Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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Under federal jurisdiction, the North-West Territories had been politi-

cally organized under a governor and an appointed council in 1875.

The region was granted representative government in 1888 and respon-

sible government in 1897. Rejecting proposals to create one large prov-

ince that might become too powerful, the federal government passed

the Autonomy Bills to divide the North-West Territories into the prov-

inces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905. As in the case of Manitoba,

the federal government retained ownership of the natural resources of

the two new provinces in order to maintain control over their settle-

ment and development in the critical formative stage. The northern

boundary of the two provinces was established at the 60th parallel, the

same as that of British Columbia, and the 110th meridian was chosen

as the boundary between the two new provinces because it divided

them into areas of roughly equal size. Together, the three Prairie Prov-

inces would evolve into another strong regional interest to challenge

the dominance of central Canada and the power of the federal govern-

ment (Thomas 1972).

Western settlement was the catalyst for sustained national economic

prosperity that ultimately seemed to justify Macdonald’s National Pol-

icy. Relentless in attacking the National Policy as the source of regional

discontent and Canada’s economic ills while they were the Ofﬁ cial

Opposition, the Liberals wholeheartedly embraced the strategy after

they came to power. The former advocates of free trade and reciprocity

with the United States continued Macdonald’s policy of tariff protection

to stimulate domestic industry and east-west trade. The Liberal tariff

policy of 1897 also extended Macdonald’s idea of reciprocity of tariffs

by offering lower customs duties to countries giving similarly favorable

terms to Canada. Since Britain already adhered to such a policy, the

Liberal tariff revision amounted to a measure of imperial preference

that did not conﬂ ict with protectionist goals and yet appealed some-

what to both free trade and imperialist sentiments. As a result, Britain

became the leading market for western grain in addition to other farm

exports such as meat, dairy products, and fruit. Heavy British invest-

ment in Canadian development during the wheat boom period further

strengthened relations between the two countries. Indeed, Laurier, like

Macdonald, was committed to a national economic strategy that was

transcontinental and transatlantic in scope.

The expansion of prairie settlement and east-west trade strained the

facilities of the Canadian Paciﬁ c Railway. Rising western demand for

lower freight rates and better service, especially to remote areas not

linked to the CPR, convinced the Laurier government that another

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transcontinental line was necessary. By 1903 two powerful railway

enterprises responded to offers of government support to compete with

the CPR. The second-largest railway system in Canada, the Grand

Trunk Railway, revived its earlier plan to extend its eastern-based line

to the Paciﬁ c by undertaking to build the Grand Trunk Paciﬁ c from

Winnipeg to Prince Rupert, some 550 miles up the coast from Vancou-

ver. To open up the northern regions of Ontario and Quebec, the fed-

eral government agreed to construct the National Transcontinental

from Winnipeg to Moncton and then to lease the new railway line to

the Grand Trunk. Meanwhile, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann,

who had built up the western-based Canadian Northern into the third-

largest railway system in Canada, undertook to extend lines from

Edmonton to Vancouver and from Port Arthur to Quebec City to fulﬁ ll

their own transcontinental ambitions. The federal government tried to

persuade the Grand Trunk and the Canadian Northern interests to join

forces, but their mutual jealousies and conﬂ icting ambitions stood in

the way of any agreement. Indeed, the government could have forced a

merger by making its support conditional upon a joint venture, but the

optimism of the age induced even the normally pragmatic Laurier to

assume that unlimited national expansion would enable Canada to sus-

tain three transcontinental railways.

The completion of the two new transcontinental lines by 1915 added

some 22,000 miles to the national railway system, thereby giving Can-

ada the highest mileage per capita of any country in the world. But the

outbreak of World War I in the previous year curtailed the ﬂ ow of immi-

gration and slowed down the pace of national expansion. Not only did

the three transcontinental railways ﬁ nd themselves involved in ruinous

competition for a volume of trafﬁ c that was less than anticipated in the

populated areas, but also the lines ran almost side by side through hun-

dreds of miles of unproductive Shield wilderness and sparsely settled

western communities. Further burdened by mismanagement and mount-

ing debt, both the Grand Trunk Paciﬁ c and the Canadian Northern stag-

gered into bankruptcy, and the Grand Trunk reneged on the agreement

to assume the lease of the National Transcontinental.

