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Canadian History Exam, 20 multiple 1 paragraph answer.

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210 A History of the Canadian Peoples
cultural disruption, recovery from which would be
extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.
The Fraser River gold rush presaged a new element
in the resource economy of British North America:
exploitation of the rich mineral wealth of the north-
ern part of the continent. New technologies provided
a constantly expanding market for British North
America’s mineral wealth. They also brought new
means of extracting it from the ground. By the 1850s
copper ore was being mined along Lake Superior, and
petroleum was discovered in southwestern Ontario in
1855. Production of crude oil in Canada by 1863 ran
to 100,000 barrels a year. Unlike timbering, mineral
production tended to be extremely capital-intensive,
requiring specialized scientific knowledge. Until the
twentieth century, production involved only a few
minerals located conveniently for transportation in
bulk. Coal seams on both coasts were obvious targets.
The continent’s burgeoning industrialization would
demand ever-larger quantities of minerals, and the
future potential was indisputable.
Responsible
Government and
the Reorientation
of Politics
The British government gradually resolved the con-
stitutional problems of the commercial period in
British North America over the decade following the
unification of Upper and Lower Canada in July 1840.
Legislative union did not by itself satisfy Lord Durham’s
other major recommendation for Canada, the right of
the assembly to decide policy and its implementation
through control of “the persons by whom that policy was
to be administered” (quoted in Craig, 1963: 141). Part of
the problem was that nobody at the time understood the
importance of political parties or how they could work
in responsible government. Colonial governors served
as party brokers rather than conceding responsible gov-
ernment. Finally, in 1848 the governor of Canada, Lord
men. It is almost invariably found in conjunction with
a system of “flumes” or wooden aqueducts of various
extent, running parallel with the claims on a creek or
river. It is necessary, in separating the earth from the
gold which is mixed with it, that each sluice should be
supplied with a fall of water, and if the stream contigu-
ous to the mine run on too low a level to supply this
want, miners . . . are often compelled to go consider-
able distances in quest of water sufficiently elevated
to afford the object desired. Flumes are thus brought
into requisition, and by openings made in that side of
them opposite the mine, water is admitted to the sluice,
which is placed at such an angle that the water may
have forced enough to carry off the earth, while leaving
the gold behind.
Sluice-boxes are of various sizes, and are fitted closely
together so as to form a strongly built and extended
trough. The fall of the water in the sluice-box is adjusted
to allow sufficient time for the riffles and quicksilver to
arrest the gold as it passes, and the supply from the flume
is regulated by a slide in the opening on the side of it. The
bottom of each sluice is usually intersected with strips of
wood, and in the interstices of this grating quicksilver is
spread to intercept the fine gold in its descent, nuggets
and grains of coarse gold being caught by the grating
itself. The sluice is supported on trussels so as to raise or
lower it to the level convenient for shoveling in the earth.
Several miners introduced “dirt” on either side, and others
assist in loosening the heap and removing large stones, so
that the gold may be easily precipitated. . . .
Source: Matthew Macfie, Vancouver Island and British Columbia: Their History, Resources and Prospects (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green,
1865), 267–70.
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2116 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Elgin (1811–63), called on the leaders of the Reform par-
ties, recently successful at the polls, to form a ministry.
Louis LaFontaine (1807–64) and Robert Baldwin (1804–
58) had allied their respective parties in 1842 on a
Reform platform. In placing himself, as a representative
of the Crown, above party politics and leaving govern-
ment in the hands of leaders selected by their parties,
Lord Elgin inaugurated responsible government in the
Province of Canada.
The victory of responsible government in Canada
did not begin the story or end it, however. Nova Scotia—
where Joseph Howe had been agitating for responsible
government as a Reformer since 1836—finally achieved
it after an election on 5 August 1847, which focused
on that single issue. The Reformers were victorious,
and when a Reform administration took office in late
January 1848, the province became the first colony to
achieve responsible government. Prince Edward Island
acquired responsible government in 1851 and New
Brunswick in 1854. A British attempt at alternative con-
stitutional arrangements complicated the situation in
Newfoundland. In 1842 Britain gave the colony a legisla-
ture composed partly of elected and partly of appointed
members, thus amalgamating the old council and assem-
bly into one body. The experiment was not popular and
never had a proper chance to work. The older Consti-
tution returned in 1848. Newfoundlanders immediately
began agitating for “a form of Government . . . with a
departmental Government and Executive Respons ibility
similar in character to that form lately yielded to . . . Nova
Scotia” (quoted in Gunn, 1966: 315). The British reluc-
tantly gave in to this demand in 1855.
The lower provinces, even including Newfoundland,
were sufficiently homogeneous to be able to live with a
two-party system. Canada was not so fortunate. It could
and did create four parties, two for each section. The
Reform alliance of Baldwin and La Fontaine was largely
illusory. It quickly transpired that Canada East (the
unofficial designation for the former Lower Canada)
had slipped back into old voting patterns removed
from Reform. The principle of governing by a coalition
from each of the two sections of the united province
was inherently unstable. By the mid-1840s the French
had become enamoured of the principle of the “double
majority,” in which the province would be governed by
an assembly majority in each of its two main sections.
Such an arrangement naturally appealed to French
Canada’s growing sense of nationality. It also required
the parallel growth of political parties in the two sec-
tions. Two factors emerged to complicate matters for the
Province of Canada.
One was the rise of a new political movement in
Canada West at the end of the 1840s. A radical Reform
group known as the Clear Grits, with whom the mod-
erate Reformers gradually merged, appeared under the
leadership of George Brown (1818–80). Centred in the
western districts, the Grits were the heirs of William
Lyon Mackenzie rather than of Robert Baldwin. They
were democrats, populists, geographical expansionists,
and opponents of close connections between church
and state in a Protestant rather than a true secularist
sense. Furthermore—and ominously—they were hos-
tile to French Canada in traditional anglophone ways.
In 1840, when the population of Canada East had been
greater than that of Canada West, each section of united
Canada got 40 seats in Parliament. When the census of
1851 showed that the population of the anglophone sec-
tion was growing more rapidly, George Brown adopted
“representation by population”—“rep by pop”—as a cam-
paign slogan when he stood as an independent Reformer
in the general election of that year. He won easily. “Rep
by pop” came to epitomize the brassy reformism of the
Clear Grits.
The growing pressures of the Grits contributed
to, but did not by themselves produce, the second
development of the 1850s. This was the gradual with-
drawal of French Canada into its own agenda, centred
on the development of nationalist aspirations and the
preservation of French-Canadian culture and society.
The leaders of the Catholic Church took upon them-
selves the mantle of nationalism. They used the Grits
to separate nationalism from reform. In the context of
Canada West, the Grit espousal of “voluntaryism”—the
separation of church and state—was directed chiefly
against the Anglican Church. Such ultra-Protestantism
had even more implications for the Catholic Church.
Voluntaryism was not quite the same as secularism.
The voluntaryists sought to free the state from “reli-
gious privilege,” but could contemplate with equanim-
ity the passage of legislation controlling the availability
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212 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Probably the least well known of the principal “Fathers
of Confederation,” Samuel L. Tilley (1818–96) was born
in Gagetown, New Brunswick, the son of Loyalist par-
ents. He was locally educated at the Church of England’s
Madras school and then a grammar school before
apprenticing as a druggist in Saint John, opening a drug
store in the city in 1838. Tilley entered public life as a
consequence of his religious beliefs, which demanded
that he support various reforms, particularly the elim-
ination of alcohol from society. He became in 1847 a
leading figure in the New Brunswick branch of the
Sons of Temperance, originally an American organiz-
ation, which expanded into British America, utilizing
his earlier experience with the Saint John’s Mechanics
Institute to great effect. For Tilley, prohibition and sup-
port for the local business community went hand in
hand. He supported protection for infant industries,
railway construction, and the New Brunswick Colonial
Association (which debated a “Federal Union of the
British North American Colonies” and advocated honest
government for the province). Tilley entered provincial
politics in 1850 as a Reformer, and became provincial
secretary when Reform won a majority in 1854. In
office, he fought for financial control of the province by
the Executive Council and for prohibition, becoming so
unpopular that he was defeated in the election of 1856.
Unhappy out of politics, however, he ran successfully for
the legislature as a Reformer in 1857, returning to the
office of provincial secretary in a government headed
by Charles Fisher. As secretary, Tilley proved an indus-
trious administrator and demonstrated a real skill at
financial management. In 1861 he led a cabinet revolt
against Fisher (who had been involved in an unsavoury
land scandal), ending up as Premier.
In the early 1860s, Tilley joined Nova Scotia’s
Joseph Howe as a principal promoter of Maritime
railroads, particularly for a rail connection between
the region and the province of Canada. His efforts on
behalf of an intercolonial rail line led him inexorably to
advocacy of the political union of the British American
colonies. In August of 1864 he insisted that the colonies
should be bound together from Atlantic to Pacific, for
“that was the destiny of this country and the race which
inhabited it.” He attended both the Charlottetown
and Quebec Conferences in 1864. Not surprisingly,
he opposed Maritime Union and seconded John A.
Macdonald’s motion at Quebec for a federal union.
Although he returned from Quebec aware that there
was “a strong current running against Federation,”
he was surprised at the extent of the government’s
defeat (and his own) in the election of 1865. Tilley
led the pro-Confederation forces in the 1866 “union
Samuel L. Tilley, politician, Montreal, QC, 1864. William
Notman photo, I-13477.1. © McCord Museum.
Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley
Biography
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2136 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
of alcoholic beverages during the Sabbath (which they
held sacrosanct). While God might not be eligible to
hold land or be exempt from taxation, he could be used
to justify state intrusion in matters of morality. Such
ideas were very much at odds with the principles of
French-Canadian religious nationalists. The result was
an alliance between the latter and the Upper Canadian
opponents of the Grits.
The rise of denominational divisions as major
factors in politics was not confined to the Canadas,
although the sectional situation—Roman Catholicism
in Canada East and evangelical Protestantism in
Canada West—gave such matters a special edge in that
province. To a considerable extent, denominational
politics reflected the growing democratization of the
political process. As the interest, involvement, and size
of the electorate grew, politicians turned to issues that
appealed to the voter. Denominations also reflected
ethnic background and regional strengths. Infighting
among religious denominations constantly tussling for
advantage transferred easily into the political arena.
In Nova Scotia such struggles had occurred for years
over the creation of institutions of higher learning. No
denomination could allow another an educational edge,
and the result was the creation of a series of colleges
and universities, one for each major denomination (and
one for each ethnic branch of Catholicism in the prov-
ince). By the 1850s the venue for denominational dis-
agreements had shifted to public education. In Prince
Edward Island the question began over Bible-reading
in the schools, a practice pressed by the evangelical
Protestants and opposed by the Roman Catholics.
The “Bible Question” helped realign Island politics as
Catholics and liberal Protestants, backed by the old
Tories, joined against evangelical Protestants. By 1858
the principal issue in that year’s election was between
Protestantism and Romanism, and the result was a
Protestant party and a Catholic party. In Newfoundland
as well, the contending political parties wore denomina-
tional as well as ethnic faces, the Liberals backed by the
Irish Roman Catholics and the Tories supported by the
English Protestants.
In Canada, John A. Macdonald (1815–91), the Scots-
born lawyer from Kingston, came gradually to domin-
ate the anglophone Conservatives. Macdonald was not
a man to allow abstract principle, such as the double
majority, to stand in the way of power. In 1856 he was
able to forge a new coalition among the moderate (some
said very pragmatic) Tories he led and the Bleus of French
Canada, led after 1859 by George-Étienne Cartier.
This alliance enabled the Tories to remain in power
despite Grit victories in Canada West. It also led George
Brown’s Globe to comment in August of 1856 that “If
Upper and Lower Canada cannot be made to agree, a
federal union of all the provinces will probably be the
result.” By 1863 most of Canada’s leading politicians
had come to concur on the need for some other form
of union.
or disunion” election, backed by the British govern-
ment and the Roman Catholic Church, and in a nega-
tive sense by a Fenian raid at the mouth of the St Croix
River in April. One Nova Scotia confederate wrote him,
“All the Saints in the Calendar must have been on your
side.” He took pro-Confederation resolutions passed by
the New Brunswick legislature to England in July 1866,
and then had to wait impatiently for the Canadians to
join him. Tilley’s reward for his service was the inferior
post of Minister of Customs in the Macdonald govern-
ment. Nevertheless, Tilley operated efficiently with the
customs until 1873, when he briefly became Minister of
Finance before the government fell. He then returned
to New Brunswick as its lieutenant-governor. In 1877 he
re-entered politics, winning a seat in Saint John in 1878
and becoming Minister of Finance in the Macdonald
government, a post in which he served until 1885.
Tilley’s second term as Minister of Finance saw him
put in place the tariff structure that implemented the
“National Policy,” and he was a strong supporter of the
CPR. He was appointed again as lieutenant-governor of
New Brunswick in 1885, serving until 1893. Tilley was
never very well known outside his native province dur-
ing his lengthy public career, but his persistent advo-
cacy of political union and his financial skills made
him essential both to New Brunswick and to Canada.
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214 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Born at Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Lower Canada,
George-Étienne Cartier (1814–73) attended the College
of Montreal beginning in 1824 and started legal train-
ing in 1831. Becoming a lawyer in 1835, he had already
gravitated towards the radicals, and he was clearly a
Patriote in 1837, present at the battle of St-Denis. He then
fled to the United States until October 1838, when he
returned to Montreal and apparently was rehabilitated.
After a number of years of feverish legal activity,
he entered the legislature in 1849 and subsequently
worked increasingly for the Grand Trunk Railway, with
which his name was always associated. He did not enter
the debate on the Rebellion Losses Bill. Cartier became
associated with the moderate reformers and entered the
MacNab-Taché government as provincial secretary for
Canada East in 1855. He won an election caused when
his acceptance of office required him to seek a fresh
mandate from the voters after vociferous opposition
from the radical Rouges, and in the Taché-Macdonald
cabinet of 1856 he became Attorney General for Canada
East. When Taché withdrew from politics in 1857, he
joined with John A. Macdonald to form a government.
The two remained close political associates until his
death. He was part of the “double shuffle” of 1858, in
which a defeated government returned to office by
briefly accepting different portfolios and then resum-
ing their former ones. In the years before 1862, when he
and Macdonald were defeated on a militia bill, he was
the guiding force behind a number of legislative meas-
ures that reshaped united Canada, including municipal
reform, educational reform, and legal reform.
He returned to power in 1864 and became part
of the Grand Coalition committed to the unification
of British America. He was the chief spokesman for
French Canada in the various discussions that pro-
duced the Quebec Resolutions, maintaining that only
Confederation would do as an alternative to American
annexation and insisting on the importance of a separ-
ate province for French Canada in which religious and
linguistic rights would be preserved. He was also, of
course, a strong advocate of a transcontinental railroad.
When he entered the first cabinet of the Dominion he
refused an honour inferior to Sir John A. Macdonald’s
knight of the Order of the Bath, and subsequently
accepted a baronetcy. He served initially in both the
federal and the provincial houses of Parliament, but
was clearly Macdonald’s chief lieutenant in Quebec and
co-leader of the government.
Cartier played a central role in the negotiations that
brought the Red River Settlement into Canada, and was
Sir George-Étienne Cartier. Notman & Son, LAC, C-02162.
George-Étienne Cartier
Biography
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2156 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
The New Imperial
Relationship
The imperial government conceded responsible gov-
ernment in British North America because it had little
choice, given its unwillingness in the era of free trade
to devote unnecessary amounts of money to colonial
administration. There was a feeling in both the Colonial
Office and in the Parliament that the separation of col-
onies, particularly colonies populated with large num-
bers of British emigrants, was inevitable when those
colonies had reached a point of sufficient “maturity.”
An equally strong feeling was that the costs of imperial
administration were an unnecessary drain on the pub-
lic purse. Britain was responsible for the direction and
financing of the land and sea defences of British North
America. Under free trade and responsible government,
Britain reduced its military establishment in British
North America and attempted with mixed success to
convince the colonials to take up the burden. When
the American Civil War endangered the stability of the
continent, the imperial authorities would respond by
attempting to strengthen colonial defence through pol-
itical and constitutional revisions. The “mother country”
also had considerable authority in the West, and was in
charge of Aboriginal policy everywhere.
Victorian Society
The relationship between political unification and
social change was a complicated one. There were some
obvious connections, however. A number of major
themes dominated the society of these years. First,
there was an unmistakable sense of geographical move-
ment, as we have already discussed, mainly out of the
older and more settled rural districts. Second, the class
structure of society began to take shape and to solidify.
The chief changes were the appearance of a new busi-
ness class, the emergence of a working class associated
with urbanization and industrialization, and the rapid
professionalization of certain educated and skilled
segments of the middle class. Along with the develop-
ment of social classes went a strengthening of certain
caste lines associated with class but not identical with
it; many of these lines emphasized ethnicity. Finally, an
enormous expansion of voluntary organizations of all
sorts occurred, at least partly to maintain personal iden-
tities and a sense of belonging in a time of great mobility
and social change.
unquestionably more sympathetic to Louis Riel and
his “rebellion” than were most of the Macdonald cab-
inet members in 1870. He probably made promises to
the delegates from Red River that he could not honour,
but he was unable to gain approval for an amnesty for
Riel and his government, despite Riel’s relinquishment
of a nomination to Parliament in 1872 in his favour.
Cartier was a genial man who at the same time brooked
no opposition to his will, especially in terms of political
and religious innovation.
John A. Macdonald, c. 1883–4, oil portrait by Thomas Horsburgh,
from a photograph by William James. LAC, C-097288.
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216 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Most British North Americans uprooted them-
selves at least once, and many were constantly on the
move. Wilson Benson, an immigrant of the 1830s, tells
the story in his autobiography. Beginning in Ireland at
age 15, Benson changed his district of residence 11 times
(six times in Ireland and Scotland between 1836 and
1838 and five times in Canada West between 1838 and
1851) before finally settling on a farm in Grey County
in 1851 at age 30. He bought the farm not with his sav-
ings but with an inheritance from Ireland. Benson had
changed jobs 29 times in those years and apprenticed to
at least six different trades in the 1830s and 1840s before
finally settling down to farming. In his later years, he
also kept a store in his community. On the whole, tran-
sients like Wilson Benson were not economically suc-
cessful. In both urban Hamilton and rural Peel County,
Upper Canada, there was a remarkable correlation
between transience and poverty. Whether such people
failed because they were continually on the move, or
constantly moved in search of a better life they never
found, is debatable. So, too, is the question of whether
their failure was so deep-rooted as to be transmittable to
The Orange Order was founded as the Loyal Orange
Association in the 1790s in County Armagh in response
to the increasing disorder in Ireland. Protestants in
Ulster created local societies devoted to the memory
of William of Orange, who had intervened in Ireland
militarily in 1688 to replace James II and to guarantee
the Protestant succession in England, thus guarantee-
ing the position of the Protestant minority in Ireland.
William’s great victory at the Battle of the Boyne in
1690 was celebrated every 12 July with a parade and
commemoration, including the festooning of every-
thing imaginable in the colour orange.
In Ulster the Order existed as a hierarchy of
local lodges devoted to the maintenance of the
Protestant faith and loyalty to the Crown of England,
and included a good deal of secrecy and costumed
ritual similar to the Masons. In British America the
Order downplayed its secrecy and emphasized vari-
ous fraternal aspects, including life insurance and
support for families of members. The first lodge in
Canada was founded in Brockville, Upper Canada,
in 1830 by Ogle Gowan, and thereafter it spread
rapidly. By the later 1830s the Order had over 100
lodges, most of them in Upper Canada. Probably the
most important ingredients in its Canadian spread
were its transcendence of Irish ethnicity in favour of
a non-denominational Protestantism encompassing
immigrants from all over the British Isles, its identifi-
cation with deep-seated fears of Roman Catholicism
in many parts of British America, and its various fra-
ternal aspects.
At its height the Orange Order probably had no
more than 50,000 actual members, but its degree
of popular support in Newfoundland and New
Brunswick, as well as in Protestant Upper Canada/
Ontario, made it seem much more ubiquitous.
The Order had begun by opposing Irish Roman
Catholicism through demonstrations and violence. Its
leaders insisted that its enthusiasm was mainly a dis-
play of support for the Crown, but the Crown during
the 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales to British America
made clear that waving an orange flag did not find
any favour with the monarchy. The Order gradually
transferred its hostility from Irish to French-Canadian
Catholics and, in Manitoba especially, to the Métis led
by Louis Riel. After Confederation the Orange Order
became much more constrained in its public demon-
strations, but it always maintained a stance of hostility
to Roman Catholicism and support for British values
(especially the monarchy) in Canada.
BACkGROUNDER
The Orange Order
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2176 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
their children. In any case, the success stories in terms
of the accumulation of wealth usually involved those
who remained more or less permanently in one place.
The need for a sense of belonging in an era of change
and mobility helps explain the enormous expansion in
the number of private associations devoted to non-oc-
cupational and non-economic goals. Despite the growth
of the state, even in Canada it did not weigh heavily
on the lives of British Americans. Political allegiances
were not as important to the average person as family,
religion, and fraternal commitments. Churches con-
tinued to be important. They were increasingly dom-
inated—especially on the Protestant side—by women,
who made up the bulk of the attending congregations.
Women also supported their own religious organiz-
ations with their own money, kept separate from the
larger funds of the church, and these organizations
offered many women their first glimpse of independent
administration. British Americans also found a place
in the temperance societies, which had begun in the
1820s but really expanded in the 1840s under the Sons
of Temperance, a fraternal organization that served “no
liquor stronger than tea.” The temperance movement
crusaded against drunkenness, but it was also a way of
reacting against new immigration—mainly Irish—and
asserting a sense of Protestant hegemony.
By 1870 few British Americans—whether urban
or rural—could be found who did not belong to a good
number of voluntary societies beyond their churches. In
earlier eras, private fraternal organizations had supple-
mented or provided public services such as water, light,
fire protection, and library facilities. By 1870, many
organizations had virtually relinquished charitable and
public goals in favour of entertainment and companion-
ship for their members. Some of the new societies were
created to provide a framework for sporting activities
such as curling, lacrosse, or baseball.
Rural overpopulation produced some migrants
who would settle and tame undeveloped regions and
others who would provide a labour force for industrial-
ization. While the farming pioneers remained small-
scale commodity producers indeterminately related
to the class structure, the urbanized workforce swiftly
turned into a landless working class. At the other end
of the scale, merchants turned into bankers, financiers,
and industrialists, and became far wealthier. Over the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, the older
social structure of elites and non-elites disappeared, to
be replaced by one far more clearly stratified.
Successful businessmen were highly esteemed in
the era of economic transformation, achieving their
high status partly by self-ascription and partly by their
acknowledged economic and political power. Nowhere
was the power more evident than at the municipal level,
where businessmen formed a mutually supportive
coterie that took the lead in all aspects of life in the city,
including its development and land market. Most busi-
ness leaders in this period were self-made men, not in
the sense that they had risen from rags to riches, but in
that they had achieved their position in the commun-
ity by their own efforts. Scots were over-represented
in business ranks, where Protestantism predominated.
The new wealth was in finance and manufacturing. The
wealthier business leaders of Montreal and Toronto
began to adopt extravagant lifestyles that were in
many respects comparable to those of their American
counterparts.
As Canadian cities began the shift from commer-
cial entrepôts to industrial and financial centres, they
already contained significant inequalities in terms
of wealth and income. In Hamilton, for example, the
most affluent 10 per cent of the city held 88 per cent
of its propertied wealth, drew nearly half its income,
and controlled about 60 per cent of its wealth. On the
other hand, the poorest 40 per cent earned only about
1 per cent of the city’s total income and controlled about
6 per cent of its total wealth. A close relationship existed
between wealth and emerging class status, and between
class status and ethnicity. The last was an important
determinant of status both because ethnic groups like
the Southern Irish carried over their Old World poverty
into the New World and because the poorer immi-
grants tended to arrive later when opportunity was less
fluid. The Irish were by far the largest element of the
working-class poor in Hamilton and were the most sub-
stantial non-Francophone part of the poor in Montreal.
Nevertheless, before 1860 rich and poor in both
Hamilton and Montreal lived in close proximity to
each other. Only as cities grew larger and developed an
expanding middle class that could afford to move out of
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218 A History of the Canadian Peoples
the urban centre and a working class desperate for hous-
ing would the industrial city emerge with its clear div-
isions between rich and poor and between one economic
function and another. In the pre-industrial city the role
of women and children in the labour force was fairly
limited. Industry could and did employ both women
and children for some of the simple repetitive tasks that
supplemented the machines, however. Factory owners
found that children worked for low wages. Families
often insisted that employers take on the entire family,
so they would earn enough to live, and the income of all
members of the family—including older children—was
crucial for survival. In the last analysis, the major char-
acteristic of families on the unskilled side of industrial-
ization was their vulnerability to poverty. Not all the
working-class poor worked in factories. Opportunities
for women were strong at the lower end of the labour
force in domestic service, and increasingly as well as in
business and clerical occupations. The mid-Victorian
Age saw changes in the retail trade as well as in manu-
facturing. In 1840 retail establishments were relatively
small. By 1870 general merchandising had begun to
spawn the department store: the T. Eaton Company was
founded in Toronto in 1869.
The relatively small physical size of cities before
1865 made residential segregation relatively difficult,
and as various British ethnic communities turned into
British North Americans, they came to share loyalty to
their new homeland and to a common Empire and mon-
archy. At the same time, an increase of certain forms
of ethnic conflict was imported from the British Isles.
Ireland was a major arena for such conflict, as Protestants
and Catholics in that land became constantly more
aware of their antipathies for one another. The success
of the Orange Order was a sign of the problem. As Irish
immigration turned into a flood—especially after the
potato famine drove thousands of impoverished and
embittered Irish Catholics across the Atlantic—the Irish
groups were increasingly forced into contact with one
another. Irish ethnic differences were not simply con-
fessional or geographical. They also were class-driven.
In most places the Catholic Irish were both the latest
and the poorest arrivals, forced to take the worst lands
(often as tenants) in the countryside or the worst jobs in
the cities. The Irish were looked down upon, and often
responded with anger to their treatment. The Irish had
a long-standing tradition of parades and public events
to celebrate their major ethnic holidays, a tradition they
brought to North America. Such occasions, particularly
in New Brunswick, the Ottawa Valley, and the city of
Toronto, which had especially large Irish Catholic popu-
lations, produced continual ethnic tensions.
Between rich and poor, the middle class—although
it ranged from small urban merchants to small-town
industrialists to well-to-do rural farmers—came increas-
ingly to be anchored by members of the educated profes-
sional occupations. Professionals’ relative dependability
of income tended to set them apart. Guaranteeing that
dependability through professionalization was the chief
development within the middle classes in this period.
The numbers of qualified practitioners were increased
through formal education, and at the same time strin-
gent licensing requirements were imposed, often set
by the occupation itself. The doctors took the lead. An
attempt to legislate the creation of a College of Physicians
and Surgeons of Upper Canada failed in 1840, although
another similar attempt in Canada East in 1847 was more
successful. Perhaps significantly, doctors were one of the
first groups to organize nationally: the Canadian Medical
Association formed in the very year of Confederation.
Lawyers engaged in a similar policy, with most provin-
cial law societies formed between 1846 and 1877.
Outside the class structure entirely were women,
Aboriginal peoples, people from Asia, and blacks (or
Negroes, as they were then called). In Victorian Canada
the woman, as the bearer and nurturer of children, was
regarded as belonging in the home as wife, helpmate,
and mother. Women had few legal rights. A woman
could not expect automatically to inherit a deceased
husband’s property. In most provinces, a husband could
sue a wife for divorce on grounds of adultery, but a wife
could sue a husband only if he were adulterous and
had committed some other heinous offence. The courts
expected women to reform violent husbands rather than
to prosecute them. Mothers had a better chance to rights
of guardianship over children even if they were unwed.
Despite the domestic ideal, many women worked. The
most invisible women workers were the domestic ser-
vants. The typical domestic servant in the census of
1871 was a single woman in her twenties who lived in
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2196 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
the house and could both read and write. The most pres-
tigious occupation to which most women could aspire
was that of schoolteacher. Actively recruited into the
teaching ranks, they then remained at the lower end of
the ranges of both salary and responsibility. There was
little opportunity for entry into the professions. Emily
Howard Stowe (1831–1903) obtained a medical degree
from the New York Medical College for Women in 1867,
but she could not achieve proper accreditation until
1880. The first woman lawyer would not appear until
the next century.
Blacks and Chinese joined the Aboriginal peoples
in suffering from widespread racial prejudice and dis-
crimination in British North America. Chinese migration
before 1870 was relatively small, and confined to British
Columbia. But thousands of blacks fled the United States
for freedom north of border, often encouraged by blacks
like Harriet Tubman. After 1840 governments pressured
the Indigenous peoples of the settled provinces to become
freehold farmers. While governments recognized some
Native rights, that alone did not lead to much protec-
tion. In 1850 the Canadian Parliament passed legislation
Orange Order parade along King Street, Toronto. Parades were important public occasions in nineteenth-century British America,
and were often the occasion for violence. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, T13222.
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220 A History of the Canadian Peoples
that operationally defined who was and who was not an
“Indian” within the meaning of the Acts involved. The
process of legislating for Aboriginals rapidly escalated
after 1850. In 1857 the legislature of Canada passed the
Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in the
Canadas. It contained many provisions that ran against
the expressed wishes of the Aboriginals. Canadian policy
became devoted to removing Natives from the paths of
settlement, by coercion and compulsion if necessary.
Most of these policies—which defined “Indians,” made
them citizens when properly educated, and provided for
land grants—passed on to the Dominion of Canada from
the Province of Canada in 1867.
Few British North Americans believed that the
state would come to their assistance in times of trouble.
For some, politics and government were a source of
employment or patronage, but for the average person
the government (whether local, provincial, or federal)
existed mainly to act as an impartial and somewhat
distant umpire. Government mostly affected events
outside the citizen’s personal experience. Nevertheless,
the exodus from older settled districts with traditional
agrarian and resource-oriented economies into towns
and cities demonstrated two points. First, it showed the
extent to which the older mercantile economy was fail-
ing to support the rate of population growth. Second, it
showed the extent to which new economic development
was essential. By the 1860s politicians were extremely
conscious of out-migration, particularly to the United
States. Territorial expansion westward was one solution.
A more sophisticated economy was another. In the view
of many political leaders across British North America
both seemed to require new political arrangements.
The Creation
of Cultural
Infrastructure
The conscious cultivation of mind, creativity, and aes-
thetic taste—which is what most people have in mind
when they think of “culture”—is obviously something
that does not come easily to a pioneer society living on
the edge of a vast wilderness and spending most of its
energy on survival. Such culture requires a complex infra-
structure in order to flourish. While small parts of that
infrastructure had been in place almost from the begin-
ning of settlement in North America, the elaboration of
substantial institutional support for culture was slow to
develop. The years between 1840 and 1870 were import-
ant in terms of that elaboration, if only because they wit-
nessed such a striking growth in urban populations. Only
a few illustrative examples can be discussed here.
Until the 1830s most newspapers had been pub-
lished weekly, but biweekly editions for papers in the
larger cities began in the late 1830s. The Saint John
News introduced a penny edition in 1839, and dailies
started in the 1850s. Most early papers were four page-
sheets and had relatively small circulations, printing
no more than 1,000 copies, although readership could
be far greater. Susanna Moodie described the typical
newspaper of her day as “a strange mélange of politics,
religion, abuse, and general information,” adding that
it “contains, in a condensed form, all the news of the
Old and New World, and informs its readers of what is
passing on the great globe, from the North Pole to the
Gold Mines of Australia and California” (quoted in
Rutherford, 1982: 38). One modern content analysis of
four papers from this era corroborates this description
(Rutherford, 1982: 39). George Brown published the first
daily in 1853, printing it on a steam-powered cylinder
press, and he reached a hitherto unheard of circulation
of 28,000 by 1861. In British North America Brown was
a pioneer in the regular serialization of popular fiction,
including the works of Charles Dickens. He also aggres-
sively covered the arts, especially in the local commun-
ity. All newspapers, especially the dailies, benefited
from the introduction of telegraphy to British America
in the late 1840s.
In history everything connects. Critical to the emer-
gence of the daily newspaper and the development of a
larger and more sophisticated arts community was the
introduction of mass education. This began in the 1840s,
especially in anglophone British North America. Mass
education was a product of the introduction of publicly
supported schooling combined with the principle of
universality. The result was that increasing numbers of
people learned to read and write, and this increased the
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2216 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Petition of a Number of Colored Inhabitants of the City of Montreal
Document
Respectfully Sheweth,
That the undersigned Petitioners, loyal and dutiful
subjects of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, and
residing in the City of Montreal, Canada East, are desir-
ous of proving their attachment to the British Crown
under which they hold their rights and privileges as Free
Citizens, in common with their brethren of European
origin, humbly and respectfully solicit the Authority of
Your Excellency as the Representative of Her Majesty in
this part of Her Dominions, to allow your Petitioners to
raise and organize from themselves a Volunteer Militia
Company of Foot, in class B, to be dominated, if it should
please Your Excellency, the Colored Company of Montreal
Volunteer Rifles; to be drilled & exercised in conformity
with the regulations of the Service in all respects.
That Your Petitioners pledge themselves should
Your Excellency feel disposed to favor their views, to
cloth themselves at their own expense, in a neat and
appropriate uniform (subject to the approval of Your
Excellency), and to conform in every way to the Militia
Rules & Regulations,
That Your Petitioners venture most respectfully
to bring to Your Excellency’s notice, that in the West
India Island belonging to Her Majesty, there exist many
Companies of Militia composed entirely of the Colored
population, who have at all times been found ready to do
their duty when called on; and that the Regular Colored
Colonial Regiments in the West Indies volunteered their
Services to a man on the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny;
thus proving that the Colored race, under a free and
enlightened Government like that of Great Britain, are
second to none in loyalty, fidelity and truthfulness to
their Country and their Queen.
Your petitioners, in conclusion, would most respect-
fully entreat Your Excellency to grant them a favorable
reply to this their earnest Petition, to be allowed to par-
ticipate as Citizens, in the duties of the Militia Force of
this valuable Colony; and should your Excellency under
all the circumstances of Your Petitioners case, view the
same in a favorable light, they, as in duty bound will
ever pray—
Proposed Strength of Company
1 Captain 3 N.C. Officers
1 Lieutenant 1 Bugler
1 Ensign 59 Rank & File
[signed with 38 names]
One way of showing loyalty to Canada in the nineteenth century was by offering to organize a
militia company, as did a number of blacks in Montreal in 1860. We do not know whether the
petition was successful.
Source: Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 227–8.
To His Excellency Sir Edmund Walker Head, Governor General of British North America and Captain General
and Governor in Chief of the Provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Island of Prince Edward,
&c. &c.
The humble Petition of a number of the Colored Inhabitants of the City of Montreal, Canada East,—Montreal, 19th
February 1860.
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222 A History of the Canadian Peoples
François-Xavier Garneau (1809–66) was born in Quebec
(City) into a quite poor family, his father a man of shift-
ing occupations. He was educated at local schools until
age 12, when he entered a Lancastrian school for two
years. His family was unable to afford the Séminaire de
Québec, and Garneau instead became an assistant to the
clerk of the Court of King’s Bench before apprenticing as
a notary in 1825. Throughout his life he was conscious
of his lack of formal education. While an apprentice,
he read widely and taught himself Latin, Italian, and
English. In 1828 his employer recommended him as a
travelling companion for an Englishman who visited
the United States. Three years later, on his own initia-
tive, he visited England and France. While in London,
he accepted an appointment as Denis-Benjamin Viger’s
secretary, meeting many of the leading politicians of the
time. He returned to Lower Canada in 1833, publishing
poetry and briefly editing a newspaper. Then, in 1834,
he returned to the practice of notary and became an
ardent nationalist.
By 1837 Garneau had determined to write the his-
tory of Canada, but he was apparently not active in the
rebellions. In 1842 he was appointed as French trans-
lator to the Legislative Assembly, a post that gave him
much free time and access to a number of libraries.
Locating sources was one of the hardest problems for
a historian when Garneau began his work. The first vol-
ume of his Histoire du Canada, taking events to 1701,
appeared in August of 1845. It was heavily criticized
for being unsympathetic to religion. At about this
time he used his friendship with Edmund O’Callaghan
(a Patriote who somehow became state archivist in New
York) to consult documentary material copied from
French archives. The new documents greatly enhanced
the second volume of the Histoire, published in April
1846. Continued publication was hampered for some
years by ill health, but volume 3 of the Histoire appeared
in 1849, getting the story to 1792. Garneau disarmed
his critics in this volume by declaring the unity of reli-
gion and nationality. For several years he worked on
revision of the first three volumes (published in 1852,
with an account of the period 1792–1840 appended).
Here Garneau offered a narrative sympathetic to
the Patriotes and highly critical of the Union of the
Canadas. In 1855, Francois-Marie-Uncas Maximilien
Bibaud, the son of Michel Bibaud, who had written a
history hostile to the Patriots, wrote a piece attacking
Garneau, referring to his work as “charlatanism in hist-
ory.” This attack could not undermine his growing repu-
tation as French Canada’s leading historian. Garneau,
with the help of his son, prepared one more edition of
the Histoire. It appeared in 1859, polishing the style and
adding more documentation. A year later Andrew Bell
produced an English translation. Garneau complained
that the translation was too free and distorted his work,
François-Xavier Garneau. Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales
du Québec.
François-Xavier Garneau
Biography
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2236 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
but it remains the version by which Garneau is known
to English Canada. Self-taught and extremely conscious
of his formal educational deficiencies, Garneau saw the
history of French Canada as one of survival against
“the Anglo-Saxon race.” His work stood at the time as
a denial of Lord Durham’s sneering remarks about the
lack of culture in French Canada. He remains today, for
most French-speaking Canadians, the leading French-
Canadian author of the nineteenth century and French
Canada’s greatest historian.
The Victorian era was fond of graphic illustrations of progress. Here four schoolhouses illustrate the improvements made from the
early days of settlement to the 1860s. Such images were intended to show not just that education was available in the early settlements,
but also to show how quickly it came into line with that of established communities, evolving from one-room structures to more
significant structures. Beyond the buildings themselves, what other elements of these illustrations suggest that progression? Top: two
“First Settlers’ School-houses”; bottom left: “Country District School-house”; bottom right: “Village School-house.” From H.Y. Hind,
The Dominion of Canada: Containing a Historical Sketch of the Preliminaries and Organization of Confederation (1869).
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224 A History of the Canadian Peoples
audience and market for the arts and culture. Census
data from 1861 suggest that more than 90 per cent of
the population of Canada West could read, a tribute to
the early introduction of free schooling. The figures were
lower in Canada East, where over one-third of the popu-
lation could not read in 1861, and in the Maritimes, where
22.6 per cent could not read and 32.7 per cent could not
write. The 1871 census indicated that only just over 12 per
cent of Ontarians could not write; the figure for Quebec
was 45.8 per cent and for the Maritimes 23.3 per cent. The
data suggest that French Canada remained a much more
oral society than English Canada. Naturally, the younger
members of society were more literate than their elders,
and males in most places were more literate than females.
Raw literacy data do not tell us much about how indi-
vidual people employed their skills, but combined with
increases in the number of libraries and the availability
of books and newspapers, the figures suggest a marked
increase in the audience for cultural productions.
The Road to
Confederation
The political problems of the Canadas were the immedi-
ate stimulus for Canadian politicians to begin to
explore the possibility of a larger union with the east-
ern provinces, beginning at the famous Charlottetown
Conference of September 1864. Such a solution did
not come out of thin air, however. Politicians had dis-
cussed the political unification of the provinces of
British North America on and off since the days of the
Loyalists. Few of the early proposals were very elabor-
ate. Most gave no consideration to whether the proposed
union would result in an independent national state.
Most came from Tories concerned with enhancing the
power of the Crown or providing a basis for economic
development. By the 1850s, however, particularly in the
Canadas, some sense was emerging of “a true Canadian
feeling—a feeling of what might be termed Canadian
nationality, in contradistinction to a feeling of mere
colonial or annexation vassalage,” as the Montreal Pilot
put it on 6 April 1850. Sometimes these sentiments
were couched in high-flown rhetoric. Often economic
or cultural protectionism dominated the phraseology,
but a new Canadian nationalism was growing in power
after mid-century. It flourished partly on changing
communications technology that made it possible to
transmit fast-breaking news across the provinces in
moments. The royal tour of Prince Albert in 1860 sug-
gested that British North America was already in some
senses a political entity.
Neither the bind of the double majority nor the
beginning of national sentiment was sufficient, how-
ever, to propel British North Americans to national
unification. As so often had been the case, events in
the United States provided the catalyst. The American
federal union broke apart with surprising suddenness
in 1861. The southern states seceded into their own
Confederacy. The American Civil War began. Many
Canadians quietly rooted for the Confederacy despite
its maintenance of slavery. Britain adopted an official
policy of neutrality. The British watched warily while
public opinion in the northern states, whipped up by
American newspapers, talked openly of finding com-
pensation for the lost Confederacy by annexing British
North America.
Britain could hardly leave its North American col-
onies unprotected. Defending them at great expense
was not something the British faced with relish, how-
ever. By the 1860s the British ruling classes believed
that colonies like British North America would inevit-
ably separate from the mother country. Why not hasten
the process and save money? An independent British
North America could organize its own defences. In
1864 the military situation in the United States turned
more dangerous for British North America, as the Union
forces gained clear victories over the Confederacy. In
several respects the efforts of the Canadians to create
a larger union fitted very well with British desires for
reduced colonial responsibility and expense. The full
weight of the still considerable influence of the British
colonial system came down on the side of unification.
In Canada the difficulty of agreeing to military
mobilization was one of the many factors that led George
Brown to propose a political coalition with his ene-
mies. The understanding rested on a commitment to a
British–American federal union. This Great Coalition—a
ministry formed by a union of the Conservatives under
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2256 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
The Blackfoot Confederacy, or the Siksikaitsitapi,
lived a nomadic lifestyle bounded by the Great Sand
Hills of Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains.
Buffalo hunters, the Blackfoot were one of a num-
ber of western First Nations who came into contact
with European material culture long before they
encountered a person of European origin. As with
many Plains tribes, the most important of these was
the horse. The horse and other objects of European
