Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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at this time because each legislator argued that the venture with which

he was associated was more deserving of preferential treatment.

The perilous position that the Canadian government had assumed

through its generous support for railways was revealed with the recur-

rence of world economic depression in 1857. Not only was the Cana-

dian railway boom brought to an abrupt halt, but the ﬁ nancial position

of the provincial government was severely compromised. More revenue

had to be generated to ensure the completion of the Grand Trunk, to

bail out other hard-pressed railways, and to pay down mounting public

debt that largely resulted from railway support. In an age before income

tax, the major source of public revenue was derived from customs

duties on imports. Since the Reciprocity Treaty prevented a tariff

increase on natural products imported from the United States, Finance

Minister Galt had little recourse but to raise the tariff on manufactured

imports in 1859. In so doing, he established the connection between

railways and tariffs that would become the cornerstone of future

national economic strategy (Creighton 1964).

Although Galt insisted that the primary purpose of his tariff was to

raise revenue, it also represented the ﬁ rst serious move in the direction

of industrial, as opposed to agricultural, protection, thus reﬂ ecting the

profound changes that the Canadian economy was experiencing in the

wake of the railway boom. The railway encouraged the development of

related industries such as engine foundries, locomotive shops, rolling

mills, and ironworks. Along with canal-building and shipbuilding, rail-

ways also stimulated a variety of secondary industries: ﬂ our mills, saw-

mills, boot and shoe factories, textile shops, breweries and distilleries,

and wagon and carriage manufacturers. This industrial growth led to

the development of numerous towns, mainly along the railway lines, to

service the prosperous agricultural hinterland. Railways, along with

reciprocity, reinforced the links that Montreal and Toronto were devel-

oping with their hinterland regions. While Montreal remained the larg-

est city and the dominant metropolis of British North America, Toronto

was emerging as its chief rival by the end of the 1850s. This metro-

politan rivalry would be intensiﬁ ed in the second half of the 19th cen-

tury by the increasing relationship between railway development and

industrial protection.

Quite apart from its long-range implications, the tariff increase of

1859 immediately provoked vigorous protests from Britain and the

United States, the sources of most Canadian manufactured imports.

British manufacturers complained that the tariff was a violation of the

principle of free trade. But Galt argued that free trade meant that the

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colonies were free to direct their own economic policies in their best

interests. This assertion of colonial ﬁ scal autonomy from Britain was

allowed to pass unchallenged by the imperial authority, thus signifying

a growing willingness to surrender control over the external economic

relations of British North America. Furthermore, American manufac-

turers claimed that the higher tariff on their products violated the

spirit, if not the letter, of the Reciprocity Treaty. The prospect of

increased exports of manufactures to Canada had been a signiﬁ cant

inducement for American acceptance of free trade. With this advantage

removed, reciprocity no longer seemed an attractive proposition, and

the demand increased for the treaty to be terminated at the ﬁ rst oppor-

tunity. The victory of the protectionist North in the Civil War would

destroy the delicate regional balance in American politics that had

made agreement on the treaty possible. Although formal cancellation of

the treaty would not occur until 1866, the end was already a certainty

many years before.

Despite government support on a large scale, the Grand Trunk was

completed too late and was too costly to achieve its main purpose of

redirecting American midwestern trade down the St. Lawrence to

Europe. Capturing the growing trafﬁ c within Canada itself was not

enough to prevent the Grand Trunk from bankruptcy with a deﬁ cit of

$13 million by 1861. With Britain more ﬁ rmly committed than ever to

free trade and with the Americans obviously souring on reciprocity,

Canadian business and political leaders turned their attention to

another developmental prospect made possible by the advent of the

railroad. The railroad offered a means of surmounting the great barrier

posed by the Canadian Shield, beyond which lay a vast settlement fron-

tier stretching to the Paciﬁ c and under British control. Railway links to

the Maritimes and to the Paciﬁ c could set the stage for a revival of the

transcontinental empire of the St. Lawrence based on interprovincial

trade (Morton 1964).

The Changing Prospects of the West

For nearly three decades after its merger with the North West Company

in 1821, the revitalized Hudson’s Bay Company ruled virtually unchal-

lenged over the vast domain of Rupert’s Land, extending from the upper

Great Lakes to the Arctic and Paciﬁ c Oceans. Sir George Simpson presided

over the realm like a despot, defending the company’s chartered right to

monopolize trade and governing the widely scattered posts with military-

like discipline. He assiduously maintained the traditional priorities of the

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

162

fur trade—efﬁ ciency of operation, maximization of proﬁ ts, and dis-

couragement of settlement. Aside from the nomadic encampments of

the Native people, the only permanent settlement in the Hudson’s Bay

Company domain continued to be Lord Selkirk’s colony along the Red

River (Stanley 1960; Pannekoek 1988).