The federal government could not afford to allow the railway compa-

nies to collapse because both taxpayers’ money and the nation’s reputa-

tion with international creditors were involved. A royal commission

appointed in 1916 to investigate the railway problem recommended that

the federal government take over the troubled lines. Over the next seven

years, the Canadian Northern, the Grand Trunk Paciﬁ c, and the Grand

Trunk were amalgamated with the National Transcontinental and the

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Intercolonial to form the state-owned Canadian National Railway

(incorporated in 1919) to compete with the privately owned Canadian

Paciﬁ c Railway (CPR) (Stevens 1973). Despite the dubious ﬁ nancial

legacy of the new transcontinental railways, their construction enhanced

national prosperity, provided employment for many immigrants, and

helped to uncover the previously remote or unknown northern resource

frontier.

New Resource Frontiers and the New Industrialism

While the much-anticipated expansion of the western frontier was

unfolding in accordance with the design of the National Policy, a new

northern frontier was opening up to enhance the prospects of Canadian

industrial development. Long the preserve of the fur trade, the Canadian

Shield and the western Cordilleras became a treasury of minerals, tim-

ber, and hydroelectric power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As early as 1883, CPR construction crews blasting through the rugged

terrain of northern Ontario discovered copper and nickel deposits in

the vicinity of Sudbury. As reﬁ ning processes, uses, and markets for the

metal developed, Sudbury became the world’s largest nickel producer.

The building of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway led to

the discovery of rich silver deposits around Cobalt north of Lake

Nipissing in 1903 and touched off a mining boom that spread north-

ward to Kirkland Lake and the Porcupine district. Railway construction

through the Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia also led

to signiﬁ cant discoveries of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc. Although

the economic importance of these mining operations was enduring,

they did not capture the public imagination to the same extent as the

Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s (Zaslow 1971).

Fortune-seekers from all parts of the world ﬂ ocked to the Klondike

and Yukon River valleys to pan for gold starting in 1896. At the height

of the gold rush in 1898, the previously unsettled subarctic frontier had

a population of about 30,000, more than half of which was concen-

trated in the newly established town of Dawson. In the same year, the

federal government created the Yukon Territory, administered by an

appointed commissioner, in an effort to ward off the prospect of annex-

ation to Alaska. Even if the economic signiﬁ cance of the Klondike

strike was somewhat exaggerated and short-lived, the tales of sudden

riches, heroic and tragic exploits, and the rowdiness and lawlessness of

the mining frontier were immortalized through popular ﬁ ction and

folklore, notably the poetic verses of Robert W. Service (Berton 2001).

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Perhaps less romantic than the mining booms, the exploitation of for-

est and water resources was just as vital to national development. The

Douglas ﬁ r, spruce, and cedar stands of British Columbia along with the

white pine forests of Ontario satisﬁ ed construction demands on the tree-

less prairies as well as in the growing cities and towns of central Canada

and the United States. British Columbia’s forests also supplied lumber to

Asia. In addition, the softwood forest wealth of the Cordilleras and the

Shield was a valuable source of pulpwood for the development of the

pulp and paper industry, which made Canada one of the world’s leading

exporters of newsprint. Furthermore, the fast ﬂ owing rivers of the

Shield and Cordilleras could readily be harnessed as sources of hydro-

electric power, replacing coal in the booming factories of central Canada

as well as in the evolving mining and pulp and paper industries. The age

of electricity under public ownership and control was ushered in by the

creation of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission (now Ontario

Hydro) in 1906 to distribute and eventually to produce this vital source

of energy (Armstrong and Nelles 1986).

Western settlement and the opening of the northern resource fron-

tier stimulated industrial expansion, particularly in central Canada. As

the National Policy had intended, a growing agricultural population in

the West increased the demand for eastern manufactured goods,

thereby giving rise to agricultural implements works, iron and steel

foundries, machine shops, railway yards, textile mills, boot and shoe

factories, and numerous smaller manufacturing enterprises that sup-

plied consumer goods. By keeping out lower-priced foreign manufac-

tured goods, the high tariff policies of the federal government received

much credit for protecting existing industries and encouraging the cre-

ation of new enterprises. To climb the tariff wall, large American indus-

trial ﬁ rms opened branches in Canada, and the governments of Ontario

and Quebec aggressively urged them on by offering bonuses, subsidies,

and guarantees to locate new plants within their borders. Canadian

industrial enterprises became increasingly attractive to foreign inves-

tors, especially from the United States and Great Britain. Much of the

over $600 million of American capital that ﬂ owed into Canada from

1900 to 1913 was earmarked for mining and the pulp and paper indus-

try, while British investors contributed nearly $1.8 billion, mostly in

railway building, business development, and the construction of urban

infrastructure. As a result, the gross value of Canadian manufactured

products quadrupled from 1891 to 1916.