origin were adapted to fit into their daily lives.
One of the best ways to see that adaptation is
in the clothing they wore. The Blackfoot made intri-
cately beaded shirts that were intended to show
their accomplishments and prowess. Used to display
identity, the shirts, originally made of hide, sinew,
and other animal materials, eventually began to
incorporate European materials such as beads and
cloth. European tools, like scissors, came to be used
in the construction of these objects, and images of
guns and other trade goods were incorporated in
the quillwork and patterns displayed on the shirts
themselves. Quillwork was incredibly difficult to
produce, and was considered a sacred, female art
among the Blackfoot. The patterns and preparation
of quills required exceptional skill. Some shirts were
also painted, with details of horses captured and
enemies defeated.
The histories of those shirts that survive are
complicated. The one pictured above, for example,
is today a part of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s ethno-
graphic collections. It was given as part of a cloth-
ing exchange to Sir George Simpson of the Hudson’s
Bay Company at Fort Edmonton in 1841. The shirts
sometimes were exchanged for “chiefs’ coats,” often
scarlet cloth coats with lace on cuffs and collars. The
exchange of garments was part of creating diplo-
matic trade and political alliances between groups.
While tensions still arise surrounding the owner-
ship and repatriation of material culture of this type,
collectors and collections like the one at Pitt Rivers
Museum are responsible for the survival of many of
these forms of First Nations heritage. Simpson’s sec-
retary, Edward Hopkins, ended up in possession of
these shirts, and after he took them back to England
in 1870 they were purchased in 1893 by the museum.
Today, these objects are being given new life, informing
groups like the Blackfoot of the skills and traditions of
their ancestors. Modern technology has allowed the
plant materials used for quill dying to be identified. They
have also allowed the Blackfoot to reclaim the history
and narratives of some of their ancestors, as the shirts
serve as a form of document into the owner’s history.
Material Culture
This hide shirt, with its quillwork rondell, was part of the formal
attire of the Blackfoot. Worn for ceremonial occasions and in
warfare, the shirt displays the honours and history of the wearer.
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1893.67.2.
Blackfoot Shirt
Continued…
Source: Laura Peers, “kaahsinnooniksi Ao’toksisawooyawa: Reconnections with the Historic Blackfoot Shirts,” Pitt Rivers
Museum, http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/index.php/about-the-shirts/index.html.
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226 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Macdonald and the Bleus under Cartier, with the Grits
led by Brown, announced in the Canadian Parliament on
22 June 1864—broke the political deadlock. The new gov-
ernment moved on a variety of fronts over the summer of
1864. Most important was to prepare the outlines of fed-
eral union for a conference of Maritime delegates called at
Charlottetown in September to discuss Maritime union.
The Maritime region contained a good deal of abstract
support for unification with Canada, tempered by two
realities: any Maritime participation in a larger union
must not work to the disadvantage of the provinces, and
many felt strongly that the Maritimes were doing pretty
well within the existing imperial structure. Historians
sympathetic to central Canada have tended to view the
Maritime defence of local interests as parochial. Such an
interpretation misses the point. One problem with the
Canadian initiative was that Canada was so much bigger
and more powerful than the other provinces that almost
any union would seem more like annexation than con-
federation. The Maritimes, moreover, were already part
of a larger political and economic system known as the
British Empire. Many Maritimers had travelled on sailing
ships to the far corners of the world, and in many ways
Maritime voters were far more cosmopolitan than the
Canadians. At the time, the case against Confederation
was quite reasonable. Unification seemed an impractic-
able visionary scheme, proposed by politicians in the
Province of Canada to meet their needs. It was not neces-
sarily in the best interests of the other colonies.
Considerable ingenuity was required in 1864 to
explain to delegates from smaller constituencies how
the Canadian proposal really worked to their benefit.
The union as finally developed was somewhat different
from the one initially proposed. The biggest difference
was in the place of the provinces. The Canadians ori-
ginally intended to create a strong central government
by consolidating all the provincial legislatures (and
their powers) into one grand Parliament. This proced-
ure of legislative union was how Great Britain had ear-
lier incorporated Scotland and Ireland. The Canadians
The Charlottetown Conference, September 1864. Charles Tupper is standing against the pillar on the left and
D’Arcy McGee against the pillar second from the left, with George-Étienne Cartier in front of him; seated next to
Cartier is John A. Macdonald. George P. Roberts, LAC, C-000733.
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2276 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
granted the need for local governments to deal with
local matters. They did not intend those local govern-
ments to be fully articulated provincial governments,
certainly not provincial governments capable of form-
ing a counterweight to the central federal one. Neither
Scotland nor Ireland (after union) had separate political
administrations based upon legislatures, although both
still had local governments. The Maritime delegates
at Charlottetown responded to visions of greatness,
fuelled by food, drink, and much convivial conversa-
tion. They agreed to the Canadian scheme. By the time
of the Quebec Conference a month later, many had
sober second thoughts.
Prince Edward Island took the lead at Quebec
against the Canadian steamroller. The smallest province
of British North America, the island had fought annex-
ation to Nova Scotia for almost a century. It found it
hard to give up its autonomy to proposals that reflected
Canadian dominance. When John A. Macdonald moved
that the three sections of British North America—Canada
West, Canada East, and the four Atlantic provinces—
each have 24 members in the Senate, he gave away the
game. In the American Senate, each state had two sen-
ators regardless of population; in the Canadian Senate,
the four smaller provinces would have only one-third
of the senators among them. Eventually the Quebec
Conference in October 1864 accepted this arrangement,
offering Newfoundland an additional four senators.
Prince Edward Island also made a big issue—without any
success—over getting one more member of the House of
Commons than its population allowed (six instead of five).
A further and telling debate came over the power of the
local governments. The majority case was that Canada’s
fundamental principle had always been that “all the pow-
ers not given to Local should be reserved to the Federal
Government” (quoted in Waite, 1962: 95). But a number of
Atlantic delegates were not happy. The subsequent debate
over the Quebec resolutions was not over the principle of
union but over its terms. While it would be convenient to
see the matter of terms as a petty haggling over details,
some of the details were fairly important.
Another Canadian principle was legislative sover-
eignty. “We the People” would not create this union, as in
the United States. Instead, an Act of the British Parliament
would create Canada. Conveniently enough, this denial
of popular sovereignty meant that Confederation did not
go before the public in the form of an election, a ratifi-
cation convention, or a referendum/plebiscite. But at the
same time, the union had been worked out totally in a
parliamentary context. The public debate on the Quebec
resolutions did not always take into account the niceties
of political theory. Critics understood the basic thrust
of the proposals well enough, however, and the debate
did affect their interpretation and ultimate implemen-
tation. While the Canadians had initially intended to
reduce the provincial governments to municipal pro-
portions, both French Canada and the Maritimes made
clear that the provinces would have to survive rela-
tively intact. The proponents of union in Canada East
emphasized that Confederation meant giving French
Canadians their own province, with—as the Courrier de
St-Hyacinthe put it in September 1864—the two levels of
government both “sovereign, each within its jurisdic-
tion as clearly defined by the constitution.” An informal
adjustment addressed this matter. On the other hand,
the opposition fulminated unsuccessfully to the end
over the refusal of the proponents of Confederation to
take the scheme to the people.
Newspapers, pamphlets, and debates held in the
legislatures of each of the provinces discussed the Quebec
resolutions. What these demonstrated most of all was the
success of the proponents of union in capturing most of
the positive ground. Critics could reduce the proposals
to rubble, but had little to put in their place. For Canada,
the absence of alternatives was particularly striking. The
debates also demonstrated that the Quebec resolutions
were, on the whole, far more acceptable to Tories than they
were to Reformers. Although the debates in the Canadian
Parliament were lengthy and long-winded, the ultimate
result was approval. The eastern provinces could stand
pat, however, and some did. Newfoundland—convinced
it would be little more than “the contemptible fag-end of
such a compact” with Canada after an election fought on
the question in 1869—remained outside Confederation
until 1949. Prince Edward Island felt insufficiently com-
pensated for “the surrender of a separate Government,
with the independent powers it now enjoys.” It would not
join until 1873.
The situation in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia
was more complex. In the former province, a coalition of
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228 A History of the Canadian Peoples
opponents to union headed by A.J. Smith (1822–83) blew
away the pro-Confederation government of Samuel
Leonard Tilley (1818–96) in an 1865 election. A year
later another election was held against the background
of threatened invasion by thousands of Irish nationalists
(the Fenians), many of them veterans of the American
Union army who had kept their arms when disbanded.
The threat was sufficient to return Tilley to office.
The new administration moved an address favouring
Confederation, not, it must be noted, as embodied in the
Quebec resolutions but “upon such terms as will secure
the just rights and interests of New Brunswick, accom-
panied with provision for the immediate construction
of the Intercolonial Railway.” When this motion carried,
opposition disappeared.
In Nova Scotia, which owned one ton of sailing ship
for each of its 350,000 inhabitants, there was much con-
certed opposition to union. Joseph Howe led the oppon-
ents of Confederation. He attacked the union’s Canadian
origins from the vantage point of someone perfectly con-
tent with the British Empire. Confederation smacked too
much of Canadian self-interest. It gave Upper Canada
In Nova Scotia Mr. Howe has organized an active and
formidable opposition to the Union of the Lower Prov-
inces with Canada and although Messrs. Archibald and
McCully who have been the leaders of that opposition
to the present government have co-operated with us
most earnestly and are sustained by the uncommitted
group of that party, yet the great body of the oppos-
ition will unite with Mr. Howe to defeat confederation
and obtain power. On the other hand the Government
have rendered themselves and many of their supporters
extremely unpopular by carrying a measure providing
for the support of education by direct taxation. Many of
the Bankers and most wealthy merchants who formerly
sustained us[,] under the impression that confederation
will injure their position[,] have transferred their support
to Mr. Howe. The financial position of Nova Scotia is in
the most flourishing condition and the opponents of
confederation excite the masses of the people by the
assertion that their taxes will be increased to sustain
the extravagance of a Canadian Government and to
defend the long line of exposed Canadian frontier while
the best interests of the Maratime [sic] Provinces will be
sacrificed by a Government in whose Legislature their
influence will be overborne by numbers. Just at the time
when the friends of confederation were endeavouring
to meet these arguments Mr. Galt proposed a Bill largely
increasing the expenditure and the people of Nova
Scotia are deeply annoyed at finding that the fisheries of
the Maratime [sic] Provinces have been sacrificed by the
adoption of the Canadian policy to issue fishing licenses
to foreigners. Able agitators thus effectively armed
with the means of inflaming the popular mind against
Canada are obtaining numerously signed petitions to the
Imperial Parliament against confederation and there can
be no doubt that an appeal to the people would result in
the reversal of the resolution to the Legislature in favor of
the Union and the defeat of the measure for many years.
Indeed so strong is the feeling against Canada on the
question of the fisheries that I have reason to fear that
any delay in consummating the Union may involve the
members of the Legislature by whose votes a majority
was obtained to sanction the Union memorialising Her
Majesty in opposition to any action being taken thereon
until it has been submitted to the people.
Charles Tupper to Lord Carnarvon, 28 July 1866
Charles Tupper, Premier of Nova Scotia, explains his province’s resistance to union with Canada.
Source: G.P.L. Browne, ed., Documents on the Confederation of British North America (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 192–3.
Contemporary Views
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2296 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
rep by pop and Lower Canada provincial autonomy, but
offered nothing to Nova Scotia. The Nova Scotia legisla-
ture never did approve the Quebec resolutions. The gov-
ernment, led by Charles Tupper (1821–1915), introduced
a motion calling for a “scheme of union” in which “the
rights and interests of Nova Scotia” would be ensured
(quoted in Pryke, 1979: 27). It passed by a vote of 31 to 19.
Unlike their counterparts in New Brunswick, the oppon-
ents of Confederation in Nova Scotia did not melt away.
They eventually went on to elect full slates of candidates
provincially and federally that promised to take Nova
Scotia out of the union in which it had become involved.
Although neither Nova Scotia nor New Brunswick
ever actually approved the Quebec resolutions—which
all but the most ardent unionists recognized would con-
sign the smaller provinces to national impotence—the
fundamentals laid down at Quebec became the basis of
the new Constitution. Small wonder that the region later
complained about the deal they had made. In November
1866 delegates from Canada, Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick met in London to work out the final details,
essentially the Quebec resolutions with more money for
the Maritimes and the Intercolonial Railway. All agreed
that the name of the new country should be that of its
principal progenitor, thus openly declaring the primacy
of Canada in the arrangement and causing confusion
ever afterwards for students of Canadian history. The
resulting legislation, the British North America Act,
passed quickly through the British Parliament in 1867.
The MPs barely looked up from the order paper as they
voted. The Queen signed the bill into law on 29 March
1867, with the date of proclamation 1 July. Governor
General Lord Monck (1819–94) called upon John A.
Macdonald, the man everyone most closely associated
with the union, to be the first Prime Minister.
On the morning of 1 July—a day of celebration and
military parades in all four provinces—the new country
was proclaimed in the recently completed Parliament
buildings in Ottawa. Macdonald received a knighthood.
The ceremonial launching of the new nation did not,
however, guarantee its success. Much work still would
be needed to make Canada an integrated nation.
The road to Confederation was a complex one, with
many paths coming together. The British cut British
North America free from their mercantile system. The
British North Americans naturally were drawn to the
continental economy, and began to build railroads and
industrialize. The Province of Canada cast covetous
glances westward, where the hold of the Hudson’s Bay
Company was weakened by the beginnings of settle-
ment. A unified Canada was not only more powerful but
also a leader in achieving responsible government and
in producing a new imperial relationship. Immigration
to British North America continued, producing much
mobility, which in turn led to a need for roots. Population
growth brought a new cultural infrastructure. By the
1860s, the Canadians were ready to take the lead in cre-
ating an expanded nation, which they did against the
judgement of many in the Atlantic region.
Although 1 July 1867 would be celebrated a cen-
tury later as the date for Canada’s 100th birthday, it
was in the larger sense only an interim point. The new
union consisted of four provinces—Ontario, Quebec,
Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick—carved from the
three that had created it. Sir John A. Macdonald’s gov-
ernment was conscious that a lot of British territory on
the continent had been excluded. The new government
was also quite obviously the old Canadian coalition,
with a few Maritime faces added. Its organization was
the former Canadian departments. It used buildings
erected in Ottawa for the old Province of Canada. If the
new administration seemed familiar, so did many of
its policies.
Adding New Territory
One of the earliest legislative actions of the new
Canadian government in December 1867 was the pas-
sage of resolutions calling for transcontinental expan-
sion. Most of the legislators regarded such expansion as
the nation’s inevitable right, a sort of Canadian version
of manifest destiny. As a result, in 1868 a ministerial
delegation went to London to arrange the Hudson’s
Bay Company’s transfer of the Northwest to Canada.
While complex negotiations continued, the Canadian
government began building a road from Fort Garry to
Lake of the Woods. This was part of a proposed road and
water system linking Red River with Canada. The road
builders established informal connections with Dr John
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230 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Christian Schultz (1840–96), the influential leader of
the local faction that had been agitating for Canadian
annexation for years. Nobody paid any attention to the
Métis who constituted the bulk of the local population
of the settlement. The Canadian delegation in London
finally worked out a deal for the transfer. The British
government received the territory from the Hudson’s
Bay Company (the Canadians put up £300,000 and
agreed to substantial land grants for the Company) and
subsequently transferred it intact to Canada.
Since the arrangements for the West were made
without bothering to inform the Red River people of
their import, it was hardly surprising that the locals
were suspicious and easily roused to protest. The Métis
were concerned on several counts. The road-building
party had been involved in a number of racist incidents.
There was transparent haste on the part of the Canadian
government to build a road and to send in men to sur-
vey land. This rush suggested that Canadian settlement
would inundate the existing population without regard
for their “rights.” Canada made clear that it intended to
treat the new territory as a colony. Furthermore, some
of the road builders bought land cheaply from the
Aboriginal peoples—land that the Métis thought was
theirs. The Métis quickly perceived the Canadians as a
threat to their way of life, perhaps even to their exist-
ence. The Canadian government received a number of
warnings in 1869 that trouble was brewing. The warn-
ings came from the Anglican archbishop of Rupert’s
Land, Robert Machray (1831–1904); from the governor
of the Hudson’s Bay Company, William Mactavish
(1815–70); and from Bishop Alexandre Taché (1823–94),
the Catholic bishop of St Boniface. Ottawa received all
such reports with little or no interest. Subsequent events
were largely a consequence of avoidable Canadian blun-
ders and insensitivities. In colonial thralldom itself
until only a few years previously, Canada had little
experience in managing imperial expansion. It handled
the project very clumsily, and the entire nation would
pay dearly for its mistakes.
In October 1869 a leader of the Métis emerged
in the person of Louis Riel (1844–85), a member of
a leading family in the community. His father, for
whom he was named, had successfully led a Métis
protest in 1849 against the Hudson’s Bay Company,
which had won the right to trade freely in furs. The
young Riel spoke out publicly against the surveys. He
then led a party that stood on the surveyors’ chains
and ordered them to stop. In the meantime, William
McDougall (1822–1905) was on his way from Canada
to assume office as lieutenant-governor of the North-
West. A newly formed National Committee of the Métis
resolved that McDougall should not be allowed to enter
the country. The Métis made it clear that they would
oppose him by force if necessary. Canada responded
to the unrest by refusing to take over the territory
until it was pacified. Riel escalated the conflict. In
early November he and a large band of armed Métis
took possession of Upper Fort Garry, the Hudson’s
Bay Company central headquarters. The Métis then
invited the anglophone inhabitants of the settlement,
most of whom were mixed bloods themselves, to
send delegates to meet and co-ordinate policy. Riel
managed to get tacit consent for the establishment of
a provisional government and approval of a “list of
rights.” On 7 December he and his men surrounded
Dr Schultz’s store, taking Schultz and 48 Canadians
to Fort Garry as prisoners. The next day Riel issued a
“Declaration of the People,” announcing a provisional
government. He declared that the people of Red River
wanted to be allowed to negotiate their own entry
into Confederation on the basis of the “rights” already
agreed to by the residents. William McDougall made a
fool of himself with an illegal proclamation of his gov-
ernment—Canada having refused to take possession of
the territory—and then returned home.
Louis Riel marshalled his forces brilliantly. A con-
vention of 40 representatives, equally divided between
the two language groups, debated and approved another
“list of rights.” The convention endorsed Riel’s provisional
government. It appointed three delegates to go to Ottawa
to negotiate with the Macdonald government. So far, so
good. But in early March, Thomas Scott, a prisoner who
was an Orangeman, got into trouble with Riel and his
guards. A Métis court martial condemned Scott to death
without offering him a chance to be heard. Riel accepted
the sentence, commenting, “We must make Canada
respect us.” The “murder” of Scott would have enormous
repercussions in Orange Ontario, which was looking
desperately for an excuse to condemn the Red River
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2316 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
This letter, dated 6 October 1869, represents the ear-
liest written statement of the Métis case for oppos-
ition to Canada. The letter was probably drafted by
Louis Riel. It claims no authority except “the people
themselves,” meeting in an assembly composed of
two representatives of each parish. The letter claims
“indisputable rights” that are unspecified.
St Boniface, 6 Oct., 1869
Dear Mr Editor,
. . . Several newspapers of Upper and Lower
Canada have freely published their views on what
inconveniences might arise in the organization . . .
[of a territorial government by Canada for Red River].
And now that the Canadian people have heard these
different discussions, would they not be glad to know
what the people of Red River themselves think of all
that? Here it is:
They do not appear to be at all ready to receive a
Canadian governor. A Council chosen and constituted
outside the country cannot hope, we think, to see its
decrees highly respected. One perhaps can judge by
the demonstrations which the Métis population of
Red River has just made. Each parish has elected two
representatives in order that they might pronounce in
its name on the proceedings of the Canadian govern-
ment with respect to the people of Red River, and the
following are the resolutions that these representa-
tives have passed in their first assembly:
1. These representatives declare in the name of the
Métis population of Red River that they are loyal
subjects of Her Majesty the Queen of England.
2. These representatives acknowledge themselves,
in the name of the Métis population of Red
River, beholden to the Honourable Hudson’s Bay
Company for the protection which they have
received under the government of that Company
whatever the nature of that government may have
been.
3. The people of Red River having till now upheld
and supported the government of the Honourable
Hudson’s Bay Company, which has been estab-
lished in the country by the Crown of England,
the said representatives declare, in the name of
the Métis population of Red River, that Snow and
Dennis have disregarded the law of nations in
coming to carry out public work here in the name
of an alien authority without paying any attention
to the authority to-day existing in the country.
4. The Honourable Hudson’s Bay Company being
about to lay down the government of Red River,
the said representatives declare, in the name of the
Métis population of Red River, that they are ready
to submit to that change. But at the same time,
being settled, working and living on the lands
which they have assisted the Company [to open
A Red River Letter
Louis Riel, a carte-de-visite portrait taken in Ottawa following
his election as member of Parliament for Provencher, Manitoba,
in 1873. Notman Studio, LAC, 1957-049, C-002048.
Continued…
Contemporary Views
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232 A History of the Canadian Peoples
up, the people] of Red River, having acquired in the
above manner [indisputable rights in that country,]
the representatives of the Métis population of Red
River loudly proclaim those rights.
5. The colony of Red River having always been
subject to the Crown of England, and having
developed in isolation, through all the hazards
of its situation, the said representatives declare
in the name of the Métis population of Red River,
that they will do everything necessary to have the
privileges accorded so liberally by the Crown of
England to every English colony respected on
their behalf.
There, Mr Editor, is what we would like to com-
municate to you. And those who take the liberty to
send these things to you will not be the last to ensure
that the rights of the people of Red River may be
respected.
—TWO MÉTIS SETTLERS OF RED RIVER
Source: Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe, 28 Oct. 1869, as translated in W.L. Morton, ed., Alexander Begg’s Red River Journal
(Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1956), 411–13. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
This photograph shows Louis Riel at the centre of his provisional government sometime in early 1870. In the top row, left to right, are
Bonnet Tromage, Pierre de Lorme, Thomas Bunn, Xavier Page, Baptiste Beauchemin, Baptiste Tournond, and Thomas Spence. In
the middle row are Pierre Poitras, John Bruce, Louis Riel, John O’Donoghue, and François Dauphenais. In the front row are Robert
O’Lone and Paul Proulx. Although Canada had not annexed Red River in December 1869 as planned, it never admitted that the
provisional government was legal. LAC, PA-12854.
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2336 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
In April of 1868, a young man named Charles Mair
headed to Ottawa to see his first book through the
press. He soon fell in with an old friend, Henry J.
Morgan, a clerk in the office of the secretary of state
and author of the 1862 book Sketches of Celebrated
Canadians. Morgan introduced Mair to three other
visitors to Ottawa: George Taylor Denison III, William
Alexander Foster, and Robert Grant Haliburton. All
five men were writers, all were bachelors, and only
Haliburton was over 30. They quickly discovered their
common interests and fell into the habit of spend-
ing the early evening listening to the parliamentary
debates in the House of Commons before returning
to Morgan’s rooms at the Revere Hotel to discuss
public affairs over smokes and drinks. During the
period between 15 April and 20 May 1868, the five
young bachelors formed a secret society later called
“Canada First.” Inspired by the assassination of D’Arcy
McGee, they agreed on the evil of provincialism and
the need to inculcate a new “national spirit.” They
also agreed on the necessity of securing for the new
Dominion the vast territory west of Ontario. Except for
Haliburton, who was from Nova Scotia, the remaining
four were Upper Canadians who were sensitive about
being colonials and who wanted increased Canadian
autonomy under an imperial umbrella.
Like many Canadians of their day, the five young
men also believed in the innate superiority of white
Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Haliburton was one of the
earliest exponents of the notion that Canadians were
the heirs of the Aryan northmen of the Old World.
He told the Montreal Literary Club in March 1869 that
the new Canadian nationality comprised “the Celtic,
the Teutonic, and the Scandinavian elements,” and
embraced “the Celt, the Norman French, the Saxon
and the Swede.” Canada Firsters looked down their
noses at Aboriginal peoples and the Métis. They
saw the French as the great “bar to progress, and
to the extension of a great Anglo-Saxon Dominion
across the Continent,” as the Toronto Globe put it on
4  March 1870. They were utterly contemptuous of
“half-breeds.”
Canada First remained only a debating soci-
ety until the spring of 1870, when it determined to
orchestrate public sentiment to the execution of
Thomas Scott by the provisional government of Red
River headed by Louis Riel. The reaction in Ontario to
Riel before Scott’s death had been fairly quiet, but by
denouncing the execution of Scott, a member of the
Orange Lodge, in editorials planted in leading news-
papers—it was “like putting a match to tinder,” George
Denison later wrote—the Canada Firsters managed to
inflame Protestant Ontario against Louis Riel and his
Métis followers.
In a huge public meeting in Toronto in April,
Canada First introduced three resolutions that were
passed easily. The first endorsed resistance of the
usurpation of power by “the murderer Riel.” The
second advocated decisive measures to suppress the
uprising, and the third declared that it would be gross
injustice to negotiate with emissaries of a govern-
ment who “have robbed, imprisoned and murdered
loyal Canadians, whose only fault was zeal for British
institutions, whose only crime was devotion to the
old flag.” As a result of the Canada First intervention,
negotiations between Ottawa and Red River had to
be conducted unofficially, the military expedition to
Red River was allowed to go forward, and the leaders
of the Red River resistance received no amnesty for
their deeds in 1869–70.
BACkGROUNDER
Canada First
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234 A History of the Canadian Peoples
uprising. The three-man delegation from Red River,
headed by Abbé Noël Ritchot (1825–1905), gained sub-
stantial concessions from the Canadian government. If
honoured, they would guarantee some protection for the
original inhabitants of Red River against the expected
later influx of settlers and land speculators. In what the
Canadians always regarded as an act of extortion at the
point of a gun, the Métis obtained the Manitoba Act
of 1870. This legislation granted provincial status to a
Manitoba roughly equivalent to the old Red River settle-
ment, with 1.4 million acres (566,580 ha) set aside for the
Métis and bilingual services guaranteed. The remainder
of the North-West became a territory of Canada. One
of its government’s principal tasks was to extinguish
Aboriginal title through the negotiation of treaties with
the Indigenous peoples. These agreements would open
the way for settlement by people of European origin.
In May 1870 the Canadian government sent a
so-called peaceful military expedition to Red River. The
troops occupied the province for Canada in late August,
forcing Riel and his associates to flee for their lives.
The Scott execution provided the Canadian govern-
ment with the excuse to deny Riel and his lieutenants
an official amnesty for all acts committed during the
“uprising.” Those who negotiated with Canada always
insisted that such an amnesty had been unofficially
promised. The result was that Louis Riel went into long-
term exile instead of becoming premier of the province
he had created. (An amnesty was granted Riel in 1875,
on the condition that he be banished from the country
for five years.) Whether the government would keep
better faith over its land guarantees to the Métis was
another matter.
After the postage-stamp province called Manitoba
was taken out, the remainder of the territory transferred
to Canada by the Hudson’s Bay Company—the North-
West Territories—was initially administered under the
original legislation passed by the Canadian Parliament
in 1869 to deal with the West. It clearly envisioned
a region held in colonial tutelage, with both govern-
ment and natural resources under the strict control
of Canada. The lieutenant-governor of Manitoba also
served as lieutenant-governor of the Territories. The tem-
porary legislation of 1869 was renewed without change
in 1871. Not until 1872 were the Territories actually
given even an appointed council. It consisted of 11 mem-
bers, only two of which resided in the region. The other
nine lived in or near Winnipeg, and initial meetings of
the council were held there. Only in 1905—long after a
second rebellion, in 1885—was provincial status finally
granted to the Territories, which became Saskatchewan
and Alberta.
While the question of Rupert’s Land dragged
slowly to its conclusion, the Canadian government was
presented with an unexpected (although not totally
unsolicited) gift. It consisted of a request from British
Columbia—to which Vancouver Island had been joined
in 1866—for admission into the new union. The initia-
tive from the Pacific colony had originated with the
Nova Scotia-born journalist Amor De Cosmos (William
Alexander Smith, 1825–97), a member of the colony’s
legislative council. As early as March 1867 he had
introduced a motion that the British North America
Act, then about to be passed by the British Parliament,
allow for the eventual admission of British Columbia.
Entry into Confederation would introduce responsible
government and resolve the colony’s serious financial
difficulties, which resulted partly from the interest
on debts incurred for road building during the gold
rushes. Union with Canada received an additional
impetus when—coterminous with the passage of the
British North America Act but quite independent of
it—the American government purchased Alaska from
the Russians. The purchase touched off demands in the
American press for the annexation of British Columbia
as well. Officially the British notified the colony in
November 1867 that no action would be taken on its
relationship with Canada until Rupert’s Land had been
duly incorporated into the new nation.
Union with Canada was debated by the British
Columbia Legislative Council in March 1870. This
debate was different from earlier ones in the eastern
legislatures, for the British North America Act was
already in place and in operation. British Columbia
could not hope to influence the shape of Confederation,
only to decide whether it would enter the union and
upon what terms. The debate was a bit curious. The
opponents of Confederation wanted the issues of popu-
lar elections (in an elected assembly) and responsible
government cleared up in advance of union, while the
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2356 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
pro-confederates—the government party—were quite
satisfied with the local status quo.
Negotiations between British Columbia and Canada
took place in the late spring of 1870. The Canadians
were generous to a fault. Of course, British Columbia
could have responsible government. Of course, the debt
would be wiped out. Of course, there would be subsidies
and grants, as well as federal support for the naval sta-
tion at Esquimalt. And, of course, British Columbia
could have a rail link with Canada, to be begun within
Confederation Complete
Document
To-day, British Columbia passed peacefully and, let us
add, gracefully into the confederated empire of British
North America. Perhaps it would be more proper to
put it thus: To-day the confederated empire of British
North America stretches to the shores of the Pacific,
“whose limpid waters” to quote the poetic language of
Mr. J. Spencer Thompson, “leave in baptismal welcome
to brow of the new-born Province which forms the last
link in the transcontinental chain—the last star in the
constellation which is destined hereafter to shine so
brightly in the northern hemisphere.” To-day the great
scheme of Confederation in British North America
may be regarded as practically complete. It is true
that two islands of the Atlantic (Prince Edward and
Newfoundland) still stand aloof. But Confederation can
get on without them much better than they can get on
without it. . . . To-day British Columbia and Canada join
hands and hearts across the Rocky Mountains, and John
Bull the younger stands with one foot on the Atlantic
and the other on the Pacific—with his back to the North
Pole and his face looking southward—how far we will
not now venture to predict. Let the larger political union
which we celebrate to-day be symbolic of a union of
parties, of purpose and of action. Let the people of this
Pacific Province accustom themselves to think of the
Dominion as a second edition of Great Britain, and let
all learn to regard each other as a band of brothers upon
whom has devolved the honor and the responsibility
of laying the foundations of empire. There is a feeling
in the minds of some that the day which celebrates the
nuptials of British Columbia and Canada at the same
time celebrates the divorce of the former from the parent
empire, and this feeling may tend to damp the enthusi-
asm of such as are the subjects of it: and we readily con-
fess that, did not ground for the idea exist, we would
sympathise with the feeling it is calculated to beget. Not
only is there no ground for the idea, but the reverse is
actually true. Instead of the union we celebrate weak-
ening those bonds which connect us with the parent
empire, it will impart additional strength and vitality
to them. It will release us from the red tape and seal-
ing wax of Downing street, it is true—but then, it will
draw us nearer to the throne. It will do more. It will draw
together all the peoples of British North America into
one common brotherhood and beget a national senti-
ment, a sentiment more truly British than would be
compatible with isolation and discontent. Let the union
we celebrate be suggestive of a drawing together, a har-
monizing and a nationalizing of all those sometime
discordant elements which have culminated in local
faction; and while joining hands with Canada in the
grand and patriotic work of building up a second British
Empire on this continent, let us join hands among our-
selves in a friendly but firm resolve to begin our new pol-
itical life a united and harmonious band for the purpose
of making British Columbia—what Nature designed her
to be—the Queen Province of the Dominion. With one
common nationality, one common interest, one object
should now actuate every heart and obliterate all those
lines created by the factions of the past.
Source: From The British Colonist (Victoria), 20 July 1871
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236 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Source: From The Patriot (Charlottetown), 3 July 1873.
Dominion Day in Charlottetown
Contemporary Views
On Tuesday, whether for weal or woe, Prince Edward
Island became a province of the Dominion of Canada.
At 12 o’clock noon, the Dominion flag was run up on
the flag staffs at Government House and the Colonial
Building, and a salute of 21 guns was fired from
St.  George’s battery and from HMS. Spartan now in
port. The Church and City bells also rang out a lively
peal, and the Volunteers under review at the City Park,
fired a feu de joie. So far as powder and metal could
do it there was for a short time a terrible din. But
among the people who thronged the streets there
was no enthusiasm. A few moments before 12, Mr.
Sheriff Watson stepped forward on the balcony of the
Colonial Building and read the Union Proclamation.
He was accompanied by two ladies and about half a
dozen gentlemen. The audience below within hear-
ing consisted of three persons, and even they did not
appear to be very attentive. After the reading of the
Proclamation was concluded, the gentlemen on the
balcony gave a cheer, but the three persons below—
who like the Tooley street tailors who claimed to be
“the people of England,” at that moment represented
the people of Prince Edward Island,—responded never
a word. Most of the shops in the city were shut, and
a good deal of bunting was displayed. HMS Spartan,
and some of the merchant shipping in the harbor,
were gaily decked with flags. At night the Colonial
and new Post Office Buildings were illuminated, and
presented a fine appearance. A few sky rockets were
also fired off from the top of the latter building about
10 o’clock, with good effect. But  the most beautiful
sight of the day was the illumination of the Spartan,
between 9 1/2 and 10 o’clock. With her ports all lit
up, and various kinds of lights in the rigging, she was
really an object worth looking at. . . .
We have already remarked that there did not
appear to be any enthusiasm among the people.
Probably no effort the Government could have put
forth would have made the celebration of Dominion
Day a grand success, but we beg leave to express the
opinion the arrangements were very lame indeed.
The public were not notified that the Sheriff was to
read the union Proclamation in front of the Building at
12  o’clock, consequently no person was there except
two or three people who happened to be passing by at
the time. Had one of the “able men” been called upon
to prepare an oration for the occasion, and due notice
thereof given there might have been a crowd on Queen
Square to listen to both it and the proclamation. . . .
The great majority of the people of the Island,
it is pretty evident, have accepted Confederation
as a necessity. They did not take up the question
con amore and when the day arrived that the union
was a fait accompli, they had not a cheer to give.
Many of our citizens look upon last night’s illumin-
ation as but the complement of the one which took
place when the Railway Bill was passed. We have a
shrewd suspicion that their view of the case is tol-
erably correct; but now since Confederation is a
fact—since the Island is now part and parcel of the
Dominion, the duty of our people is to make the
best of their position. We are now with the Sister
Provinces in regard to political institutions; let us
perform our part so that we may do more than
merely keep pace with them in the march of intelli-
gence and reform.
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2376 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Continued…
. . . [A] general election was ordered; Confederation
being the burning question, everyone rampant on
one side or the other; of course the American ele-
ment being against the Union. At this time no dis-
tinct terms had been proposed, but if I recollect
rightly De Cosmos and the colored man Gibbs and
[John Norris] had been to the “Yale Convention”; a
Convention for the purpose of an organization for
Confederation purposes. The Convention was ridi-
culed and lambasted by opponents—the colored
man [Gibbs] having a good share. By the bye I had
been a means of getting the coloured man elected
to the House of Assembly and really he was in some
measure a superior man and very gentlemanly withal.
I think he claimed being a West Indian.
I came out against Confederation distinctly,
chiefly because I thought it premature—partly from
prejudice—and because no suitable terms could be
proposed. The tariff was a sticking point: although
we had at this time a tariff but could change it to suit
ourselves. Our income too would be diminished and
there at this time appeared no means of replenishing
it by the [British] North America Act. Our population
was too small numerically. Moreover it would only be
a confederacy on paper for no means of communi-
cation with the Eastern Provinces existed, without
which no advantage could possibly ensue. Canada
was looked down upon as a poor mean slow people,
who had been very commonly designated North
American chinamen. This character they had achieved
from their necessarily thrifty condition for long years,
and indeed they compared unfavourably with the
Americans and with our American element, for at
this time and previously very many liberal-handed
and better class of Americans resided here, many in
business—some on account of the Civil War neces-
sitating their remaining even after the frightful inter-
necine killing had ceased. Our trade was either with
the U.S. or England—with Canada we had nothing
to do. Of course my being an Anti-confederationist,
led to my being dubbed an Annexationist, but really
I had no idea of annexation, but merely wished the
Colony to be let alone under HM Govt and to fight her
way unhampered. I had nothing whatever to do with
annexation petitions, and do not know who signed
them—tho I have heard that some who now hold or
have held official positions have done so. This peti-
tion doubtless went to the President of the U.S. but
no one has ever been able to see a copy of it since,
altho it is said to exist in Victoria somewhere. There is
no doubt the Americans had a contempt for Canada
and this feeling extended to the colonists.
I suppose the election was one of the fiercest
ever fought in Victoria, everyone seemed crazy, I
among the number—these were the days of great
excitements. I had the British and American elements
and Jewish element on my side and after a time
the election came on. Numberless ladies wore my
colours, red, white and blue, in shape according to
their taste, the men likewise. Ladies were at the win-
dows waving their handkerchiefs, every hack in the
place was frightfully busy. The polling went actively
on, but there were no rows, or if there were, they
were insignificant. Various committees had districts
The Reminiscences of Dr John Sebastian Helmcken
In 1892, Dr John Sebastian Helmcken (1824–1920) of British Columbia wrote in manuscript a
lengthy collection of his memories. The manuscript ended up in the Provincial Archives of British
Columbia in Victoria, and was edited for publication by Dorothy Blakey Smith, appearing in print
in 1975. Here Helmcken discusses the election of 1868, fought over the issue of Confederation.
His use of what we would regard as racist language was quite common in the nineteenth century.
Contemporary Views
Continued…
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238 A History of the Canadian Peoples
under control; they had to get the voters up and were
responsible therefore. The cry went round that both
sides had a number of voters locked up and were
feeding them with whisky, to get them into proper
trim; altho this accusation was not strictly true, still
voters came to the polling place, where the Courts
of Justice now stand, in files. Notwithstanding all this
there were no rows outside the polling places, the
matter was too serious for this. At length 4 o’clock
struck—the polls closed; everyone tired—thirsty,
hoarse and expectant. The Anti-confederates had
won handsomely. . . .
Source: Reprinted with permission of the Publisher from The Reminiscences of Doctor Sebastian Helmcken by Dorothy
Blakey Smith. © University of British Columbia Press, 1975. All rights reserved by the Publisher.
two years and completed within 15 years. The promise
was audacious, although Canada obviously needed a
transcontinental railroad to match the lines rapidly
being constructed across the United States. The terms
were far better than expected, and on 20 July 1871
British Columbia entered Confederation as the sixth
province. While in most respects the new province
remained isolated until the completion of the rail link in
1885, Confederation encouraged the development of a
new land policy for the province. The provincial govern-
ment opened its Crown lands to massive pre-emption
and free land grants; the largesse of British Columbia
would far exceed that of the federal government.
Prince Edward Island’s acceptance of terms in
1873 was almost anticlimactic. The tiny province
had tried to survive without much support from the
British, who made clear their lack of enthusiasm for a
Crown colony. The imperial refusal to pay the salary
of the lieutenant-governor was seen as a “confederate
screw unfairly put upon us.” Both the Americans and
the Canadians actively wooed the island. In the end, it
entered Confederation in the wake of a profligate policy
of railway construction, which many saw as a scheme
to force it into union. As well as offering to take over
the debt and the railway, Canada agreed to guarantee
continuous communication with the mainland and to
help buy out the last of the old landed proprietors. Only
one island MLA, the crusty farmer Cornelius Howatt,
refused to vote for the Canadian offer.
Unlike Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland was
not persuaded to join the union at all. In 1869
Newfoundland held an election fought on the issue of
Confederation with Canada. The economy improved in
the period before the election, while the opponents of
Confederation employed every argument in their rhet-
orical arsenal. These included rumours that Canada
would use Newfoundland children as wadding for their
cannons. The 1869 election went decisively against the
pro-confederates. The island’s Catholics opposed union.
In one Catholic area, a pro-confederate candidate was
greeted by priest and populace carrying pots of pitch and
bags of feathers. The Protestant vote split equally. In the
end the election returned nine confederates and 21 antis.
The confederates blamed their defeat on the nasty cam-
paign tactics of the opposition, but Newfoundland’s union
with Canada was not a matter of high priority for anyone.
Both the British and Canadian governments acquiesced
in Newfoundland’s continued autonomy—despite spor-
adic union discussions as in 1887 and 1895—until 1949.
While adding new territory, the Canadian gov-
ernment also had to pacify Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick. This was especially true of Nova Scotia,
where pledged anti-confederates took both federal
and provincial seats in the election that accompan-
ied union. The British government refused to allow
reconsideration of the initial decision to join Canada,
chiefly on the grounds that such important political
actions should not be taken at the whim of local elec-
torates. The leading anti, Joseph Howe, eventually
accepted that there was no alternative to accepting
confederation. In February 1869 Howe ran as a pro-
confederate in a federal election in Hants County,
which was hotly contested. He won with a comfortable
majority and headed off to Ottawa, joining the federal
cabinet within weeks. In some ways this grudging
acquiescence in a situation with which he did not
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2396 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
agree may have been the most important political act
of his career.
By 1873 Canada as a nation stretched from east coast
to west coast, but not from the American border to the
Arctic. Early in 1874, however, the British government
received inquiries about the ownership of the Arctic
Islands in Cumberland Gulf. Uncertain about its claim to
sovereignty, the Colonial Office decided to transfer the
land of the Arctic Islands to Canada, providing Canada
was “prepared to assume the responsibility of exercis-
ing surveillance over it as may be necessary to prevent
the occurrence of lawless acts or other abuses.” The
Hudson’s Bay Company denied that it had ever claimed
the territory, and so had not sold it to Canada in 1870.
The government of Alexander Mackenzie told Britain
in November of 1874 that it was “desirous” of assuming
Arctic responsibility, but wanted more information. The
documents relating to the transfer were finally tabled in
the Canadian House of Commons in 1878, and a joint
address to the Queen from the Canadian Senate and
House of Commons accepted the transfer, but asked for
an imperial Act of Parliament with precise details about
the boundaries. Still uncertain about title, the British
were not anxious for imperial legislation, and Canada
ultimately agreed to an Order-in-Council, which stated
that as of 1 September 1880 all British territory in the
North, except Newfoundland and its dependencies,
was “annexed to and form part of the . . . Dominion of
Canada.” The Canadian government was not told about
the British reservations over title, and would not learn
of them for another 40 years. On the other hand, during
the years after 1880 Canada did not do much to exer-
cise sovereignty over the vast region of the North it had
apparently acquired.
Quebec
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Canada in 1873.
901491_06_Ch06.indd 239 12/18/15 3:53 PM

