupation with Quebec and Quebec-related issues, combined with his apparent lack of sympathy for regional concerns. In 1972 the Liberals were reelected with a minority government, and Trudeau was forced to rely on the support of the social democratic New Democratic Party. Although he was able to refashion a majority in 1974, his victory was as much a result of dissatisfaction with the Progressive Conservative opposition as it was an indication of his popularity. In fact, the next five years constituted a time of drastic decline in Liberal support. Trudeau’s wage and price controls alienated organized labour; his advocacy of greater government intervention in the economy angered business; and his constant efforts to impose Ottawa’s will on the provincial governments disturbed voters in Atlantic Canada and the west. In May 1979 Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark took power with a minority government.

Not quite 40 years old when elected, Clark was the youngest-ever Canadian prime minister. His youthful inexperience showed in foreign policy missteps, and his domestic agenda—which included budget austerity and privatizing of Petro-Canada—failed to gain broad support. Perhaps his most serious mistake, however, was his attempt to increase the federal gasoline tax as a means of increasing Ottawa’s share of the windfall oil profits that had flowed from the rise in energy prices and as a means of promoting conservation of gasoline. When Clark’s budget containing the tax was voted down in December 1979, his government was defeated.

Second premiership

Liberal Party of Canada: Trudeau campaigning in Quebec in 1979Bettmann/CorbisAlthough Trudeau had contemplated stepping down as Liberal leader after his electoral defeat in May 1979, he once again became prime minister in February 1980. His continued opposition to separatism was evident when he campaigned actively in Quebec against separation in a May 1980 referendum, which the Parti Québécois government called in an attempt to secure a provincial mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association with the rest of Canada. Trudeau’s intervention helped tilt the balance against the pro-separatism forces, and sovereignty-association ultimately received the support of only two-fifths of Quebec voters.

After the referendum the Trudeau government renewed its efforts to secure constitution reform. The issue centred on the revision and patriation of the British North America Act of 1867, which could be amended only by the British Parliament on Canada’s behalf. The debate was complicated by the need to adopt an amending process acceptable to the federal government as well as to the 10 provinces. On December 2, 1981, an amending process and a bill of rights (Charter of Rights and Freedoms) were accepted by all the provinces except Quebec. Nevertheless, on March 25, 1982, the British Parliament approved the resolution, and on April 17 Queen Elizabeth II issued a proclamation making Canada fully independent and recognizing the new Constitution Act (Canada Act). The patriation of the constitution and the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a political triumph for Trudeau and the culmination of a career-long campaign to place civil rights and liberties above the reach of the federal or provincial legislatures.

Canada’s economic performance during Trudeau’s last years in power was less successful. The country suffered greatly in the worldwide recession of 1981–82, but the impact was made worse by Ottawa’s failure to control its spending and its miscalculation in anticipating that future increases in energy prices would help pay its bills. That expectation was the basis of the National Energy Program (NEP), introduced in the fall of 1980, which was designed to speed up the “Canadianization” of the energy industry and vastly increase Ottawa’s share of energy revenues. The NEP created a fierce conflict between the central government and the energy-producing provinces (particularly Alberta), chased private investment capital out of Canada, and drastically reduced exploration for oil and gas. When oil prices declined, NEP policies made the recession even deeper in Alberta.

Trudeau, Pierre ElliottTim Graham/Getty ImagesIn foreign policy, Trudeau’s approach to the Americans and the Cold War changed little after the Clark interregnum, as he maintained his professed disdain for the U.S. preoccupation with the Cold War. Nonetheless, in 1983 Trudeau’s government—over the strenuous objections of peace groups and environmentalists—granted the United States permission to test cruise missile guidance systems in the Canadian North. Perhaps to balance his decision on the cruise missiles, Trudeau later that year mounted a well-publicized global peace mission to the capitals of countries possessing nuclear weapons to press for greater international cooperation on nuclear arms control and reduction. His trip gained little, and his initiative clearly annoyed U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The administration of Brian Mulroney, 1984–93

In February 1984 Trudeau resigned and was succeeded as head of the Liberal Party and as prime minister by John Turner. In federal elections held in September, the Progressive Conservative Party won a landslide victory, and its leader, Brian Mulroney, a prominent labour lawyer from Quebec, became prime minister. Mulroney’s approach to government differed greatly from that of Trudeau. In federal-provincial relations he sought to avoid the bitterness and rancour that had marked Trudeau’s dealings with the provincial premiers. Accords were negotiated with Newfoundland and Alberta that ended the crisis over federal energy policy and dismantled the NEP. In November 1984 Mulroney’s finance minister, Michael Wilson, announced that the government would adopt a new approach to economic and fiscal matters to encourage private, including foreign, investment, to bring down the national debt, to review social programs, and to privatize crown corporations.