Expanding markets offered greater opportunities for mass produc-

tion and necessitated larger sources of capital, which in turn led to the

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growing concentration of Canadian industry and ﬁ nance. Small, often

family-owned manufacturing companies merged to form large corpora-

tions that were considered more efﬁ cient and competitive in an expand-

ing market. Corporate conglomerates such as the Steel Company of

Canada (Stelco), Dominion Steel, Algoma Steel, Canada Cement, Maple

Leaf Milling, Dominion Textiles, Massey Harris, and Imperial Oil

emerged in the early 20th century to dominate production and distri-

bution within their respective industries. By limiting foreign competi-

tion, high tariff policies tended to encourage the rise of these

monopolies, which aroused hostility from small business and farmers.

Although the federal government responded by passing the Combines

Investigation Act in 1910, this attempt to control the growth of monop-

olies was ineffective mainly because the laissez-faire-oriented public

sector was reluctant to interfere with private enterprises that employed

so many workers and paid substantial taxes (Bliss 1987).

The ﬁ nancial sector was also consolidating into powerful organiza-

tions as government regulation dating back to the Bank Act of 1871

favored the development of a centralized system of branch banking

that, unlike the decentralized system in the United States, tended to

encourage the absorption of smaller and weaker banks by their larger

and more stable competitors. Accordingly, the number of Canadian

banks had decreased from 41 in 1886 to 22 in 1914. The three largest

Canadian banks—the Bank of Montreal, the Montreal-based Royal

Bank, and the Toronto-based Bank of Commerce—extended branches

throughout the country and invested heavily in new industries.

Corresponding with the emergence of large corporations was the

organization of skilled industrial workers into unions. Early labor

unions were mutual aid societies rather than bargaining agents for their

members. Not until 1872, after a successful strike of the Toronto Typo-

graphical Society against George Brown’s Globe newspaper for a nine-

hour day and six-day week, did the federal government pass the Trade

Union Act, which recognized the right of registered unions to exist and

to organize without fear of prosecution as illegal associations. On the

other hand, an amendment to the Criminal Code passed at about the

same time imposed severe penalties, including a prison sentence, for

most forms of picketing and union pressure. In 1883 the Trades and

Labour Congress of Canada (TLC) was formed as the second-largest

national union association, surpassed in membership numbers only by

the American-based Knights of Labor. Soon after its formation, the TLC

afﬁ liated itself with Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labor

(AFL), while remnants of the Knights of Labor formed a craft union

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known as the Canadian Federation of Labour in 1902. Other localized

unions, such as the Provincial Workmen’s Association in the Mari-

times, the Catholic unions in Quebec, and the radical American-based

International Workers of the World (IWW), which enjoyed some suc-

cess in the West, emerged to challenge the international unions (Forsey

1974).

Despite these initial efforts to organize industrial workers, division

within the labor ranks and the hostility of employers and government

slowed the growth of unions. The union movement was divided over

whether workers should be organized by industry or by trade. The

Knights of Labor and the IWW endeavored to develop working-class

consciousness and political organization through industrial unionism.

The AFL and TLC promoted trade unionism that refrained from parti-

san political activity in favor of using economic power in the form of

strikes and boycotts to achieve immediate improvements in wages,

working hours, and working conditions. By 1914, over 140,000 out of

a total trade union membership of about 166,000 belonged to interna-

tional unions, thus raising concerns about foreign inﬂ uences within the

labor movement among both supporters and opponents. Furthermore,

scarcely one in 10 workers was unionized, and most unskilled or semi-

skilled workers as well as all female laborers remained unorganized

(Abella 1975).

Government demonstrated its growing awareness of labor’s role in

industrialized Canada through the establishment of the Royal Commis-

sion on the Relations of Labour and Capital in 1889, through its procla-

mation in 1894 of Labour Day (the ﬁ rst Monday in September) as a

national holiday, through the creation of the Federal Department of

Labour in 1900, and through passage of the Industrial Disputes Investi-

gation Act in 1907. The Ontario government also introduced the Work-

men’s Compensation Act in 1914, and most provinces established their

own departments of labor by the early 1920s. On the whole, however,

government maintained a laissez-faire attitude that it should not inter-

fere in the workplace, with the result that the Industrial Disputes Inves-

tigation Act became more an instrument to prevent strikes and lockouts

from disrupting industry than to resolve labor disputes equitably.

Thus, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Canada underwent a

veritable industrial revolution that would permanently alter the way in

which people earned their livelihoods. Increasingly, the factory was

replacing the farm as the embodiment of the workplace as many Canadi-

ans found the prospect of a steady wage to be more appealing than rely-

ing on the unpredictable forces of nature and world markets. However,

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workers would soon discover that their economic and social security

was no less precarious within modern industrial life.