240 A History of the Canadian Peoples
The Development of
National Policies
As well as completing the creation of a transcontinental
nation, the Macdonald government gradually impro-
vised some national policies with which to govern the
new Dominion. Confederation was encouraging to
foreign investment. From its inception, Canada was
able to import large amounts of capital to help create
its infrastructure. Between 1865 and 1869 Canada
raised $16.5 million in Great Britain, a figure that rose
to $96.4 million in 1870–4, $74.7 million in 1875–9, and
$69.8 million in 1880–4.
The government obtained some recognition of
Canadian diplomatic autonomy by its acquiescence to the
Treaty of Washington in 1871. Outstanding issues with the
Americans included the Alabama claims. The Alabama
was a Confederate raider built in Britain for the southern
states. The Americans, half-seriously, demanded the ces-
sion of British-American territory in compensation for the
losses it inflicted on northern shipping. In 1871 the British
government made Macdonald a member of an inter-
national joint commission set up in 1870 to deal with the
fisheries question. The British made clear they were will-
ing to surrender Canadian interests in the fisheries to set-
tle outstanding Anglo–American differences. Macdonald
signed the resulting treaty. On the domestic front, the
banking system of the new nation grew rapidly from 123
chartered bank branches in 1869 to 279 in 1879 and 426
by 1890. Two major pieces of national legislation were the
Dominion Notes Act of 1870 and the Bank Act of 1871.
The former allowed the government to issue circulating
notes of small denominations, only partly backed by spe-
cie. The latter exerted control over the banking system.
The Bank Act specified capital requirements for banks,
prohibited new foreign-owned banks, and supplied gen-
eral regulation. Canada accepted the international gold
standard, but the government would share the issuance
of currency (and the control of the creation of money) with
the banks until well into the twentieth century.
One of the major new developments of the Macdonald
government was a new federal system of justice for the
new nation commensurate with Confederation’s div-
ision of the administration of justice between federal
and provincial governments. It began in 1868 with the
establishment of a Department of Justice, creating the
post of Minister of Justice to administer it as well as an
Attorney General; the Minister of Justice was given the
task of reviewing provincial legislation and the attorney
general the supervision of the criminal law. Other reno-
vations to the administration of justice followed. The
creation of a national penitentiary system also began in
1868, with the enactment of a statute that envisioned a
prison system where punishment and deterrence were
meted out through discipline and rewards (Swainger,
2000). The Canadian government established the North-
West Mounted Police in 1873 to act as its quasi-military
agent in the West. It modelled the NWMP on the Irish
constabulary. Its officers, drawn from the elites of eastern
Canada, believed in a notion of public stability that asso-
ciated crime and violence with the “lower orders” and the
Aboriginal peoples. The Mounties kept ahead of settle-
ment and have always been seen as the chief instruments
of a more peaceful process of western expansion than
occurred in the neighbouring United States. Certainly, in
Canada there was less overt violence, but this was often
owing to the early exertion of state power and control.
Much capital would be invested in railways. The
opportunity for railway expansion was one of the prin-
cipal arguments for Confederation. Railways were a
prime target of foreign investors. The Macdonald gov-
ernment was slow to move on a transcontinental line,
chiefly because of the enormous expense involved in
building so far ahead of population needs. To some
extent, the offer to British Columbia cast the die. There
followed an unseemly scuffling over a charter, awarded
in 1873 by Parliament to the Canada Pacific Railway
Company of Sir Hugh Allan (1810–82). Then the Pacific
Scandal broke. Allan had provided the government
with money for its 1872 election campaign. Macdonald
was unable to steer totally clear of the corrupt dealings.
In November 1873 the government resigned. Replacing
it was a Liberal government headed by a Scottish-born
former stonemason, Alexander Mackenzie (1822–92).
He sought to build a transcontinental line more grad-
ually, using public funds. He also encouraged private
interests to hook up with American western lines.
Trains began running from Minnesota to Winnipeg
late in 1878.
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2416 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Born in London, Upper Canada, to evangelical Angli-
can parents from Northern Ireland, Edward Blake
(1833–1912) attended Upper Canada College and
the University of Toronto (BA, 1854), where he developed
a reputation for fierce intellectuality and intensely hard
work. These would combine with a moral rigidity to
disable him frequently in later life. Becoming a lawyer
specializing in equity, he became highly successful and
wealthy at an early age; he was lecturing in equity at the
University of Toronto before his thirtieth birthday. A
conscience-driven Anglican, he was soon sought after as
a politician, winning both provincial and federal seats
in the first elections after Confederation. In 1869 he
introduced into the Ontario legislature motions oppos-
ing change to the British North America Act without
consultation with the provinces, an early statement of
provincial rights.
In 1871 he became Premier of Ontario, but in 1872
was forced to decide between federal and provincial
politics when dual representation was abolished. He
chose the Dominion, and began a curious federal career
of refusing to take on positions of responsibility that
he desperately wanted, beginning with the leadership
of the Reform Party in March 1873. His problem was
continual nervous collapse, brought about by overwork
and personal anxiety—contemporaries said he suffered
from neurasthenia—exacerbated by aggravation at not
being offered positions he thought he deserved because
of concerns about his instability. Given his extreme
ego, this was a recipe for trouble. During the 1870s he
consorted with the Canada First movement and was
a firm opponent of Louis Riel, but he would tempor-
ize on Riel in 1885–6. In 1874 he made an unsuccess-
ful attempt to replace Alexander Mackenzie as Prime
Minister, following up with a notorious speech at
Aurora, Ontario, which staked out his political creed,
including expanded suffrage, imperial federation, and
Senate reform. In 1875 he became Minister of Justice,
subsequently declining the appointment as first Chief
Justice of the newly created Supreme Court. He resigned
his post in 1877 because of ill health, returning to pol-
itics in 1880 as leader of the Liberal Party. As leader he
dealt unsuccessfully with the discontent of Catholics
and French Canadians, continually threatening resig-
nation until finally stepping down in June 1887. Out of
office, he became a firm opponent of the unrestricted
reciprocity that captured many Liberals at this time. In
1892 he unexpectedly removed himself from Canadian
politics by accepting a seat in the British Parliament as
an Irish Nationalist, serving until 1907. Blake’s weak-
nesses were many, and could not be overcome by sheer
intelligence and hard work.
Edward Blake. LAC, D #20738, Ewing, C-30444.
(Dominick) Edward Blake
Biography
901491_06_Ch06.indd 241 12/18/15 3:53 PM