During the 1820s the Selkirk colony consisted of about 500 settlers

situated along both banks of the river. Another 500 Métis were settled

at Pembina to the south, where the Red River intersects with the 49th

parallel. In 1834 the Selkirk heirs abandoned their interest in the settle-

ment and sold it back to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which organized

it as the District of Assiniboia under a governor and an appointed coun-

cil. By the late 1840s, the French-speaking Métis, situated mostly south

and west of the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, comprised

about half of the colony’s population of 6,000. The Métis subsisted

largely on the buffalo hunt, some small-scale farming, and seasonal

labor for the Hudson’s Bay Company. To the north, along the Red River

toward Lake Winnipeg, lived the descendants of English-speaking fur

traders and their wives along with the original Selkirk settlers. Despite

their common native bond, the English-speaking settlers, many of

whom were retired or active Hudson’s Bay Company employees, did

not mix a great deal with the French-speaking Métis.

A source of cultural division was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s tight

control over the settlement, which the Métis increasingly resented. The

company’s claim that it had a monopoly over selling goods to the colo-

nists and trading with the local Natives was decisively tested in 1849

when Pierre-Guillaume Sayer, a Métis trader, was charged with illegally

trafﬁ cking in furs. Although the court found Sayers guilty based on the

evidence, the judge decided to impose no sentence, no doubt inﬂ u-

enced by a force of up to 300 armed Métis gathered outside the court-

house. Not only did this case signify the triumph of free trade over the

Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly, it also demonstrated that the Métis

were the most cohesive community and the most powerful military

force in the Red River colony. In 1851 Métis military supremacy in the

region was further demonstrated with their decisive victory over the

Sioux at the Battle of Grand Coteau in North Dakota, thus ending a

decade of intense border conﬂ ict. Indeed, the presence of the Métis

along with the Hudson’s Bay Company was a deterrent to the north-

ward progress of the American settlement frontier.

By the mid-19th century, the days of Hudson’s Bay Company rule in

the West were numbered amid growing American and Canadian inter-

est in the region as an agrarian settlement frontier. Minnesota consid-

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ered the Red River colony to be within its natural orbit of transportation

and communication. The building of a wagon road to St. Paul in the

early 1850s was followed by the inauguration of steamship service

along the Red River in 1859. Upon the achievement of statehood in

1858, the Minnesota legislature passed a resolution in favor of the

annexation of the Red River district.

A few Canadians who had recently arrived in the colony urged the

Canadian government to take decisive action to ward off the expan-

sionist threat from the south. Canadian interest in the Northwest was

aroused by the ﬁ ndings of two distinct expeditions in 1857—a British-

sponsored exploration led by John Palliser and a Canadian-based scien-

tiﬁ c inquiry conducted by Henry Youle Hind. Contrary to opinions

rendered by fur traders and previous visitors to the Northwest, both

expeditions reported on outstanding possibilities for agriculture, par-

ticularly in the Red River and North Saskatchewan River valleys. This

news was especially welcomed in Canada West, where most of the good

farmland was already occupied. But whereas the Canadians still had to

overcome formidable geographical, economic, and political barriers

before they could secure control over the vast northwestern frontier,

Minnesota interests had direct and unimpeded access to the region

along with a railway link from St. Paul to the Atlantic Coast. Indeed, by

the early 1860s, the British Northwest appeared destined to become

another Oregon.

The Convention of 1818 had placed the Oregon Territory, situated

on the Paciﬁ c coast between California and the southern tip of the

Alaska panhandle, under joint British and American occupation. In

practical terms, however, the Hudson’s Bay Company inherited control

of Oregon from the North West Company in 1821 and maintained its

fur-trading monopoly almost unchallenged for two decades. By the

early 1840s the American western frontier was expanding across the

Rockies to the Paciﬁ c slope, and the familiar conﬂ ict between the fur

trade and settlement was extended to the southern half of the Oregon

Territory. The Hudson’s Bay Company, realizing its helplessness to

stem the tide of settlement, aimed to contain its interests north of the

Columbia River in the emerging dispute with the Americans. Although

President James Polk came into ofﬁ ce in 1845 with an electoral promise

to ﬁ ght for all of Oregon up to the Russian border (“54° 40' or ﬁ ght”),

the outbreak of war with Mexico over California made the Americans

more amenable to compromise. The Oregon Treaty signed in 1846

extended the international boundary along the 49th parallel to the

Paciﬁ c but left all of Vancouver Island in British hands. With this

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164

settlement, coming on the heels of the Maine–New Brunswick bound-

ary settlement, the process of negotiating the southern boundary of the

future Dominion of Canada was complete.