Immigration and the Seeds of Multiculturalism

Besides altering the political map and economic fortunes of the nation,

the wave of immigration that helped to sustain the prairie wheat boom

signiﬁ cantly diversiﬁ ed the cultural composition of Canadian society.

In 1891 the Canadian population was 58 percent British, 30 percent

French, and 12 percent “other.” This distribution reﬂ ected a basic

assumption underlying Canadian immigration policy that preference

should be given to foreign peoples who could be readily assimilated

into the existing population. Physical and cultural distance from Britain

and the degree to which skin pigmentation conformed to that of white

Anglo-Saxons were the essential criteria by which the assimilation

potential of immigrants was measured.

Naturally, the more than 1 million British immigrants who arrived

from 1896 to 1914 were deemed to be most “desirable” or “preferred”

by virtue of their language, religion, and customs. Still, British home-

steaders who lacked farming experience had a difﬁ cult time adapting to

a frontier environment. A notable example was the settlement estab-

lished near Saskatoon by Reverend Isaac Barr, who proclaimed his

“patriotic” intentions: “Let us take possession of Canada: Let our Cry

be ‘Canada for the British’” (Canada 2000). However, most of his set-

tlers were Londoners with no farming experience and little tolerance

for pioneer hardships. The miserable failure of the Barr Colony acted as

a deterrent to future British colonization schemes. Other British settlers

who failed to adjust to rural life either drifted to the booming Prairie

towns or left for the cities of the United States.

The nearly three-quarters of a million Americans who migrated to

Canada during the wheat boom period were likewise desirable in terms

of language and social customs, although their republican political ideas

might be cause for some concern. Sifton was particularly interested in

recruiting experienced pioneer farmers of the American West and in

repatriating Canadians who had settled in the United States. However,

American blacks were not welcome in Canada. While Canadian immi-

gration agents highlighted the opportunities available to white settlers,

they sought to discourage blacks by emphasizing the harshness of the

climate and the loneliness of life on the western plains. The agents’

efforts were apparently successful since less than 1,500 blacks immi-

grated to Canada during the ﬁ rst decade of the 20th century.

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Sifton hoped to attract immigrants from northern and western

Europe—Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, and Swit-

zerland—whom he regarded as easier to assimilate than the less desir-

able southern Europeans, including Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Jews,

Portuguese, Spaniards, and Turks. The imperialist belief in the inherent

superiority of the northern over the southern “races” was at its height

in the early 20th century. Although the inﬂ ux of the preferred northern

and western Europeans turned out to be lower than anticipated, Sifton

did express a special appreciation for the agricultural skills of eastern

and central Europeans: “I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat,

born on the soil, whose forefathers had been farmers for ten genera-

tions, with a stout wife, and a half-dozen children, is good quality”

(Palmer 1975, 35). Through their experience on the land, Sifton was

conﬁ dent that these immigrants would eventually be “nationalized.”

Of the nearly three-quarters of a million Europeans who arrived

from 1896 to 1914, more than 100,000 were Ukrainians lured by the

prospect of larger landholdings than were available to the peasantry in

the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Enthusiastically respond-

ing to the offer of vilni zemli, or free land, these industrious newcomers

cleared and cultivated vast areas of prairie land and established tightly

knit communities that retained many vestiges of their old world cul-

ture. They communicated in their own language, encouraged their

children to wear their national dress, and worshipped in their distinc-

tive Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox churches with onion-shaped

domes. Ukrainian cultural devotion aroused concern among Anglo

Canadians such as social reformer J. S. Woodsworth, who in 1909

wrote about “how difﬁ cult is the problem of Canadianizing them” in

his book Strangers Within Our Gates (Brown and Cook 1974).

Other eastern European group settlement proved equally difﬁ cult to

absorb. Religious persecution in their native Russia caused three paci-

ﬁ st sectarian groups—the Mennonites, the Doukhobors, and the Hut-

terites—to immigrate to western Canada on the promise from the

federal government that they would be granted communal settlements,

religious freedom, and exemption from military service. The German-

speaking Mennonites were ﬁ rst to arrive, settling in the vicinity of Win-

nipeg during the 1870s. The success of the Mennonites encouraged

immigration ofﬁ cials to offer special privileges to the Russian-speaking

Doukhobors, who settled in the Prince Albert and Yorkton regions of

Saskatchewan in 1899. However, their “strange ways” and several inci-

dents of mass civil disobedience, including nude marches sensational-

ized in newspapers, aroused Anglo-Canadian hostility toward the

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Doukhobors. When they refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the

Crown as a condition for gaining title to free land, they forfeited their

holdings and relocated in the Kootenay region of British Columbia

under the spiritual leadership of Peter Veregin in 1907. The German-

speaking Hutterites lived in South Dakota until 1917, when wartime

persecution forced them to resettle in southern Manitoba and southern

Alberta. Assured of exemption from military service, they lived a simple

communal life with their own schools and churches. The Hutterites

prospered and expanded their farms rapidly, sometimes incurring the

resentment and jealousy of their neighbors, who objected to their col-

lective farming practices.