242 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Mackenzie’s government was also largely respon-
sible for the initial funding of western railway construc-
tion. It gave the railway companies large land grants
along the right of way. Although Canada developed a
seemingly generous homestead policy by which pioneers
could receive free land grants in return for developing the
land, the generosity was deceptive. Almost no homestead
land was available within easy access to the rail lines.
Most early settlers ended up purchasing their land, either
from the railways or from the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Mackenzie’s government had a number of posi-
tive achievements to its credit. It resolved the Louis
Riel question in 1875 by granting the Métis leader an
amnesty, conditional on his residence in exile for five
years. It established the Supreme Court of Canada
that same year, and subsequently created the office
of the Auditor General. But the real importance of the
Mackenzie government was its demonstration that the
nation could be governed without serious upheaval by
another political party with different policies from the
one led by Sir John A. Macdonald. Mackenzie was a man
without charisma, however, and many critics thought he
spent too much energy micromanaging the budget.
The probity of his government did not save
Alexander Mackenzie in 1878. Sir John A. Macdonald
returned to power. Recognizing the temper of the times,
Macdonald worked hard to restore in the public mind a
sense of identification between his party and the pro-
cess of nation-building. Decisiveness and flamboyance
were part of the image. Even before the election was
called, Macdonald had his platform. He introduced into
the House of Commons a resolution “That this House is
of the opinion that the welfare of Canada requires the
adoption of a National Policy, which, by a judicious
readjustment of the Tariff, will benefit and foster the
agricultural, the mining, the manufacturing, and other
interests of this Dominion” (quoted in Easterbrook and
Watkins, 1962: 238). The Tory leader invented neither
the policy nor the term used to describe it. Both went
well back into the history of the Province of Canada,
which had begun using a tariff as an instrument of both
protection and revenue in the late 1840s. Nor did John
A. Macdonald ever articulate the version of the National
Policy as it was later lovingly described by economic
historians and textbook writers. But he certainly rec-
ognized some relationship involving tariffs, manufac-
turing, employment, and national prosperity. He also
wanted a transcontinental railway and the accompany-
ing western settlement necessary to make it a reality. All
these features had been and remained a traditional part
of Canadian economic expansionism.
What Macdonald achieved was masterful in its
own way. He succeeded in persuading a large number of
Canadians in all provinces that policies strongly driven
by the economic self-interest of some of the people in
some of its constituent parts were in the best interest of
the nation as a whole. He then persuaded the electorate
that his party was the one that had successfully built
the nation and would continue to do so. The fact that
the opposition party took the lead in developing a dif-
ferent and less overt version of nation-building helped
in this identification.
The responsibility for immigration policy had been
divided between the Dominion and the provinces by
the British North America Act. Both the Macdonald
governments and the Mackenzie government sought
to develop federal supremacy over immigration policy,
in large measure to make possible the rapid settlement
of the West. The Dominion also began to set rules indi-
cating which immigrants would be acceptable. The fed-
eral Parliament passed its first immigration legislation
in 1869 and, in 1872, prohibited the entry of criminals
and other “vicious classes.” That same year Parliament
passed the Dominion Lands Act, which created home-
steading privileges on western lands. The Dominion
then began extensive advertising in Europe for new
settlers. While the Canadian government discouraged
the Métis from settling in concentrated blocks of land,
in the mid-1870s it negotiated with several European
groups, including the Mennonites and the Icelanders,
for group settlement in Manitoba.
The first successful arrangements for block settle-
ment were conducted by the Canadian government
with Russian Mennonites beginning in 1872 and 1873.
These Mennonites were European Quakers commit-
ted to pacifism who had originated in Prussia and
Poland in the sixteenth century. They were driven
out of their homes by threats of military conscription
in Frederick the Great’s Prussia, finding an asylum
in Russia, where Catherine II offered them generous
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2436 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
conditions of resettlement, including land, freedom of
religion, their own schools, and permanent exemption
from military service. By 1870s the Mennonites were
again threatened, this time by a rising Russian nation-
alism that resented a people set apart. The Canadian
government offered inducements similar to the earlier
Russian ones: exemption from military service, reli-
gious liberty, control of education, free homesteads of
160 acres, and the right to purchase additional land
at one dollar per acre. Canada set aside two blocks of
townships for the Mennonites in southern Manitoba.
One block of eight townships was on the east side of
the Red River southwest of Winnipeg, and another
block of twelve townships (“The West Reserve”) was
located along the international boundary west of
the Red River. The blocks of reserves signalled to the
Mennonites that they could live in their own com-
munities (and hold land in common) apart from their
neighbours; about 8,000 Mennonites settled in 1874 in
southern Manitoba.
In 1879, a federal Order-in-Council prohibited
the entrance of paupers and destitute immigrants.
Not long afterwards, the government began to admit
large numbers of Chinese immigrants (over 15,000),
approximately half of them as labourers on the trans-
continental railroad. In 1882, a public response to
Russian pogroms led to the admission of a contin-
gent of 247 Jews leaving London for Manitoba and the
North-West to establish a “New Jerusalem” in what
would become Saskatchewan. They did not receive
land until 1884, by which time their numbers had been
greatly reduced, and the settlement soon failed. By the
early 1880s demands for further restrictions on the
number of immigrants surfaced in Canada, particu-
larly of those outside previous Canadian experience
regarded as “unassimilable.” Sir John A. Macdonald
told the House of Commons in 1883 that “It will be
all very well to exclude Chinese labour, when we can
replace it with white labour, but until that is done, it
is better to have Chinese labour than no labour at all”
(quoted in Magocsi, 1999: 359). As soon as the rail-
road was completed, Macdonald gave in to pressures
from British Columbia and elsewhere to deal with
the Chinese, who were blamed for a variety of social
and economic evils. A Royal Commission on Chinese
immigration in 1885 recommended restrictions on the
number of Chinese workers, and Macdonald instituted
a head tax of $50 on every Chinese person entering the
country. His legislation also restricted the number of
Chinese people who could be carried on individual
vessels entering Canadian ports. (On 22 June 2006,
Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized
to the Chinese community for this policy, which con-
tinued until 1923.) The federal legislation was added
to numerous provincial statutes (especially in British
Columbia) to limit the rights of the Chinese in Canada.
The Quest for
Regional and
National Identity
The British North America Act had no guarantees that
political unification would necessarily create a nation.
After 1867 Canadians made various attempts to locate
themselves in their world. Some of these attempts were
political and constitutional. Others were cultural, with
intellectuals and artists playing their part by providing
rhetorical flourishes as well as creating national institu-
tions in which the arts could operate.
The development of nationhood in the years after
1867 did not mean that all Canadians shared in the
same vision (or version) of the meaning of the nation.
One of the major questions was whether Canada was an
indissoluble new creation or the product of a compact
among the provinces that they could modify or even
leave. Since the time of the debate over Confederation
in the 1860s, people had disagreed over the nature of
the union. While most Canadians in 1867 saw the
British North America Act as creating a strong cen-
tral government, provincial legislatures still existed.
They would quickly assert more than the merely local
power accorded them by the Quebec resolutions. One of
the arch-critics of Confederation, Christopher Dunkin
(1812–81), had prophesied in 1865 that “In the times to
come, when men shall begin to feel strongly on those
questions that appeal to national preferences, prejudi-
ces and passions, all talk of your new nationality will
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244 A History of the Canadian Peoples
People from Iceland had been coming to Canada from
the early 1870s, prompted by both volcanic eruptions
and grassland shortages in their homeland and a gen-
eral population excess pressing on available resources.
The first arrivals had come to Ontario and Quebec, but
were attracted west by promises from the Canadian
government of an autonomous settlement in the
west. The land they chose was on the west side of
Lake Winnipeg, about 15 miles wide and 40 miles long
stretching from present-day Selkirk to Hecla Island and
including the modern community of Gimli. This territory
was beyond the then northern boundary of the prov-
ince of Manitoba, and the newcomers were allowed
autonomous settlement, “the Republic of New Iceland,”
with its own laws and judicial system. The Canadian
government accepted a provisional council (“Thing”) set
up by the  Icelanders, and allowed them to produce a
fully articulated system of self-government. This entity
became part of Manitoba when the boundaries  of the
province were expanded in 1881, but self-govern-
ment remained until 1887. Although the territory the
Icelanders chose was good for fishing on Lake Winnipeg,
it contained some of the poorest agricultural land in the
region. The Icelanders were struck by epidemic disease
and spring flooding, and in the later 1870s a religious
dispute emerged as well. Many moved to the United
States or to Winnipeg. Most who remained made a living
by fishing. Icelanders were generally well-educated and
committed to preservation of their language. Schools
and newspapers were established in New Iceland within
months of settlement, and the community over the next
half-century would produce a number of poets, journal-
ists, and writers who employed the Icelandic language
before the area was absorbed gradually into Manitoba.
BACkGROUNDER
The Republic of New Iceland
Many Icelanders who settled in Manitoba hoped to make a living through agriculture, but due to flooding and
disease, as well as settlement on marginal land for farming, most were unsuccessful. Archives of Manitoba, New
Iceland 312 (N11314).
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2456 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
sound but strangely. Some older nationality will then
be found to hold the first place in most people’s hearts”
(quoted in Waite, 1963: 511). Even Sir John A. Macdonald
had admitted in Parliament in 1868 that “a conflict may,
ere long, arise between the Dominion and the States
Rights people” (quoted in Cook, 1969a: 10).
Ontario initially spearheaded the provincial-rights
interpretation of the new union. The seeds of this
interpretation were inherent in the constitutional
arrangements, and the movement could have begun
anywhere. As early as 1869 Ontario became distressed
at “the assumption by the Parliament of Canada of the
power to disturb the financial relations established
by the British North America Act (1867), as between
Canada and the several provinces” (quoted in Cook,
1969a: 11). Not surprisingly, the old Reform Party of
Canada West, in the persons of George Brown, Edward
Blake (1833–1912), and Oliver Mowat (1820–1903),
took the lead. They demanded—in Blake’s phrase of
1871—“that each government [Dominion and provin-
cial] shall be absolutely independent of the other in
its management of its own affairs” (quoted in Cook,
1969a: 13). The Rouges of Quebec soon joined in the
same call, adding the identification of French-Canadian
“national” rights to Ontario’s “provincial” ones. Before
long, Liberals in most provinces—many of whom had
either opposed Confederation or been lukewarm about
it—had embraced provincial rights.
Provincial rights often seemed interchangeable
with Ottawa-bashing for local political advantage,
lacking in any other principle than the desire to pres-
sure Ottawa into fiscal concessions. In its early years,
Quebec did not dominate the movement. There was
little insistence that Confederation was a cultural deal
between two distinct societies. In 1884, for example,
the Honourable Honoré Mercier (1840–94) tabled reso-
lutions in the Quebec legislature stating merely that
“the frequent encroachments of the Federal Parliament
upon the prerogatives of the Provinces are a permanent
menace to the latter” (quoted in Cook, 1969a: 31). The
ensuing debate involved no more cultural nationalism
than one backbencher’s assertion that “le Québec n’est
pas une province comme les autres” (quoted in Cook,
1969a: 33). Although the Riel affair of 1885 (discussed
later in this chapter) pushed Quebec towards the brink
of arguments of cultural distinctiveness, when Mercier
(by this time Premier of Quebec) invited the provinces
to the Interprovincial Conference in 1887 to re-examine
the federal compact, broad agreement could be reached
on demands for better terms and constitutional change
by the five provinces attending without the need for
such concepts.
Provincial rights involved on one level a political-
constitutional struggle over revenue and power. On
another level they were a reflection of the continued iden-
tification of the people of Canada with their province of
residence as much as, if not more than, with their nation.
The educational structure of Canada certainly encour-
aged this identification. In all provinces education passed
from private to public financial support at the same time
that schooling became increasingly universal. However,
section 92 of the British North America Act left educa-
tion completely in the hands of the provinces. It is almost
impossible to talk about any integrated national move-
ments. Indeed, education would become one of the most
divisive issues in the new nation. A major question was
whether provinces would have a single public school sys-
tem for all students or would support separate religious
(and linguistic) education as well. Educational divers-
ity was still the norm after Confederation. There were,
at best, provincial educational systems and norms, not
national ones.
Although a sense of nationalism was beginning to
develop, it did not pose a serious challenge to provincial
loyalties. The movement calling itself Canada First, for
example, did not have a program that was particularly
attractive outside Protestant circles in Ontario. Canada
First was an exclusive secret society rather than a
broad-based organization. It did not help that its vision
of Canada was really that of Canada West writ larger.
While Canada First’s notions were compatible, to some
extent, with the westward thrust of Canada West, they
were, fortunately, not totally typical of the conscious
development of Canadian nationalism. The French-
Canadian poet Octave Crémazie (1827–79), for example,
lamented ironically that Canada’s major literary lan-
guages were entirely of European origin. He continued:
“if we spoke Huron or Iroquois, the works of our writ-
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246 A History of the Canadian Peoples
ers would attract the attention of the old world. . . . One
would be overwhelmed by a novel or a poem translated
from the Iroquois, while one does not take the trouble to
read a book written in French by a native of Quebec or
Montreal” (quoted in Rasporich, 1969: 225). The search
for an essential “Canadian-ness” went on in many cor-
ners of the new Dominion. It was nowhere so success-
ful as in the somewhat remote New Brunswick town of
Fredericton, home of the University of New Brunswick.
There the rectory of St Anne’s Parish (Anglican) pro-
duced Charles G.D. Roberts (1860–1943), while not
far down the road lived his cousin Bliss Carman
(1861–1929). Along with Ottawa’s Archibald Lampman
(1861–99) and Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947),
these men comprised the first school of Canadian poets,
designated “Confederation Poets” by modern literary
critics. Roberts, Lampman, Carman, and Scott brought
Canadian themes into their writing, notably the local
or regional landscape, with some degree of skill and
sensitivity. As Crémazie had suggested, however, the
European origins of their literary influences limited
their efforts.
While many intellectuals and artists sought ways
to articulate Canadian-ness in their work, others took a
more prosaic route towards the realization of a Canadian
national identity. Curiously enough, it was the paint-
ers, not normally known for their political acuity, who
took the lead in organizing national groups to main-
tain professional standards and publicize Canadian
achievement. The Ontario Society of Artists, formed in
1872 and incorporated in 1877, was at the forefront of
this effort. The OSA was instrumental in the formation
of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880—in
collaboration with the Governor General, Lord Lorne
(1845–1914)—and in the establishment that same year
of the National Gallery of Canada. One of the founders
of this organization wrote, “We are bound to try to civil-
ize the Dominion a little” (quoted in Williamson, 1970:
64). The year 1880 was doubly important in art circles,
for in that year the Canadian Society of Graphic Art was
also founded.
The first president of the Royal Canadian Academy,
the painter Lucius O’Brien (1832–99), was art director
of an elaborate literary and artistic celebration of the
young nation. Picturesque Canada (1882) was based on
the highly successful books Picturesque America and
Picturesque Europe. It was the idea of two Americans,
the Belden brothers, who had established themselves
in Toronto. The editor of the project—George Monro
Grant (1835–1902), principal of Queen’s University—
stated in the preface: “I believed that a work that would
represent its characteristic scenery and history and
life of its people would not only make us better known
to ourselves and to strangers, but would also stimu-
late national sentiment and contribute to the rightful
development of the nation.” The two large volumes of
Picturesque Canada—which can sometimes be found
in second-hand bookshops—contain 540 illustrations.
They included wood engravings based on paintings
and, for the West, photo engravings of photographs that
offered serene vistas fulfilling the promise of the title.
The descriptive texts by Grant, Charles G.D. Roberts,
and others presented an idealized, complacent view of
the cities, towns, and regions of Canada, praising the
present and pointing to a glorious future.
The Royal Society of Canada was founded in
1882 to promote research and learning in the arts
and sciences. Lord Lorne again provided much of the
impetus, replicating a British institution to establish
the importance of cultural accomplishments in creating
a sense of national pride and self-confidence. The first
president, J.W. Dawson (1820–99), principal of McGill
University (another Nova Scotian transported to cen-
tral Canada), emphasized in his presidential address a
sense of national purpose. Dawson stressed especially
“the establishment of a bond of union between the scat-
tered workers now widely separated in different parts
of the Dominion” (quoted in Royal Society of Canada,
1932: 91–2). Thomas Sterry Hunt (1826–92), a charter
member and later president, observed that “The occa-
sion which brings us together is one which should mark
a new departure in the intellectual history of Canada”
(Royal Society of Canada, 1932: 91–2). He added that
“the brightest glories and the most enduring honours
of a country are those which come from its thinkers
and its scholars” (Royal Society of Canada, 1932: 91–2).
However romantic that praise might sound, what mat-
tered was Hunt’s emphasis on the country as a whole.
Like the Royal Canadian Academy, the Royal Society
had its headquarters in Ottawa.
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2476 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Religion and the
Churches
The mid-Victorian period was a crucial era for Roman
Catholicism in Canada. Within French Canada the per-
iod witnessed the emergence of the Church as the lead-
ing voice of French Canada’s national aspirations and
the assumption of local leadership by the curé. It also
saw the Church take on the ultramontane character
that would remain with it for many years. In Quebec,
the man who symbolized the ultramontane Church in
the mid-Victorian period was Bishop Ignace Bourget
(1799–1885). Bourget was consecrated coadjutor to the
Bishop of Montreal in early 1837, on the very eve of
rebellion, and succeeded to the see in 1840. He died
in June 1885, on the eve of the second Riel uprising,
although he had retired a few years earlier. Bourget was
always an active defender of both the papacy and the
position of the Church in Canada. He introduced the
Roman liturgy and fervently opposed the principles of
the European revolutions of 1848. Gradually, he became
the leading opponent of liberal thinking in the prov-
ince, particularly as it was represented by the Institut
Canadien in Montreal. Bourget carried on a lengthy bat-
tle against the Institut and especially its library, which
contained many prohibited books. Equally important
was his expansion of the ecclesiastical administrations
of his diocese, so that nearly every parish had a priest
and nearly half the priests had an assistant. The clergy
were now able to mobilize public opinion, and they did
in 1868 when they helped raise 507 Zouaves in Quebec
(and over $100,000 to support them) to serve in the papal
army. Quebec bishops strongly supported the doctrine
of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870.
English-speaking Catholicism had succeeded by
1840 in separating itself from francophone control. At
about the same time, the hierarchy had also re-established
its control over the laity, which had previously assumed con-
siderable autonomy in the absence of local bishops and
clergy. Anglophone bishops from the Maritime region were
among those who attempted unsuccessfully to prevent the
issue of papal infallibility from being decided at the Vatican
Council. Contemporaries often overlooked the importance
of Anglophone Catholicism in the nineteenth century.
Only in Canada West/Ontario were Protestants in such a
clear numerical ascendency and position of power that the
regional culture assumed obvious Protestant dimensions.
This Ontario culture, especially as it expanded westward
onto the prairies, began to be confused with Canadian cul-
ture in some circles.
By 1840 Protestantism everywhere in British North
America had largely cut itself free from its foreign origins
in either Great Britain or the United States. The major
development of the mid-Victorian period, notably in an
Ontario where Protestantism emerged as a distinct and
all-embracing culture, was the construction of a broad
alliance among the major denominations: Anglican,
Presbyterian, and Methodist. The gradual elimination
of the major points of public friction between the estab-
lished churches and the dissenters made this possible.
The result was a Victorian Protestant culture in Ontario
that emphasized the relationship between social stabil-
ity and Protestant morality. A firm belief in God and
his millennium formed the basis for the latter. Gradual
social change was progressive, offering a way of under-
standing the events and changes that swirled around
the individual in the Victorian era. The moral code was
strict, but chiefly voluntary and individualistic.
The churches, especially the Protestant ones, were
also a key to the growth of a vast network of clubs, soci-
eties, and charities. By the mid-nineteenth century
women members were implicitly challenging the male
governance of the churches. Evangelically oriented
churches frequently employed their ladies auxiliary
groups to sponsor missionary activity. By 1885 there were
120 Baptist Women’s Missionary Aid Societies scattered
across the Maritimes. Women generally used their own
money to support their religious organizations, which
kept separate accounts and offered many women their
first opportunity at independent administration.
Cultural Life
The creation of the nation did not directly affect all
aspects of cultural life. Indeed, most culture in Canada
existed quite apart from political considerations. Despite
their new self-consciousness about the need for cultural
achievements to match their political accomplishments,
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248 A History of the Canadian Peoples
most Canadians probably did not appreciate how much
progress was being made in many cultural spheres.
Only a brief sampling of cultural activity in Victorian
Canada—focusing on painting, theatre, music, organ-
ized sports, and literature—can be included here.
Painting was the most vibrant and productive of the
arts in the era immediately after Confederation, with
many artists producing large numbers of canvases, some
of them key works in the history of Canadian painting.
The beginning of the period coincided roughly with the
end of a tradition of landscape painting that had become
dominant partly in response to the developing quest for
national identity and the topographical beauties of the
new country that were still being discovered. Lucius
O’Brien (1832–99) and John A. Fraser (1838–98) were
two of numerous painters who travelled west in 1880 at
the invitation of the Canadian Pacific Railway to paint
the Rockies. O’Brien’s most famous painting, however, is
Sunrise on the Saguenay (1880). It is a remarkable depic-
tion of the sublime in nature, while in its poetic, moody
treatment of the romantic scene it is also an outstand-
ing Canadian example of a style, popular in the United
States, that came to be called “luminism.” This paint-
ing was hung in the inaugural exhibition of the Royal
Academy, of which O’Brien was the first president, and
deposited in the new National Gallery of Canada.
Homer Watson (1855–1936) and his friend Horatio
Walker (1858–1936) both came to concentrate on
Canadian landscapes that romanticized rural scenes.
Oscar Wilde, after seeing Watson’s work in Toronto,
called him “the Canadian Constable.” In fairness to
Watson, he was no imitator, since at the time he had never
heard of Constable. Walker, who was born in Listowel,
Canada West, wintered in New York and summered on
the Île d’Orléans just north of Quebec in the St Lawrence.
He specialized, with great commercial success, in strik-
ing, sentimentalized interpretations of Quebec farm life
in the style of the French painter Jean-François Millet.
Walker himself described his preoccupations:
The pastoral life of the people of our country-
side, the noble work of the Habitant, the mag-
nificent panoramas which surround him, the
different aspects of our seasons, the calm of
our mornings and the serenity of our even-
ings, the movement of ebb and flow of our tides
which I have observed on the shores of my
island which is truly the sacred temple of the
muses and a gift of the gods to men: such are
the preferred subjects of my paintings. I have
passed the greatest part of my life in trying to
paint the poetry, the easy joys, the hard daily
work of rural life, the sylvan beauty in which is
spent the peaceable life of the habitant, the ges-
ture of the wood cutter and the ploughman, the
bright colours of sunrise and sunset, the song
of the cock, the daily tasks of the farmyard,
all the activity which goes on from morning
to evening, in the neighbourhood of the barn.
(Quoted in Harper, 1966: 204)
By 1880 young Canadian painters sought to study
in the academies of Paris, the centre of the art world
of the time. There they learned to paint large, richly
detailed, subtly coloured, naturalistic canvases fea-
turing the human figure and sentimental subtexts.
Robert Harris’s studies of everyday life were exem-
plars of this approach. They included: The Chorister
(1880), showing a young man singing in a church choir;
Harmony (1886), a portrait of a young woman (his wife)
playing the harmonium, a popular musical instrument
in rural Canada; and A Meeting of the School Trustees
(1885), in which a young Prince Edward Island teacher,
identified as Kate Henderson, doubtless with “new-
fangled ideas,” faces the suspicious gazes of four male
trustees.
Perhaps the most important development in Canadian
theatre in this period was the extension of railroad con-
struction, which would make possible extensive touring
across the nation by theatrical and vaudeville companies.
By the 1880s, most Canadian cities could look forward
to visits by professional performers, which undoubtedly
raised the standard of presentation and provided models
worthy of emulation. At the same time, the arrival of pro-
fessionals and the raising of standards could be damag-
ing to local amateurs, who had previously dominated the
theatrical scene and occasionally even produced home-
grown plays and musicals.
Although only a few trained musicians existed in
British North America, the mid-Victorian era saw the
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2496 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
development of a widespread musical life. Garrison
bands and choral groups were the chief components.
In British Columbia the band of the Royal Engineers
brought new standards of musical performance when it
arrived in the colony in 1859. From that year until 1863
(when it was reposted to Britain) it entertained as militia
band, fire-brigade band, brass band, and even a dance
band. In British Columbia, as elsewhere, brass bands
were the most common and popular instrumental
ensembles throughout the nineteenth century. Few band
musicians were professional or professionally trained. A
number of brass bands were organized in the province
in Aboriginal communities and residential schools. At
least 33 sprang to life between 1864 (when the Oblates
founded the St Mary’s Mission Band near Mission City)
and the end of the century. In Red River, a brass band
from St Boniface played as the Métis provisional gov-
ernment raised its new flag in December 1869.
By the time of Confederation, larger cities were
producing substantial numbers of musical societies,
chiefly choral in their orientation. In 1864, for example,
the Mendelssohn Choir and the Société Musicale des
Montagnards Canadiens, as well as Les Orphéonistes
de Montréal, joined the Montreal Oratorio Society.
Montreal also helped produce the first well-known
Canadian composer, Calixa Lavallée (1842–91), best
known today for the music to “O Canada.” He made his
debut at the piano in Montreal at age 13, spending much
Luminism was a North American style that focused on detail and emphasized the striking vistas of the continent. The vastness of
the natural landscape compared to the human element of the boats, especially when compared to the growing industrial cities of
Europe, made Canada seem wild and vast. “Sunrise on the Saguenay,” oil on canvas, 1880, by Lucius O’Brien. National Gallery
of Canada, Ottawa. Photo © National Gallery of Canada, 113.
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250 A History of the Canadian Peoples
time in the United States until he went to Paris in 1873.
Returning to settle in Quebec, Lavallée wrote a grand
cantata for the reception of Governor General Lord Lorne
and his wife. It concluded with a stirring contrapuntal
arrangement of “God Save the Queen” and “Comin’ thro’
the Rye.” Unable to make a living in Canada, the com-
poser spent the last years of his life in exile in the United
States. Although Canada was not often generous to its
professional musicians, it embraced amateur musical
performance with gusto. Most music-making occurred
in the home, with people gathering around the piano to
sing hymns and popular songs of the day.
The mid-Victorian period in Canada saw a continued
development of organized sports and games. Most were
imported, although some (like lacrosse) had local ori-
gins. Lacrosse had begun as an Aboriginal game called
baggataway or tewaarathon, and was played by many
tribes under various rules. In 1833 the First Nations
near Montreal played lacrosse, and in 1856 the Montreal
Lacrosse Club was organized, to be joined by two others
before 1860. A Montreal dentist, William George Beers
(1843–1900), codified the game in Montreal and pro-
moted it across the country. Lacrosse flourished between
1868 and 1885, achieving great success as a spectator
“A Meeting of the School Trustees,” oil on canvas, 1885, by Robert Harris. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Here the artist
captures the dynamic of many a school district in Canada in this period. Purchased 1886, #6. Photo © National Gallery of
Canada, 6 R.
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2516 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
sport until it was overtaken by baseball and hockey.
Snowshoeing, which became very popular as an organ-
ized winter activity in the 1860s (often among the sum-
mer lacrosse crowd), was another obviously Aboriginal
development. The Montreal Snow Shoe Club was organ-
ized in 1843, and in Winnipeg a snowshoe club, begun in
1878, was the major winter diversion for members of the
city’s elite by the early 1880s.
The formulation of rules for these and other sports
occurred in most cases between 1840 and 1880, which
was the great era of codification of sports. Precise dates
are very contentious, with many communities advan-
cing their own claims for “firsts.” Certainly by 1880
most sports and games familiar to us today had reached
a stage of rule development that would have made them
comprehensible to a modern Canadian. What is import-
ant about the development of sports is not simply the
introduction of standardized rules, techniques, and
equipment, but the sheer scope and ubiquity of sporting
activity on the part of both participants and spectators.
While many Canadians participated, many more gath-
ered to watch sporting activity. The development of any
of the major games followed roughly the same path of
regularization, which made it possible for teams from
one place to play teams from another.
By 1885 two aspects of sports in Canada had evolved:
participation and spectacle. Sports still had not achieved
an overt political meaning. There was not yet the creation
of either national leagues or national teams to play in
international competitions. Expansion, sophistication,
and growing organization matched the development of
the nation. The mobility of the population moved vari-
ous sports and games around the country and made the
standardization of rules both possible and necessary.
The development of official rules and growing hierarch-
ies of teams and players pointed to the future.
The Struggle for
the West
Sincere efforts were made in the new Dominion to
encourage a sense of nationhood transcending the lin-
guistic barriers between French and English and the
geographical barriers of the provinces and the regions.
Nevertheless, the new Canadian nationality remained
fragile, more than a bit artificial, and very racist. In
addition, at least outside French Canada, it tended to
express the prejudices and values of British Ontario.
The crucible for the new Canada, many believed, was
in the vast expanse of territory west of the Great Lakes.
Here its limitations were most clearly evident.
The interests of the Canadian government in
the North-West Territories, especially under Sir John
A. Macdonald, were focused on agricultural settle-
ment. This would provide both an outlet for excess
eastern population and the means of encouraging the
development of a truly transcontinental nation. The
process of settlement and government policy pushed
the Aboriginal inhabitants of the region out of the way
as quickly as possible. The federal government con-
tinued the pre-Confederation policy of the Canadas
by establishing an Indian Department and insisting
on the rule of law in its westward expansion and in
its dealings with the Native peoples. Foremost in the
rule-of-law approach were the creation of the North-
West Mounted Police and the working out of treaties
with the First Nations that extinguished Aboriginal
claims to the land as first inhabitants in exchange for
reserves on the most marginal and least attractive land.
Eleven “numbered” treaties were negotiated between
1871 and 1930, the first five of which were land ces-
sion agreements covering most of the Canadian West,
except for British Columbia. As well as reserves, the
Aboriginals received cash money, allowances for blan-
kets and tools, seed and livestock, and the right to hunt
on land not otherwise used by Canadians. The govern-
ment’s hope was to convert the First Peoples into set-
tled farmers, and its rhetoric featured an insistence on
its humanitarianism and paternalism, under which a
good deal of racism and prejudice flourished. As one
Indian Commissioner wrote in 1887, the government
was engaged in “the slow and tedious work of uplifting
a savage race and eradicating the nomadic and other
inherent tendencies which centuries of a wild and
barbarous life have firmly planted” (quoted in Titley,
2009: 207). While the Aboriginal people might eventu-
ally aspire (with Canadian government assistance) to
full citizenship by assuming all the characteristics of
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252 A History of the Canadian Peoples
the European colonizers, in the meantime they would
be denied full citizenship and given a special inferior
status experienced by no other Canadians.
Administration of the treaties and of Dominion
“Indian policy” in the West left a good deal to be desired.
The Aboriginal peoples were obviously caught in an
inexorable process that was going to change forever
their traditional way of life. The buffalo were rapidly dis-
appearing, the victims of overhunting and of the arrival
of settlement and new technology. Most Aboriginal
leaders saw the handwriting on the wall clearly enough.
They did not get anywhere near enough help from the
Department of Indian Affairs, however. The government
expected the Aboriginals to be able to become self-suffi-
cient virtually overnight. It did not supply the reserves
with enough food to prevent starvation and disease, and
it complained when the Natives slaughtered their live-
stock for something to eat. The reserve land tended to
be marginal, the assistance supplied was inadequate—
often for financial reasons—and the attitude of many
of the government’s Indian agents was unsympathetic.
By the early 1880s, the North-West was a virtual pow-
der keg of Aboriginal discontent. Cree leaders in what is
now Alberta sent a letter to John A. Macdonald (who was
Minister of the Interior and head of Indian Affairs as
well as Prime Minister) complaining of destitution and
noting that the motto of their people was: “If we must
die by violence let us do it quickly.” The winter of 1883–4
was particularly harsh and severe, and many were
starving. Some Indian agents wrote to Ottawa, but noth-
ing was done. In June 1884, Big Bear and his followers,
with many others, travelled to Poundmaker’s reserve to
hold a big meeting. They discussed the serious state of
affairs, after which some 2,000 Aboriginals held a Thirst
Dance, a religious ritual.
Like the First Nations, settlement drove the Métis to
the margins. By 1885 Ontario-born settlers outnumbered
the Métis five to one in Manitoba, and only 7 per cent of
Caughnawaga (Kahnawake) Mohawks, lacrosse champions of Canada, 1869; photo by James Inglis. This photograph makes clear
that Aboriginals were skilled and successful lacrosse players. James Inglis, LAC, C-001959.
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2536 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
the population of the province was of mixed-blood origin.
Many Métis drifted farther west, to the Saskatchewan
Valley, where they formed small mission settlements
including Qu’Appelle, Batoche, and Duck Lake. The buf-
falo were becoming scarce everywhere. Government sur-
veyors caused uncertainty and fear, as they had in Red
River a decade earlier. Over the harsh winter of 1883–4,
many Métis and Aboriginals starved. The Métis turned in
despair to Louis Riel. He had apparently put his life back
together after years of exile in the United States and hos-
pitalization for mental disturbance in 1876–8 at Longue
Pointe, Quebec. He became an American citizen and was
teaching in St Peter’s, Montana (where he had married),
when a delegation from the Saskatchewan country vis-
ited him on 4 June 1884. They told him of the grievances
that were burdening the peoples of the region, explained
that agitation was developing against the Canadian gov-
ernment, and pleaded with him to return to Canada to
lead them. Why Riel agreed to do so is one of the many
mysteries surrounding his life. However, within a month
he and his family were in Batoche. By December 1884,
Riel and W.H. Jackson (secretary of the Settlers’ Union)
had finished drafting a long petition (with 25 sections),
which they sent to Ottawa. It concluded by request-
ing that the petitioners “be allowed as in [1870] to send
Delegates to Ottawa with their Bill of rights; whereby an
understanding may be arrived at as to their entry into
confederation, with the constitution of a free province.”
Ottawa acknowledged the petition, but gave no other
response.
In March 1885 events took a menacing turn. Riel’s
military leader, Gabriel Dumont (1836–1906), inter-
cepted a small NWMP detachment near Duck Lake. The
engagement turned into a full-fledged battle in which
Nahani
Slave
Chipewyan Chipewyan
Beaver
Cree
Cree
Cree
Cree
Assiniboine
Cree
Cree
OjibwaOjibwa
Ojibwa
Sekani
Sarcee
Blackfoot
Blood
Stoney
Piegan
11
1921
1
1871
2
1871
3
1873
4
1874
5a
1875
5b
1908
6a
1876
6b
1876
8
1899
9
1905
10
1906
7
1877
N
S
E W
0 500
kilometres
1,000
The numbered treaties, 1871–1921. Adapted from J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian–White
Relations in Canada, rev. edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 166.
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254 A History of the Canadian Peoples
fatalities occurred on both sides. Riel called upon the
First Nations to assist him, and there were incidents of
Aboriginal violence connected less to Riel’s resistance
than to younger warriors’ discontent with conditions.
Poundmaker’s people broke into buildings in Battleford,
terrifying settlers. The Cree warrior, Wandering Spirit
(Kapapamahchakwew, c. 1845–85), one of Big Bear’s war
chiefs, led a band that attacked Frog Lake, killing nine.
Prime Minister Macdonald determined to crush this
rebellion quickly, sending an armed force under Major
General Frederick Dobson Middleton (1825–98) by way
of the new Canadian Pacific Railway. The Canadian
force of 800 men arrived at Batoche on 9 May. They
quickly defeated Riel and about 200 Métis. The upris-
ing was over by 12 May. Dumont and others fled to the
United States. The government arrested Riel. In order
to achieve this result, the Canadian government had
mustered “5,546 soldiers in three columns, 586 horses,
2 Gatling Guns, 6,000 Snider Enfield, 50 calibre rifles,
2 field hospitals, 70,000 Gatling Gun rounds, 1,500,000
rifle cartridges and 2,000 cannon shells,” at a cost of
$4,451,584.38 (Barnholden, 2009: 13).
A formal charge of high treason, carrying the death
penalty, was laid against Riel on 6 July. (Despite the fact
that Riel was an American citizen, the Canadian gov-
ernment held with the British government that he was
also a British subject, since British citizenship acquired
through birth could never be renounced.) Even if Riel
was a foreign national, however, he could still be tried
for treason. The government chose to focus responsibil-
ity for the rebellion on Riel, which would allow leniency
towards most of his followers. The trial began on 28 July
in Regina, where feelings ran high. It was a political
trial, infamously coloured in many ways by Macdonald’s
determination to have Riel found guilty and executed.
Riel passionately denied a plea of insanity intro-
duced by his lawyers, realizing that to be declared
insane (i.e., not responsible for his actions) would dev-
astate his reputation and impugn his honour. The six-
man jury (operating under the law of the North-West
Territories) found him guilty but recommended mercy.
It is not clear whether the jury brought in the mercy rec-
ommendation because it felt Riel’s resistance was par-
tially justified or because it did not really believe that he
was responsible for his behaviour. In any case, because
the charge was high treason, a guilty verdict brought a
mandatory death sentence. The Canadian government
could have heeded the jury’s recommendations, but
refused to do so. Ottawa dismissed two appeals, and
Riel was hanged at Regina on 16 November.
If Riel was treated without sympathy by the
Canadian government, the punishments meted out to
the First Nations, who were regarded as having joined
Riel’s resistance rather than acting on their own initia-
tive, proved to be equally severe. The Macdonald gov-
ernment used the occasion of the rebellion and the
violence committed by the leaders of the First Nations
to crush the Aboriginal protests against the failure to
observe the negotiated treaties. Eight warriors, includ-
ing Wandering Spirit, were executed in late November
of 1885, and before the courts were finished more than
50 others had been sentenced to imprisonment. Among
the leaders, Poundmaker stood trial for treason and
was sentenced to three years in prison. Released after a
year, he died four months later. Big Bear received a sim-
ilar sentence, but was released after a year and a half
because of poor health and died soon after. The trials
were most improper, conducted without full translation
against people who understood little English and less of
the law being employed. Few were properly represented
in court. Most First Nations leaders and people tried
to remain clear of the Métis uprising, but this did not
save them from a subsequent campaign of repression
by Assistant Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed, who
argued that the rebellion had abrogated the treaties and
who introduced a series of policies that made the First
Nations totally dependent on the largesse of Canada.
The execution of Louis Riel had a lasting impact on
Canada. In Quebec it strengthened French-Canadian
nationalism and helped turn voters away from the
Conservative Party, which they had supported since
Confederation. On 22 November 1885, at a huge gather-
ing in the public square in Montreal called the Champ
de Mars, Honoré Mercier, the Liberal leader in Quebec,
joined Wilfrid Laurier in denouncing the government
action. Mercier insisted: “In killing Riel, Sir John has not
only struck at the heart of our race but especially at the
cause of justice and humanity which . . . demanded mercy
for the prisoner of Regina, our poor friend of the North-
West.” Laurier added: “Had I been born on the banks of
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2556 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
The fact that little is known of Big Bear’s lineage—
his parents were probably Salteaux but he became a
leader among the Cree—tells us much about the fluid-
ity among First Peoples on the Canadian Plains in the
nineteenth century. Big Bear (c. 1825–88) was appar-
ently brought up in a “homeguard” family near Fort
Carlton in present-day central Saskatchewan, later
moving as a chief to reside near Fort Pitt. Around 1870
he moved south to the Plains, and reportedly partici-
pated in the last major Aboriginal battle in the region
at Belly River (near present-day Lethbridge, Alberta) in
October of that year. He was one of the few chiefs who
rejected friendly overtures from the Canadian govern-
ment in the 1870s, suspecting that the next step would
be peace treaties in which the First Nations would
surrender land and end up on reserves. Regarded as
a troublemaker, he did not attend the negotiations for
Treaty Six in August 1876, and was the first important
chief to refuse to sign a treaty. Increasing numbers of
dissident warriors joined him over the next few years
as the number of buffalo coming north decreased,
and then, after 1879, disappeared from the region.
Still resistant, Big Bear and his people moved to
Montana and hunted the remaining buffalo until late
in 1882, when Big Bear capitulated and signed Treaty
Six in return for food. For the next several years, he
argued with Indian Department officials before host-
ing a Thirst Dance, a ritual explicitly forbidden by
the Canadian government, at Poundmaker’s reserve
in April 1884. Several thousand First Nations war-
riors gathered, many later confronting the RCMP and
nearly provoking an open battle. Big Bear made clear
in August of 1884 that he wanted the signed treaties
revised and renegotiated by one chief speaking for all
the tribes. That same month he met with Louis Riel.
But the government paid little attention.
When news of a Métis victory at Duck Lake reached
the First Nations camped at Frog Lake, Big Bear’s son,
Ayimasis (Little Bad Man), and the war leader Wandering
Spirit emptied the Catholic church and despite Big Bear’s
shouts of “Stop! Stop!” killed most of the worshippers and
priests present. The subsequent trial (for treason-felony)
was told that Big Bear had said afterwards, “it is not my
doings and the young men won’t listen, and I am very
sorry for what has been done.” Others testified that
the warriors paid no attention to Big Bear. The judge
instructed the jury of six that the old chief could be called
innocent only if he had removed himself from the band
when it rose up in violence. The jury took 15 minutes to
bring in a sentence of guilty, with a recommendation for
mercy. Big Bear was sentenced to three years in the Stony
Mountain prison near Winnipeg, dying shortly after his
release in 1887, probably of tuberculosis. He was one
of the last of the traditional chiefs to oppose European
civilization, but despite his conviction and jail sentence,
he had not done so with guns.
Big Bear (Mistahimaskwa)
Biography
the Saskatchewan . . . I would myself have shouldered a
musket to fight against the neglect of governments and
the shameless greed of speculators.” The two leaders dis-
agreed over Mercier’s proposal that French Canadians
leave the two major parties and form one of their own.
Laurier insisted that Mercier’s proposal would destroy
Confederation. Symbolically, French Canada took the
execution of Riel to represent the final exclusion of the
francophone from the West. Few spoke of the symbolic
meaning for the Aboriginal peoples of the shearing of
Big Bear’s long hair when he was in captivity, or of the
execution of Wandering Spirit.
The military defeat of the Métis, the humiliation
of the First Nations, and the public execution of Louis
Riel in November 1885 were only part of the reason why
that year and that month were so significant, not only
901491_06_Ch06.indd 255 12/18/15 3:54 PM

256 A History of the Canadian Peoples
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901491_06_Ch06.indd 256 12/18/15 3:54 PM

2576 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
in the history of the West but in the history of Canada.
In November 1885 workers drove the last spike at
Craigellachie in eastern British Columbia, marking the
completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The CPR
had been resurrected in 1881 as a hybrid corporation
controlled by private capitalists and financed largely
by the state, which, along with public subsidies, gave
it about 25 million acres (10,117,500 ha) of land along
its right of way. Contemporaries actively debated the
question of building in advance of settlement, particu-
larly given the inducements needed to persuade hard-
headed businessmen to proceed with construction.
The Macdonald government defended the railway on
the grounds of national interest. Since this concept is
not measurable in dollar amounts, it is impossible to
know whether the price was too high. Even before the
line was completed, Macdonald used it to send troops
west to help suppress the Métis uprising of 1885.
I have reason to be thankful to see His Excellency and
since this [treaty] medal was put on my neck from the
Great Mother I am thankful—& all my tribe—to see the
Great Mother’s representative here that I will speak
for her as I speak for my children. I am a poor man
and now will express my views on this subject, but
as I look round I do not see anything I could live by. I
see nothing, all that I used to live on has gone. Where
I used to get my [living] was the animal the buffalo,
and also I had horses, now the buffalo and the horses
have left me. I say with that I am a poor man.
You may have seen the poverty of the land as
regards the animal—that was my hunting ground. I
used to find them all I wanted. Now it is a solitary wil-
derness. I find nothing there, when I look at all this I
see but one thing left, that is to work the ground. I am
too old to work but I think of my children & grandchil-
dren they may learn.
The first thing [we want] is some strength, i.e.,
farm implements & cattle—these are necessary. If we
don’t progress faster than in the past years, we shall
move very shortly and my Grandchildren will not see
it for we walk very slowly now. Why I say this is that
the crops we have raised the half was spoilt as sick-
ness came on us and my people could not work. I
remember right on the treaty it was said that if any
famine or trouble came the Government would see
to us and help. My trouble arose from partly star-
vation and sickness. The remedy I ask for now. We
want nets, we want guns. I ask for these only for liv-
ing. There is another thing we lack. When I take a flail
to thrash I lose part of my wheat. I want a thrash-
ing machine. A thrasher and a reaper and the power
to work them. There is no end to my losses. I loose
[lose] in the thrashing. I have miles sometimes to go
through the snow to have my grain ground, and I am
only about to bring back a handful. I make no doubt
that his Excellency will sympathize with us, that he
will open his heart towards the trouble of his Indian
Children. What we want is speedy help on my farms. I
have no more to say. I wish to be remembered to the
Great Mother & to the Princess and please remember
me in the cold winter days & give me covering for my
women and children.
“All That I Used to Live on Has Gone”
At a meeting with the visiting Governor General of Canada, the Marquess of Lorne, at Fort Carlton
in 1881, Chief Ahtahkakoop of the Plains Cree addressed Lord Lorne.
Source: “Report of the Marquis of Lorne’s Trip,” quoted in Deanna Christensen, Ahtahkakoop: The Epic Account of a Plains Cree Head Chief, His People, and Their
Struggle for Survival 1816–1896 (Shell Lake, Sask.: Ahtahkakoop Publishing, 2000), 422–3.
Contemporary Views
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258 A History of the Canadian Peoples
With rumours of armed trouble rife across western
Canada, a contingent of militia from Winnipeg was
mustered and ordered west before the encounter
at Duck Lake near Prince Albert, where a column of
Mounties and special constables were badly beaten
by a force of Métis commanded by Gabriel Dumont.
After Duck Lake, Major General Frederick Middleton,
arriving in Winnipeg via American rail lines, left the city
with the 90th Rifles, 260 strong and badly equipped.
The railroad got the troops only as far as Qu’Appelle,
whence they marched north to Fort Qu’Appelle to
practise firing rifles before heading further north
to Batoche, a village on the east bank of the South
Saskatchewan River, where Middleton had decided to
confront the Métis.
The troops made about 25 miles a day under
adverse conditions. It was over 200 miles from the
end of the railway line to the Métis strongholds,
and so the CPR played very little active role in the
campaign. By 24 April they had made Fish Creek
and found signs of smouldering Métis campfires in
a ravine between bluffs. The troops suffered heavy
casualties from a crossfire from Métis sharpshoot-
ers, who disappeared into the bush of a ravine and
withdrew as their ammunition ran out. Middleton
camped on the site of this first battle for 12 days,
waiting for reinforcements from eastern Canada and
a detachment manning a Gatling gun.
The village of Batoche was a scattered settlement
of houses and outbuildings on both sides of the river,
connected by a ferry operated on a cable. On 5 May
the paddlewheel steamer the Northcote arrived on
the river and was ambushed by the sharpshooters,
then damaged severely when its smokestacks hit the
ferry cable. Middleton had 800 men, most of them in-
fantry but including about 100 horsemen. He also had
four field guns and the Gatling gun. Gabriel Dumont
later estimated he had 200 effectives (Métis), and per-
haps 200 Aboriginal warriors to fight with him. Louis
Riel and Dumont disagreed over tactics. Riel prayed
for divine assistance, while Dumont dug into rifle pits
across a two-mile front.
The initial encounters impressed General Middle-
ton, but he was afraid to fall back because he doubted
his inexperienced troops could sustain their discipline
in retreat. The Canadians held their ground, con-
structing a little fort of wagons in the midst of the
prairie. Middleton wanted a decisive victory and was
prepared, if necessary, to starve out Batoche. He or-
dered his troops to fire away, but did not yet order an
assault. Finally Middleton ordered a battle plan for 12
May. He would attack the village from two sides, using
mounted troops from the north and the infantry from
the south. The men on horseback were to be the feint,
the infantry assault the major attack. The feint went
well, but the infantry attack did not occur, apparent-
ly because the order to advance had not reached
Colonel van Straubenzie, the officer in charge.
In the meantime Middleton had met emis-
saries from Riel, asking him to stop shelling the
BACkGROUNDER
The Battle of Batoche
The construction of the CPR was a spectacular feat
of engineering, partly thanks to the managerial skills of
William Van Horne (1843–1915). The CPR was built chiefly
on the backs of 6,500 Chinese coolie labourers especially
imported for the job. Many died, and those who survived
were summarily discharged when the work was com-
pleted. With the CPR finished, the Canadian government
moved swiftly to limit Chinese immigration. With the
Plains peoples and their Métis allies totally subjugated,
Canada was open for settlement from coast to coast.
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2596 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Conclusion
By the 1860s the united province of Canada was ready
to take the lead in creating an expanded nation. The
two Maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Nova
Scotia were reluctantly joined to the new union (with
Prince Edward Island soon following suit), and United
Canada itself became the two provinces of Ontario
and Quebec. Now Canada began casting covetous
glances westward, and over the next few years pro-
duced a transcontinental nation. The West was to be
Saskatchewan River
‘A’ Company
90th
Gun Batteries
10th
‘C’ Company
90th
‘D’ Company 90th
Camp
Boulton ’ s Scouts
Intelligence
C
orps
‘E’
‘F’
Indian Camp
V illage of B A TOCHE
Metis Fi r e Position
Me
tis
Fi r
e P
osi
tio
n
Me
tis
Fi r
e P
osi
tio
n
Metis Fi r e Position
Metis Fi r e Position
BATOCHE
Fought 12 May 1885
‘B’ Company
MIDLANDERS
Battle of Batoche. The battle took place over several days, and included several different stages. What does this map/
diagram tell us about the battle?
Source: Bruce Tascona and Eric Wells, Little Black Devils: A History of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles (Winnipeg: n.p., 1983), 50). Courtesy of
The Royal Winnipeg Rifles.
houses harbouring women and children. Middleton
responded by telling them to gather the women and
children in a house marked with a white flag, which
would not be shelled. But he would not negotiate
and would only accept unconditional surrender. It
was never clear who gave the infantry the order to
advance, but once the order was given the troops
quickly overran the rifle pits and headed for the vil-
lage. The battle was over within half an hour. Batoche
was taken and the resistance melted away.
On this last day the army lost five  dead  and  25
wounded, while the Métis casualties were never count-
ed. Mounted riders quickly brought the  news  of the
victory back to the telegraph lines and then east to
a victory-starved Canada. The army soon rounded
up the Aboriginals who were independently fighting
the settlers, the NWMP, and the Canadian military. The
Last Stand of the Aboriginal West had ended.
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260 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Big Bear (centre) trading at Fort Pitt, an HBC post on the North Saskatchewan River, 1884. In the same year the post was taken
over by the North-West Mounted Police. In April 1885, in the course of the uprising, Big Bear’s band attacked the fort, which they
evacuated and then burned. O.B. Buell, LAC, PA-118768.
Riel in the prisoner’s box. He addressed the court twice during his trial, once after all the evidence had been presented (when he
spoke for more than an hour) and once before sentence was pronounced. O.B. Buell, LAC, 1966-094, C-001879.
901491_06_Ch06.indd 260 12/18/15 3:56 PM

2616 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
A CPR construction crew laying track at Malakwa, BC, early 1880s. This photo does not show any of the Chinese workers who
laboured on this project. This was likely an intentional decision. LAC, C-001602.
The first transcontinental passenger train arrives at the foot of Howe Street in Vancouver, 23 May 1887. These trains were not the
only way to access the Pacific coast. Notice that the station has been built right up to the harbour and the development that runs
along the shore. City of Vancouver Archives, LGN 460.
901491_06_Ch06.indd 261 12/18/15 3:56 PM

262 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Confederation and the Canadian Senate
One of the curious features about Canadian Confed-
eration is that it has generated virtually no historiog-
raphy. A handful of books and articles appeared during
the Centennial years of the 1960s, but those were mainly
interested in explaining how a bunch of disparate col-
onies had managed to achieve unification rather than
exploring historical questions in any depth. There was
much learned discussion of the federal principle. After
this spate of material there was virtual silence until
Christopher Moore’s 1997 study, 1867: How the Fathers
Made a Deal. This strange history helps to explain, as
Moore observed, why the existing studies failed to
address usefully issues of current interest. One of those
questions is: why is the Canadian Senate so useless? The
simple answer is: because the Fathers designed it that
way. Why they did so is a rather more complicated and
interesting business.
The delegates to the Quebec Conference met on
Monday, 10 October 1864, in the second-floor library of
the Legislative Council. The conference continued a dia-
logue begun at Charlottetown a month earlier between
representatives of Canada and those of the Maritime
provinces of British America, with a view to unification.
The dialogue was in some ways unequal. The Canadians
met regularly in caucus and planned their moves in con-
cert. The average Maritime delegates had no such organ-
izational support. As a result, the Maritimers were often
simply overwhelmed—or bullied—into agreement by
the force of Canadian prior agreement, perhaps chivvied
along a bit by champagne and rich dinners. According
to PEI’s Edward Palmer, “for the first few days, the lead-
ing delegates of the lower provinces exhibited caution
and vigilance upon every question affecting the inter-
ests of these provinces.” But after the Senate debate,
compromise in favour of Confederation was much more
common. Many thought Charlottetown had resolved the
broad outlines of a scheme to establish a new nation; all
that remained were the details. But these details were
not easily agreed upon. The biggest problem faced by
the delegates was the disparity in size between Canada
and the lower provinces, even when the latter were
combined. Maritimers understandably feared being
swallowed up by the behemoth. To assuage Maritime
concerns, Canada had conceded at the outset that it
would forgo its preference for a single elected legisla-
ture to form a two-tiered (or bicameral) structure, with
an upper house formed on principles more favourable to
the Maritimes.
On 16 October John A. Macdonald introduced the
Canadian proposal for the Senate, offering sectional
equality among Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes
combined into one unit. The Maritimers seemed to
accept unification, but argued for more senators. As
Andrew Macdonald of PEI insisted, if there was to be
representation by population in the elected chamber,
“the upper house should be more responsible of the
smaller provinces, as it was to be the guardian of their
rights and privileges.” He proposed that each province
should have an equal number of representatives, as
was the case in the American Senate. Why Macdonald’s
proposal did not win more favour from the Maritimes
contingent is not clear, Instead, Canada proposed addi-
tional seats if Newfoundland joined the union. After
several more days of debate, the delegates unanimously
agreed that senators would be appointed for life by the
federal government. As Christopher Moore observes,
such a method of appointment would assure that the
Senate would not be a powerful independent body. And
such, it turned out, was exactly the point. In the 1850s
most provinces had toyed with the idea of an elective
upper house—Canada had even accepted one in 1856.
But most British Americans were still fascinated by the
concept of responsible government, and responsible
government could not work properly if both houses of
a bicameral legislature were equally powerful. Money
bills had to originate in the House of Commons. The
Historiography
901491_06_Ch06.indd 262 12/18/15 3:56 PM

2636 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Bolger, Francis. Prince Edward Island and Confederation,
1863–1873. Charlottetown, 1964. The standard study.
Bradbury, Bettina. Working Families: Age, Gender, and
Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal. Toronto,
1993. An exciting work on early industrialization in
Montreal from the twin perspectives of women and
the working classes.
Buckner, P.A. The Transition to Responsible Government:
British Policy in British North America 1815–59.
Westport, Conn., 1985. Now the standard study,
based on detailed research and elegantly argued.
Bumsted, J.M. The Red River Rebellion. Winnipeg, 1996.
A revisionist account.
Courville, Serge, and Normand Séguin. Rural Life in
Nineteenth-Century Quebec. Ottawa, 1989. A middle-
level synthesis of an important topic.
Curtis, Bruce. Building the Educational State: Canada
West, 1836–1871. Sussex and London, 1988. A
revisionist work that argues the importance of edu-
cational policy for state formation in this period.
Daschuk, James. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of
Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina,
2014. A controversial study arguing that the First
Nations were deliberately starved in the West in the
1870s and 1880s.
Gagan, David. Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and
Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada
West. Toronto, 1981. The product of a huge quantifi-
cation project, this book attempts to explain the rela-
tionship between land and mobility in rural English
Canada.
Galbraith, John S. The Hudson’s Bay Company as an
Imperial Factor.Toronto, 1957. The classic statement
of the imperial role of the Hudson’s Bay Company in
the nineteenth century.
Grant, Shelagh D. Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic
Sovereignty in North America.Vancouver, 2010.
Greer, Allan, and Ian Radforth, eds. Colonial Leviathan:
State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada.
Toronto, 1992. A collection of essays informed by inter-
national thinking about the nineteenth-century state.
Hodgetts, J.E. Pioneer Public Service: An Administrative
History of the United Canadas, 1841–1867. Toronto,
1955. A pioneer work decades ahead of its time.
Katz, Michael. The People of Hamilton, Canada West:
Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City.
delegates could accept an upper house of “sober second
thoughts,” but not a strong Senate.
As George Brown argued in Toronto shortly after
Quebec, he doubted whether “two elective chambers,
both representing the people and both claiming control
over the public finances,” could possibly work in con-
tinual harmony. There was considerable agreement—
indeed virtual unanimity—at Quebec that the demands
of responsible government could only be met by con-
structing a weak Senate, and such was what the Fathers
of Confederation put together, however strange a legis-
lative body resulted from their efforts.
Short Bibliography
an anglophone colony of Canada. Not only were First
Nations, Métis, and Chinese cast aside as quickly as
possible, but French Canadians were not expected to
settle there in any substantial numbers. National con-
solidation was arguably complete in 1885, but much
Canadian “nationalism” still bore the distinctive mark
of the Ontario WASP. Two cultures, French and English,
were in firm opposition to each other, and other cul-
tures were thoroughly marginalized. Trying to satisfy
the nation’s two main components would continue to
be the most challenging task facing the Canadian gov-
ernment for many years.
901491_06_Ch06.indd 263 12/18/15 3:57 PM