Two major initiatives marked the government’s first period in office: the Meech Lake Accord and the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement. The Meech Lake Accord, a constitutional agreement with all 10 provinces that was designed to bring Quebec’s approval of the Constitution Act of 1982, was concluded in the spring of 1987, but the refusal of Newfoundland and Manitoba to ratify the accord by the June 1990 deadline was a severe blow to Mulroney and created a new crisis on the issue of Quebec separatism.

Mulroney, Brian: signing of the North American Free Trade AgreementDirck Halstead—Time Life Pictures/Getty ImagesMulroney was more successful with the free trade agreement. Negotiated with the United States over a period of two years, it was signed by Mulroney and Reagan in January 1988. The agreement easily passed the U.S. Congress but was the object of bitter debate in Canada. In the federal general election of November 1988, free trade was virtually the only issue. Although his mandate was reduced, Mulroney survived with his majority intact, and on January 1, 1989, the free trade agreement went into effect. Mulroney next abolished a manufacturer’s sales tax hidden in the commercial price structure (i.e., the cost of an item) and replaced it with a highly unpopular (and visible) tax on goods and services (GST). In December 1992 Canada signed the multilateral North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Mexico.

Chrétien, JeanLarry Downing/SygmaAlso in 1992 the government tried again to bring constitutional agreement. The federal and provincial governments and Indian groups forged an accord at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, which provided enhanced autonomy for aboriginal groups and Quebec, but it was defeated in a national referendum in October. This defeat, the GST, the recession of 1990–92, and increasing restiveness among the Indian population (e.g., a Mohawk band confronted the armed forces over a land dispute at Oka, Quebec, in 1990) undermined Mulroney’s popularity. He resigned in June 1993 and was replaced by Kim Campbell, Canada’s first female prime minister. In the general election that October, the Progressive Conservatives suffered a resounding defeat, reduced to just two seats in the House of Commons. Jean Chrétien, a veteran politician who had held a number of cabinet posts in the Trudeau government, led the Liberal Party to a majority government and became prime minister. The western-based Reform Party, a conservative, populist party formed in 1987, obtained 52 seats, and the Quebec separatist Bloc Québécois, which had informal ties with the Parti Québécois, became the official opposition with 54 seats.

Canada since 1993

The new Liberal government faced several challenges, including an ongoing recession, political fragmentation along regional lines, and a resurgence of the independence movement in Quebec. In early 1995 Canada’s self-image was tarnished when the government disbanded the Canadian Airborne Regiment, which had been tainted by charges of torture and murder while serving in Somalia. Shortly thereafter Canada became involved in a dispute with Spain over Spanish commercial fishing in Canadian waters off Newfoundland. A Spanish fishing boat was seized, and tensions mounted between the two countries before an international agreement was negotiated to govern access and assure that depleted stocks would not be overfished.

In October 1995 the country came closer than ever before to political partition. Quebec held another referendum on secession, and this time the separatists were only narrowly defeated, by a margin of 50.6 to 49.4 percent. The independence movement benefited from the charismatic personality of federal representative Lucien Bouchard, who took over the leadership of the Parti Québécois and became premier of Quebec in 1996. As prosperity returned to the country, enthusiasm for independence in Quebec waned, and Bouchard became more pragmatic in his dealings with the federal government and his fellow provincial premiers. The goal remained the same, but, unless secession actually seemed likely, confrontation was to be avoided. In the meantime the federal government attempted to mollify Quebec by pursuing a policy of “distinct status” for the province but assuring, through legislation called the Clarity Bill, that any future referendum would require federal approval and involvement.

A new generation of Canadians—both inside and outside Quebec—seemed less concerned with the sovereignty issue and more interested in the opportunities that had emerged with NAFTA and its resultant prosperity. Economic growth—and the tax bounty that accompanied it—permitted provincial governments and the federal government to secure their fiscal position, though not without considerable rancour. Payments from Ottawa to the provinces were reduced as Chrétien was determined to balance the federal budget; in similar fashion, provincial governments shifted costs to municipal governments and individual citizens, who frequently found themselves without services they had come to expect or, in some cases, paying for those services with increased or new taxes and user fees. Prosperity camouflaged many problems encountered by the middle and upper classes, but working-class and unemployed Canadians found themselves without support. In some provinces, particularly Alberta and Ontario, both under the leadership of Progressive Conservatives, the cost cutting was ideological, deep, and divisive. Tax cuts in these provinces, particularly for wealthier citizens, were viewed as a panacea for Canada’s economic and social ills.

