Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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The distribution of powers outlined in the British North America

Act was clearly designed to keep the provinces subordinate to the fed-

eral government. Macdonald’s Conservatives sought to keep the prov-

inces weak by invoking the power of disallowance whenever provincial

legislation conﬂ icted with federal enactments or generally interfered

with the interests of the national government. The Liberal Party

adopted the position that the federal government should resort to its

power of disallowance only when the provinces exceeded their consti-

tutional jurisdiction. The provincial governments countered with the

argument that Confederation was a compact between the provinces and

the Dominion whereby the provinces had voluntarily delegated certain

powers to the federal government, which could be altered by mutual

consent. Opponents of this “compact theory” of Confederation main-

tained that the British North America Act was a statute of a superior

legislature rather than an agreement among provinces (Cook 1969).

The strongest challenge to Macdonald’s centralist views of Confed-

eration ﬁ ttingly came from Canada’s most populated and afﬂ uent prov-

ince. Oliver Mowat, the Liberal premier of Ontario from 1872 to 1896,

like his predecessor Edward Blake, claimed that his province was a

partner rather than a satellite of the federal government. Mowat saw in

the Ontario-Manitoba boundary question an opportunity to reinforce

the dominance of his province within the Confederation. When the

federal government unilaterally awarded the disputed territory west of

Thunder Bay to Lake of the Woods to Manitoba in 1881, Ontario

appealed the decision to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,

which ruled in the province’s favor three years later.

In another landmark case, Hodge v. The Queen, the Judicial Commit-

tee in 1884 upheld Ontario’s Act Respecting Licensing Duties, which

the federal government had disallowed, because liquor licensing was a

local matter and the provinces had full authority in their own realm of

legal jurisdiction. Provincial power was further enhanced by yet

another Ontario challenge over the role of the lieutenant governor as

primarily a servant of the federal government. In 1892 the Judicial

Committee ruled that the lieutenant governor as a representative of the

Crown in Canada had the same relationship with the province as the

governor-general had with the federal government. Ontario was also at

the forefront of a series of Judicial Committee decisions, notably Russell

v. The Queen in 1882 and the Local Prohibition case in 1896, which

resulted in provincial power over property and civil rights taking

supremacy over federal authority for peace, order, and good govern-

ment. In effect, the Judicial Committee ruled that federal residuary

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power could exceed beyond the matters enumerated in Section 91 of

the British North America Act only in times of extreme emergencies,

thereby nullifying the centralizing intentions of Confederation.

Growing provincial power, however, did not translate into greater

unity of the provinces, as demonstrated during the ﬁ rst Interprovincial

Conference that convened at Quebec in 1887 to reconsider the basis of

Confederation. The Conservative premiers of Prince Edward Island and

British Columbia declined to attend, while four of the ﬁ ve premiers

who did meet were Liberals. Dismissing the gathering as a Liberal Party

conspiracy, Macdonald declined an invitation to send federal represen-

tatives. With few interests in common, the provinces were united only

in attacking federal government policies. While Ontario and Quebec

were divided by cultural sentiments, they were mutually suspicious of

the smaller provinces’ demand for more federal subsidies that invari-

ably would mean higher taxation for central Canadians. Maritime com-

plaints regarding tariffs or Manitoba’s railway freight rate problems

were also of little concern to Ontario and Quebec. Although it high-

lighted the lack of national unity after two decades of Confederation,

the meeting was ultimately signiﬁ cant for inaugurating a new vehicle

for political decision-making in Canada as interprovincial conferences

evolved into federal-provincial conferences.

Cultural Conﬂ ict and Minority Rights

In Quebec, concern over provincial rights was complicated by the

thorny question of minority rights. Quebec actively supported provin-

cial rights as a strategy to preserve racial and religious privileges within

the province but did not hesitate to call upon the federal government

to nullify provincial measures that failed to protect the French minority

in other provinces. The dilemma created by this position became appar-

ent in 1871 when the New Brunswick government amended the Schools

Act to introduce a non-sectarian system of education that would no

longer provide public support for “separate” parish schools offering

French language and Catholic religious instruction. Despite pressure

from Acadian and Irish Catholics, the federal government refused to

intervene on two grounds. First, while the British North America Act

recognized denominational schools that had existed by law before

Confederation, those in New Brunswick existed only by custom, and

thus the new provincial act was not depriving Catholics of any legal

rights. Second, the federal government was reluctant to intervene in

education, a matter that was clearly under provincial jurisdiction

THE CLASH OF NATIONALISMS AND THE RESURGENCE OF REGIONALISM

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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according to the act. George-Étienne Cartier and other Quebec political

leaders agreed with Macdonald that federal intervention to alter exist-

ing provincial education laws would set a dangerous precedent (Silver

1982; Linteau, Durocher, and Robert 1983).