264 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Cambridge, Mass., 1975. The first attempt to apply
American quantitative methodology on a large scale
to a Canadian subject.
Lewis, Robert. Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of
an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930. Baltimore,
2000. A study from a geographer’s perspective of the
growth of industrial Montreal.
Lucas, Sir Charles, ed. Lord Durham’s Report on the
Affairs of British North America, 3 vols. Oxford, 1912;
reprinted New York, 1970. The scholarly edition of
the complete Durham Report.
Masters, D.C. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854. Ottawa,
1963. Still the standard account of this important
treaty.
Metcalfe, Alan. Canada Learns to Play: The Emergence
of Organized Sport 1807–1911. Toronto, 1987. An
important work that documents the development
in Canada of organized sport in the nineteenth
century.
Monet, Jacques. The Last Cannon Shot: A Study of
French-Canadian Nationalism. Toronto, 1969. The
classic study of the emergence of nationalism, under
the watchful eye of the Church, in Lower Canada/
Canada East.
Pryke, Kenneth. Nova Scotia and Confederation 1864–
1873. Toronto, 1979. The standard account.
Saddlemyer, Ann, ed. Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario
1800–1914. Toronto, 1990. A collection of pioneering
essays that demonstrate how much is to be learned
about Canadian culture in the nineteenth century if
one chooses to look.
Shelton, W. George, ed. British Columbia and Confed-
eration. Victoria, 1967. A useful collection of essays.
Shippee, L.B. Canadian–American Relations 1849–1874.
New Haven, 1939. Still the best overall study of the
topic.
Tucker, Gilbert. The Canadian Commercial Revolution
1845–1851. Ottawa, 1970. The most useful survey of
this question.
Waite, Peter B. The Life and Times of Confederation,
1864–1867: Politics, Newspapers, and the Union of
British North America. Toronto, 1962. Still the best
account of the central period of unification.
Winks, Robin. Canada and the United States: The Civil
War Years. Montreal, 1971. Old, but still the standard
work; a thorough account of Canadian–American
relations during the war years.
Zeller, Suzanne. Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science
and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation.Toronto,
1987. A work with a controversial argument—that
science helped unite British North America—and a
good deal of material on colonial science.
Study Questions
1. Explain how Britain’s espousal of the free trade doctrine affected markets for Canadian wheat in the late
1840s.
2. Explain why the free trade doctrine led to the Reciprocity Treaty between British North America and the
United States. How did this lead to more railway-building and the rise of industrialism in British North
America?
3. Identify three reasons why people in Canada West were so anxious to move into the Canadian West.
4. Outline the political consequences of the move to responsible government in Canada East.
5. Why did volunteer and fraternal organizations become so popular in British North America?
6. Explain how the infrastructure of an educational system and a publishing industry contributed to Canadian
cultural production during this period.
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2656 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
7. What is important about George Brown’s observation that the Maritime delegates agreed that union was
desirable “if the terms of union could be made satisfactory”?
8. Give two reasons to explain why people in the Maritimes might think of Confederation as a “Canadian plot.”
9. How would you have felt about Canadian policy towards the West if you were a settler living in Saskatchewan
in 1885? If you were an Aboriginal person?
Visit the companion website for A History of the Canadian Peoples, fifth edition for further resources.
www.oupcanada.com/Bumsted5e
901491_06_Ch06.indd 265 12/18/15 3:58 PM

Becoming Modern,
1885–19157
Trolley cars became a principal mode of urban transport in the 1890s. The single-truck car shown here is from the Lower Mainland of
British Columbia. Trolleys varied from city to city and were adapted to their specific urban environments. Note that this car has a mesh
guard attached to its front and to its back, suggesting that there was a reasonable chance that it would encounter humans or animals
on its tracks. City of Vancouver Archives, H-303
901491_07_Ch07.indd 266 12/16/15 12:31 PM