In an attempt to forestall the movement of Oregon settlers north of

the new boundary, the British government established a Crown colony

on Vancouver Island in 1849 and handed it over to the Hudson’s Bay

Company to promote settlement. The company had already established

a major fur-trading post on the southern tip of the island in 1843, and

the discovery of coal on the east coast led to the founding of Nanaimo

in 1852. But by the mid-1850s, the company had exerted little effort to

add to the population of approximately 1,000 on Vancouver Island and

200 on the mainland, in addition to upwards of 60,000 Native people

in the region.

The discovery of gold in the Fraser River valley in 1858, just as the

boom in California was subsiding, brought a rush of some 25,000

fortune-seekers into the region. Concerned about an American threat

to British sovereignty and the danger of a clash with the Native

peoples, James Douglas, governor of Vancouver Island and chief

administrator of the Hudson’s Bay Company, responded decisively

by asserting his authority over the mainland. The imperial authority

then established a separate Crown colony of British Columbia on the

mainland, with Douglas as governor. When the gold rush moved into

the Caribou region in the early 1860s, Douglas arranged for the con-

struction of a 400-mile road along the Fraser Canyon to open up the

southern interior. The gold rush soon ended and most of the Ameri-

cans departed, leaving both Vancouver Island and British Columbia

so economically depressed that the two colonies decided to unite in

1866.

The northward advance of the American western frontier gave every

indication that the Red River colony and British Columbia would even-

tually go the way of the Oregon Territory. After serving as an agent of

the British Empire for nearly half a century, the Hudson’s Bay Company

was no longer able or willing to resist the mounting pressure of settle-

ment. More interested in pursuing the fur trade in the northern forests

of Rupert’s Land, the company was willing to sell the fertile southern

plains by the early 1860s, but Canada would not yet agree to pay for

land that it claimed as its own and which it could not yet settle in the

absence of any system of communication (Morton 1964; Rich 1967).

While Canada aspired to build the vital transportation linkages to

develop and defend the British Northwest, the province remained

politically paralyzed by persistent sectional and racial discontent.

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Canadian Sectionalism and Political Deadlock

Sectional division was an inherent feature of the ill-conceived union of

the Canadas in 1841. The provision for equal sectional representation

in the Act of Union, instead of accelerating the planned assimilation of

the French, created a quasi-federal system of government that enabled

Canada East to retain its distinctive laws, religion, language, and cul-

ture dating back to the Quebec Act of 1774. Within the sectionalized

provincial legislature, the French were able to counter the assimilation-

ist goals of union and emerge as a powerful force by consistently voting

as a solid political bloc, in contrast to the divisive tendencies within the

English-speaking political alignments. The high tide of political unity

in the Province of Canada was reached with the formation of the

Baldwin-Lafontaine Reform coalition, which brought together the

majority political groups of the English and French cultural communi-

ties in 1848. The success of the Baldwin-Lafontaine administration in

achieving responsible government demonstrated the practical desirabil-

ity of forming a cabinet based on the principles of dual premiership and

double majority. However, these principles would prove to be unwork-

able in the wake of the heated sectional and racial antagonism of the

1850s.

Ironically, after serving as a rallying point, the achievement of

responsible government became a source of renewed political division.

Whereas Baldwin and Lafontaine viewed responsible government as a

constitutional end in itself, English and French radical reformers

regarded it as a means to achieve further political change. Urged on by

the return of Mackenzie and Papineau from political exile, the radicals

demanded the full application of American-style democracy with its

penchant for elective institutions. Furthermore, liberal attacks on the

Catholic Church in Europe during the revolutions of 1848–49 inspired

the radicals to advocate the separation of church and state. This resur-

gent radicalism eroded the strength of the reform coalition, and the

retirement of Baldwin and Lafontaine from politics in 1851 unleashed

new forces of factionalism in both sections of the province.

In Canada West, political radicalism found its most vocal expression

in the “Clear Grit” movement, which derived its main support from the

rapidly growing agrarian hinterland west of Toronto (Careless 1967).