Although opposition parties enjoyed electoral success at the provincial level, they rarely won nationally. The Liberal Party, seen by many Canadians as the natural governing party, secured its position through its accommodating positions and its strength, particularly in the ridings (districts) of Ontario. Chrétien’s leadership was not dynamic, but it appeared competent and satisfactory, especially because his term was accompanied by a buoyant economy. In 1997 the Liberals were reelected. Although they won fewer than two-fifths of the vote, they captured 101 of Ontario’s 103 seats in the House of Commons and secured a governing majority. The Reform Party, which won 57 of the 74 ridings in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, supplanted the Bloc Québécois to become the official opposition party. Chrétien’s popularity began to wane in the late 1990s; by 2000, efforts to unite Canada’s conservatives bore some fruit with the creation of the Canadian Alliance, which elected as its leader Alberta’s former provincial treasurer Stockwell Day, who became the leader of the opposition in Ottawa. Nonetheless, the opposition was still split, consisting of parties as disparate as the conservative Canadian Alliance, the nationalist Bloc Québécois, and the socialist New Democratic Party, and in the 2000 election the Liberals were able to achieve a comfortable majority in the House of Commons, securing a third term for Chrétien—Canada’s first prime minister to win three successive majorities since 1945.

Martin, PaulPhoto by Dave Chan-PMOChrétien stepped down as leader in 2003 to be replaced by his former finance minister, Paul Martin. Almost immediately, a series of financial scandals broke regarding massive government largesse to certain advertising firms in Quebec, notably at the time of and following the 1995 referendum. In addition, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives joined forces as the Conservative Party of Canada, forming a more unified opposition to the Liberals. The Liberals, however, won a fourth consecutive electoral victory in 2004, though Martin was denied an overall majority.

Harper, StephenCourtesy of the Office of the Prime Minister, Government of CanadaMartin’s Liberal minority government struggled to maintain power, but it nevertheless pursued major reforms of health care policy and legalized same-sex marriage. Hanging over the government, however, was the financial scandal in Quebec. A report on it from the Gomery Commission in November 2005 confirmed that the Liberals and their supporters had received excessive payments and was critical of Chrétien, though Martin himself was personally exonerated. Later that month the Liberals lost a vote-of-confidence motion in the House of Commons, and in the subsequent election in January 2006 the Conservatives were elected to oversee a minority government; their leader, Stephen Harper, became prime minister.

Harper’s government enacted an accountability act on June 21, 2006, that established new procedures for the conduct of government business predicated on “fairness, openness, and transparency”; however, the prime minister’s boldest legislative move came in November when he introduced a motion in the House of Commons declaring that the Québécois formed a nation “within a united Canada.” In so doing, Harper not only beat to the punch separatists who were preparing to push a similar motion without the “within a united Canada” qualifier but also curried the favour of many within Quebec who previously had seen the nationalist Bloc Québécois as their only advocate. The prospect of shifting the balance of power in Quebec’s representation in the House of Commons away from the Liberals and the Bloc contributed to Harper’s attempts to force a vote of confidence that would necessitate a new federal election, but the Liberals, not ready to go to the polls, avoided confrontation with the government, even when Harper announced his intention not to adhere to Canada’s commitment to greenhouse-gas reduction targets set out under the Kyoto Protocol. In the meantime the Canadian economy continued to perform well, and the value of the Canadian dollar soared, reaching parity with the U.S. dollar in September 2007 for the first time since November 1976.

In September 2008—sensing that chances of winning a parliamentary majority were good, while at the same time fearing that this fortuitous moment might pass quickly if the economic crisis that had befallen the United States spread to Canada—Harper went against an earlier promise to hold regularly scheduled elections, dissolved Parliament, and called federal elections for October 14. Led by Stéphane Dion, the Liberals proposed a Green Shift agenda that called for a tax on carbon emissions. They looked as if they might mount a serious challenge to the Conservatives, particularly as the Canadian economy began to falter and as Harper seemed insensitive to many by suggesting that the economic downturn provided a good opportunity to buy stock cheaply. In the end, however, the Conservatives triumphed, capturing more than 37 percent of the popular vote and adding 19 seats to reach of total of 143 seats—still short of majority rule—while the Liberal Party lost 27 seats from its total representation, dropping to a total of 76 as it registered its lowest percentage of the national popular vote (26 percent) in the party’s history. In the meantime the New Democratic Party, led by Jack Layton, tallied just over 18 percent of the vote, adding 7 seats to its total for the 2006 election to reach 37 seats, and the Gilles Duceppe-led Bloc Québécois basically held steady, making up for some losses in by-elections to return to a total of 50 seats, one shy of its total in the 2006 results, as it claimed 10 percent of the popular vote.