1886 W.S. Fielding introduces legislation in Nova
Scotia calling for secession from the union. The
first CPR transcontinental arrives in Manitoba.
1887 Honoré Mercier leads nationaliste Liberals to
victory in Quebec. St Catharines opens first
electric streetcar system in Canada.
1890 Manitoba government abolishes public
funding for Catholic schools. CPR builds rail
line through Maine to connect Moncton with
Montreal.
1891 Sir John A. Macdonald dies.
1892 A great fire destroys St John’s, Newfoundland.
1896 Wilfrid Laurier leads the Liberal Party to a
national electoral victory. Gold is discovered in
the Klondike. The Manitoba Schools Question
becomes a national issue.
1898 A national referendum is held on prohibition of
alcoholic beverages. Newfoundland completes
a railway across the island.
1899 Canadian Northern Railway is incorporated.
Alaska Boundary Dispute is referred to an
international tribunal. Canada agrees to send
volunteer troops to South Africa.
1900 Art Museum of Toronto is founded. Prohibition
legislation is passed on Prince Edward Island.
1901 The first wireless message transmitted across
the Atlantic is received on Signal Hill near
St John’s, Newfoundland.
1902 Ernest Thompson Seton founds Woodcraft
Indians.
1903 Alaska Boundary Dispute between Canada
and the United States is handed over to a joint
commission of six “impartial jurists of repute.”
1905 Saskatchewan and Alberta are created as
provinces out of the North-West Territories.
Ontario Conservatives finally win political
control of the province.
1906 Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission is created.
1907 Development of Marquis wheat. Canadian
Department of Interior begins paying bonuses
to European immigrant agents for labourers.
Canadian Art Club is founded in Toronto.
1908 Border crossings established at 38 points
across the US–Canada border.
1909 Department of External Affairs is created.
1910 Steel Company of Canada is created by an
amalgamation of smaller firms.
1911 Robert Borden’s Conservatives take over
federal government in the Reciprocity Election.
Marius Barbeau is appointed as anthropologist
in the Museum Branch of the Geological Survey
of Canada. Noranda gold/copper mine opens
in Quebec.
1912 Social Services Council of Canada is
organized. Quebec’s boundaries are extended
to Hudson Bay.
Timeline
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268 A History of the Canadian Peoples
I n the years after Confederation, Canada became one of the richest nations in the world in terms of gross
national product and per capita income. Given the
advantage of hindsight, historians from comparably
sized countries—such as Mexico, Brazil, or Argentina—
can only envy Canada’s privileged position of wealth,
if not power, in this critical period. From the late 1870s
to the end of World War I, Canada was among the top
10 of the world in industrial development. Though the
country possessed rich agricultural and natural resour-
ces, much of the key to its success lay in the exploita-
tion of these advantages by a burgeoning industrial
sector. Canadians often saw only the weaknesses of the
Canadian economy. From the vantage point of most of
the world, however, Canada was rich, powerful, highly
industrialized, and “progressive,” even if still a part of
the British Empire. It possessed a vibrant labour move-
ment. Before the Great War, Canada had created a
self-sustaining internal economy and a dynamic foreign
trade. While the nation was transforming its economy,
it was also altering its society and culture. There was
another round of immigration, and Canada became an
increasingly urbanized country. This was also the great
era of reform, both political and social. As well, there
was a great national debate over Canada’s place within
the British Empire. The political system that made all
these developments possible operated through the
mediating influence of political parties.
As a result of both its geographical position and its
colonial situation, Canada before 1914 was able to enjoy
relative isolation from the turmoil of international
politics, concentrating on its own domestic develop-
ment. Like Americans, most Canadians were relatively
inward-looking, even isolationist, in their attitudes
towards the wider world. Most French Canadians
saw themselves as an autonomous people without
close European or international connections, while
Canadians of British origin felt varying degrees of
loyalty to Great Britain, which looked after most inter-
national affairs in the name of the Empire. Canada’s
corps of diplomats was tiny, confined to Washington,
London, and Paris. After 1909 a small Department
of External Affairs supervised and co-ordinated the
nation’s sporadic formal relations with the world. While
most Canadians felt no need to be citizens of the world
before 1914, they were not necessarily ignorant of it.
The larger daily newspapers covered foreign affairs far
more assiduously than their modern equivalents, for
example.
The Developing
Political and
Constitutional System
The Fathers of Confederation had not written political
parties into the Canadian Constitution. Nevertheless,
by the mid-1880s a two-party system had evolved at
both the federal and provincial levels that would remain
unchanged until World War I. Indeed, this period was
in many respects the golden age of Canadian party
politics. Party affiliation was a serious matter. Being
a Liberal or a Conservative was a commitment passed
on from father to son; small towns had parallel Liberal
and Conservative business establishments, including
funeral parlours. The seeming vitality of the two-party
system disguised, to some degree, the underlying ten-
sions of Canadian federalism. Before 1914, however, the
parties appeared flexible enough to contain various cur-
rents of conflict and disagreement. Both national par-
ties developed consensual systems capable of holding
together differing ideologies, sections of the country,
and interest groups.
The key to the successful functioning of the national
parties—and the allegiances of their adherents—was in
large part the power of patronage. Both parties, in office,
distributed honours and jobs to their leading support-
ers, carefully apportioning rewards to those whose
qualifications were judged solely in terms of political
service and loyalty. The patronage system rewarded
chiefly those members of the Canadian professional
and business elites (mainly from the so-called middle
class) who ran the two parties. The system diminished
ideological and regional differences, offering French
Canadians their own opportunities for advancement.
Patronage thus encouraged a stable party system in
which matters of principle were less important than the
division of the spoils of victory.
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2697 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
Despite their consensual utility, Canadian polit-
ical parties had considerable difficulty in mediating
the relationships between the federal and provincial
levels of government. The rise of a strong movement
for provincial rights, initiated by Ontario, joined by
Quebec, and supported on occasion by all provinces,
was almost inevitable. The chief, although not sole,
bone of contention would be economic development.
Provinces insisted that they, not the federal gov-
ernment, should control development within their
boundaries. What was unexpected was the support for
provincial rights provided by the Judicial Committee
of the British Privy Council, the court of last resort for
federal–provincial disagreements. In a series of land-
mark decisions stretching from the 1880s to the Great
War, the Judicial Committee consistently reduced the
power of the federal government and enhanced that of
the provinces. Both anglophone and francophone voters
tended to support this readjustment of Confederation.
They saw the provinces as a check on the federal govern-
ment’s power, and they consistently supported provin-
cial parties that wanted to confront Ottawa. Thus there
was nothing unique about the 1887 victory in Quebec of
the nationaliste Liberal government of Honoré Mercier
(1840–94). W.S. Fielding (1848–1929) had won for the
Liberals in Nova Scotia in 1884 on a platform of prov-
incial rights. In 1886 Fielding introduced legislation
calling for the secession of Nova Scotia from the union.
Obviously, provincial parties could not afford too close
an identification with their federal counterparts, par-
ticularly while the latter were in power. Only with the
success of Laurier’s Liberals in 1896 did the Ontario
Tories escape the albatross of a federal Conservative
Party, for example. By 1905 they won control of the
province, which they would seldom relinquish over the
remainder of the century.
A great irony of Confederation was that French
Canada continued as the region upon which national
political success had to be built. Until the death of Sir
John A. Macdonald in 1891, the Conservatives had suc-
cessfully appealed to Quebec with a judicious combin-
ation of local political patronage and national political
policies. The execution of Louis Riel late in 1885 threat-
ened that appeal, but the government’s Quebec ministers
held firm. The Grand Old Man’s successors, including
J.J. Abbott (1821–93), John S. Thompson (1844–94), and
Charles Tupper (1821–1915), simply did not have the
magic. In 1896 Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919) became the
national chef. He had put together a coalition of provin-
cial Liberal parties by softening the potential issues of
division. Laurier’s agonizing over the Manitoba Schools
Question of the early 1890s, when his distaste for a uni-
lingual policy for Manitoba schools was matched only
by his refusal to prevent provinces from running affairs
within their own general mandate, was a pure reflection
of his approach. Laurier saw national unity and national
harmony as identical and, not surprisingly, viewed a
bicultural state as essential.
The Conservatives of Robert Borden (1854–1937)
replaced Laurier’s Liberals in 1911. The Tories split
the Quebec vote while sweeping Ontario, thanks in
large measure to the support of the Ontario provincial
party. Key issues in the 1911 election were American
reciprocity and imperial naval defence. Borden’s vic-
tory was a triumph for Canadian imperial sentiment,
anti-continentalism, and middle-class reform. Borden
had set out his Halifax Platform in 1907, calling for
civil service reform, public ownership of telephones and
telegraphs, a reformed Senate, and free mail delivery in
rural areas. Borden spoke for the “progressive” forces of
Anglo-Canadian society and reform, which had been
marshalling strength since the mid-1880s. Laurier had
enacted some of Borden’s planks, including civil ser-
vice reform in 1908, but the Conservatives still claimed
the close imperial connection and had added the pro-
gressive mantle. Borden achieved some of his imper-
ial vision only with the beginning of the Great War.
The Conscription Crisis of 1917 completed the process,
which began in 1911 with the defeat of Laurier, of the
political isolation of French Canada. At the same time,
neither the West nor the Maritimes were content, as
events after the war’s end soon demonstrated.
The Economic
Infrastructure
Control of capital through chartered banks headquar-
tered chiefly in central Canada was one of that region’s
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270 A History of the Canadian Peoples
great advantages. Unlike the United States, Canadian
banking was always highly centralized. In 1914 in
Canada there were only 26 banks operating 2,888
branches. Some of the larger banks (the Royal Bank,
the Bank of Commerce) had more than 300 branches
each. From the beginning, Canadian chartered banks
focused less on serving local customers than on facili-
tating the transfer of commodities and funds. Their
credit facilities, especially for outlying districts of the
nation, were quite limited. The banking industry itself
wrote Canadian banking legislation. The Canadian
Bankers’ Association was an organization of a few
powerful men.
Although in 1913 Montreal-headquartered banks
held half of the assets of all Canadian banks ($788 million
of $1.55 billion), Quebec contained considerably fewer
branch banks per capita than the remainder of the nation.
The result was the founding by Alphonse Desjardins
(1854–1920) of the caisses populaires, often run by curés in
association with Catholic parishes. Financial institutions
to compete locally with the chartered banks did develop,
not only in the form of caisses populaires but as gov-
ernment savings banks, local savings banks, and credit
unions. Their economic power was limited, however, and
the chartered banks continued to grow. Banks with head
offices in central Canada refused to make local loans and
The family heritage of Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919), born
in a small Quebec village outside Montreal, dated back
to seventeenth-century Quebec. As part of his education,
Laurier lived for two years with an English-speaking
family and attended an English-speaking school. His
facility in both languages was subsequently one of his
great political strengths. After education at l’Assompt-
ion College and McGill University, he was called to the
Quebec bar.
From his earliest days Laurier was a Liberal, and
after election to Parliament in 1874 he soon joined the
Mackenzie cabinet. Laurier was an outspoken critic
of the ultramontane wing of the Catholic Church in
Quebec and defender of both the Liberals as a party
of moderation and of the laity as entitled to make their
own choices free of clerical pressure. Like many French-
Canadian Liberals of his generation, he not only wanted
a non-denominational party but was also attracted to
British history and to the British Constitution.
Somewhat chastened by political failure in the early
1880s, his career was rejuvenated by the execution of
Louis Riel, whose constitutional grievances he cham-
pioned. But Laurier resolutely refused to become a racial
and religious nationalist, and he advocated conciliation
between French and English. He exploited the clumsi-
ness of both the Conservatives and French-Canadian
Wilfrid Laurier, c. 1882. Topley Studio Fonds, LAC, PA-013133.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier
Biography
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2717 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
set local interest rates at high levels. Sir Edmund Walker
(1848–1924), president of the Bank of Commerce, labelled
regional complaints “local grievances against what we
regard as the interests of the country as a whole” (quoted
in Naylor, 1975, I: 103).
Transportation continued to be an essential
ingredient of development. As in the age of the first rail-
way boom of the 1850s, railways were both a means of
development and a field of investment. Substantial rail-
way construction involved significant public subsidies,
often in the form of land grants along the right of way,
as well as other boons. The Canadian Pacific Railway
(CPR) received from the government the completed line
from Fort William, Ontario, to Selkirk, Manitoba, as
well as the line from Kamloops to Port Moody in BC.
Moreover, it received a cash payment of $25 million,
plus 25 million acres (10,117,500 ha) “fairly fit for settle-
ment,” and various tax exemptions on its land. In addi-
tion, it had a monopoly position. Nor was the Canadian
Pacific the only railway so favoured. Dozens of railways
incorporated in Canada during these years. Local com-
munities fought desperately for railways, seeing them
as links to a prosperous future. Sir William Mackenzie
(1849–1923) and Sir Donald Mann (1853–1934) con-
structed a second transcontinental line, the Canadian
Northern Railway, which passed considerably to the
clerics over the Manitoba Schools Question, insisting that
he could effect a satisfactory compromise, which he did.
Once elected to office as Prime Minister in
1896, with the strong backing of Quebec voters, he
appointed a strong cabinet composed mainly of prov-
incial leaders with progressive ideas. Fortunately for
the Liberal government, Canada was entering a period
of great growth and economic boom, especially in the
West, providing a tide upon which almost any gov-
ernment could have ridden successfully. The Liberals
became involved with Canadian big business interests
over the construction of two new transcontinental
railroads, but eventually came to grief over military
and imperial policy, issues that still divided English
and French Canada. Laurier survived the Boer War
by allowing English Canadians to participate as vol-
unteers and by stifling all initiatives for closer imper-
ial co-operation. He even managed to deal with the
problem of increased German naval construction by
introducing a Canadian navy instead of Canadian
contributions to the British one.
One issue that helped defeat his government
in 1911 came unexpectedly, when the United States
offered Canada a reciprocal economic arrangement
and Laurier accepted it enthusiastically. To its surprise,
the Liberal government discovered that Canadians
were not willing in boom times to pay the price of a
potential loss of national sovereignty in return for
American advantages, although the loss of Quebec
support on imperial issues was probably more import-
ant, as was a perception that the Liberals had lost their
reformist edge and were less progressive on social
issues than were the Conservatives. Laurier supported
Canadian entrance into World War I wholeheartedly,
but refused to co-operate in 1917 with the govern-
ment over conscription or to join a coalition govern-
ment committed to the question. He was deserted by
many English-speaking Liberals, and in the election of
November 1917 his support was reduced almost solely
to Quebec seats.
Laurier was well known as a conciliator who sought
compromise and opposed political extremism and sec-
tional division in word and deed. In retrospect, one of
his most important achievements may have been his
refusal to allow his nation to become more closely inte-
grated into the British Empire.
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272 A History of the Canadian Peoples
north of the CPR. Everyone outside central Canada
complained about the high costs of freight, but all
Canadians relied on the railway. Passenger travel was
swift and relatively inexpensive.
Energy was another essential. Canada always pos-
sessed rich potential energy resources. Coal never pro-
vided much advantage, but abundant water power did.
Changing technology at the close of the nineteenth cen-
tury enabled major natural waterfalls to be harnessed
and others to be created through dams. Development
for hydroelectric power was substantial in the early
years of the twentieth century. No province had greater
potential for hydroelectricity generation than Quebec.
Unlike Ontario, which established the Ontario Hydro-
Electric Commission in 1906 under the chairmanship
of Sir Adam Beck (1857–1925), Quebec permitted its
hydroelectric development to be carried out by private
enterprise. The process of exploiting electricity, both
for light and for power, was one of the great unsung
technological developments of the age. Industry could
use water power as an alternative to fossil fuel. Cheap
hydroelectric power became an advantage for Canadian
industry. The manufacturing community saw cheap
power as essential to its growth and development.
Hydroelectricity lit Canadian homes at relatively low
cost. It fostered the growth of electric-powered public
transportation, such as the tram and the trolley.
The period between 1880 and 1919 was a great
age of science and technology throughout the Western
world. Most fields of scientific endeavour transformed
out of all recognition the basic theoretical assumptions
that had dominated humankind for generations. The
number of inventions that altered in practical ways how
people lived and worked was astounding. Canada played
little role at the frontiers of pure science. Its record in the
technical application of science was somewhat better,
as the activities of the Dominion Experimental Farms
system (created by Ottawa in 1886) demonstrated. The
great achievement of Canadian agricultural research
in this period was the development of Marquis wheat
in 1907 by Charles Edward Saunders (1867–1937). In
both science and technology, however, Canada was for-
tunate to be able to borrow heavily from Great Britain
and the United States. Most Canadian technical accom-
plishment came through adapting imported technology
to Canadian conditions, although a number of useful
Canadian inventions were introduced in this period.
Population growth was also necessary for economic
development. Immigration provided much of that growth
for Canada in this period, as in others. Between 1880 and
1920 nearly 4.5 million immigrants arrived in Canada,
mainly although not exclusively from Europe and the
United States. Beginning in the mid-1890s, the origins
of the newcomers shifted perceptibly. Most of the earlier
immigrants came from the British Isles, while after 1896
large numbers came from Eastern and Southern Europe.
In addition, Americans again began arriving in Canada
in large numbers, their destinations the “Last Best West”
in Alberta and Saskatchewan. By 1901, 34 per cent of the
newcomers to the prairie West came from other coun-
tries than Canada, with 33 per cent from the United
States and 22 per cent from Britain. During the peak dec-
ade of immigration (1905–14), nearly 2.8 million people
immigrated to Canada, with the numbers about equally
divided among Central and Eastern Europe, the United
States, and the British Isles. (A small number of Asians
and people from the Near East were included in the total.
Most of the Near East immigrants came from Lebanon
and were listed as “Syrians” in the official records. (Many
of the victims in April 1912 on board the ill-fated passen-
ger liner Titanic were “Syrians” travelling in steerage on
their way to Canada.) Between 1901 and 1911 alone, the
Canadian population grew by 43 per cent. In the 1911
census, over 20 per cent of all Canadians enumerated
had been born abroad. While many of the newcomers
settled on farms, fully 70 per cent joined the labour force
in industry and transportation. Canadian business and
government specifically recruited many of the newcom-
ers, often on a contract basis, to provide an industrial
workforce. In 1907 the Canadian Department of the
Interior began paying bonuses to European immigra-
tion agents for people who had labour experience, such
as farmers, navvies, or miners. Much of this industrial
workforce ended up in Canada’s cities.
While the typical newcomer to Canada in these
years continued to be the unassisted immigrant, arriv-
ing under his or her own power, either alone or as part
of a family group, several other categories need to be
singled out for special attention, particularly British
“orphans” and European contract labourers.
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2737 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
Canadians were generally more willing to accept
immigrants from the British Isles than from any other
place, although resentment was common against those
Britons who looked down their noses at their “colonial
cousins.” On the other hand, many Canadians objected
to the activities of British philanthropists and philan-
thropic institutions in employing Canada as a dumping
ground for unwanted children of the urban poor. These
children were recruited as cheap labour, mainly for
Canadian farms and as domestic servants. The majority
were young boys, but a substantial number were young
girls. Nearly 100,000 of these “home children” were sent
to Canada before the Great War, most of them recruited
in British slums. Many were encouraged to go by their
parents; others were literally seized from parents and
sent overseas “for their own good.” The results were
mixed, with the worst experiences probably suffered
by children of both genders who were sent into rural
homes, where many were badly exploited by their sup-
posed benefactors. This immigration was constantly
accompanied by opposition to its continuance. Much
of the opposition to child immigration came from the
Canadian labour movement, especially between 1888
and 1895. It was concerned less with the treatment of
the victims than with their presence as an unregulated
low-wage component of the workforce.
Perhaps the most colourful of the philanthropists
involved in child “rescue” was the Dublin-born Thomas
John Barnardo (1845–1900), who was personally respon-
sible for sending more than 30,000 youngsters to
Canada. Barnardo, always known as “Doctor” Barnardo,
actually scoured the streets of London for waifs, col-
lecting thousands of pounds from the British public for
his charity work. He used the money less to improve
existing conditions than to expand the scope of his
activities. Barnardo was a lightning rod for complaints
of abuse and victimization. His activities were criticized
on a number of occasions, and he came to take care that
records were kept, using photographs and letters from
children to demonstrate how well they were getting
on. As for the children, one modern study of Barnardo
children has concluded that some evidence exists that
9 per cent of the boys and 15 per cent of the girls were
actually abused (Parker, 2009: 221). (In February 2010,
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown met with a group
of former immigrants and others to apologize for their
treatment [Boycott, 2010].)
Despite the emphasis on agricultural settlement
and the concerns about the assimilability of non-British
immigrants, a number of Canadian corporations insisted
on their need for willing workers. For these companies,
headed by the railroads, British immigrants were not
desirable because they complained about wages and
working conditions; farmers were unsuitable because they
left their jobs at harvest time. The CPR turned increasingly
after 1901 to contract workers, often from southern Italy.
According to Donald Avery (1995: 30), these workers—sup-
plied by labour agents working in Europe—could “live for
a year on the wages they earn in six months.” The railroads
liked Bulgarians, Poles, and Italians because by working
hard and living simply, they were “peculiarly suited for
The Canadian Bank of Commerce building at 25 King Street
West, designed by R.A. Waite and erected in 1889–90, was
one of several new office buildings in Toronto that had some
claim to architectural distinction and even grandeur. At
seven-and-a-half storeys, it soared over neighbouring three-
and four-storey buildings, and reflected the influence of the
first skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. City of Toronto
Archives, Fonds 1497, Item 21.
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274 A History of the Canadian Peoples
the work.” A massive national railway construction pro-
gram between 1900 and 1914 was sustained by 50,000 to
70,000 immigrant navvies (unskilled construction work-
ers) per year. Mining corporations were equally attracted
to Slavic and Italian workers, and by 1913 more than 300
labour agencies were recruiting more than 200,000 work-
ers per year from abroad for labour in Canada. Several
foreign governments protested the treatment of their
nationals by labour agencies and Canadian employers,
and both organized labour and nativist groups opposed
the contract workers as being scabs. More than half of
these workers were sojourners, who intended to use the
savings from their earnings to return to their homelands,
but a substantial minority would remain in Canada
permanently. The Italians brought several new elements
in their cultural baggage. Several secret societies mod-
elled on the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta
provided a range of services to immigrants, sometimes
also engaging in extortion activities that were attributed
by the Canadian media to the “Black Hand.” A few Italians
were also anarchists; one of their leaders, Luigi Galleani,
was deported from Canada in 1903.
Another Round of
Industrialization
Financial centralization and growing industrial cap-
acity, particularly the shift from the processing of
primary goods into the secondary manufacturing of
finished goods, were major economic developments in
Canada in the years 1880–1919. Continued industrial-
ization always involved more than the construction of
new and larger factories. Canadians needed to extend
and rationalize transportation facilities. They had to
mobilize investment, exploit resources, and recruit
a labour force. Despite the National Policy, Ottawa
did not maintain control over, or ownership in, the
Canadian economy. The country’s emergence on the
international scene increased its vulnerability to world
economic conditions and economic cycles. Moreover,
its industrial development was distinctly uneven, with
industrial growth well above the national average in
Ontario, at the national average in Quebec, and well
below the national average in the Maritime and western
provinces. Larger urban centres, such as Montreal and
Toronto, expanded constantly, while smaller commun-
ities fell steadily behind.
One of the keys to Canadian economic growth
between 1885 and the Great War was an influx of
foreign investment. Few nations depended so heav-
ily on foreign capital to fuel economic growth as has
Canada throughout its history. Investment in this
era—particularly in the boom years 1900–13—was
significant. Like other countries, Canada used most of
its imported capital to finance large development pro-
jects, such as railways and hydroelectric generation.
Canada’s imports of capital came in the two forms of
indirect (portfolio) investment and direct investment.
These two types of investment reflected the respective
A 1907 poster exhorting immigrants to settle in western
Canada. This poster well illustrates the mentality of western
development in the first years of the new century. How would
you describe this mentality? LAC, C-30621.
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2757 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
activity of Canada’s two largest financial partners.
Much of the portfolio investment came from Great
Britain. Much of the direct investment came from the
United States. In terms of the foreign domination of
the economy that resulted, the two types of investment
were quite different. Direct investment resulted in far
greater control. At the time few Canadians agonized
overly much about the extent or the origin of foreign
ownership. Foreign control did not become a serious
issue in Canadian economic theory or public life
before the late 1950s. Until then, almost all Canadians
might have agreed with the American entrepre-
neur Frank Clergue, who declared in 1901 that “for-
eign money injected into the circulating medium
of Canada” would “remain forever to the everlasting
blessing of thousands of its inhabitants” (quoted in
Bliss, 1972: 38).
As students now learn routinely in introductory
economics courses, portfolio investment represents
money borrowed against securities, in this period
mainly bonds. Bonds are a relatively safe investment.
They do not carry management implications. The British
preferred portfolio investment in Canada because their
prosperous citizens wanted to clip coupons in their old
age. Government (federal, provincial, municipal) and
the railways did most of Canada’s borrowing in Britain.
The money went to finance transportation networks and
public works. Little was available for private enterprise,
almost none for venture capital. In the first years of the
twentieth century, Canadian entrepreneurs exploited
the British investment market in new ways. The chief
innovation was the promotion of bond issues for giant
industrial operations created from the merger of smaller
companies. Nobody was more successful at merging
than William Maxwell Aitken (1879–1964, later Lord
Beaverbrook), son of a New Brunswick Presbyterian
minister. His great triumph came in 1910 with the cre-
ation of the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco), the bonds
for which his Royal Securities firm sold in London. “I
believe in consolidations,” Aitken told Maclean’s maga-
zine in 1911. “They are more efficient. They give bet-
ter service to the consumer. In a large country such
as Canada, they reduce the distribution costs. They
are good for the consumer” (quoted in Marchilson,
1996: 181). He was the most visible and sharpest oper-
ator in a movement that saw 58 giant corporations cre-
ated in Canada between 1909 and 1912.
The United States was an importer of British capital
before World War I and had little available for overseas
portfolio investment. The Americans invested directly
in Canada to gain access to Canadian raw materials
and the Canadian market. They went heavily into the
resource sector. They also invested in Canadian manu-
facturing to gain maximum access to the Canadian mar-
ket. Less than half of American direct investment was
in manufacturing, but the total amount involved was
over $100 million by 1910. The protective tariff played
an important role in encouraging American branch-
plant investment. Early Canadian protectionism sought
to foster employment. Canadians did not worry much
about the outflow of profits or the influx of foreign man-
agers. Canadians generally accepted that Canadian
businessmen and investors were not very adventurous,
preferring familiar fields and allowing the Yankees to
take the chances. Far from endangering the Canadian
identity, American investment fostered it. The alterna-
tive was immigration to the United States.
The Americans preferred to locate their branch
plants in southern Ontario. This choice came for a var-
iety of reasons. Americans were active in the heavy
industries of Ontario, partly because Ontario was so
close to the industrial heartland of the United States
south of the Great Lakes. Moreover, Ontario deliberately
encouraged Americans to invest in the processing of raw
materials by allowing them virtually free access to the
province’s natural resources. Ontarians believed that
they had all the requirements for self-sufficiency within
their own borders. The province required that resources
taken on Crown land be processed in Canada. “Debarred
from the opportunity of cutting logs for export, it is an
absolute certainty that the American lumberman, in
default of other sources of supply, will transfer his saw-
mill enterprises to Canadian soil” (quoted in Nelles,
1974: 217). American preference both contributed to and
reflected the industrial development of Ontario.
After 1885 manufacturing replaced commerce as
the chief propellant of urban growth in Ontario. Much of
the new industrial plant involved sophisticated techno-
logical applications, often imported from the United
States. Ontario became the centre of the Canadian iron
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276 A History of the Canadian Peoples
and steel industry. The transformation of the older iron
industry into the steel industry was symptomatic of the
process that was occurring. Coal replaced charcoal as
the source of heat. The refining process turned into two
steps, first involving open-hearth furnaces and then a
steam-driven rolling mill. The result was a product with
a slightly higher carbon content. Its name was steel.
Mechanization occurred at every step in the manufac-
turing process. “Gigantic automation” was the watch-
word at huge installations like Stelco’s Hamilton plant
and Algoma’s Sault Ste Marie operation. Steel rails were
the most common standard product. Ontario’s manufac-
turing grew in a number of smaller urban centres.
Quebec manufacturing relied far less on heavy
industry (and vast capitalization) than did manufac-
turing in Ontario. It depended far more on an indus-
try based on labour and fussy mechanization, such as
clothing, wood products, textiles, and food processing.
Part of the explanation for the difference may reside in
labour availability. Part may have been the availabil-
ity of cheap hydroelectric power in Quebec after 1900.
Quebec had eliminated Ontario’s early advantage in sec-
ondary over primary manufacturing by 1915. Montreal
provided the greatest concentration of Quebec’s manu-
facturing sector. By 1900 workers in that city repre-
sented about half the manufacturing labour in the
province. It is easy to overemphasize the notorious lag
between the two central Canadian provinces. They were
more like one another than they were like the remain-
der of the nation. The industrial disparity between the
Workers at looms, c. 1908. As this photograph indicates, most workers in the textile industry were women, working in crowded
conditions on the shop floor. City of Toronto Archives, James Collection, Fonds 1244, 137.
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2777 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
Manufacturing Output, 1870–1890
Document
Percentage Change in Manufacturing Output, 1870–1890
One of the developments of the post-Confederation period was the tendency for the industrial
output of the Maritime region to lose ground to Ontario and Quebec. The following table
documents the change in output by province in various industrial sectors between 1870 and 1890.
Industry Nova Scotia New Brunswick Quebec Ontario
All factories 128 42 104 116
Farm production (butter, cheese, and
cloth)
60 67 50 34
All manufacturing 120 44 101 113
Consumer goods 160 95 100 119
Durable goods 30 –10 83 61
Intermediate goods 214 50 120 162
Chemical products 210 3 149 410
Clothing 224 49 125 277
Coal & petroleum products 164 321 365 –5
Food & beverages 361 292 122 82
Iron & steel products 142 21 92 90
Leather & fur products –1 –12 50 41
Nonferric metal products 348 204 191 854
Nonmetallic mineral products 114 121 186 215
Printing 54 111 86 177
Paper products 48 –52 313 254
Rubber goods n.a. n.a. 202 4,311
Transport equipment 3 –38 154 26
Tobacco products –78 64 162 263
Textiles 505 443 406 150
Wood products 213 2 64 153
Source: Kris Inwood, “Maritime Industrialization from 1870 to 1910,” Acadiensis 21, 1 (Autumn 1991): 147. Reprinted by permission.
central provinces and the others grew continually in the
years before 1914.
While the absence of industrialization in the Canadian
West was a consequence of the recentness of its settlement,
this did not apply to the Maritime region. Here rural stagna-
tion joined a crisis in the shipbuilding industry. The growth
of new technologies was partly to blame, but the problem
was mainly a failure of the Maritime shippers’ nerve. The
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278 A History of the Canadian Peoples
shippers always viewed their ships as instruments of trade.
Instead of reinvesting their capital in a modern shipbuild-
ing industry, they and the business community of the
region made a desperate effort to exploit the internal mar-
ket. They accepted the National Policy and tried to work
within it. The attempts at continentalism seemed initially
successful in the 1880s, but rapidly turned to failure.
The reasons for the ultimate Maritime failure remain
uncertain. Most Maritime entrepreneurs seemed to lack
the financial resources to withstand the ups and downs
of the economic cycles. They tended to blame many of
their problems on high railway freight rates. At about
the same time that the region’s business community was
moaning about railway rates, outside capital moved in
and began buying up locally based companies. Montreal
capitalists did most of the damage. They bought up and
dismantled many burgeoning industries still servicing
the local market.
Maritime entrepreneurs, convinced that they
were at a substantial geographical disadvantage in
competing with central Canada, ceased trying in most
sectors after 1895. Instead, the region turned to the
panacea of iron and steel. Surely the presence of local
raw materials would make this industry a competitive
one. Unfortunately, central Canadian interests soon
took over the Maritime steel industry. By 1911 Montreal
controlled much of the region’s industrial enterprise.
Toronto, on the other hand, moved into the region’s
wholesale and retail marketing sector. Between 1901
and 1921 the number of regional businesses that were
branches of central Canadian firms more than doubled,
from 416 to 950. The net result of both sorts of takeovers
was a regional loss of economic autonomy. Outsiders
siphoned capital away from the Maritimes, and when
times got tough they closed stores and factories. The
region was systematically deindustrialized and decom-
mercialized. It would never recover its economic vitality.
Most of the businessmen who operated the indus-
trializing economy were immigrants or sons of immi-
grants, with Scots farmers over-represented in both
categories. Few had begun at the bottom of the social
scale. French Canadians were seriously under-represented
among large-scale entrepreneurs and industrialists, even
within their own province. Most French-Canadian busi-
nesses remained small in scale, family-controlled, and
confined chiefly to the province of Quebec. These busi-
nessmen did share an overall philosophy. They insisted
on government involvement in large schemes of public
development, such as railways. They accepted govern-
ment power to grant monopolies of public service through
charters or access to Crown lands through advantageous
leases. They sought to minimize competition wherever
possible, even if public regulation was the price paid for
the reduction. Small businessmen who could not combine
institutionally to control trade, such as the small retailers,
fought hard for early closings and price-fixing. Business
rhetoric about competition had less to do with extol-
ling the virtues of free enterprise than with complain-
ing about unfair competition. The business community
insisted that what it wanted was a “living profit,” a reason-
able return on investment of time and capital.
While few business leaders believed in policies of
laissez-faire in the relationship between the state and
business, the situation was quite different when it came to
labour organizations. From the view of business, organ-
ized labour was an illegitimate combination designed
to erode the right of the individual to run his business
as he saw fit. Nevertheless, the growth of industrializa-
tion was conducive to expanding worker militancy. The
Canadian state proved relatively receptive to the rights
of labour to organize. Whereas in the United States
public policy was almost universally hostile to labour
organization, in Canada laws that legalized union activ-
ity were put on the books beginning in the 1880s. Many
of the late nineteenth-century labour organizations in
Canada were foreign imports, chiefly from the United
States. If Canadian labour got much of its structure from
the Americans, it drew much of its practical experience
from Great Britain. The Noble and Holy Knights of Labor
spread from the United States across Canada in the
1870s.The Knights were all-inclusive reformers, as their
agenda suggested. For Canada as a whole, the Canadian
Labour Congress formed in 1883 as an umbrella organ-
ization for local trade councils, and in 1892 it became the
Trades and Labor Congress of Canada.
In this period most labour conflict revolved around
the right to organize and the recognition of unions.
Government acceptance of union activity in some ways
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2797 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
increased the frequency of conflict. Moreover, the civil
authorities frequently intervened in labour conflicts,
usually in the name of public order and often on the
side of management. Such intervention often produced
violence. Strikes were certainly common everywhere in
Canada, especially after 1900. In Ontario’s 10 largest cit-
ies, between 1901 and 1914, there were 421 strikes and
lockouts involving 60,000 workers. In the Maritimes,
324 strikes occurred between 1901 and 1914. Except
in the Far West, the majority of the workers involved in
these confrontations were skilled rather than unskilled.
By 1914 approximately 155,000 Canadians belonged to
Declaration of Principles of the Knights of Labor (1883)
Document
1. To bring within the fold of organization every
department of productive industry, making know-
ledge a standpoint for action, and industrial moral
worth, not wealth, the true standard of individual
and national greatness.
2. To secure to the toilers a proper share of the wealth
that they created; more of the leisure that right-
fully belongs to them; more society advantages;
all of the benefits, privileges and emoluments of
the world; in a word all those rights and privileges
necessary to make them capable of enjoying, appre-
ciating, defending and perpetuating the blessings
of good government.
3. To arrive at the true condition of the producing
masses in their educational, moral and financial con-
dition, by demanding from the various governments
the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics.
4. The establishment of co-operative institutions, pro-
ductive and initiative.
5. The reserving—of public lands—the heritage of the
people—for the actual settler. Not another acre for
railroads or corporations.
6. The abrogation of laws that do not bear equally
upon capital and labor; the removal of unjust tech-
nicalities, delays and discriminations in the admin-
istration of justice; and the adopting of measures
providing for the health and safety of those engaged
in mining, manufacturing and building pursuits.
7. The enactment of laws to compel chartered corpora-
tions to pay their employees weekly, in full, for labor
performed the preceding week, in the lawful money
of the country.
The enactment of laws giving mechanics and labor-
ers the first lien on their work for their full wages.
8. The abolishment of the contract system on national,
state and municipal roads or corporations.
9. The substitution of arbitration for strikes, whenever
and wherever employers and employees are willing
to meet on equitable grounds.
10. The prohibition of the employment of children in
workshops mines and factories, before attaining
their fourteenth year.
11. To abolish the system of letting out by contract the
labor of convicts in our prisons and reformatory
institutions.
12. To secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work.
13. The reduction of the hours of labor to eight per day,
so that the laborers may have more time for social
enjoyment and intellectual improvement, and
be able to reap the advantages conferred by the
labor-saving machinery which their brains have
created.
Source: Labor Union (Hamilton), 1883, as quoted in Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario,
1880–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 399–400.
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280 A History of the Canadian Peoples
organized labour unions, many of them affiliated with
American internationals.
Natural Resources
If Canada was to avoid eternal international balance-of-
payment deficits (the plague of Third World countries
in our own era) it obviously needed commodities to
export. It found many of these in the natural resour-
ces sector. To a considerable extent Canada’s resources
were the old mainstays of the colonial staple economy,
now produced under different guises. Resources not
only earned money abroad, they encouraged manufac-
turing at home.
Agriculture
As if on some master schedule, the Canadian wheat
economy continued to expand without pause. Fields
of operation moved from central Canada to Manitoba
and slightly later to the North-West Territories (which
became the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in
1905). Between 1870 and 1890 thousands of farmers,
chiefly from Ontario, poured into the West. The num-
ber of acres of occupied land went from 2.5 million to
“Steel mills at Sydney, Cape Breton,” oil on canvas, 1907, by the railway magnate Sir William Cornelius Van Horne. Built between
1900 and 1905, these two plants attracted hundreds of workers, creating an instant city. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift
of the artist’s grandson, William C. Van Horne. Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Brian Merrett.
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2817 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
over 6 million (1,011,750 to 2,428,200 ha) in the years
1881–91, while the acres of land under cultivation
exploded from 279,000 to 1,429,000 (112,911 to 578,316
ha) in the same 10-year period. The opening of the CPR
was critical for the production of western wheat. So, too,