In pressing for more democracy, the Clear Grits focused their attention

on the emerging issue of representation by population. The census of

1851–52 (the ﬁ rst decennial census in Canadian history) revealed that

the population of Canada West for the ﬁ rst time surpassed that of

Canada East by 952,000 to 890,000; by 1861 the gap had widened as

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Canada West had 1.4 million inhabitants compared to 1.1 million for

Canada East. Now it was Canada West’s turn to complain about the

unfairness of the union, and the Clear Grits led the charge. The Clear

Grits also took the lead in the demand for the secularization of clergy

reserves. A decade previously, Lord Sydenham had arranged for the

proceeds from the sale of clergy reserves to be divided among the lead-

ing churches, with the Anglican Church still being favored. The insis-

tence of the Clear Grits that these funds be used to support a public

education system became the basis for a ﬁ nal settlement of this issue in

1854.

On the issue of separation of church and state, the Clear Grits had a

potent ally in George Brown, owner of the Toronto Globe, the most

inﬂ uential Canadian newspaper. A staunch Presbyterian, Brown entered

politics as a moderate reformer in 1851 to campaign against Anglican

privileges. Brown and the Clear Grits became severely agitated over the

passage of the Common Schools Acts of 1853 and 1855, which estab-

lished a system of state-supported Catholic schools for Canada West on

the strength of French votes in Canada East. Outraged at this apparent

French domination of the union, Brown decided to support the Clear

Grits in their demand for representation by population. Despite this

support for “rep by pop,” Brown remained devoted to the British con-

stitution and the imperial connection, strongly opposing the Clear

Grits’s preference for American-style democracy. Brown and the Clear

Grits also found common ground in their opposition to government

ﬁ nancial support for the Montreal-based Grand Trunk Railway. Never-

theless, he strongly disagreed with those Clear Grits who advocated the

dissolution of the union of the Canadas to remedy the political under-

representation of the western section. As a businessman, Brown

believed in the unity of the St. Lawrence economy, and his objection to

the Grand Trunk was that it promoted the interests of Montreal over

those of Toronto. He regarded the Northern Railway project, which

served the interests of Toronto’s rising business community, as being

more deserving of public support.

Indeed, while the Montreal promoters of the Grand Trunk Railway

were engaged in a futile attempt to capture the trade of the American

Midwest, Brown and the Clear Grits were turning their attention to the

prospects of developing the British Northwest. The desire of the Clear

Grits to access a new agrarian frontier merged with the interests of

Brown and the Northern Railway promoters to make Toronto the

entrepôt of trade between the British Northwest and either London

(England) or New York. In 1857 Brown persuaded the Clear Grits to

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drop their interest in American democratic ideas and dissolution of the

union of the Canadas and to join forces with his own supporters of

moderate reform to pursue the annexation of the British Northwest to

Canada West and representation by population within the context of a

British parliamentary system. This new Reform coalition emerged as

the strongest political grouping in Canada West and would become the

basis of the future Liberal Party.

The chief opposition to Brown and the Clear Grits in the realigned

politics of Canada West was a new alliance consisting of Baldwin

reform supporters led by Francis Hincks and moderate Tory or Conser-

vative followers of William Draper under the direction of Kingston

lawyer John A. Macdonald. Tending to draw its electoral support from

districts east of Toronto, this political grouping not only objected to

Clear Grit radicalism but also shared an afﬁ nity for business develop-

ment and railway-building. A special interest in the Grand Trunk Rail-

way and St. Lawrence commercial development enabled Hincks and

Macdonald to cultivate new allies within the English-speaking business

community of Canada East, where political alignments were also shift-

ing dramatically.

After the achievement of responsible government, the French

reformers who followed Lafontaine did not fragment to the same extent

as did Baldwin supporters in Canada West. A small group of radicals,

known as the Parti Rouge (Red Party), under the leadership of A. A.

Dorion, sought to revive the traditions of Papineau’s Parti Patriote.

Inspired by republicanism in the United States and France, the Rouges

were the leading supporters of the Annexation Manifesto of 1849,

which temporarily cast them in a strange alliance with some disgrun-

tled members of the Montreal English-speaking business elite. Advocat-

ing dissolution of the Union of the Canadas while attacking the British

connection, Rouges nationalists could be considered the forerunners of

the Quebec separatist movement. They were also highly critical of the

close links between government and business, focusing particularly on

dealings with the Grand Trunk Railway. Their persistent anticlerical

outbursts upset the Catholic Church and invariably alienated many of

the French voters whose electoral tendencies were inﬂ uenced from the

pulpit. Consequently, unlike their western radical counterparts, the

Rouges never succeeded in becoming a political force in Canada East.

The politics of Canada East continued to be dominated by the mod-

erate French reform bloc, which by the early 1850s was known as the

Parti Bleu (Blue Party) under the leadership of George-Étienne Cartier.