The New Brunswick school dispute following upon the heels of the

Red River uprising awakened the Quebec clergy to the fate of the grow-

ing population of French Catholics outside of the province. From the

mid-19th to the early 20th century approximately 100,000 young

French Canadians left Quebec every decade to seek more favorable

economic opportunities either in the United States or elsewhere in

Canada. In response to this exodus as well as to the imperialist and

continentalist appeals for the unity of the Anglo-Saxon race, the ultra-

montane movement within the clergy sought to make Quebec the cen-

ter of French Catholicism in North America, championing the cause of

expatriates wherever they formed a community, holding their loyalty to

the homeland, and occasionally attracting them back within its borders.

The ultramontanes, therefore, believed that it was imperative to main-

tain the Catholic Church and the French language not only as instru-

ments of cultural nationalism but also as barriers against the subversive

ideas of Protestantism or modern secular thought. In their Programme

catholique of 1871, the ultramontanes condemned the doctrine of

separation of church and state, boldly claiming that the state was sub-

ordinate to the church and the pope was the supreme authority in civil

and religious matters. The Programme catholique further declared that

the Catholic Church had the right to intervene directly in politics and

to brand as a sin a vote for a candidate who did not uphold the interests

of religion as deﬁ ned by the Quebec bishops. The lack of a dominant

ﬁ gure like Cartier to rally the forces of French Catholicism to the side

of the Liberals, along with the anti-Catholic and anti-French attitude

that prevailed within the Ontario wing of the party, drove the French

clergy to support the Conservative Party despite the prominence of the

Protestant extremist Orange Order within its ranks. While Macdonald

appreciated the electoral value of this uneasy “holy” alliance, he and his

party would have reason to regret this political fortune when the

North-West Rebellion erupted in 1885.

Farther west along the Saskatchewan River, the Métis and the Native

tribes were discovering that they could not escape the encroachment of

agricultural settlement. Once again, the government system of square

survey ignored the boundaries of the long and narrow river-lot farms

and brought their titles into question. Once again, the federal govern-

ment ignored the demands of the inhabitants for recognition of their

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land claims, for fulﬁ lment of the Indian Treaty obligations, and for local

self-government with representation in the national Parliament. And

once again, the Métis, with the initial support of white settlers who were

also upset over Ottawa’s indifference to western grievances, turned to

Louis Riel to lead their struggle against a government that apparently

had learned little from the political turmoil 15 years previously.

Riel had lived in exile mostly in the United States since he ﬂ ed Red

River in 1870. He returned brieﬂ y to be elected and reelected to Parlia-

ment, and in 1874 he mysteriously managed to sign the members’ reg-

ister in Ottawa. In 1875 Riel was granted a general amnesty on the

condition that he remain in exile for another ﬁ ve years. During his

years in exile, Riel’s religious obsessions caused him to spend time in a

mental asylum, and he became convinced that God had chosen him to

serve as “prophet of the New World.” So, when approached to lead the

western protest against an eastern-dominated national government in

1884, Riel believed that his divine mission was about to be fulﬁ lled.

At ﬁ rst, Riel sought political change by peaceful means, helping to

draft a petition demanding more generous treatment of Indians, more

favorable land terms for both whites and Métis, local control of natural

resources, lower tariffs, a railway to Hudson Bay as an alternative to the

CPR, responsible government for the North-West Territories, and west-

ern representation in Ottawa. In the face of government inaction, Riel

and his Métis followers grew increasingly impatient and adopted a more

confrontational approach. As he had done at Red River 15 years earlier,

Riel established a provisional government with himself as president in

March 1885. This action and subsequent talk of violence alienated many

of his white supporters, while Riel’s growing religious fanaticism turned

the Catholic Church against him (Stanley 1960, 1974).