was the appearance of new wheat strains capable of mat-
uration in the short prairie growing season.
Before the mid-1890s the typical prairie settler was
an Ontario-born farmer who came west to make a new
start. Despite the passage of the Dominion Lands Act
of 1872, which made a fair amount of homestead land
available, most farmers preferred to purchase land
from companies set up by the great corporate benefac-
tors of government land grants, especially the railways.
Farmers believed (with some legitimacy) that homestead
land was less likely to acquire rail transportation than
was land owned by the railway itself. Although home-
stead land was free to the male settler (women could not
apply for homesteads), successful farming still required
substantial capital investment. Conservative estimates
of the costs of “farm-making” ranged from a minimum
of $300 (the annual wage for an unskilled labourer) to
$1,000. Most farmers brought money with them from
the sale of land back east. The western farmer was a mar-
ket farmer. Although the family grew as much food as
possible for personal consumption, the farmer’s instinct
was to increase constantly his acreage under production.
Before World War I, mechanization was limited mainly
to harvesting. Animals (horses and oxen) did most of
the ploughing and cultivation. Nevertheless, the indi-
vidual farmer managed to cultivate considerable quan-
tities of land, limited mainly by the size of his labour
force. In 1898 Ontario-born A.J. Cotton (1857–1942) har-
vested a crop of over 17,000 bushels of top-grade wheat
in Treherne, Manitoba.
Before the 1890s, western settlement was ham-
pered by several factors. In the first place, the American
West seemed a more attractive option to most potential
new arrivals, with a longer growing season and bet-
ter transportation networks. Between 1871 and 1891,
more people from Canada had departed to the United
States than had come to Canada from abroad. In the
second place, Canadian immigration authorities had
concentrated on recruiting British farmers, with only
limited success. People with agricultural backgrounds
in Britain were, on the whole, doing well and not anx-
ious to move. Finally, the large private land companies
that had received large land grants were not anxious
to select their lands and release them onto the market,
speculating that land would increase in value after the
country was better settled. Beginning in the 1890s an
open and aggressive Canadian immigration policy, con-
ducted by both the federal and provincial governments,
brought new settlers to the prairies. In 1896 a new
Minister of the Interior (with responsibility for immi-
gration) took office. Clifford Sifton (1861–1929) was an
Ontario-born Manitoban who believed in massive agri-
cultural immigration as the key to Canadian prosper-
ity. The trick, he held, was to find suitable immigrants
and to get them onto the land. Sifton decided to take his
immigrant farmers from wherever in the world he could
find them, rather than concentrating on people from the
United Kingdom. He was prepared to recruit in Eastern
Europe, especially on the steppes of Russia where grain
cultivation was well established. Sifton saw a quality
immigrant as a “stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat
born on the soil, whose fore-fathers have been farmers
for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen
children” (quoted in Petryshyn, 1985: 21). He was also
prepared to recruit in the United States, which no longer
had an unsettled frontier of its own, despite a previous
Canadian reluctance to encourage American settle-
ment. Changing conditions in both Eastern Europe and
the United States worked to Canada’s advantage.
The Ukrainians and Doukhobors
Ukraine is a vast territory on the central and southern
plains of Eastern Europe, and during the later nine-
teenth century 85 per cent of this territory was part of
the Russian Empire, while 15 per cent belonged to the
Austrian Empire. The first settlers from Ukraine to
Canada had come in the early 1890s, joining Mennonites
and Hungarians as early arrivals from these European
empires. In 1895, Dr Joseph Oleskiw, a Ukrainian aca-
demic who taught agriculture, visited Canada and
proposed an extensive Ukrainian immigration to the
Canadian West, which Clifford Sifton did his best to
implement. Between 1896 and 1914, about 170,000
Ukrainians—chiefly from the overpopulated Austrian
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282 A History of the Canadian Peoples
provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna—entered Canada,
mainly settling on the prairies. In their homeland, these
people had been experiencing increasing subdivision of
their land and declining productivity because of lack of
capital resulting from heavy taxation. By 1900, half of the
landholdings in the provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna
were less than two hectares in extent, and many small
landholders were heavily in debt. The Ukrainians would
probably have preferred to go to the United States, but
they faced increasing immigration restrictions and an
often hostile reception from the Americans, who no
longer had any unsettled agricultural land to distribute
to newcomers. Many of the immigrants came to Canada
because of a secret agreement between the Canadian
government and the North Atlantic Trading Company,
which directed immigrants to Canada in return for
under-the-table payments on a per capita basis. Indeed,
steamship and railway companies were probably more
successful recruiters of immigration outside the British
Isles than was the Canadian government.
Canada may have been a second choice, but at least
it encouraged Ukrainians to settle and it could make
land available to them. Most Ukrainian immigrants
were poor but not destitute. Like generations of immi-
grants before them, they had sold their land and pos-
sessions to purchase their passage. Like all immigrants
of the time, they found the transatlantic passage in
steerage to be a difficult experience. As their own his-
In western Canada, farmers’ instincts were to increase acreage as much as possible, creating large, profitable farms. Here, farmers
are seen breaking land in Pincher Creek, Alberta. Despite the width and size of the plows illustrated here, they are still being drawn
by horses. Note the size of the crew apparently required for this operation. Glenbow Archives, NA-2382-9.
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2837 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
torians have emphasized, the situation the Ukrainians
entered in Canada was little different from that at
home: bare survival on the land and an early death
for those who failed. But they were stubborn—and
hopeful. Many new arrivals found the quarter-section
homestead concept—160 acres or one-fourth of a square
mile township, the standard survey unit in the West—to
be beyond their comprehension, partly because of its
size and partly because of the difficulty of reproducing
compact village communities like the ones they had left.
The first Ukrainians typically emigrated without
many of their natural leaders, especially parish clergy-
men. They were particularly assisted by three members
of the Ukrainian intelligentsia—Joseph Oleskiw, Kyrole
Genik, and the Reverend Nestor Dmytriw—employed by
the Canadian government as “overseers” and advisers.
These three men produced a substantial body of writ-
ing to assist the new arrivals. They emphasized the need
for capital to establish a farm, the adoption of Canadian
styles of dress, and the acquisition of free land. Canadian
society received the Ukrainians with considerable sus-
picion, chiefly because they were obviously non-British
“foreigners” who spoke an alien language and practised
different customs. Those who settled in the cities (espe-
cially Winnipeg’s North End) in ethnic slum commun-
ities were almost visible. But the willingness of the new
arrivals to work hard was in their favour, at least before
the onset of the Great War. After 1914, Austria-Hungary
joined Germany as the enemy, and many Ukrainians in
Canada became “enemy aliens.”
Usually considered separately from the Ukrainians,
although originating from the same region, the Doukh-
obors were a sectarian movement that broke away from
the Russian Orthodox Church in the eighteenth century.
The Doukhobors (the term literally means “spirit wrest-
lers”) became a Quaker-like pacifistic group that empha-
sized the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and
women and the validation of their beliefs not in books
but in the “book of life.” With the aid of Russian novelist
Leo Tolstoy, the Doukhobors came to western Canada in
search of refuge from Russian persecution. The first con-
tingent was granted recognition as conscientious object-
ors by the Canadian government on 6 December 1898.
Over the next few years, more than 7,500 Doukhobors
arrived in Canada to settle on tracts reserved for them in
what would become Saskatchewan and Alberta. They were
joined by their leader, Peter Verigin (1859–1924), in 1903.
In 1907 the Canadian government backed away from an
earlier commitment to allow the Doukhobors to live and
work communally, insisting instead on individual home-
steading and an oath of allegiance. As a result, under
the leadership of Verigin, communal-living Doukhobors
bought land in the Interior of British Columbia and moved
into the Kootenay region, where they would subsequently
struggle with the authorities over their beliefs.
The Americans
Although the Canadian press would occasionally com-
plain about the “Americanization” of the West and other
places, most Americans had always been regarded
as desirable settlers who “understood the ways of the
continent and its institutions” (Troper, 1972: 12). Many
Americans, of course, had started their lives in British
America before moving to the United States earlier in
the century. Some exceptions to the favourable atti-
tude towards Americans prevailed, however. Many
Canadians objected to the polygynous marriage prac-
tices of the Mormons, who were one of the earliest
groups of immigrants into Alberta in the 1880s, and few
Canadians showed any enthusiasm for the admission
into their country of American blacks from Oklahoma
and elsewhere. In addition to the Mormons, American
cattle and sheep ranchers arrived before the 1890s, but
following the well-publicized “closing of the frontier”
in the United States during that decade the Canadian
government made a real effort after 1896 to recruit
American farmers of European origins for what would
become known as “The Last Best West.”
Canadian agents openly sought wealthy immi-
grants. One common form of recruitment was through
personal correspondence from successful settlers to
prospective ones, organized by the Department of
Immigration. Much of the settlement in Saskatchewan
and Alberta occurred in the so-called Palliser’s Triangle,
a dry-belt region with marginal rainfall. American farm-
ers were alleged to be the best settlers of such land, as
they were familiar with the techniques of dry-land farm-
ing. In a series of land rushes, thousands of American
farmers settled the dry belt in the years between 1906
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284 A History of the Canadian Peoples
and 1914. They prospered because there was adequate
rainfall during this period, but later they abandoned the
region when drought conditions returned.
By 1921 over 44 million acres (17,806,800 ha) of the
prairies were under cultivation. According to one set of
calculations, the wheat economy in 1901–11 contributed
over 20 per cent of the growth in per capita income in
Canada. While wheat was the big prairie crop, other
crops were possible. Before the arrival of farmers, much
of southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan was
the domain of ranchers, who grazed their cattle on open
range leased from the federal government. At the height
of the cattle boom in 1898, Canadian ranchers exported
213,000 live head. Most cattlemen were American, but a
substantial minority were British, and polo-playing was
common in early Alberta. Although ranchers insisted
that much of the range land was unsuitable for farming
because of water shortages, their obvious self-interest in
an open range negated the force of much of their argu-
ment. Nevertheless, water remained a major potential
problem in much of the West.
Mines and Timber
In 1890 Nova Scotia was the leading mining province in
Canada, chiefly because of its rich coal resources. After
that year, three factors hastened a great shift in Canadian
mineral extraction. One was the development of new
Ukrainian (Galician) immigrant family in Quebec, 1911. While immigrants came from many parts of the world to Canada, a
number of programs were directed at Eastern Europeans. Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton desired these “stalwart peasants in
sheep-skin coats,” such as those pictured here, to farm the West. Photo by W.J. Topley, LAC, PA-10401.
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2857 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
technologies to extract ore. Another was the increasing
availability of railway transportation to remote areas.
Most important of all, the international market created a
new demand for metals that Canada had in abundance:
copper, nickel, and silver. Almost overnight, Ontario
and British Columbia became the leading mineral
producers.
Although the most famous mining rush of the per-
iod was to the Yukon’s Klondike district for gold, the
Klondike was hardly typical of the mining industry.
More representative were the mining towns that sud-
denly sprang up and equally rapidly closed down in the
mountains of British Columbia and Alberta. Like most
Canadian mines, these required considerable machin-
ery and expertise to exploit, well beyond the resources
of the individual miner. Well-capitalized corporations
opened such mines, employing money and technology
often imported from the United States. In Quebec, the
most buoyant segment of the mineral industry between
1900 and 1920 was asbestos fibre, used chiefly in con-
struction material consumed in the United States. The
Canadian mining industry greatly benefited from the
military requirements of the Great War.
In the forest industry, the decline through perma-
nent depletion of the white pine forests of eastern
Canada pushed the centre of activity to the West. British
Columbia had millions of acres of Douglas fir and
cedar. The province started harvesting in the coastal
regions close to water, but soon pushed inland. Most of
its production went to American markets. The remain-
ing forests of eastern Canada proved valuable for their
softwood. The pulp and paper industry expanded
rapidly, driven by an insatiable American demand for
inexpensive newsprint. By 1915 wood pulp and paper
represented one-third of the value of Canadian exports,
virtually equal to wheat and grain in the overseas mar-
ket. Quebec produced nearly one-half of Canada’s wood
pulp and paper.
The resource sector produced its own version of
labour militancy. The sector was difficult to organize
by traditional means. In mines and lumber camps, the
distinction between skilled and unskilled labour had
little meaning. Nevertheless, worker alienation was
often extreme. In British Columbia, unrest was par-
ticularly strong among miners, who worked for large
absentee corporations under difficult conditions. In this
kind of environment, syndicalists and radicals (such as
the Wobblies or the Impossibilists) did very well. They
preached the need for the organization of all workers
into general unions and the destruction of capitalism
by revolution.
Urban and Rural
Canada
In 1881 Canada had a population of 4,325,000, of whom
3,349,000 lived outside urban centres. Forty years later,
of the nation’s 8,788,000 inhabitants, only 4,811,000
resided in non-urban areas, and 1,659,000 lived in
cities with populations over 100,000. While the non-
urban population had grown over these years from
3,349,000 to 4,811,000, the number of city dwellers had
burgeoned from 974,000 to 3,977,000. Urban growth
was obviously a major trend of the period 1880–1918.
Canada developed some very large metropolitan cen-
tres, but their residents did not constitute the entire
urban population. If 1,659,000 Canadians lived in cit-
ies of over 100,000 in 1921, another 2.2 million lived
in smaller centres, with 1,058,000 in towns of 5,000 to
29,999 people and 765,000 in towns of 1,000 to 4,999.
Canadian urban growth in this era produced all sorts
of new problems for the nation. At the same time, urban
development was not the entire story for these years.
As the statistics well demonstrate, before 1921 more
Canadians continued to reside in rural than in urban
areas. Rural Canada, although its earlier dominance
was gradually eroding away, was still very important to
the national ethos. Moreover, the very sense of the grad-
ual loss of traditional rural values was critical for the
Canadian psyche.
The City
As with most other aspects of Canadian development
in this period, urban growth was uneven across the
regions. Maritime cities grew fairly sluggishly. None
could establish regional dominance. Indeed, Halifax
lost ground as central Canada siphoned off its financial
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286 A History of the Canadian Peoples
The 1889 Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor
and Capital documented through first-person testi-
mony that a substantial number of children of both
sexes between the ages of 10 and 14 were employed
full-time (10 hours a day, six days a week) in the factor-
ies of Ontario and Quebec. They were paid between
$1.00 and $2.00 per week, depending on their age and
production during a time when the typical working-
man earned $7.00 per week and females somewhat
less. These children were subjected to heavy discipline,
including corporal punishment. They were frequently
fined when they fell behind quotas, and one factory
even had a “black hole” in which a child could be con-
fined for hours or even days. Laws against the use of
child labour, especially children under the age of 14,
existed but were not enforced any more than were
the laws calling for compulsory school attendance.
Parents supported the employment of their children,
even insisted upon it, as part of a “family economy”
that helped sustain many in the working classes of the
nation. The absence of any clear concept of child-
hood beyond the early years helped contribute to the
presence of children in factories and elsewhere in
the Canadian industrial workforce, but such a pattern
was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the
employment of children in Victorian Canada. Most of
Canada remained agricultural, and in this sector of
the economy the dominant economic institution was
the family farm, which operated on the assumption
that every family member beyond the earliest years
worked to contribute to its survival and prosperity.
Unlike the child factory workers, many of whom
probably turned their earnings over to their fam-
ilies, the children working on the farm received no
wages. Also unlike those employed in factories, of
course, some of those children who worked on
the family farm had a prospect of an inheritance at
the end of the day, although usually only the older
males and almost never the females benefited in this
way. According to one recent study of prairie child
labour in the Victorian period, the Canadian West
could not have been successfully settled without the
heavy use of child labour. “Children contributed to
production,  took part in paid employment or other
money-raising activities, worked at domestic and
subsistence tasks, and thereby increased the sup-
ply of cash, food, and other necessary commodities
to the family” (Rollings-Magnusson, 2009: 133–4).
Indeed, settlement in Canada in any period was based
on the exploitation of the unpaid labour of the family,
including both women and children.
BACKGROUNDER
Child Labour in Victorian Canada
Although there were laws in place to protect child labourers,
such as the children seen here separating the ore from the rock in
a Quebec copper mine, these laws were not enforced. © McCord
Museum.
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2877 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
institutions. In Quebec, Montreal continued its path to
the status of the Dominion’s premier city, with Quebec
City and other towns lagging far behind. In Ontario,
Toronto was clearly the “Queen City,” although a num-
ber of smaller cities (Hamilton, London, and Kingston)
were vibrant. Ottawa inhabited a world of its own as the
nation’s capital, as it always would. The most spectacu-
lar urban growth rates were in the West, which in this
era spawned two major cities, Winnipeg and Vancouver,
and two contenders for such a rank, Edmonton and
Calgary. While western settlement usually suggests
farms and agriculture, urban development in the West
was strong from the outset. Land speculation drove
local pretensions, and many communities aspired to be
regional entrepôts. In the Prairie provinces the urban
population grew from 103,000 to 606,000 between 1900
and 1916. City dwellers, who represented 25 per cent of
the region’s population in 1901, had increased to 35 per
cent only 10 years later. By 1921 in British Columbia,
Vancouver (117,217) and Victoria (38,727) contained
25 per cent of the population of that Pacific province.
The larger cities of Canada most clearly exposed
the social problems of the later Victorian and sub-
sequent Edwardian eras. The greatest problem was
poverty. Existing evidence suggests that up to half of
the Canadian urban working class lived below, or at
best around, the poverty line. Most working-class fam-
ilies were glad to supplement the father’s income with
the earnings of wife and children in menial occupa-
tions. Given the grinding conditions of their lives, it
is not surprising that many sought refuge in alcohol.
Unbalanced diets and malnutrition were only the start
of the problems of the poor. Their housing was typically
overcrowded, with poor sanitation and a lack of open
yards and spaces.
Home ownership was difficult, even for the mid-
dle classes, because mortgages were hard to obtain and
were only of short duration, often no more than three or
four years. Malnutrition and deplorable housing condi-
tions combined to produce high overall death rates and
high infant mortality rates in Canada’s largest cities. The
mortality differentials between the poor and the pros-
perous were substantial, ranging from 35.51 deaths per
1,000 in 1895 in one working-class ward in Montreal to
less than 13 per 1,000 “above the hill.” Infant mortality
rates in Canadian cities were little different from those
in places like Calcutta and Bombay. The children of the
urban poor often got little schooling. Moreover, the poor
resisted pressures for compulsory education.
If the city had social problems, it also made pos-
sible a rich and varied cultural life. Before 1918 cultural
life maintained an amateur tradition of considerable
vitality. The major development in Canadian urban
culture in this era was not so much the appearance
of first-rate artists as the creation of an institutional
infrastructure that might eventually enable them to
emerge. The city made possible the development of
cultural institutions in the form of both organiza-
tions and buildings to house them. The construction
of museums, for example, was characteristic of the
age. The Art Museum of Toronto appeared in 1900, the
Royal Ontario Museum in 1912 (it opened in 1914).
Equally characteristic of the era was the formation of
artistic organizations. The Canadian Art Club (1907)
was organized in Toronto, although its founders had
no idea how to achieve their goal of introducing new
Canadian painting to the entire nation. Formal art
and music schools were organized in most of the lar-
ger urban centres, offering regularized instruction to
neophyte painters and musicians. Theatrical buildings
became a measure of a city’s status. As early as 1891
Vancouver had a 1,200-seat opera house. Toronto’s
Royal Alexandra Theatre (1906–7) seated 1,525, and
Winnipeg’s Walker Theatre (1907, recently renovated
as a theatrical venue) seated 2,000 in splendid com-
fort. These buildings operated continuously, housing
mainly professional touring companies and local ama-
teurs. Homegrown professional theatre emerged first in
Montreal. There were 10 different professional compan-
ies at work in Montreal in the 1890s. In 1899 alone these
companies gave 618 performances of 109 plays.
The extent of the growth of urban Canada between
1880 and 1919 was largely unanticipated. The large
city cut against most of the dominant ideologies of
the time, which were traditional and rural. The insti-
tutions of urban government were not well integrated
into the overall Canadian political system. The British
North America Act did not leave much room for the
governance of cities that would have budgets and rev-
enues as large as those of the provinces in which they
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288 A History of the Canadian Peoples
were located. Urban government and urban politics
operated outside the structures of Confederation, with
their own agendas and distinct party labels. Most cities
were slow to abandon property qualifications for vot-
ing. Local merchants and real estate promoters tended
to dominate city councils, even in cities with a relatively
democratic franchise. The ward system produced muni-
cipal politicians who curried favour with the electorate
through corrupt practices ranging from the purchasing
of votes to offers of “jobs for the boys.”
No urban centre could expect to prosper in this
era if it was not on a main-line railway. Contemporaries
clearly recognized this reality. During the several out-
bursts of railway expansion—particularly between 1906
and 1915, when more than 14,000 new miles (22,530 km)
of railway track were laid in Canada—efforts by aspir-
ing communities to become depots and junction points
were prodigious. Conversely, rumours of new railway
construction were sufficient to create a village where
none had existed previously. The extremes to which
communities would go to publicize themselves in order
to attract railways were occasionally ludicrous and often
expensive. Agricultural fairs, as well as the presence of
town bands and sports teams, publicized communities.
A marching brass band and a baseball team were two of
the best advertisements an “up-and-at-’em” town could
enjoy. “Bonusing”—financial inducements for railways
and business entrepreneurs alike—was a way of life in
this period.
If urban growth relied on railway networks, it
operated in a context of fairly blatant and open land
speculation. The attempted creation of every new
city in western Canada began with a land boom. This
stage of development usually ended with a collapse in
land prices that required years of recovery. Many small
businessmen in the West made a decent living selling
out in one community just ahead of the bust and moving
to a new townsite further down the rail line. The false
fronts on western small-town stores were symbolic of the
transitory nature of commitment. Speculation in land
involved not merely businessmen—or the West. Almost
all segments of local communities across Canada joined
in real estate speculation whenever they could. Indeed,
the attempt to turn a profit by investing in undeveloped
The “foreign” quarter of Winnipeg, c. 1909. Archives of Manitoba, Immigration 17, N7936.
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2897 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
land must surely be one of the most enduring features of
Canadian life. Speculation was different from develop-
ment. The former involved the holding of land for future
profit, the latter the translation of land—often acquired
at bargain prices—into immediate profit as sites for
houses or factories.
Town and Suburb
In the larger urban centres land speculation and develop-
ment were inseparable from the process of suburbaniz-
ation. This trend combined with urban expansion away
from the commercial core of most cities. There were
three distinct motives for suburban expansion. Different
types of suburbs were the result. The first motive dom-
inated among the prospering business and professional
classes, who moved to new residential suburbs to escape
the noise, odours, and bustle of the central city. Horse
droppings on busy city streets, for example, were a
major problem before the Great War. Some of these
suburbanites were attempting to separate themselves
from the growing slums of the industrializing city. The
architectural style most closely associated with the new
suburban elites grew out of the English Arts and Crafts
movement and became known as the English Domestic
Revival. A second motive for suburban growth was the
Interior of slum home, Winnipeg, c. 1915.What assumptions can we make about the subjects and surroundings in this photograph?
Archives of Manitoba, Foote 1491, N2438.
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290 A History of the Canadian Peoples
quest for lower land costs and lower taxes outside the
central city. The result was the development of a number
of industrial suburbs, such as Maisonneuve in Montreal,
which flourished outside the city but were still within its
orbit. The third motive was proximity to work. As indus-
trial development moved into the cheaper outskirts,
workers were forced to follow their jobs into often inad-
equate new housing. During this period, most large cit-
ies in Canada grew by a continuous process of absorbing
outlying communities.
The genuine Canadian small town tended to fit
one of two models. It was either a community serving a
surrounding rural area, sometimes with a manufactur-
ing plant or two, or a single-resource community, often
remotely located, that had formed around a mine or
mining/smelter operation. The resource town consisted
almost exclusively of single males, with only a handful
of women. There were precious few sources of entertain-
ment other than booze and gambling. Many resource
towns, though not all, were company towns. Such com-
munities were both violent and restive, often centres of
labour unrest.
The service community, on the other hand, was the
centre of economic, social, and recreational life for its
district. Before the advent of radio and television, the
social life of small-town Canada bustled impressively.
Organizations of all kinds proliferated and flourished.
Most towns had a variety of lodges and an endless round
of meetings, dances, and “occasions.” These occasions
included concerts, plays, sermons by visiting evangelical
It will be remembered that, according to our indus-
trious census, the total number of poor families was
reckoned at 888 in “the city below the hill.” Half of
this number were by the writer selected as material
for a second and more searching investigation, with
a view of more fully examining the characteristics,
conditions and causes of our west-end poverty. Four
hundred and thirty-six families were sought for, and
the first fact that was brought to the notice of the
investigator was that 46 families, or 10 1/2 per cent
of the above number, had left their former abodes,
within the two months between the first and second
canvass, drawing attention to one of the sad fea-
tures of poverty’s lot, viz., the constant necessity to
move on because of inability to satisfy the claims of
the landlord. If this ratio were maintained, and each
month saw 5 per cent of the poor evicted, in a year
not half these families could be found at the former
addresses.
A second fact, made apparent by the special
investigation, was that our west-end poverty was not
the result of recent immigration. Quite the reverse
from what would have been the case in New York or
Chicago, hardly a dozen families were discovered that
had not been residents of the city for at least three
years. The vast majority were old residents who had
lived in Montreal for the greater part of their lives.
The presence of poverty, then, in the nether city is
not chargeable to any considerable influx of foreign
elements.
Herbert Brown Ames on Poverty in Montreal
In 1897 the Montreal businessman Herbert Brown Ames published a series of articles in the
Montreal Star that subsequently appeared as a book. The articles were based on his careful survey
of social conditions in part of the west side of Montreal. The district he had selected probably
offered a fair sample of working-class residences in Montreal at the end of the nineteenth century.
Contemporary Views
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2917 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
preachers, and lectures on temperance or exotic places.
By the end of the Great War, most towns had a “movie
house” or a hall that exhibited motion pictures on a
regular basis. Many small towns had exercised the local
option permitted by liquor legislation and “gone dry.”
Small-town social relations were often strained, particu-
larly between the middle classes and those who worked
in the factories that many eastern small towns possessed.
In the West, class conflict often pitted farmers against
hired hands or the crews of threshing contractors. The
possibility of outbreaks of violence was never far away.
Even more serious were the gender constraints
inherent in the structure of small towns. Masculinity
dominated the life of the town, in terms both of family
relationships and especially of extracurricular activity.
Local sports were controlled by notions of manliness,
and most athletic organizations catered only to men.
Local fraternal organizations were equally mascu-
line and exclusionist, although occasionally they had
women’s auxiliaries. One of the most important under-
lying tensions in many (although not all) small towns
was between church-related and other voluntary organ-
izations. The church organizations were dominated by
women and often sought reform, including prohibition
of alcohol and elimination of gambling. The mascu-
line-dominated voluntary structure was often, by impli-
cation, the chief target of these reformers. The attentive
and careful reader can find all these tensions exhibited
in the novels of small-town life that dominated Canadian
literature in these years.
In the case of 323 families inquiries were made
as to the causes, assigned by the people them-
selves, for their indigent condition. With 109 families,
or 34 per cent the reply was “irregularity of work.”
The wage-earners were not without vocations but
their employment was intermittent and often work
ceased altogether for considerable periods. With
87 families or 28 per cent the answer was that the
wage-earners had no work whatever, nor did there
seem to be any immediate prospect of getting any.
With 27 families, or 9 per cent, old age had unfitted
and with a like number sickness had prevented the
worker from earning the requisite support. Out of
these 323 families, among the poorest of the poor,
62 per cent claimed to be able to better their condi-
tion were employment regular and abundant. That a
certain percentage of the answers given did not state
the real facts of the case is quite probable. Few are
the families that will admit to a stranger that drink,
crime or voluntary idleness is the cause of their mis-
ery, though in 7 per cent of the cases visited drunk-
enness was clearly at the bottom of the trouble. Still
it is the belief of the investigator that the undeserving
among the poor form a far smaller proportion than is
generally imagined.
As to the composition of the family, out of 390 fam-
ilies, 86 were found wherein the head of the household
was a widow, and 54 cases where the husband was
too old or too ill to work, making in all 140 families, or
36 per cent of the whole, that might be called “decapi-
tated” family groups. In about two-thirds of the  fam-
ilies, or in 64 per cent of the cases examined, there was
an able-bodied man in the house, oftimes more than
one, a man able to work and professing to be willing to
do so. If these proportions may be taken as fairly indi-
cating the average among the families of the poor, it is
evident that at least one-third of them are in indigent
circumstances through no fault of their own. . . .
Source: H. Ames, The City Below the Hill, pp. 74–6. © University of Toronto Press, 1972.
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292 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Rural Canada
A number of major changes occurred in Canadian agri-
culture during the period from 1880 to 1914. The most
obvious was the enormous expansion of farming in the
prairie West, concentrating single-mindedly on grain
cultivation. Elsewhere, the era saw a major shift in east-
ern Canada towards specialized farming. In central
Canada, farmers moved into specialized high-quality
consumer production, becoming increasingly depend-
ent on off-farm processing, particularly of cheese, but-
ter, and meat. By 1900 Ontario had over 1,200 cheese
factories, which captured over half of the British mar-
ket. Ontario cheese makers were renowned around the
world. Quebec farmers had greater difficulty in making
the change because of the marginality of much of their
land. Specialty farming was very remunerative for those
able to engage in it. The aristocrats of farming were the
dairy farmers and the fruit farmers. Along with special-
ized farming came new technology, although the ubi-
quitous tractor did not replace the horse until after the
Great War. More important were mechanical harvesters,
centrifugal cream separators, and the introduction of
refrigeration. Technology was essential to specializa-
tion. It was also capital-intensive. Not all farmers could
make the shift. Those who could not often stagnated or
failed absolutely. Between 1891 and 1921 the Maritime
region lost 22,000 farms and 1,556,709 acres (630,000 ha)
of farmland under cultivation. Unmodernized farms
could not continue to support the entire family. By
1911 the Farmer’s Advocate could refer to the “perennial
debates as to ‘Why the Boys Leave the Farm’.” While
urban migration was one response, another was that
farmers—and farm women—moved into the traditional
resource industries of the nation. Males went to sea to
fish or into the woods to cut timber. Females worked
seasonally in factories, processing farm products or fish.
Contemporaries often blamed the growing rural
exodus on the social and cultural attractions of the
city. While it might thus be tempting to visualize rural
Canada as a vast wasteland of isolated and unlettered
country bumpkins, such a view would be most inaccurate.
Isolation did exist, as did educational limitations. On the
other hand, a relatively efficient and inexpensive postal
service provided contact with the wider world. People
read books and discussed them at clubs that met in local
churches. Clergymen often talked about controversial
books and topics from their pulpits. Many farm families
received at least one daily newspaper through the mail—
seldom on the day of publication, but usually only a day
or two later. Canadian dailies in this era provided more
substantial fare than today. International coverage was
much fuller, and many papers saw themselves as “papers
of record,” often reproducing verbatim accounts of court
trials and important meetings. In the spring of 1919, for
example, the Winnipeg Tribune carried a full stenograph-
er’s report of the debates at the labour convention in
Calgary, which agreed to “an Industrial Organization of
all workers.” Most rural folk also relied heavily for their
edification on farm journals such as the Grain Growers’
Guide (1908–28) and more general magazines like the
Christian Guardian, the voice of the Methodist Church;
it was begun in 1829 by Egerton Ryerson and continued
under that name until 1925. The wide range of letters to
the editor included in most of these periodicals suggests
both their circulation and their vitality.
If rural Canadians had access to considerable infor-
mation, they were also surprisingly able to get together
socially with each other. The school and the church
Although most athletic organizations catered only to men, by
the turn of the twentieth century, hockey was being regularly
played by women as well as men. Here is the Rossland, British
Columbia, Ladies’ Hockey Team, c. 1900. Rossland Museum
Archives, RHMA02-18-997.
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2937 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
The Town Directory of Treherne, Manitoba, 1895
Document
Town Directory 1895
E. Hamilton’s our high school master;
D. Hamilton puts on the plaster;
Revds. McClung, Fraser and George Fill
On Sundays do our pulpits fill;
T.J. Lamont’s our town M.D.;
One blacksmith’s name is Thos. Lee;
Rogers sells dry goods and coffees;
Alexander keeps post office;
D. Williams and J.K. McLennan
Sell dry goods, cod, haddock finnan,
Ben Englewain repairs the clocks;
Our miller’s name is Jas A. Cox;
James Telford Reid’s our legal light
One retired farmer’s called John White;
’Tis G.A. Anderson that carried
The business on for Massey-Harris;
And S.L. Taylor sells the pills,
That sometimes cure and sometimes kill;
C.W. Barkwell is town baker;
Ed Roberts is the undertaker;
Tom Roberts helps his brother Ed
Sell furniture and house the dead;
Joe Straube is town hardware man;
In athletics Paulin leads the van;
One livery’s kept by the Parker Brothers;
And John Perrie keeps the other;
Jas. Stevenson keeps the “Manitoba,”
With parlor, dining-room, and lobby;
Fred Rocket keeps the “Rocket House”;
Our tailor’s name is Harry House;
D. Harvie harness makes and collars
Watt Smith irons wagons, sleighs and rollers
And general blacksmith shop controls;
His carriage maker’s William Bowles;
Andrew Ross supplies the butcher meat;
Malcolm McClarty shoes the feet;
H. Watson, Senior health inspector;
James McAdam’s tax collector;
Claude Somerville’s mill engineer;
John Coulter is mill charioteer;
James Emmond sues for delinquent debts,
And William Frame does serve the writs;
Robson deals in lumber, lime, and bricks . . . .
In 1907 Alan Ross, a local poet in Treherne, Manitoba, published a small volume of his verse. It
included the following poem, the subject of which is self-explanatory.
Source: Alan Ross, Poems (Treherne, Man.: The Treherne Times, 1907), 18.
were two local institutions that served other functions
besides providing formal education and worship servi-
ces. School districts were usually the only sign of public
organization in vast regions of rural Canada that were
otherwise politically unorganized. The community
jealously guarded its schoolhouse, which, from coast
to coast, was typically of one room. The most common
Quebec school in the 1913 census had one room, built
at a cost of $1,200. Whether Protestant or Catholic,
francophone or anglophone, rural Canadians took their
religion seriously. Sermons provided topics for daily
conversation. The activities of various auxiliary groups
connected with any church, particularly the picnics and
socials, were very popular. Winter did not shut down
social life in rural areas, but permitted it to flower. The
demands of the farm were much lighter in winter, while
snow and ice provided a decent surface for horse-drawn
sleighs and carrioles to travel about the countryside. “A
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294 A History of the Canadian Peoples
working day . . . was from about 4:30 a.m. to 11 o’clock at
night,” reported one western farmer, “but this was only
in seeding and harvesting time. In the winter we used to
really have fun” (quoted in Voisey, 1988: 158).
A number of diaries and journals kept by rural
Canadians in this period have recently appeared in
print. They provide two revelations for the modern
reader. The first is the sheer volume of social inter-
change, especially among the young, that actually
occurred. The second is the extent to which Canadians
of this era actively participated in their own entertain-
ment rather than being amused as passive spectators by
the activities of others. Canadians of both sexes and all
ages routinely spent social evenings singing hymns and
other songs. They created and performed their own skits
and joined together in active games such as charades.
Rural life was not all bucolic pleasure, of course.
The real reason for the rural exodus was not isolation
but exploitation and lack of economic opportunity. The
underside of life on the family farm was the exploitation
and abuse of those who would not in the end inherit a
substantial share in the property. The system was par-
ticularly hard on women, who usually did not share in
the ownership of the farm and who seldom received
remuneration for their labour. Western farmers espe-
cially were hostile to “anachronistic” legal concepts
such as dower rights. The homesteading system was
generally unsympathetic to the rights of women to set
up as independent farmers. For many women every-
where in Canada, the daily routine was even more
continually demanding than it was for men. Women’s
responsibilities included not only the kitchen garden
and the smaller livestock, such as chickens and pigs,
but care of the family itself. One consequence of the
shift into specialized farming was that parts of the
farm operation previously consigned to women that
provided them with a small income (“egg money”) were
taken over by the males. Canadian rural society con-
tinued to be inherently patriarchal in its organization.
Men owned the land and usually made the decisions,
including when to uproot and resettle, often against the
wishes of their wives. The figure of the rural patriarch as
an intensely self-righteous, land-hungry, materialistic
tyrant became a common motif in Canadian fiction of
this and a slightly later period.
Despite the darker side, a vast majority of Canadians
continued to hold rural values and to think of the nation
largely in pastoral terms. Those who read Canadian
poetry or looked at Canadian art found little but
Canadian nature. Foreigners inevitably saw Canada as
a completely undeveloped country and Canadians as an
agricultural people. In the hands of the poets, Canadian
nature was chiefly benign. Writers of prose sometimes
depicted nature differently, often in terms of the victory
of hardy settlers over the harsh landscape and climate.
Many Canadian writers and painters of this period
romanticized the farm and farming, none more so than
Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne of Green Gables summed
up a major conflict of the era: the problem of reconciling
the bucolic beauty and tranquility of the rural landscape
with the need to leave it in order to fulfill one’s ambitions.
For large numbers of Canadians of this era, growing up
meant leaving the farm.
Another form of romanticization of rural life was
the collection of its folklore and folksongs. Marius
Barbeau (1883–1969) was the first great Canadian col-
lector of folk traditions, beginning in 1911 when he was
appointed an anthropologist at the Museum Branch
of the Geological Survey of Canada (now the National
Museum of Canada). Barbeau recorded and preserved
in archives thousands of songs and narratives that
document not only the folk traditions of rural Quebec
but also those of the Aboriginal peoples in British
Columbia. The folkways and songs that Barbeau and
others collected were part of the traditional rural
experience of Canada. They preserved almost nothing
of urban origin. The collectors desperately gathered up
dialects, riddles, tall tales, and children’s rhymes, all of
which told more of the daily life of the people than most
other historical evidence. Underlying the desperation
was the fear that these traditions would disappear in the
rapidly changing society of the period.
The dominance in Canada of the myth of agricul-
ture carried over into the various efforts of the period
to turn Aboriginal peoples into “peaceable agricultural
labourers.” Agrarian ideology had the advantage of both
justifying the dispossession of the Native peoples of
their hunting grounds and providing them with an alter-
nate way of life. Before the Great War most Canadians
regarded agriculture as “the mainspring of national
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2957 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
Quebec
United States of America
Alaska
(USA)
Ontario
Manitoba
Alberta
District of Mackenzie
Saskatchewan
British
Columbia
District of
Keewatin
District of
Ungava
Yukon
Territory

N
ew
foundland
Nova
Scotia
NB
PEI
District of
Franklin
Montreal
Ottawa
Toronto
Vancouver
Victoria
Quebec
Winnipeg
Regina
Edmonton
St
L
aw
re
nc
e
R.