Sifton tolerated eastern European immigrants as good farmers, but

he disapproved of southern Europeans because they tended to swell the

ranks of the urban working class. In this regard, he faced considerable

criticism from business interests who wanted Italians as cheap labor.

However, labor unions were antagonistic toward unskilled Italian

workers who, by accepting lower wages, took jobs away from union

workers. The Jewish communities that formed in Montreal, Toronto,

and Winnipeg after 1880 also incurred Anglo-Canadian displeasure for

their unassimilable character, lack of agricultural experience, and

industrious tendencies.

For the same reason, Asian immigrants were not welcome on the

western prairies, but they were recruited as a source of diligent and

cheap labor mainly for railway-building, ﬁ shing crews, and mining and

lumber camps in British Columbia. Chinese immigrants ﬁ rst arrived

during the gold-rush era from the late 1850s to the early 1860s, and

another 15,000 were hired to work on the CPR in the 1880s. Unfortu-

nately, Chinese workers were resented as unfair competition since they

could readily be exploited by ruthless entrepreneurs. The provincial

government imposed a head tax (payable upon entering the country),

which reached $500 by 1903, to limit Asian immigration. Nevertheless,

British Columbia’s Asian population exceeded 10 percent by 1911.

Opposition to Asian immigration reached a peak of frenzy in 1907 with

the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League, which soon organized a

protest march through Vancouver’s Chinatown. In the ensuing riot, the

mobs attacked Chinese residents and destroyed their property. British

Columbians’ insensitivity to Asian immigration was further demon-

strated in 1914 when the provincial government refused to allow a

shipload of prospective immigrants from India to land in Vancouver.

For two months, the ship anchored offshore, while the 400 predomi-

nantly Sikh passengers argued that they were British subjects and that

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many of them had professional qualiﬁ cations. Ultimately, they were

denied permission to land, and a Canadian naval vessel escorted the

“alien” ship out to sea amid cries of “White Canada forever” and

refrains of “Rule Britannia.”

Canadian attitudes toward “foreigners” in the early 20th century

were universally racist, inasmuch as the concept of a multicultural soci-

ety still lay more than a half-century in the future. T. S. Sproule, a

Conservative member of Parliament, proclaimed unabashedly and

without much rebuttal: “Canada is today the dumping ground for the

refuse of every country in the world.” In Strangers Within Our Gates,

Woodsworth spoke for many English-speaking Canadians when he

warned: “If Canada is to become in a real sense a nation, if our people

are to become one people, we must have one language.” Anglo Canadi-

ans believed that the schools and churches had to “Canadianize” these

newcomers, not only by teaching them English but also by inculcating

British-Canadian beliefs in citizenship, democracy, and the Protestant

work ethic (Knowles 1997; Kelley and Trebilcock 1998).

The Anglo-Canadian perspective of education as an instrument of

cultural assimilation and national unity further complicated attempts

to resolve the schools question in the West. In 1897 Laurier concluded

a compromise with Manitoba Premier Thomas Greenway that did not

restore the state-supported separate school system but allowed reli-

gious instruction in the public schools for the last half hour of the day

and bilingual teaching when 10 students in any school had a native

language other than English. Because French no longer had the status

of equality with English that it had been accorded under the Manitoba

Act of 1870, the Catholic hierarchy in Quebec accused Laurier of

capitulating to the English-Canadian Protestants and appealed to the

pope in Rome to intervene. Despite condemning the Manitoba School

Act of 1890 and judging the Laurier-Greenway compromise as unsatis-

factory, the papacy agreed with Laurier that these terms were the best

that Catholics could hope to obtain given their minority position in

Manitoba.

Western opposition to separate denominational and linguistic schools

reﬂ ected not only the prevailing cultural intolerance but also the

declining inﬂ uence of the French Catholic community since the Mani-

toba Act of 1870. Although thousands of French Canadians responded

to the Catholic clergy’s call to settle in the West during the 1880s, their

numbers paled in comparison to English-speaking migrants. The Cana-

dian West was simply too distant and remote compared to neighboring

New England, which offered more employment opportunities in its

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