Within an atmosphere of rising tensions, Riel’s renewal of armed resis-

tance against the Canadian government was ignited on March 26, 1885,

by a clash at Duck Lake between a force of the Northwest Mounted Police

(NWMP) and a band of Métis led by Gabriel Dumont, whom Riel had

appointed as military commander of the resistance movement. Dumont’s

victory not only forced the NWMP to abandon Fort Carlton and retreat to

Prince Albert but also encouraged Cree chiefs Poundmaker and Big Bear

to mount Indian attacks at Battleford and Frog Lake, respectively. News

of these skirmishes aroused the federal government to dispatch an expe-

ditionary force of more than 5,000 troops to the West via the partially

completed Canadian Paciﬁ c Railway. The speedy arrival of this force

under the command of Major General Frederick Middleton highlighted

the value of the transcontinental railway and helped to discourage a larger

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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Indian uprising, thereby localizing the rebellion. After three weeks of

ﬁ erce ﬁ ghting, Riel was defeated and captured in the decisive battle at

Batoche, the headquarters of his provisional government, on May 15,

1885. Dumont ﬂ ed to the United States, while Poundmaker and Big Bear

continued to resist brieﬂ y before surrendering.

Unlike his ﬁ rst uprising, which occurred within a political vacuum,

Riel’s second act of armed resistance was clearly a revolt against a consti-

tuted authority. The Canadian government proved to be far more deci-

sive in suppressing the North-West Rebellion than in preventing its

outbreak in the ﬁ rst place. The vast majority of Plains Indians who hon-

ored their treaty promises not to take up arms against the state were

rewarded with gifts and supplies, while the relatively few who partici-

pated in the rebellion were dealt with harshly by the courts. In the sub-

sequent trials, 125 Indians and Métis were prosecuted, and eight Indians

were publicly hanged to demonstrate the government’s determination to

resist challenges to its authority. For his part in leading the rebellion, Riel

was charged with treason and fought all of his lawyers’ efforts to have

him acquitted by reason of insanity. After one hour of jury deliberation,

Riel was found guilty and was sentenced to execution by hanging.

In the process, the leader of western protest against eastern domina-

tion and the defender of Native rights against encroaching white “civi-

lization” also became the catalyst for ethnic and religious passions that

had been smoldering uneasily since the Red River uprising. English

Protestant Ontario, still remembering him as the murderer of Thomas

Scott and an obstacle to provincial aspirations to annex the West,

demanded Riel’s execution. On the other hand, French Catholic Que-

bec, hailing Riel as a defender of cultural and minority rights in the

West, called upon the federal government to pardon him. Appeals for

clemency came from all parts of Canada and the United States as well

as from Britain and France. After several delays, including a legal appeal

to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and further investiga-

tions of Riel’s sanity, Macdonald concluded that “Riel must swing” in

order to keep Ontario loyal to the Conservatives and to herald the tri-

umph of Canadian law and order in the West. These motives were vital

to the success of his National Policy. Bolstered by the support of his

French-Canadian lieutenants, Hector Langevin and Adolphe Chapleau,

Macdonald was willing to gamble that his party’s strength in Quebec

would hold ﬁ rm. As it turned out, Riel’s execution in November 1885

would profoundly transform the political landscape of Quebec.

Both Wilfrid Laurier, a rising federal Liberal politician, and Honoré

Mercier, leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, seized the opportunity to

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capitalize on Riel’s “martyrdom.” Laurier declared at a mass rally

attended by over 50,000 people on the Champs de Mars in Montreal:

“Had I been born on the banks of the Saskatchewan, I myself would

have shouldered a musket” (Dafoe 1922, 2). Within two years, Laurier

was leader of the federal Liberals, and a little over a decade later, he

would become the ﬁ rst French-Canadian prime minister. At the same

rally, Mercier condemned the federal Conservatives as the party of

English Canada, and particularly of Ontario Protestant bigotry. Indeed,

the demise of the Conservative Party in Quebec in the 1890s can be

traced back to the bitterness aroused by Riel’s execution.

Mercier endeavored to revive the long-standing Rouge notion, all but

discredited by persistent ultramontane attacks during the 1870s, that

only an autonomous Quebec government could adequately represent

French-Canadian interests within the Confederation. Mercier allied his

Liberal supporters with dissident Conservatives to form the Parti

National, which would emphasize French Canada ﬁ rst, reminiscent of

the Canada First movement’s focus on the interests of English Protes-

tant Ontario (Silver 1982). In the provincial election of 1886, Mercier

led the Parti National to a narrow victory, and as premier of Quebec, he

set out to win the conﬁ dence of the ultramontane clergy by cultivating

his image as defender of the Catholic religion and French-Canadian

rights. In 1888 the Quebec legislature passed the Jesuit Estates Act,

which was primarily intended to compensate the Jesuit Order for prop-

erty seized by the Crown after the British Conquest. To settle the rival

claims of the Jesuits and the Catholic hierarchy in Quebec, the provin-

cial government called upon the pope to arbitrate.