A t l a n t i c
O c e a n
P a c i f i c
O c e a n
H u d s o n
B a y
N
S
E W
0 500
kilometres
1,000
A r c t i c C i r c l e
Quebec
United States of America
Alaska
(USA)
Ontario
Manitoba
District of
Alberta
District of
Athabasca
District of Mackenzie
District of
Saskatchewan
District of
Assiniboia
British
Columbia
District of
Keewatin
District of
Ungava
District of
Franklin
Yukon
Territory
1898

N
ew
foundland
Nova
Scotia
NB
PEI
Montreal
Ottawa
Toronto
Vancouver
Victoria
Quebec
St
L
aw
re
nc
e
R.

A t l a n t i c
O c e a n
P a c i f i c
O c e a n
H u d s o n
B a y
N
S
E W
0 500
kilometres
1,000
A r c t i c C i r c l e
Provinces
Northwest Territories
Yukon Territory
Newfoundland
Disputed Area
Provinces
North-West Territories
Yukon Territory
Newfoundland
Disputed Area
Canada in 1898 and 1905.
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296 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Basket socials may not be a form of amusement
peculiar to Prince Edward Island, but in all events, I
have never seen a place where they attained to such
prominence, among the various schemes for getting
money, as in this province. . . .
Often it happens that in country villages a debt
is to be paid by a congregation, either a balance
due on their church or perhaps for a new organ.
Instead of raising the necessary amount by pri-
vate subscription, the people decide upon a basket
social, and word is sent to everyone. Upon hearing
this the young ladies all begin to prepare baskets
containing ample lunch for two people. These they
carry, carefully wrapped in many sheets of paper,
to the hall on the night of the social, and hand over
to the committee in charge. The baskets are sold
by auction, and the purchaser of each must share
its contents with the young lady who brought it.
Of course every young man is anxious to get the
basket prepared by his “best girl”: but as the names
are not announced until after the baskets are sold,
many mistakes are made, and the remarks some-
times uttered, by fond lovers who have paid a high
price for the wrong one, look much better in print
when expressed by a dash.
Let us try to imagine ourselves in a hall in almost
any country settlement on the evening devoted to
one of these popular meetings. . . . The committee,
composed of elders of the church, were kept busy
finding seats for the ladies; taking care of the bas-
kets handed to them, and doing the many little things
necessary at all such entertainments. Now, however,
we see them placing a row of chairs on the platform,
and pushing the organ into a more convenient pos-
ition. Hardly had this been done when there enter
from a side door a number of ladies and gentlemen,
who proceed to occupy the chairs. This is the village
choir, and during the past week they have been prac-
ticing pieces to be sung to-night. . . .
Cheers, whistles and stamping of feet greeted
the choir, who arose and, to the accompaniment
of a hard-breathing organ, sang “Jingle Bells.” The
first verse was sung amid perfect silence, but in the
second the crowd caught the rhythm of the piece and
kept time to it with their feet, especially in the chorus,
when a string of sleigh bells was used to make the
effect more realistic. A recitation, “Curfew shall not
ring to-night,” given by a young lady, followed the
chorus, but as most of the audience knew the piece
by heart, very little attention was paid, and the greater
portion of the piece remained almost unheard. But
amid the din the speaker’s voice could be heard every
now and then, and bravely she struggled through
until, with the saving of the lover, the piece ended and
the “Amen corner” burst into thunderous applause.
Then came a fine-looking soloist—tenor in the choir
and local auctioneer. He began “Ten thousand leaves
are falling,” but having pitched the song in too high a
key, his voice broke and he stopped, his failure being
greeted by frantic howls and advice from one of the
“A Basket Social in P.E. Island”
“Preserve me from ‘pie socials’,” wrote Lucy Maud Montgomery in her journal on 4 April 1899.
“They are the abomination of desolation.” The following more positive view was expressed
by “Welland Strong” (presumably a nom de plume) in a 1901 issue of the Prince Edward Island
Magazine. Whoever the author may have been, he or she was quite right in thinking that the social
was not distinctive to the Island, but appeared everywhere in rural Canada.
A Basket Social in P.E. Island
by Welland Strong
Contemporary Views
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2977 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
greatness” and farming as a way of life that uplifted one
“morally and emotionally” (Carter, 1990: 20). Scientists
saw agriculture as a crucial step in the ladder of prog-
ress. They perceived other ways of using the land, such
as mining or lumbering, as tainted and inferior. The
government displaced Aboriginals by treaties, then
removed them to reserves and encouraged them to farm.
Exhortation was not the same as useful practical assist-
ance. Native Canadians on the prairies needed a good
deal of help to shift from a semi-nomadic hunting/gath-
ering existence to a settled agricultural one, and they
did not consistently receive assistance. Government
aid was sporadic, cheese-paring, and patronizing. After
1885 coercion replaced subsidization as the federal gov-
ernment’s major weapon to impose agriculturalism on
the reserves. Not surprisingly, the policy failed.
A final illustration of nature’s appeal for Canadians
came in the various back-to-nature movements. One form
involved mounting crusades to preserve Canada’s natural
environment in the face of encroaching civilization. The
fight for the conservation of Canadian wildlife involved
the establishment of game reserves and legislation to
curb indiscriminate hunting. The crusade’s major vic-
tories came with the establishment of large numbers of
national and provincial parks across Canada in the years
before the Great War. Another expression of the back-
to-nature movement was the summer cottage, which
flourished among urbanites who could afford one by the
early years of the twentieth century. Many refugees from
the farm resolved their ambivalences through the sum-
mer cottage or summer travel, often into the wilderness.
Thus, alongside the burgeoning Canadian cities came
the growth of summer cottages and resort hotels, located
at lakeside or seaside, and frequently directly served
by rail. Weekend train services poured middle-class
Canadians by the thousands into the Laurentians of
Quebec, the Muskoka, Algonquin Park, and Haliburton
districts of Ontario, and from Winnipeg into the Lake of
the Woods district. The Canadian fascination with the
summer cottage had taken firm hold before the Great
War. During this same period, the establishment of
a national park system had begun with the creation of
Rocky Mountain Park (later Banff National Park) in 1885,
and this and other parks in the Rocky Mountains (Yoho,
Glacier, Jasper, Waterton Lakes) of British Columbia and
Alberta were conveniently reached by rail and, in some
cases, the railways built expensive, sumptuous hotels to
accommodate sojourners from the city.
While some Canadians settled temporarily into
cottage or tourist hotel, others became fascinated
with the recreational possibilities of wilderness travel.
The waterways of Ontario and Quebec grew crowded
small boys to “start her at five thousand.” The pro-
gramme went on; chorus following reading, and solo,
chorus, the last few numbers being rendered ’midst
an almost deafening noise and shouts of “Bring on
the baskets.”
When it ended the choir moved to one side of the
platform, the schoolmaster who was to act as secre-
tary and treasurer took his place at the table, and the
auctioneer stepped forward holding in his hand the
first basket, now unwrapped and decorated in a most
fantastic manner with flags, flowers and coloured tis-
sue paper. . . . After all the baskets have been sold,
the names of the purchasers and ladies are read off
by the secretary, and the baskets opened by them.
Usually besides various kinds of cake and pie, the
basket contains glasses and a bottle of home-made
wine; but in case this has been left out, and also for
the benefit of the older people, the committee fur-
nish plenty of tea. When the lunch has been disposed
of, the men go to the nearest stables for their horses,
which have been left there, while the young ladies
gather their belongings, get muffled up ready for the
drive home and, while waiting for their friends, sing a
verse of “God save the King.”
Sleigh after sleigh drives up to the door, the
women and girls depart, and in a very few minutes
no one remains in the hall save the members of the
committee—counting over the money they have
made and writing a report of the social to be pub-
lished in the papers next day.
Source: The Island Magazine 46 (Fall/Winter 1999): 7–12. Reprinted with permission.
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298 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Wed. June 29 [1892]. Well here it is just a beauti-
ful day, fine and just warm enough to be pleasant.
This is the third day of our holidays and I can’t say
I have enjoyed them very much so far. Yesterday it
poured rain from dinner time until tea time, but still
I was not very lonely because there is such a house-
ful of us. Besides, Aunt Rose (who came over a week
ago tomorrow) came up and stayed all day, and she
is just splendid company. In the morning I did my
housework up and then trimmed May’s sailor hat,
and after dinner I got Winnie’s ready for trimming and
then made lemon filling for my Washington pie which
I made yesterday and made frosting for it also. And I
practised some and read some of a book called Little
Journey in the World by the same author of Baddeck
and That Sort of Thing. Mr. Bailey and Eddie White,
Fred Henderson and Leonard Webster came up and
spent the evening. We had lots of fun as usual over
those Tiddlywinks. We had two tables, and when
one side missed they had to go to the other table,
and the best players kept their same places. There
were Mr. B. and Nell, Win and Fred, Leonard and
Bois, and Eddie and I. After playing we had a lot of
music. Leonard sang “They are After Me” and some
other songs, and Mr. Bailey gave us a solo, then we
had some Charades. We also made up an orchestra
just for fun. Mr. B. played on the mouth organ (he
plays just beautifully on it), and Leonard had the tam-
bourine, Bois a tin whistle, Eddie another, and May
the table bell, and Winnie played one piano and Nell
accompanied her on the other, while I had the zither.
Oh but we had fun over that.
Monday morning (day before yesterday) was
fine but the afternoon was wet. I wrote a long let-
ter to Ted before dinner. She wrote Nell and I while
she was on her journey that they had stopped for
a while at a little place a hundred miles from Port
Arthur. Her mother told me yesterday that they both
liked it in Winnipeg very much and Lottie was feeling
very well only tired and sleepy. It is just three weeks
I think from Monday since they left. For the past
month back, part of the Lodge members were get-
ting up a drama for the Lodge called The Social Glass.
Nettie Evans, Mrs. Lodge, and Floss White and Eddie
McDonald, Mr. Russell, Mr. Butler, Mr. Colwell, and
Mr. Belyear and Es Hamilton are the ones that took
part in it. So they gave it to the public last Monday
evening. It was just fine. They had a full house and
the band played between every act, some very pretty
selections. They all took their parts splendidly. Hardly
anybody knew Flo, when the curtain rose, and she
was dressed as a bride in a light blue dress and her
hair done up and flowers in it and she looked just
sweet but so womanly. Es Hamilton was too comical
for anything as Bob Brittle. Oh he was grand. Nettie
Evans as Nettie Nettlebee could not have been bet-
ter. It just suited her to a tee. “She did love to make
folks happy.” Will Butler was splendid as Fairly. He
acted the delirium tremens fine and all the rest were
good too. Though it was ridiculous and comical in
lots of places, yet it was sad when you thought it was
just real life. This social glass at first and then it gets to
more and more until your own life is ruined by it and
many many others.
Sadie Allen’s Diary, Summer 1892
Source: Mary Biggar Peck, ed., A Full House and Fine Singing: Diaries and Letters of Sadie Harper Allen (Fredericton: Goose Lane Press, 1992), 66–7.
with weekend canoeists enjoying a brief respite from
the pressures of the city. Ernest Thompson Seton
(1860–1946), who founded an organization called
Woodcraft Indians in 1902, promoted a junior version
of this outdoor activity from his apartment in New York
City. Some of the best publicists for the canoe and the
wilderness were painters, especially those who eventu-
ally formed the Group of Seven in 1920. Its members,
Contemporary Views
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2997 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
mainly English-born Torontonians making a living as
commercial artists, had begun travelling north into
the Georgian Bay and Algonquin wildernesses as early
as 1911. This group captured the iconographic essence
of wilderness Canada: a bleak and sombre but none-
theless curiously beautiful landscape of Jack pines,
rock outcroppings, and storm-driven lakes, totally
uninhabited by people.
Other Identities
We can easily make too much of the political and
religious arena. The elaboration of competing and
occasionally incompatible identities by and for its cit-
izens characterized the Victorian Age. As well as their
national and provincial loyalties, most Canadians had
firm allegiances to their ethnic origins, whether these
were French Canadian, Acadian, or British. French
Canada further elaborated its cultural identity in this
period, and the Acadians began self-consciously to
develop one. As for those people whose origins were
in the British Isles, they simultaneously thought of
themselves as British as well as Welsh, Scottish, Irish,
or English. Indeed, British Canadians may well have
thought of themselves as more British (as opposed to
Welsh or Scottish) than did their compatriots at home.
The state did not weigh heavily on the daily lives of
most Canadians in this era, although the administrative
state had begun its development before Confederation.
“Odabin Cottage,” the summer house of Charles Howard Millar, the local postmaster, Drummondville, Quebec, c. 1903. Canadians’
fascination with the summer cottage had already taken hold before 1914. Except for some ostentatious present-day “cottages” on
some lakes, this cottage of more than a century ago is little different from those that Canadians rush to in the summer months
today. Such cottages are perhaps most notable for how they blend into—as opposed to stand out from—the surrounding natural
environment, in this case even with the decking built around small trees. © McCord Museum.
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300 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Taxation had not yet become ubiquitous and occurred
mainly as tariffs and duties. Moreover, the state—as
represented by province, nation, or city—did not nor-
mally provide social benefits or solace when people got
sick, lost jobs, retired, or died. For some, politics and gov-
ernment were a source of employment or patronage. For
most Canadians, however, government had very little to
do with their lives. For many people, political allegiance
to the state was therefore not as important as loyalty to
the caring institutions: family, ethnic group, religion,
and fraternal organization. Churches and religion were
most important. Canada was a Christian country and
few of its citizens openly defied Christian norms and
values. By the 1880s the mobility of many Canadians
contributed to the tendency to belong to a good many
other voluntary organizations beyond the church. In an
earlier period, voluntary organizations supplemented
or provided municipal services such as water, light,
fire, and libraries as well as charity. By the 1880s some
organizations had begun providing entertainment and
companionship for their members.
Technically independent of the churches, but closely
connected in overlapping membership and social goals,
were reform organizations like the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union. Letitia Youmans (1827–96), a pub-
lic school teacher and Sunday school teacher in the
Methodist Church, founded the first Canadian local
of the WCTU in December 1874 in Picton, Ontario.
The WCTU spread rapidly across Canada in the 1880s,
preaching that alcohol abuse was responsible for many
of the social problems of contemporary Canada and
campaigning for public prohibition of the sale of alco-
holic beverages. Most of its membership came from the
middle class, and much of its literature was directed
at demonstrating that poverty and family problems
among the lower orders could be reduced, if not elim-
inated, by cutting off the availability of alcohol to the
male breadwinner.
Canadians of the time tended to associate
Orangeism with political matters—organizing parades
on 12 July, opposing Roman Catholics, objecting to the
1870 execution of Thomas Scott—and with the Irish.
Nevertheless, the Orange Order’s real importance and
influence continued to rest on the twin facts that its
membership united British Protestants of all origins
and that it served as a focal point on the local level for
social intercourse and conviviality. As a “secret” society,
it had elaborate initiation rites and a ritual that appealed
to men who spent most of their lives in drudgery or
dull routine. Lodges provided a variety of services for
members, including an elaborate funeral. But if local
fraternity was the key to Orangeism’s success, its public
influence was enormous. In 1885 John A. Macdonald’s
government would prefer to risk alienating Quebec by
executing Louis Riel than alienating Orange Ontario by
sparing him.
The Orange Order was not the only fraternal organ-
ization that grew and flourished in Canada. Because
most of these societies were semi-secret, with rites based
on Freemasonry, they appealed mainly to Protestants.
The Masons themselves expanded enormously during
the mid-nineteenth century. They were joined by a num-
ber of other orders, such as the Independent Order of
Oddfellows (founded in England in 1813 and brought
to Canada by 1845), the Independent Order of Foresters
(founded in the United States in 1874 and brought to
Canada in 1881), and the order of the Knights of Pythias
(founded in Washington, DC, in the early 1860s and
brought to Canada in 1870). The Knights of Labor was
an all-embracing labour organization that owed much
to the lodges. Fellowship and mutual support were the
keys to the success of all of these societies. Their success
led to the formation in 1882 of the Knights of Columbus
as a similar fraternal benefit society for Roman Catholic
men, although the first chapters in Canada were prob-
ably not founded until the early 1890s. While few of these
societies admitted women directly, most had adjunct or
parallel organizations for women. By the 1880s many
Canadians belonged to one or more of these societies.
Membership offered a means of social introduction into
a new community, provided status and entertainment to
members, and increasingly supplied assurance of assist-
ance in times of economic or emotional crisis.
Culture
In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, most Canadians
continued to amuse themselves at home by making
music and playing numerous parlour games. Outside
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3017 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
the home, the amateur tradition remained strong. In
most fields of artistic endeavour, Britain and the United
States remained the dominant influences. Perhaps
the outstanding original achievements in Canadian
cultural production in this period occurred in fiction.
Three developments stand out. One was the creation of
the Canadian social novel. A second was the rise of a
major figure in Canadian humour to carry on the ear-
lier tradition of Haliburton and McCulloch. The third
development, related to the previous two, was the emer-
gence of several Canadian authors as international
bestsellers. Some of these authors were women. All the
successful authors were at their best in writing about
the values of rural and small-town Canada at the end of
the nineteenth century.
The best example of the social novel—also a novel
of ideas—was The Imperialist by Sara Jeannette Duncan
(1862–1912). Duncan had been born in Brantford and
educated at the Toronto Normal School. She then
became a pioneering female journalist, working for a
long list of newspapers in the United States and Canada.
In 1888 she and a female friend began a trip around
the world, which she subsequently fictionalized. In
1904 she produced The Imperialist, a novel intended to
describe the Imperial Question from the vantage point
of the “average Canadian of the average small town . . .
whose views in the end [counted] for more than the
opinions of the political leaders” (quoted in Klinck,
1965: 316). Duncan drew on her childhood experiences
in Brantford to describe conditions in Elgin, a “thriv-
ing manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute,
eleven churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for
the deaf and dumb, to say nothing of a fire department
unsurpassed for organization and achievement in the
Province of Ontario” (Duncan, 1971 [1904]: 25). The
opening chapter began with an account of the celebra-
tions in Elgin on 24 May, the Queen’s Birthday. Duncan
interwove the issue of imperialism with the social
values of late Victorian Canada. For her protagonist,
young politician Lorne Murchison, Canada’s continu-
ation as a British nation was of moral rather than stra-
tegic importance.
Duncan was perhaps the first Canadian writer to rec-
ognize the literary potential of small-town Canada, espe-
cially for satirical purposes, but she was not the greatest.
Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) had been born in England,
but grew up on a farm near Lake Simcoe. Educated at
Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and the
University of Chicago, Leacock published a successful
college textbook, Elements of Political Science, in 1906. He
produced his first volume of humorous sketches, Literary
Lapses, in 1910, and two years later published Sunshine
Sketches of a Little Town. This was an affectionate satirical
look at life in Mariposa, a fictionalized version of Orillia,
the nearest town to his boyhood home. Leacock per-
fectly captured the hypocrisy, materialism, and inflated
notions of importance possessed by Mariposa’s residents.
He followed this triumph with a much more savage sat-
ire of a North American city, obviously the Montreal in
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) sold the rights to her
highly successful novel Anne of Green Gables to an American
publisher for $500. Anne has gone on to become a mythic
Canadian heroine, equally popular in Japan as in Canada
itself. Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward
Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery 3110-1.
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302 A History of the Canadian Peoples
which he lived and taught (at McGill University). The
work was entitled Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
(1914). In this book, which he pretended to set somewhere
in the United States, Leacock began the transference of
his satire from Canada to North America. He moved on
from these early works to produce a volume of humorous
sketches virtually every year, increasingly set in an inter-
national milieu. His books were very popular in Britain
and the United States. Many critics feel that Leacock’s
best work was his early Canadian satire, in which he
scourged Canadian pretensions.
Duncan and Leacock both achieved international
reputations as writers of fiction, and they were joined by
several other Canadians in the years between 1900 and
1914. One was the Presbyterian clergyman Charles W.
Gordon (1860–1937), who under the pseudonym “Ralph
Connor” was probably the best-selling writer in English
between 1899 and the Great War. Born in Glengarry
The Spell of the Yukon
Document
I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.
No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.
You come to get rich (damned good reason);
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end.
British-born Robert W. Service (1874–1958) was the most popular poet in Canada at the end of the
nineteenth century, best known as the “poet of the Yukon.” His poem, “The Spell of the Yukon,”
reprinted below, suggests his attraction.
The Chilkoot Pass. This iconic photograph suggests some of the
difficulties gold seekers endured to reach the Yukon. © World
History Archive/Alamy.
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3037 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
County, Canada West, and educated at the University
of Toronto and Edinburgh University, Gordon became
minister of a Presbyterian church in Winnipeg, where
he lived for the remainder of his life. Ralph Connor’s first
three books, published between 1899 and 1902, sold over
five million copies. One of these, Glengarry School Days:
A Story of Early Days in Glengarry (1902), was probably
the best book he ever wrote. Like Duncan and Leacock,
Connor excelled at the evocation of small-town life and
mores, drawing from his personal experiences as a boy. He
was not a great writer but knew how to sustain a narrative
and to frame a moral crisis. Some of his work—including
novels in which clerical examples of muscular Christianity
faced a variety of frontier challenges—obviously struck a
responsive chord in an international audience. Connor’s
heroes triumphed over sin, anarchy, and unregenerate
people by sheer force of character, Christian conviction,
goodness, and even physical strength; they represented
I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.
The summer—no sweeter was ever;
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness—
O God! how I’m stuck on it all.
The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.
There’s a land where the mountains are
nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.
They’re making my money diminish;
I’m sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish
I’ll pike to the Yukon again.
I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;
It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;
And it’s better than this by a damsite—
So me for the Yukon once more.
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
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304 A History of the Canadian Peoples
A wooden church in the French Gothic style located
on Prince Edward Island, St Mary’s Church in
Indian River was designed by William Critchlow Harris
(1854–1913), perhaps the leading architect in the
Maritime  provinces in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Harris was born near Liverpool,
England, and immigrated with his family to the Island
in 1856. One of seven children, he attended Prince
of Wales College and spent his life in the Maritimes,
a residential choice that may have cost him the
opportunity to achieve a national or even inter-
national reputation as did his elder brother Robert
Harris, the painter. Harris began designing churches
in 1880, most of them located on PEI or in Nova
Scotia. Although he frequently built with stone, his
most characteristic and iconic churches are, like St
Mary’s, renderings in wood of buildings in the Gothic
style. Indeed, his adaptation of wood to a Victorian
vocabulary was his most original contribution to the
architectural landscape of the region. The buildings
stand out today partly because they are painted in
bright colours. Harris began working in High Victorian
Gothic, but gradually shifted to French Gothic, as
exemplified in St Mary’s. A keen amateur musician,
Harris’s churches were invariably acoustical triumphs,
in effect musical instruments rendered as buildings.
This church was decommissioned by 2009 and is
presently used as a concert hall. Harris’s designs were
distinguished by multi-paned pointed-arch Gothic
windows and often by circular side-towers, as well
as clipped gable roofs and bargeboards with drilled
holes as decoration. The tower at Indian River also
contains representations of the 12 apostles, perhaps
a tribute to the Cathedral at Chartres. Harris’s willing-
ness to adapt wood to the Gothic style is an obvious
repurposing of a specific material culture tradition
to Canada. The use of classic architectural forms to
produce distinctively regional churches is a repeated
theme of colonial encounters, but in St Mary’s we see
that trend continuing even after Canada has become
an established nation. That the building now hosts
concerts and other musical events is a holdover from
the interests of its architect, but also an adaptation of
the space to present needs.
Material Culture
St Mary’s Church. © Bill Gozansky/Alamy.
St Mary’s Church, Indian River, Prince Edward Island
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3057 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
what his generation saw as the forces of civilization and
progress. Fellow Presbyterian Nellie McClung (1873–1951)
also had great success with similar material, even less art-
fully rendered, in books such as Sowing Seeds in Danny
(1908); her fame was more in the political arena.
A much superior artist was Lucy Maud Montgomery
(1874–1942), whose Anne of Green Gables also first appeared
in 1908. Montgomery’s books lovingly described rural
life and presented some of the standard dilemmas faced
by her readers, ranging from growing up to having to
leave the farm.
Imperialism, Reform,
and Racism
Contemporaries often characterized Canadian political
life in this era in terms of its lack of ideology and its pre-
dilection for what the French observer André Siegfried
called the “question of collective or individual interests
for the candidates to exploit to their own advantage”
(Siegfried, 1907: 142). Lurking only just beneath the sur-
face, however, were some serious and profound issues.
First was the so-called Canadian question, which bore in
various ways upon the very future of the new nation. It
often appeared to be a debate between those who sought
to keep Canada within the British Empire and those who
wanted it to assume full sovereignty. Into this discus-
sion other matters merged subtly, including the “race”
question and the reform question. The former involved
the future of French Canada within an evolving Anglo-
American nation. The latter concerned the institution
of political and social change through public policy.
Debate and disagreement over the three loosely linked
issues—imperialism, Anglo–French antagonisms, and
reform—kept political Canada bubbling with scarcely
suppressed excitement from the 1880s to the beginning
of the Great War. Canada’s involvement in the military
conflict of Europe would bring those issues together,
although it would not resolve them.
Imperialism
The period from 1880 to 1914 saw a resurgence of imper-
ial development around the world. The French, the
Germans, even the Americans, took up what Rudyard
Kipling called the “White man’s burden” in underdevel-
oped regions of the world. About the same time, Great
Britain began to shed its “Little England” free trade
sentiments. The world’s shopkeeper discovered that
substantial windfall profits came from exploiting the
economies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, espe-
cially the last. Canada first faced the implications of
the resurgence of Britain’s imperial pretensions in 1884
when the mother country asked it to contribute to an
expedition to relieve General Charles Gordon, besieged
by thousands of Muslim fundamentalists at Khartoum
in the Egyptian Sudan. Sir John A. Macdonald’s immedi-
ate response was negative, but he ultimately found it
politic to allow Canadian civilian volunteers to assist
the British army. By the end of the century Joseph
Chamberlain at the Colonial Office in London was
advocating that Britain’s old settlement colonies be
joined together in some political and economic union,
the so-called Imperial Federation.
Encouraged by a new infusion of immigrants from
Britain—nearly half a million between 1870 and 1896
and a million between 1896 and 1914—many anglophone
Canadians began openly advocating Canada’s active
participation in the new British Empire. Their sense of
imperial destiny was not necessarily anti-nationalistic.
They saw no inconsistency between the promotion of
a sense of Canadian unity and a larger British Empire.
“I am an Imperialist,” argued Stephen Leacock in 1907,
“because I will not be a Colonial.” Leacock sought “some-
thing other than mere colonial stagnation, something
sounder than independence, nobler than annexation,
greater in purpose than a Little Canada” (quoted in
Bumsted, 1969, II: 78). Such pan-Britannic national-
ism came to express itself concretely in demands for
Imperial Federation. It was most prevalent in the prov-
ince of Ontario.
Unfortunately for the imperialists, not all Canadians
agreed with their arguments. Several strands of anti-
imperial sentiment had emerged by the turn of the cen-
tury. One strand, most closely identified with the political
journalist Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), insisted that the
geography of North America worked against Canadian
nationalism. Smith advocated Canadian absorption into
the United States. Fear of this development led many
Canadians to oppose a new reciprocity agreement with
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306 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Born in Chatsworth, Ontario, Nellie McClung (née
Mooney) (1873–1951) moved with her family to Manitoba
in 1880. After attending normal school in Winnipeg, she
taught in rural Manitoba for many years. She was active
in temperance work and in suffrage agitation. In 1896 she
married Robert Wesley McClung, a druggist, who prom-
ised, Nellie later reported, that “I would not have to lay
aside my ambitions if I married him.” Her emergence to
prominence began when she entered an American short
story competition in 1902 and was encouraged by an
American publisher to expand the story into the novel
that became Sowing Seeds in Danny, a lighthearted look at
village life on the prairies published in 1908. The book sold
over 100,000 copies, was in its seventeenth edition at the
time her death, and brought her both fame and fortune.
She and her husband moved to Winnipeg with their
four children in 1911, where she helped organize the
Political Equality League in 1912. Frustrated with the
difficulty of arousing male politicians to suffrage reform,
after some humiliating experiences she turned herself
into a first-rate platform speaker. In 1914 she organized
the Mock Parliament of Women, in which women played
all the political roles. McClung herself was Manitoba
Premier Rodmond Roblin, one of the major opponents of
women’s right to vote. McClung and her associates, sup-
porting the Liberal Party, were unable to defeat Roblin’s
government in the 1914 election, but it soon fell under
the weight of a construction scandal. The Liberal govern-
ment of Tobias Crawford soon made Manitoba the first
province in Canada to grant women the right to vote.
Meanwhile, the McClungs had moved to Edmonton,
where Nellie again led the fight for female suffrage. She
was also a strong supporter of the war effort and the Red
Cross. In 1921 she was elected to the Alberta legislature,
where she championed a host of radical measures of
the time, ranging from mothers’ allowances and dower
rights for women to sterilization of the mentally unfit.
She was defeated in 1926 when her temperance stance
became unpopular. Nellie subsequently helped in the
successful fight for Canadian woman senators. The
McClungs moved to Victoria in 1933. In her west coast
years, she became a CBC governor (1936–42), a delegate
to the League of Nations (1938), and an advocate of
divorce reform.
Throughout her life she was an active Methodist
and subsequently a member of the United Church, and
was prominent at the national and international levels
in her church work. Apart from her first novel, none of
her subsequent fiction has withstood the test of time
very well. McClung did better with her autobiograph-
ical memoirs, all of which were highly regarded and
reprinted. Like many early feminists, she was clearly
a figure of her own time. She supported the Great War
with almost bloodthirsty enthusiasm and was an active
advocate of eugenics.
Nellie McClung. CP PHOTO.
Nellie Letitia McClung
Biography
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3077 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
the United States in 1911. Another strand, led by John
S. Ewart (1849–1933), insisted on Canada’s assumption
of full sovereignty. Ewart argued that “Colony implies
inferiority—inferiority in culture, inferiority in wealth,
inferiority in government, inferiority in foreign rela-
tions, inferiority and subordination” (Ewart, 1908: 6). Yet
another perspective was enunciated by Henri Bourassa
(1868–1912), who advocated a fully articulated bicultural
Canadian nationalism. He wrote, “My native land is all
of Canada, a federation of separate races and autono-
mous provinces. The nation I wish to see grow up is the
Canadian nation, made up of French Canadians and
English Canadians” (quoted in Monière, 1981: 190). The
Bourassa version of nationalism was considerably larger
than the still prevalent traditional nationalism of French
Canada. As the newspaper La Vérité put it in 1904, “what
we want to see flourish is French-Canadian patriotism;
our people are the French-Canadian people; we will
not say that our homeland is limited to the Province of
Quebec, but it is French Canada.”
The most common confrontations over the role of
Canada within the Empire occurred in the context of
imperial defence. At Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebra-
tion in June 1897, Laurier had fended off a regulariz-
ation of colonial contributions to the British military.
The question arose again in July 1899 when the mother
country requested Canadian troops for the forthcom-
ing war in South Africa against the Boers. When the
shooting began on 11 October 1899, the popular press
of English Canada responded with enthusiasm to the
idea of an official Canadian contingent. But news-
papers in French Canada opposed involvement. As
La Presse editorialized, “We French Canadians belong
to one country, Canada: Canada is for us the whole
world, but the English Canadians have two countries,
Professor Stephen B. Leacock, Montreal, 1914. Leacock was
both a successful Canadian writer of humorous fiction and a
skilled polemicist on the subject of Imperialism for Canada.
© McCord Museum.
We speak of “our Empire.” Have you ever considered
how little we Canadians count in that Empire, the most
wonderful fabric of human organization that has ever
existed. Of course, as far as land is concerned, and
water, and rocks, and mines, and forests, we occupy
a large portion of the Empire. As to population we are
only seven millions out of over four hundred millions.
As to imperial powers, we have none. The people of
the British Kingdom, forty millions in number, possess
as their sole property the rest of that Empire. Suppose
you except Canada with her seven millions, Australia
with her four millions and a half, New Zealand with one
million, and South Africa, with a little over one million
of white people: apart from those semi-free states, the
whole empire of India, the hundreds of Crown colonies,
and those immense protectorates in Africa or Asia, no
On Imperialism and Nationalism
One of the opponents of Canadian imperialism was Henri Bourassa (1868–1952). In 1912 he
explained his position in an address to the Canadian Club.
Continued…
Contemporary Views
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308 A History of the Canadian Peoples
one here and one across the sea.” The government com-
promised by sending volunteers, nearly 5,000 before
the conflict was over. The defence issue emerged again
in 1909, this time over naval policy. Under imperial
pressure, Canada finally agreed to produce a naval
unit of five cruisers and six destroyers. Both sides
attacked Laurier’s compromise Naval Service Bill of
January 1910. The anglophone Tories insisted it did
not provide enough assistance for the British, while in
Quebec nationalists and Conservatives joined forces
to fight for its repeal.
Reform
The reform movement of this period was rich and var-
ied in its interests. It ranged from the women’s suffrage
more belong to us than they belong to the Emperor of
Germany, or to the President of the French Republic.
We have no more to say as regards the government,
the legislation, the administration, the revenue and the
expenditure, and the defence of that territory, compris-
ing four-fifths of the total population of the Empire, than
have the coolies of India or the Zulus of Matabeleland!
I am not saying this in disparagement of the system; I
am simply putting our position as it is. At the present
time, the seven millions of people in Canada have less
voice, in law and in fact, in the ruling of that Empire,
than one single sweeper in the streets of Liverpool, or
one cabdriver on Fleet Street in London; he at least has
one vote to give for or against the administration of that
Empire, but we, the seven million Canadians, have no
vote and no say whatever.
When I hear splendid phrases, magnificent ora-
tions, sounding sentences, about that “Empire of ours,”
I am forcibly reminded of the pretension of a good
fellow whom I had hired to look after the furnace of a
building of which I had the management in Montreal.
Every year, when the time came to purchase the coal
for the winter, he used to exclaim, with a deep sense
of his responsibilities: “How dear it costs us to keep
up our building!” Our right of ownership, of tutelage,
of legislation, in the British Empire is exactly what the
right of partnership of that stoker was in that building.
. . . [A]t the sixth Imperial Conference, the dele-
gates from Australia, representing a courageous,
intelligent, progressive British community, with a
high sea trade amounting in imports and exports to
$650,000,000 a year, asked the representatives of the
British  Government why the British authorities, with-
out even thinking of asking the opinion of Canada, of
Australia, of South Africa, and of New Zealand, had
concluded with the great maritime powers the inter-
national treaty known as the Declaration of London,
which may affect beneficially or otherwise the trade of
the world in future naval wars. They enquired also if it
would be possible to have at least one representative
from the self-governing British colonies on the Board
of Arbitration, eventually to be constituted, under the
terms of that treaty, to adjudicate upon the seizures
of trade and ships in times of war. Sir Edward Grey,
undoubtedly one of the ablest men in British public
life to-day, showed there, I think, his great tact and his
extraordinary command of words and of diplomatic
means. But, when all the courteous terms and all the
frills were taken off, his answer amounted to this: On that
board the negro President of Hayti could sit, the negro
President of Liberia could sit, but the Prime Minister of
Canada or of Australia could not sit, simply because
Hayti and Liberia are nations, whilst Canada or Australia
are not nations. He explained that the colonies were
not consulted because they exist only through Great
Britain, and that the moment Great Britain accepted that
treaty it applied to us as to her. Undoubtedly true and
another evidence, I think, to show that in the “imperial
partnership,” in the enjoyment of that imperial citizen-
ship of which we hear so much, there still remains a
slight difference between the British citizen in England,
Scotland and Ireland, and the British citizen of Canada:
one is a member of a sovereign community, the other
is the inhabitant of a subjected colony.
Source: H. Bourassa, Canadian Club Addresses 1912 (Toronto: Warwick Bros & Rutter, 1912), 78–80.
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3097 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
movement to various efforts at social and humanitarian
change. Mainstream Canadian reform movements had
some features in common, however. Their leaders were
members of the middle and professional classes who
shared assumptions of the age about regeneration and
social purity. Those of Protestant backgrounds tended
to predominate, particularly in temperance/prohibition,
public health, education, and women’s suffrage. Women,
because of their general nurturing role in society, played
a major role in most reform movements. These women
were often less concerned with restructuring gender
roles in society than with the need for inculcating
middle-class virtues or with helping the poor. French-
Canadian women were significantly under-represented
in most national reform movements, partly because of
the political isolation of Quebec and partly because the
The average age of school children is from six to six-
teen years. During this time both mind and body are
undergoing development. Throughout school per-
iod the growth of the body is continued until almost
completed. There are unusual demands, therefore,
upon the functions of absorption and assimilation.
The food must be abundant, and of the charac-
ter to furnish new tissue, and to yield energy in the
form of heat and muscular activity. The food should
also contain salts of lime to meet the requirements
of formation of the bones and teeth. Many children
acquire habits of dislike for certain articles of food,
which become so fixed in later life that they find it
very inconvenient, especially when placed in circum-
stances, as in travelling, where one cannot always
obtain the accustomed diet; it therefore is unwise
to cultivate such habits, which are often a serious
obstacles to normal development. . . . An important
consideration in school diet is to avoid monotony,
which becomes so common from economic rea-
sons, or more often from carelessness. It is much
easier to yield to routine and force of habit than to
study the question. The hours for study and for
meals should be regulated that sufficient time will be
allowed before each meal for children to wash and
prepare themselves comfortably without going to the
table excited by hurry, and they should be required to
remain at the table for a fixed time, and not allowed
to hastily swallow their food in order to complete an
unfinished task or game. An interval of at least half an
hour should intervene after meals before any men-
tal exertion is required. Constant nibbling at food
between meals should be forbidden; it destroys the
appetite, increases the saliva, and interferes with gas-
tric digestion. . . . [C]hildren should have their meals
made tempting by good cooking and pleasant var-
iety, as well as an agreeable appearance of the food.
Meat which is carved in unsightly masses and vege-
tables which are sodden and tasteless will be refused,
and an ill attempt is made to supply the deficiency in
proper food by eating indigestible candy, nuts, etc.
Children often have no natural liking for meat, and
prefer puddings, pastry or sweets when they can
obtain them; it is therefore more important that meat
and other wholesome foods should be made attract-
ive to them at the age when they need it.
A Few General Rules Regarding Diet for School Children
Adelaide Hoodless (1858–1910) was the leading advocate of domestic science in Canada before the
Great War. She was also the inspiration for the organization of Women’s Institutes, and with her friend
Lady Aberdeen (the wife of the Governor General) she was the co-founder of the National Council
of Women of Canada, the national YWCA, and the Victorian Order of Nurses. In 1898 she published a
textbook entitled Public School Domestic Science, from which the following is an excerpt.
Contemporary Views
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310 A History of the Canadian Peoples
ideology of the traditional society greatly limited the
place of women in that province.
The suffrage movement did emphasize the gender
question. It addressed women’s political powerless-
ness by attempting to win for them the right to vote.
The movement was chiefly an urban one, dominated
by well-educated women who saw political power as
necessary to bring about other legislative change. The
suffragist leaders were almost exclusively Canadian or
British-born and belonged to the mainline Protestant
churches. Well over half of these women were gainfully
employed, mostly in journalism and writing. The suffra-
gists gradually lost contact with working-class women,
who were suspicious of the class biases in both the suf-
frage and reform movements. They also failed to gain
the support of farm women because they did not under-
stand rural issues, especially the concern over rural
depopulation. Many rural women became involved
in their own organizations designed to deal with
their own problems, such as the Women’s Institutes.
Adelaide Hoodless (1858–1910) founded the first
Institute at Stoney Creek, Ontario, in 1897. (In Henry
James Morgan’s biographical compilation The Canadian
Men and Women of the Time, 2nd edn, 1912, Hoodless is
listed under the entry for her husband John, who was an
obscure furniture manufacturer in Hamilton.) Women’s
Institutes promoted appreciation of rural living, as
well as encouraging better education for all women for
motherhood and homemaking. In 1919 the Federated
Women’s Institutes of Canada organized with its motto
“For Home and Country.”
One female reform organization, the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, had both rural and urban
memberships. Founded in 1874 in Picton, Ontario, the
WCTU claimed 10,000 members by 1900 and had an
influence far beyond that number. Despite its name, the
WCTU wanted prohibition, soon seeing the elimination
of alcoholic beverages as a panacea for many of the ills
currently besetting Canadian society, such as crime,
the abuse of women and children, political corruption,
and general immorality. The WCTU was only one of sev-
eral members of the Dominion Alliance for the Total
Suppression of the Liquor Traffic. Like most Canadian
reform movements, prohibition required state inter-
vention to be effective, and this eventually led some
of its supporters to women’s suffrage. Laurier held a
national referendum on prohibition in 1898. Although
its supporters won a narrow victory, the Prime Minister
refused to implement national legislation because only
20 per cent of the total electorate had supported the
principle. The prohibitionists turned to the provinces,
succeeding in getting legislation passed in Prince
Edward Island in 1900 and in Nova Scotia in 1910. The
local option was even more effective, since it involved
local communities where prohibitionist sentiment
could be strong. Prohibitionism exemplified both
the best and the worst features of reform. It had little
Catholic or urban working-class support. Moreover,
it tended to clothe its single-minded arguments with
intense moral fervour, often of the social purity variety.
Humanitarian reform, usually of urban abuses,
often focused on the human victims of disastrous indus-
trial social conditions. One of the main spearheads of
such reform was the social gospel. Beginning in the
Methodist Church and expanding to all Protestant
denominations in Canada, the social gospel saw Christ
as a social reformer and the institution of the Kingdom
of God on earth as its (and his) mission. The growth of
city missions and church settlement houses led to the
establishment of the Social Services Council of Canada
in 1912. The most prominent social gospeller was J.S.
Woodsworth (1874–1942). Another branch of humani-
tarian reform involved various professionals who
became concerned with social problems through their
professional practices. Thus doctors, for example, were
active in promoting a public health system and in recom-
mending ways of improving public health care. Among
the medical profession’s public health recommendations
was compulsory medical inspection of schoolchildren.
Schools and members of the teaching profession
were also in the front lines of humanitarian reform.
In this period educators pushed not only for improved
schooling but for the schools to assume much of the
burden of social services for the young by acting in
loco parentis for the children of slum and ghetto dwell-
ers. The pressure for compulsory school attendance
legislation, extended on a province-by-province basis
across the nation by 1914, was partly reformist in
nature. Regular school attendance would provide a more
suitable environment for children than roaming the
streets or working in factories. The children might learn
skills that would lift them out of their poverty and (in
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3117 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
The Americanization of Canada
Document
In 1850, 147,711 persons of Canadian birth were living
south of the border—about one-sixteenth of the num-
ber of people living in the British possessions at the
same time. In 1860 the Canadian-born population of
the United States had increased to 249,970, a gain of
76 per cent, while the general population of the Union
was increasing at the rate of 35.6 per cent, and that of
the British provinces at about 33.6. In 1870 there were
493,464 Canadians in the United States, an increase of
97.4 per cent for the decade against 22.6 per cent for that
of the population of the Republic as a whole, and 16.2
per cent for that of the British colonies, now united in
the Dominion of Canada. . . . While the population of the
Republic was a little more than tripling in fifty years, and
that of Canada was being multiplied by less than two
and a half, the little Canada south of the boundary line
saw the number of its inhabitants multiplied by eight. Of
all the living persons of Canadian birth in 1900, more
than one-fifth were settled in the United States. But if
the statement stopped there it would be incomplete. In
addition to the native Canadians in the United States in
1900, there were 527,301 persons of American birth but
with both parents Canadian. There were also 425,617
with Canadian fathers and American mothers, and
344,470 with Canadian mothers and American fathers.
Thus there were in all 2,480,613 persons in the United
States of at least half Canadian blood, which is more
than half the number of similar stock in Canada. . . .
In density of Canadian population, ignoring all
other elements, Massachusetts stands first, exceeding
any province of Canada, and Rhode Island second. The
relative rank of the various Provinces and States previ-
ously named on this basis is:
Canadian population per square mile
1 Massachusetts 64.2
2 Rhode Island 64.0
3 Prince Edward Island 45.36
4 Nova Scotia 20.6
5 New Brunswick 11.2
6 Connecticut 10.9
7 New Hampshire 10.8
8 Ontario 8.4
9 Michigan 7.1
10 Vermont 6.8 . . .
Classified in the same way, the principal Canadian
cities in 1900–1 were:
1 Montreal 267,730
2 Toronto 208,040
3 Boston 84,336
4 Quebec 66,231
5 Chicago 64,615
6 Ottawa 49,718
7 Detroit 44,592
8 New York 40,400 . . .
In 1907 the American journalist Samuel E. Moffatt published a book entitled The Americanization
of Canada, which extended Goldwin Smith’s earlier arguments about the extent of Canadian
integration into the United States.
Source: Samuel Erasmus Moffatt, The Americanization of Canada (1907).
the case of immigrants) they would become assimilated
to the values of Canadian society.
Educators clearly believed that using schools for
reform purposes was in the best interests of Canadian
society. It was also in their best interest. Compulsory
education opened more employment and introduced
the educator as social expert, a professional who
knew more about what was important for children than
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312 A History of the Canadian Peoples
parents, particularly the parents of the disadvantaged.
Compulsory education, medical examinations, school
nurses, and lunch programs all were part of a new
form of social engineering that would only increase in
emphasis over the century.
In the course of time, many of the private agen-
cies of reform became conscripted as quasi-public ones
under provincial legislation. They served as arms of
the state in the intermediate period before the estab-
lishment of permanent government bureaucracies.
Thus private child welfare programs became officially
responsible for abandoned, abused, and delinquent
children. Despite this trend towards a public approach,
the framework remained that of individual morality.
The humanitarian reformers commonly linked vice,
crime, and poverty. Even those who focused on poverty
tended to attribute it to almost every other cause than
the failure of the economic system to distribute wealth
equitably. The concept of a basic minimum standard of
living as the right of all members of society was slow
to develop in Canada. Attacks on poverty in this period
retained a certain class overtone, with a “superior” class
helping an “inferior” one.
Another whole category of reformers sought
structural alteration within the Canadian system.
Their model was often sound business practice, for
the leaders of this movement were usually successful
businessmen. They sought the elimination of wasteful
graft and corruption through political reform, the cre-
ation of publicly operated (and profitable) utilities to
reduce unnecessary taxation, and the introduction of
public planning. They tended to focus on the big city,
although they spilled over in various directions. These
reforms, which in the United States were associated
with the Progressive movement, all found allies within
associated middle-class and professional groups. The
City Beautiful Movement, for example, received much
of its support from an expanding community of profes-
sional architects, who combined an urge to plan the city
as a whole with aesthetic considerations of coherence,
visual variety, and civic grandeur. Like Americans,
many Canadians saw cities as the culmination of civil-
ization, and many grand plans made their appearance
on paper. Cities settled for a few monumental new
buildings, such as the imposing legislative structures
completed in many provinces before the war. Political
reform of municipal government concentrated on
“throwing the rascals out,” combined with structural
changes to reduce the damage they could do when they
were in. The changes often included the replacement of
Sample Questions for Junior Grade Examinations, May 1911
Document
1. If there are before you two tumblers of colorless
liquid and you are told one contains water and the
other alcohol, by what four tests can you determine
which contains alcohol?
2. Explain how the juices of raspberries, cherries and
currants are turned into wine. Why is the use of such
home-made wines objectionable?
3. Explain the real cause of the so-called “stimulating”
effect of alcohol on the heart.
4. Explain why employers do not wish to employ per-
sons who use alcoholic liquors, tobacco or narcotics.
5. Why is alcohol which quickens action, hurtful, while
exercise, which does the same thing, useful?
6. What is sleep? Show the necessity for it, and the evil
effects of narcotics upon it.
Source: Canadian White Ribbon Tidings, May 1911, as quoted in Sharon Anne Cook, “Through Sunshine and Shadow”: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,
Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 121.
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3137 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
The pioneering woman in the Canadian legal profes-
sion was Clara Brett Martin (1874–1923), who graduated
with high honours in mathematics from Trinity College,
Toronto, in 1890. In 1891 she petitioned the Law Society
of Upper Canada to be registered as a student. The pe-
tition was denied, and she was advised to “remove to
the United States,” where more than 20 states admitted
women to the bar. Instead of leaving the country, Martin
found an Ontario legislator willing to introduce a bill into
the provincial legislature that would explicitly define the
word “person” in the Law Society’s statutes as including
females. This initiative was supported by Dr Emily Stowe,
leader of the Dominion Woman’s Enfranchisement
Association, who gained the approval of Premier Oliver
Mowat for the new legislation. By the time it was passed
in 1892, the legislation was emasculated so that women
could only become solicitors (not barristers), and then
only at the discretion of the Law Society.
The Law Society subsequently again refused admis-
sion to Martin, and Oliver Mowat himself attended the
next Law Society Convocation to move her admission.
The Law Society agreed by the narrowest of margins, and
Clara Martin became a student-at-law, accepted as an
articling student by one of the most prestigious law firms
in Toronto. Martin met much disapproval from within
her law firm and was forced to change firms in 1893.
She was also harassed in the lecture halls of Osgoode
Hall and missed as many lectures as she possibly could.
She eventually completed her degree and easily passed
the bar examinations. Martin also pressed for revision of
the legislation that allowed women to act only as solici-
tors, not barristers. She won this battle, too, and then had
to face the Law Society again. A final controversy came
over the dress code for female barristers, when women
were required to wear their gowns over a black dress.
Martin was finally admitted as a barrister and solicitor
on 2 February 1897, the first woman in the British Empire
entered into the legal profession. She practised for most
of her legal career in her own firm in Toronto.
Clara Brett Martin, first female lawyer in the British Empire.
Law Society of Upper Canada Archives, Archives Department
collection, “Photograph of Clara Brett Martin,” P291.
Clara Brett Martin
Biography
elective councils with more professional government
by commission. Businessmen reformers also fought
fierce battles over the question of the ownership of
utilities. While the utilities barons complained of the
attack on private enterprise, the corporate reformers
countered by arguing that utilities were intrinsic mon-
opolies that should be operated in the public interest.
Much of the impulse behind reform of all sorts came
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314 A History of the Canadian Peoples
from fear of class warfare and moral degeneration. The
reformers did for the poor rather than with the poor.
The results were a vast increase in the public concerns
of the state and the beginning of the growth of a public
bureaucracy to deal with social matters.
Racism: The Darker Side of
Canada’s Growth
Racialist thinking was at its height during this period.
Part of the “race question” in Canada was not about
“race” at all, of course, but about the conflict between
French and English Canada. While there was no racial
barrier between French and English, contemporaries
accepted race-based arguments and analyses as “scien-
tific.” Many imperialists regarded the historical prog-
ress of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada as
evidence of the special genius of the “Anglo-Saxon race.”
The French were acceptable partners because they, too,
were a northern people. Out of the scientific theories of
Charles Darwin came the conviction that inheritance
was the key to evolution. Races were formed by natural
selection, exhibiting quite unequal characteristics. In
almost everyone’s hierarchy, the dominant Canadian
population was at the progressive top of the racial scale.
Newcomers who could not or would not assimilate
would inevitably lower the Canadian “standard of civil-
ization.” Sexual morality was an important component
of the racism of the time.
Canadians saw the new immigration after 1896
as particularly troubling. Even that secular saint J.S.
Woodsworth, the Methodist minister and social worker
in Winnipeg who would become a leftist federal par-
liamentarian and the first leader of the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation (CCF), associated crimin-
ality with the newcomers. Many feared the potential
degeneracy of the “great northern race” through com-
mingling with lesser stocks. Others concentrated on
the campaigns for social purity, mixing restrictions on
the consumption of alcoholic beverages with hostility
to prostitution, venereal disease, and sexual exploita-
tion. The first serious efforts at large-scale immigration
restriction, designed mainly to keep out the “degener-
ates,” began in the early years of the century. Campaigns
for social purity, immigration restriction, and exclusion
of Asians all came out of the same stock of assumptions
about heredity and environment that informed many
other reform movements of the period. The reformers
often emphasized social and moral aspects, directing
their efforts chiefly against newcomers.
Immigration restrictions came in three senses. One
was an insistence on the good health, good character,
and resources of the individual immigrant. A second
was an equally strong insistence on preventing group
immigration by certain peoples deemed unassimil-
able, headed by Asians but also including American-
born blacks. Efforts at a broader exclusionary practice
involved bilateral negotiations with foreign nations
to restrict the departure of their nationals, such as an
exclusionary agreement with Japan in 1907 that fol-
lowed anti-Asian riots in Vancouver. The third involved
provincial legislation, mainly in British Columbia, to
limit the rights of the unwanted. By 1907, the British
Columbia legislature had disenfranchised nationals of
China, Japan, and imperial India. Federal immigration
policy was expressed mostly in informal ways before
1906, but thereafter, immigration authorities became
much more concerned with formal regulation of the flow
of newcomers, emulating the Americans in this regard.
In 1906 a new Immigration Act consolidated many
earlier laws, barring large categories of people, including
prostitutes and pimps, the insane, the mentally retarded,
epileptics, and the “deaf and dumb.” An expanded immi-
gration service in 1908 for the first time began to monitor
the border with the United States at 38 border crossings
across the continent—before this time the border had
been wide open with little checking of those crossing it in
either direction—and was allowed to deport individuals
who belonged to prohibited categories or become public
charges. In 1908, another amendment to the Immigration
Act provided that all immigration to Canada had to
come via a continuous journey on a through ticket from
the country of origin. This “continuous journey” proviso
was intended to make it more difficult for immigrants
to Canada to evade immigration restrictions placed by
the governments of their homelands, often established
at Canadian insistence, and it effectively cut off immi-
gration from India. Another restrictive Immigration Act
in 1910 gave the cabinet the power to regulate immigra-
tion according to race and to keep out “prohibited and
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3157 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
undesirable classes.” Any group deemed unsuited to the
climate or requirements of Canada could be deported
on grounds of political or moral undesirability. Political
grounds for rejection included the advocacy by a person
not a Canadian citizen of the overthrow by force or vio-
lence of the government of Great Britain or Canada. The
Act also introduced a head tax on all immigrants except
the Japanese, who had been paying $500 since 1903 (9–10
Edward VII Chap 27, An Act respecting Immigration).
Perhaps the most extreme example of Canadian
exclusionism occurred in May of 1914, when the
Japanese vessel Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver
harbour with 376 passengers aboard. Of these, 165 had
boarded at Hong Kong, 111 at Shanghai, 86 at Maji, and
14 at Yokohama. Of the passengers, 340 were Sikhs, a
people who had been arriving in British Columbia for
more than a decade. Most had been males from the Jat
Sikh community in rural Punjab who came to Canada as
sojourners, intending to return to their homes; accord-
ing to official Canadian statistics, the number of East
Indian adult females who entered Canada over the
years 1904–7 was 14, and the number of children was
22. The East Indian community soon began to become
organized and articulate. The Khalsa Diwan Society, a
fraternal organization with nationalist overtones, was
organized in Vancouver in 1907. East Indian revolu-
tionary agitators began their work in North America,
including Canada. Separating the activities of Indian
nationalists into those directed at abuses at home and
in host countries is not easy. Much of our knowledge
about the nationalists comes from information collected
by police undercover agents, and must be understood in
this context. The agents were convinced that the leading
nationalists were advocates of violence and terrorism.
The Komagata Maru’s organizer expected that
the Canadians would overlook the continuous voyage
requirement when the ship docked in Vancouver and that
the local community would raise the money for the head
tax. He was right on the second count but wrong on the
first. The Canadian government—backed by Vancouver
municipal authorities and the British Columbia govern-
ment, both of which became quite hysterical—refused to
allow the passengers to land. Conditions on board ship
deteriorated rapidly, and the incident quickly became
an international one. Canadian immigration authorities
attempted to storm the vessel by force but were driven
off. Eventually the ship sailed out of Vancouver harbour
under naval escort and headed back to India, a powerful
symbol of Canada’s exclusionism.
Canada’s Entrance into the
Great War
The sudden arrival of the Great War in September of
1914 would subsume events such as those in British
Columbia, as it would virtually everything in Canadian
life. Canada officially went to war at 20:45 hours (Ottawa
time) on 4 August 1914, as an automatic consequence of
the British declaration of war on Germany. If Canada
had no voice in the decision to go to war, it did have some
control over the extent of its involvement, and it chose to
plunge into the maelstrom quickly and completely. The
Canadian Minister of Militia was Colonel Sam Hughes,
who had long expected that Canadians would eventu-
ally meet Germans on the battlefield. On 10 August, an
Order-in-Council permitted him to call 25,000 men to
the colours. By this time, some militia units had already
begun appealing for recruits. In Winnipeg, for example,
Lieutenant-Colonel J.W. de C. O’Grady had mustered
his unit, the 90th Winnipeg Rifles, in their drill hall
and announced that he had promised that the regiment
would turn out “not only [in] full strength but one thou-
sand strong. Who goes?” (Tascona and Wells, 1983: 63).
The response was overwhelming, and on 9 August—
the day before the Order-in-Council—the Rifles held
a recruiting parade on the streets of Winnipeg. When
formal sign-ups began after 10 August, one of the rules
was that married men had to have the permission of
their wives, many of whom dragged their spouses out of
the ranks while brandishing their marriage certificates.
These early volunteers had virtually no uniforms or
equipment, and were sent for first training aboard trams.
By the time the Canadian Parliament met on
18 August the die was cast. Canadian volunteers would
participate in the war on a massive scale. On 22 August
Parliament passed “An Act to confer certain powers upon
the Governor in Council in the event of War, Invasion, or
Insurrection”—the famous War Measures Act—enabling
the government to act in the defence of the realm with-
out consulting Parliament. Before August was over,
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316 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Sam Hughes had created a vast training camp north-
west of Quebec City at Valcartier—a tent city capable of
housing 32,000 men. Before the end of September the
first contingents of soldiers from Valcartier were board-
ing the passenger liners that would take them to Britain.
The fleet sailed on 3 October and arrived at Plymouth
11 days later. “Canada’s Answer,” as the British called
the new arrivals, numbered 31,200. Sent to bivouac on
Salisbury Plain, they were finally reviewed by King
George V on 4 February 1915, and before the end of
the month they were suffering their first casualties on
the front lines in France. One of the advantages of the
breathtaking speed with which Hughes had moved to
create Canadian regiments was that Canadian troops
were kept together as units rather than being broken up
and integrated into the British forces.
World War I brought to fruition several major
trends of the period between 1885 and 1914. It marked a
triumph of sorts for Canadian imperialism, for example,
as Canada subordinated its substantial military effort
to the needs and direction of Great Britain. It also
rejuvenated Canadian reform. The patriotic fervour of
the war and the eventual political isolation of French
Canada made possible a sweeping program of reform,
much of which French Canada had opposed. Reform has
always required an active state, and wartime conditions
encouraged the Canadian government to intervene in
almost all areas of life and work.
How History Has Changed: Aboriginal Peoples
and Christian Missions
Susan Neylan, Wilfrid Laurier University
For a long time, histories of Christian missions to Aborig-
inal peoples in Canada privileged the churches’ perspec-
tives and valorized heroic missionaries. They highlighted
conversion experiences and, for the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, emphasized what was termed
the “civilizing” project. Historians told the story of how
Aboriginal people encountered Christianity through the
teachings of Euro-Canadian missionaries and cast aside
former belief systems for the new religion and, often,
its Western associations. Aboriginal spiritualities and
Christianity were cast in opposition to one another.
Parallel to the rise of Native history as a distinct
field of Canadian historical scholarship in the 1970s and
1980s, a new generation of mission historians arose who
gave far more attention to the role of Aboriginal peoples.
Scholars stressed either their agency or victimization
by casting a critical eye on the churches and mission-
aries. John Webster Grant’s Moon of Wintertime (1984)
argues that Aboriginal peoples accepted Christianity at
a moment of severe cultural disruption; as missionaries
arrived on the scene bent on transforming Aboriginal
cultures, Native spiritual systems were thrown into
crisis. First Nations were not helpless in this encounter,
yet they had little input beyond the local context.
However, this generation of scholars also high-
lighted the importance of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis
in the narrative. Many actively resisted the encroach-
ment of missions through rejection and opposition;
others embraced elements of Christianity and assumed
roles of leadership within the missions and churches.
Such latter individuals were cast as cross-cultural medi-
ators who enabled the transmission and the translation
of religious ideas. Accordingly, biographies of Aboriginal
men and women abound in the literature, ranging from
those who enthusiastically spread the gospel as mission
employees to others who walked in two worlds. Winona
Historiography
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3177 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
Wheeler’s study (2003) of Askeenootow (Charles Pratt)
demonstrates how adopting Christianity was never a
clear-cut replacement of his Cree-Assiniboine identity
with the Christian one.
The third scholarly generation was influenced
by the so-called “cultural turn” of the 1990s that drew on
theories from anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics,
and literary studies, notably post-colonial literature. It
encouraged historians to look at the big picture, particu-
larly when it came to culture, and the socially constructed
nature of all human reality. Historians recognized the
place of missions within older frameworks of Indigenous
histories of change and continuity and broader patterns
of systemic colonialism. Accordingly, the encounter bet-
ween Aboriginal peoples and Christians came to be
represented in far more nuanced terms than the mission
hagiographies of the first generation or the agency/vic-
timization or Aboriginal spirituality/Christianity mod-
els of the second.
Scholars proceeded from the idea that Christianity
can be translated and incorporated as an integral
part of an authentic Indigenous identity without hav-
ing to wholly replace what came before. Adopting a
post-colonial interpretation, Aboriginal spiritual practi-
ces were seen to have altered Christianity itself. Hence
the Aboriginal–Christian encounter could be studied
from points on meeting and similarities, instead of only
underscoring distance and differences. Susan Neylan
(2003) studies the role in mission work of the first gen-
eration of Aboriginal Christian converts, highlighting
their contributions to mission forms in ways that did not
forsake older spiritual traditions, despite the negative
effects of missions. Many turned to Christianity for
more than its spiritual appeal and resonance. They
were seeking citizenship in a wider Western framework
that would allow them to survive as Indigenous people
regardless of the political, economic, and cultural chan-
ges instituted under colonialism.
Third-generation scholars demonstrate Aboriginal
creativity and initiative alongside missionary coer-
cion and dogma, and analyze the impact of the
Indigenization (whereby Christianity is made cultur-
ally relevant and naturalized as their own), syncretism
(the creation of new beliefs and practices through the
compatibility of religious forms and traditions), and
genuine conversion. However, there is no denying the
part Christian churches played in the colonial pro-
cess itself, which included the attempted destruction
of Aboriginal cultures, identities, lands, and resour-
ces. Aboriginal residential schools are probably the
best-known tool of Christian colonialism. J.R. Miller’s
Shingwauk’s Vision (1996), John Milloy’s A National
Crime (1999), and studies authored by residential
school survivors expose this dark, shameful aspect of
Aboriginal–Christian relations.
Whether talking about first-generation scholars
or those of the twenty-first century, the trajectory of
this historical scholarship has also been heavily influ-
enced by changes in methodologies. Initially, church
records and missionary accounts comprised the bulk
of the primary sources used as evidence. There were
Aboriginal voices within this colonial archive, but
usually very few, or the materials had to be read closely
“against the grain” to find Aboriginal perspectives. This
changed with the application of ethnohistorical meth-
odologies. Ethnohistory is an approach to the study of
the Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal encounter that consid-
ers textual, oral, and material sources in its analysis.
Scholars sought to evaluate Native responses to Christian
missions in as much detail as they had invested in the
examination of missionary goals and criteria.
More recently, ethnohistorians have turned from
colonialism as the only way to assess the encounter
between the colonizers and the colonized. Change, even
when it first appears to be evidence of colonialist suc-
cesses at work, can simultaneously exemplify cultural
continuities. Canadian history can also be situated
within Aboriginal history and chronologies. Research
with rather than about Aboriginal peoples, employing
Indigenous research methodologies, has served to
accentuate Aboriginal voices, world views, and concep-
tualizations of the past. Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las
(2012) reconsiders one Christian Aboriginal woman’s
life in the context of both Kwakwaka’wakw systems of
prestige, knowledge, and status and colonial political
histories. By prioritizing Indigenous insights and writ-
ten as a collaboration, the study shifts from merely an
analysis of Aboriginal–Settler interactions to one that
Continued…
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318 A History of the Canadian Peoples
shows internal community dynamics and tension. After
all, history is also negotiated in the present.
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The pioneer study of these ideas in Canada, and still
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Urban social history that takes advantage of all the
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Shipping Industry in Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914.
Montreal, 1990. A study, based on quantitative data,
of an important industry.
Short Bibliography
901491_07_Ch07.indd 319 12/16/15 12:34 PM

320 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Troper, Harold Martin. Only Farmers Need Apply: Official
Canadian Government Encouragement of Immigration
from the United States, 1896–1911. Toronto, 1972. The
standard work on the topic.
Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral
Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto, 1991.
One of the few overall syntheses of the reform move-
ment, focusing particularly on its moral dimensions.
Voisey, Paul. Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community.
Toronto, 1988. Probably the best historical commun-
ity study ever executed in Canada.
Walden, Keith. Becoming Modern in Toronto: The
Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late
Victorian Culture. Toronto, 1997. A work in cultural
studies that deconstructs the Toronto Industrial
Exhibition.
Study Questions
1. What role did the patronage system play in Canadian political parties in the years before the Great War?
2. How did the industrialization of the period 1885–1914 differ from that of the 1850s and 1860s?
3. Compare the major problems of urban and rural life in Canada in the early years of the twentieth century.
4. Are the differences between child labour in factories and on farms significant?
5. What does the poem “Town Directory” tell us about Treherne, Manitoba, in 1895?
6. How was Canada selling the western region to newcomers in 1907?
7. Discuss the relationship between the small town and the development of Canadian fiction, 1890–1914.
8. What were the linkages among imperialism, reform, and racism before the Great War?
9. Was Canada a country truly open to immigrants in this period? What were the limitations?
Visit the companion website for A History of the Canadian Peoples, fifth edition for further resources.
www.oupcanada.com/Bumsted5e
901491_07_Ch07.indd 320 12/16/15 12:34 PM

Table of Contents
List of Maps
Preface
Introduction
Understanding History
The Value of History
The Elusive Fact
The Conventions of History
New Interpretations
1 | The Beginnings
Timeline
The First Arrivals
The First Nations Population around 1500
The First Peoples: A Regional Introduction
The First Arrivals from Europe
Europe around 1500
The European Entry into North America
The Impact of Disease on the Aboriginal Peoples
European Contact and the Development of Cultural Conflict
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
2 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France
Timeline
The First European Communities
Newfoundland
The French Maritime Region to 1667
Acadia after 1670
Canada Fights for Survival
Canada, 1663–1760
Women in New France
Common Life and Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
3 | Struggling for a Continent, 1627–1763
Timeline
The Beginnings of Overland Exploration
The “Pays d’en Haut”
Lower Louisiana
Upper Louisiana
Beyond the Formal Empires: Hudson Bay and the Prairies
Acadia and Nova Scotia
The First Three Anglo–French Wars
The Seven Years War
The Conquest and Its Aftermath
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
4 | Becoming and Remaining British, 1759–1815
Timeline
From the Proclamation to the Rebellion
The First American Civil War
Accommodating the Loyalists
Reinventing British North America
Immigration and Settlement, 1790–1815
The War of 1812
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
5 | Relying on Resources, 1815–1840
Timeline
The Resource Economy
The Staple Resources
The Mercantile System
Immigration
The Resource Society
Religion and Education
Colonial Culture
The Politics of the Elite
Reform and Rebellion
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
6 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885
Timeline
The Mobile Society
From Mercantilism to Free Trade
The Rise of Industrialism
Westward
Responsible Government and the Reorientation of Politics
The New Imperial Relationship
Victorian Society
The Creation of Cultural Infrastructure
The Road to Confederation
Adding New Territory
The Development of National Policies
The Quest for Regional and National Identity
Religion and the Churches
Cultural Life
The Struggle for the West
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
7 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
Timeline
The Developing Political and Constitutional System
The Economic Infrastructure
Another Round of Industrialization
Natural Resources
Urban and Rural Canada
Other Identities
Culture
Imperialism, Reform, and Racism
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
8 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945
Timeline
Returning to “Normalcy”
Regional Protest in the 1920s
The Depression and Responses to It
Canadian Society between the Wars
Canadian Culture between the Wars
World War II
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
9 | Prospering Together, 1945–1960
Timeline
Affluence
The Cold War
The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society
Immigration
Aboriginal People
The Growth of the State
The Shape of Politics
French Canada after World War II
Federal–Provincial Relations
The Rise of Canadian Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
10 | Edging towards the Abyss, 1958–1972
Timeline
The “Radical Sixties”
A Still Buoyant Economy
Political Leadership
Immigration Reform
The Beginning of International Drift
The Expansion of the Welfare State
Quebec
The Nation and Quebec
Canadian Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
11 | Coming Apart, 1972–1992
Timeline
The Problems of Liberal Federalist Nationalism
The Shape of Federal Politics
The Provinces, the Constitution, and the Charter of Rights
The Rise of Aboriginal Rights
The Economy
Canadian Society
Immigration
Canadian Culture
International Affairs
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
12 | Freefalling into the Twenty-First Century, 1992–2001
Timeline
Politics
The Constitution
The Economy
Globalization
External Affairs
Canadian Society
Canadian Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
13 | Into the New Millennium
Homeland Security
The Tale of Two Mad Cows
Softwood Lumber
Energy
Global Issues
Canadian Politics
The Canadian Economy
Canadian Society and Culture in the Meltdown Era
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
Epilogue | The Speed and Balance of Canadian History
The Speed of History
History in the Balance
Notes
References
Index