Wishing to conserve their favorable position within the union in the

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face of resurgent radicalism, the Bleus reached a unique accommoda-

tion with English-speaking Tories from both sections of the province.

For this accord to work, the St. Lawrence Tories had to accept the sur-

vival of the French Catholic society that they had formerly condemned

as disloyal and had long sought to assimilate. Likewise, the French had

to shed their resistance to English commercial enterprise, and their

support for the abolition of the obsolete seigneurial system in 1854

epitomized their growing reconciliation with modern capitalism.

Despite forming the largest political bloc in the united provincial legis-

lature, the Bleus needed Tory support to form a majority government

and thus to pass legislation that would protect French cultural rights.

For their part, the Tories, who represented a minority in both sections

of the legislature, needed French support to carry out their railway

schemes for the St. Lawrence route. Both the Bleus and the English-

speaking Tories also agreed that their respective interests could best be

served by opposing representation by population. Following the elec-

tion of 1854, which conﬁ rmed the disintegration of the old Baldwin-

Lafontaine Reform alliance, Macdonald and Cartier ofﬁ cially engineered

the formation of a Liberal-Conservative coalition ministry that eventu-

ally evolved into the Conservative Party (Creighton 1964).

The realignment of political forces during the 1850s was achieved at

the expense of government stability. A persistent difﬁ culty was the

inability of any governing political group or party to maintain majority

support from both sections. The Conservatives under Cartier and Mac-

donald were dominant in Canada East but could not attract more than

a minority of voters in Canada West. The alliance of Brown and the

Clear Grits, which was becoming increasingly known as the Liberal

Reformers, held a solid majority of electoral support in Canada West

but could not sustain more than a loose coalition with Dorion’s Rouges,

which were in the distinct minority in Canada East. For example, a

Brown-Dorion ministry lasted scarcely three days in 1858. Complicat-

ing the political picture in a time when party lines were still somewhat

blurred was the prevalence of independent legislative members, or

“loose ﬁ sh,” whose loyalties would shift with the winds of special con-

cessions and privileges. This precarious balance of political forces left

government at the mercy of shifting allegiances and opinions on an

issue-by-issue basis, with the result that the four provincial elections

from 1854 to 1864 produced no less than 10 short-lived government

ministries (Cornell 1967).

The persistent sectional conﬂ ict, which rendered the Canadian

union virtually unworkable, motivated a search for alternatives other

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than the mere dissolution advocated by the more radical elements

among the Clear Grits and the Rouges. To restore a stronger measure

of separation between Canada West and Canada East, Rouges leader

Dorion ﬁ rst proposed to the Legislative Assembly a full application of

the federal principle to the existing union in 1856. Under a federal

union, matters of local concern would be addressed by legislatures

ruled by each sectional majority, while matters relating to the whole

province would be handled by a general parliament based on represen-

tation by population. In 1858 Galt convinced Macdonald and Cartier to

pursue a federal union of all the British North American colonies in

order to facilitate the building of an intercolonial railway connecting

Canada with the Maritime colonies via the Grand Trunk. In the follow-

ing year, George Brown persuaded his Clear Grit allies to abandon their

dissolutionist tendencies and accept a federal union of the Canadas

under representation by population in anticipation that Canada West

would dominate such an arrangement through its annexation of the

Northwest. The British government was mostly unresponsive to such

proposals because they appeared to be factional initiatives that did not

yet have widespread support in all the colonies.

Thus, by the early 1860s, the convergence of several problems—

political and sectional deadlock within Canada, the ﬁ nancial burden of

railway-building, the growing urgency of western expansion, imminent

commercial upheaval likely to follow the abrogation of the Reciprocity

Treaty, and the troublesome question of defense in the wake of the Brit-

ish military withdrawal from North America and the revival of annex-

ationist sentiment in the United States during the Civil War—was

driving the Province of Canada not only to reconsider the legislative

union of 1841 but also to develop its relationship with neighboring Brit-

ish North American colonies. The solution pointed to some form of

federal union involving all the British North American provinces, and as

the largest province and the one most seriously affected by these con-

cerns, Canada would have to assume the initiative to persuade its reluc-

tant neighbors to become partners in a great national experiment.

Toward a Reluctant Partnership

Political deadlock in the Canadian legislature reached a climax in June

1864 with the defeat of the fourth ministry in a span of three years.

Averting the prospect of a third election in as many years, Brown

agreed to join Macdonald and Cartier to form the Great Coalition. This

historic alliance brought together the leaders of the largest political

THE ROAD TO CONFEDERATION