Predictably, Protestant Ontario, led by Conservative member of Par-

liament D’Alton McCarthy, objected vehemently to papal intervention

in Canadian affairs and demanded that the federal government use its

powers of disallowance. However, Macdonald refused to intervene in a

provincial matter that would generate more ethnic and religious antag-

onism, so McCarthy’s motion of disallowance was decisively defeated.

With strong support from the Protestant Orange and Masonic Orders,

McCarthy formed the Equal Rights Association, which advocated a

Canadian nationality based on one language (English), one culture

(British), and one faith (Protestantism). After being burned in efﬁ gy in

Quebec for sacriﬁ cing Riel to the English Protestants, Macdonald found

himself viliﬁ ed in Ontario for conspiring with French Catholics.

To build up support for the Equal Rights Association, McCarthy took

his anti-Catholic and anti-French campaign to Manitoba in 1889, where

he urged the Liberal government of Thomas Greenway to abolish

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separate Catholic schools and French language rights, both of which

had been guaranteed in the Manitoba Act of 1870. In response to the

rhetoric of McCarthy and the Equal Rights Association as well as to the

steady decline in the size of the French Catholic community relative to

the English Protestant population, the provincial legislature passed the

Manitoba Schools Act in 1890. The act discontinued government ﬁ nan-

cial support for separate schools in favor of a uniform, state-funded,

secular education system administered by a newly created Department

of Education. The same session of the legislature abolished French as an

ofﬁ cial language, contrary to Section 23 of the Manitoba Act.

Disappointed Catholics in French and English Canada urged the

federal government to use its general power to disallow provincial leg-

islation or its speciﬁ c power to pass remedial legislation to protect

minority education rights under Section 93 of the British North Amer-

ica Act. Macdonald adopted the same cautious strategy that had served

him well in the New Brunswick school question of 1871. The Manitoba

school question differed from the New Brunswick dispute in the sense

that the federal government was being called upon to defend rights that

were constitutionally guaranteed.

The ﬁ rst Interprovincial Conference at Quebec City in 1887, with Ontario premier Oliver

Mowat in the chair, Quebec premier Honoré Mercier sitting to his right, and Nova Scotia

Premier W. S. Fielding sitting to his left. Fielding would later make the transformation from an

anti-Confederationist to a cabinet minister in the Laurier government.

(Library and Archives

Canada C-011583)

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Nevertheless, Macdonald remained determined to avoid a federal-

provincial clash over a volatile political issue that could inﬂ ict serious

electoral damage on his party. His strategy was to let the courts decide.

While the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the right of Catholics to

have state-supported separate schools, the Judicial Committee of the

Privy Council reversed this decision and ruled in favor of the Manitoba

government’s position. In another legal case, the Privy Council ruled

that the federal government had the constitutional right to pass reme-

dial legislation to protect minority rights, even though the Manitoba

law had been ruled constitutionally valid (Cook 1969).

When remedial legislation was ﬁ nally introduced to Parliament in

1896, it fell victim to the disintegration of the ruling Conservatives, who

had gone through four leadership changes in the ﬁ ve years since Macdon-

ald’s death. Macdonald’s successors as prime minister—John J. Abbott

(1891–92), John S. Thompson (1892–94), Mackenzie Bowell (1894–96),

and Charles Tupper (1896)—were either unable or were not in ofﬁ ce long

enough to build a party consensus on the issue. In the end, the remedial

bill was stalled by prolonged debate until the ﬁ ve-year term of Parliament

expired. The Manitoba schools question thus became a major issue in the

federal election of 1896. The divided and disorganized Conservatives

expressed support for remedial legislation when campaigning in Quebec

but denied that the bill would ever become law when campaigning in

English-speaking Canada. The Liberals under the leadership of Wilfrid

Laurier were able to shift the focus of the Manitoba schools question from

minority rights to provincial rights. In this way, Laurier could challenge

the political authority of the ultramontane Catholic clergy without

appearing to abandon the interests of his native Quebec. In the ﬁ nal

analysis, Quebec’s historic shift from the Conservative to the Liberal fold

was decisive in securing a narrow victory for Laurier, thus giving Canada

its ﬁ rst French-speaking and Catholic prime minister.