Only weeks after their election victory, Harper and the Conservatives introduced a budget update that contained new policies, including the suspension of programs to achieve pay equity between women and men, the temporary suspension of the federal public sector’s right to strike over wage issues, and limitations on public financing for political parties. To block this program, the three principal opposition parties threatened a no-confidence vote to bring down Harper’s government and pledged to replace it with a Liberal-NDP coalition government with the support of the Bloc Québécois. To avoid a vote, Harper requested that Parliament be prorogued. When it returned to session in late January 2009, the government introduced a new budget update that included an economic stimulus package. In exchange for forthcoming quarterly budget reports that would provide opportunities for confidence votes, the Liberals agreed to support the budget.

Canada survived the global economic downturn that began in 2008 better than most of its partners in the Group of Eight (G8), partly because of the country’s closely regulated banking system. Notwithstanding Harper’s generally assured stewardship of the economy, in March 2011 a House of Commons committee found his government to be in contempt after it failed to provide MPs with requested budgetary information relating to the costs of government proposals for anticrime programs, corporate tax cuts, and plans to purchase fighter jets from the United States. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff responded by sponsoring a no-confidence vote that brought down the government, forcing a general election in early May.

Harper ran a disciplined low-key campaign, promising voters continued stability and warning them of the dangers of coalition government that might result from an opposition victory. The centrepiece of the Liberal Party platform was the “Family Pack,” a basket of social programs to be funded by reversals in the corporate tax cuts passed by the Conservatives. It was the NDP, however, benefitting from the growing personal popularity of its energetic leader Layton, that captured the attention of voters on the left. The NDP surged in the polls, and on election day the party captured its highest total of seats ever, 103, to surpass the Liberals as the official opposition. The NDP’s remarkable dominance of the vote in Quebec, where it captured 59 seats, resulted in the marginalization of the Bloc Québécois. As predicted, the Conservatives won the election, but the magnitude of their victory surprised most observers; they easily ascended to majority rule by winning 166 seats. In the meantime, the Liberals limped to the finish line with less than 20 percent of the popular vote, dropping to 34 seats in the House of Commons, a showing that brought into question the continued viability of the party that had dominated politics in Canada for most of the 20th century. In late July Turmel became the interim leader of the NDP when Layton stepped down to battle cancer. He died on August 22.

Controversy erupted early in 2012 when the nature of Canadian law regarding same-sex marriage was brought into question by Justice Department lawyers responding to a pair of divorce cases. At issue was the legality of a requirement that same-sex married couples must live in Canada for one year before seeking divorce. More controversial was the new assertion that the marriage in Canada of same-sex couples (legal since 2004) who were residents of other countries was valid only if same-sex marriage was legal in their homelands. Almost immediately Prime Minister Harper sought to distance his government from the actions of the Justice Department in these cases.

The federal government was engulfed by scandal in 2013 when it was revealed that four senators—three of them appointed by Harper—had improperly used housing and travel allowances. As criminal investigations unfolded, Harper’s chief of staff was implicated in wrongdoing after he offered to pay to settle one of the senator’s expenses, an act that violated the Senate’s Conflict of Interest Code. Although Harper claimed to have had no knowledge of the deal, journalists uncovered evidence that numerous high-ranking Conservatives had been aware of it. The Liberals, hoping to regain their standing ahead of the 2015 general election, chose Justin Trudeau, the son of former long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau, as their leader in April 2013.

In foreign policy, Harper joined other NATO allies in condemning Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea in March 2014, and Canada subsequently enacted a series of escalating economic sanctions against Russia in response to Russia’s role in the unrest in southeastern Ukraine. In October 2014 Harper received parliamentary approval to engage in military operations in the Middle East against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Against that backdrop, a pair of attacks unconnected with each other were carried out against uniformed Canadian military personnel in Canada. In the first incident, an individual struck two soldiers with a car in Quebec, killing one; the driver had been on a government watch list for suspected militant intent. Days later an honour guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa was killed by a gunman who then stormed the halls of Parliament. Harper, who was present in the Parliament Buildings at the time, was safely evacuated, and ministers barricaded themselves in rooms while police exchanged gunfire with the suspect. Police identified the two attackers, who were both killed, as having been “radicalized” in their Islamic beliefs but did not cite a motive for the attacks. In a television address, Harper vowed that “Canada will never be intimidated” by such actions, and the government sought to strengthen existing antiterrorism legislation and expand its surveillance powers in the wake of the attacks.

In the early 21st century Canada continued to struggle with the set of issues that had been at the centre of Canadian existence for centuries: French-English relations, the British governmental inheritance, a powerful and occasionally overwhelming U.S. shadow, and tendentious relations with its Indian (First Nations) population. Still, Canada in the 21st century possessed considerable wealth and prosperity, and the country, which had become a magnet for immigrants from throughout the world, had established its own distinctive cultural, economic, and political identity.