Charles Tupper’s defeat after slightly more than two months at the

head of the Conservative government bestowed on him the ignoble dis-

tinction of serving the shortest term of any Canadian prime minister.

More important, the general election of 1896 marked the end of the Con-

servative ascendancy in national politics, an era dominated by Sir John A.

Macdonald. Laurier would emerge as the heir to Macdonald as a master

strategist in the complex politics of cultural division, regional protest,

and national unity. His 15-year reign as prime minister would be marked

by a reversal of national economic fortunes, the rise of the Liberal politi-

cal ascendancy, and the growing diversiﬁ cation of Canadian society, all

trends that would continue throughout the 20th century.

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THE WHEAT BOOM AND

NATIONAL EXPANSION

(1896–1914)

n 1904, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier predicted: “The nineteenth

century was the century of the United States, the twentieth century

will be the century of Canada.” Laurier’s conﬁ dence was buoyed by

the remarkable prosperity that Canada was enjoying since he came to

power in 1896 and which it would continue to experience with only

brief interruptions during the ﬁ rst three decades of the 20th century. As

much as Laurier may have believed that his government’s policies were

responsible for the turnaround in Canada’s fortunes, the reality was that

Macdonald’s National Policy was ﬁ nally fulﬁ lling its promise. Just as the

National Policy had faltered because of the slow progress of western

settlement, so it ﬂ ourished in the wake of the extraordinary inﬂ ux of

immigrants to the prairies, which triggered the so-called wheat boom

from 1896 to 1914. Accordingly, the late 19th-century pessimism and

doubt about Canada’s survival gave way to a new sense of optimism and

conﬁ dence that inspired a greater interest in external relations. In the

process, renewed controversies over contributions to imperial defense

and commercial reciprocity with the United States led to the downfall

of the Laurier government.

Western Settlement and the

Triumph of the National Policy

The settlement of the Canadian West after 1896 was stimulated by the

reversal of the same external factors that had previously been impedi-

ments. The revival of world trade was marked by a rise in the demand

for agricultural products and other raw materials to supply the growing

cities and factories in Britain and western Europe. The price of wheat,

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for example, quadrupled from 1891 to 1921, thereby making farming a

more proﬁ table venture. Furthermore, as the American western frontier

reached the limits of its expansion by the end of the 19th century, the

cheap and fertile land of the Canadian prairies became known as the

“last, best west” (Brown and Cook 1974).

The prospect of developing the Canadian West was enhanced by

improvements in agricultural techniques and technology that enabled

settlers to cope with the natural limitations of climate. The application

and reﬁ nement of “dry” farming techniques helped to overcome the

relatively low rainfall of the prairies. The advent of the chilled steel

plough facilitated cutting through the hard prairie sod, while improved

harrows and seed drills as well as tractors and threshers made it pos-

sible to work large farms effectively. Perhaps the greatest advance was

Marquis wheat, a high-yielding strain that could mature in less than

100 days, thereby reducing the hazards of a late spring or an early

autumn frost and extending the farming frontier to the northern areas

of Alberta and Saskatchewan. As a result, Canadian wheat exports

increased from barely 2 million bushels in 1896 to over 150 million

bushels in 1921.

As the wheatlands of western Canada became more attractive to set-

tlers, the federal government embarked upon an ambitious immigra-

tion policy administered by Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton, who

had migrated from Ontario to Manitoba during the 1880s. Believing

that agriculture was the backbone of the Canadian economy, Sifton

organized vigorous publicity campaigns in Britain, the United States,

and continental Europe promoting the unparalleled opportunities of

farming in the “Wondrous West,” as one of his many pamphlets was

entitled. While government agents recruited immigrants with an offer

of a quarter section (160 acres) of free land under the Dominion Lands

policy, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian Paciﬁ c Railway

were willing to sell their favorably located holdings at reasonable prices

because more people meant more business. The response was over-

whelming as from 1896 to 1914 upwards of 2.5 million immigrants

came to Canada, with about 1 million of them settling on the western

prairies. Accordingly, Canada’s population expanded from 4.8 million

in 1891 to 8.8 million in 1921 while the population of the West, includ-

ing Manitoba, the North-West Territories, and British Columbia, grew

from little more than 250,000 to over 2 million during the same period

(Fawke 1957).

In response to this growth, western settlers pressured the federal

government to grant provincial status to the North-West Territories.

THE WHEAT BOOM AND NATIONAL EXPANSION