Confederation and expansion

By the 1830s, reformers in Upper and Lower Canada had run out of patience. The colonies had elected assemblies, but progress toward democracy felt far too slow. In 1837 and 1838 that frustration turned into armed rebellion, in the countryside outside Montreal and in Toronto. The rebels did not have enough public support. British troops and Canadian volunteers put both risings down, and a number of the rebels were hanged or exiled.

Britain sent Lord Durham to find out what had gone wrong. His report made two recommendations. The first was that Upper and Lower Canada be merged and given responsible government, which means that the ministers who run the government must have the support of a majority of the elected assembly. The second was that the Canadiens assimilate into English-speaking Protestant culture and give up their own.

In 1840 Durham got his union. Upper and Lower Canada were joined as the Province of Canada. The other half of his advice went nowhere. The men who finally won responsible government did it in two languages, working together.

Responsible government is a simple idea with large consequences. The ministers who run the government must have the support of a majority of the elected assembly. Lose that majority and you lose your office. Winning that rule took a generation.

Two men led the fight in the Canadas: Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, a champion of democracy and of French language rights, and Robert Baldwin, a reformer from Upper Canada. In Nova Scotia, Joseph Howe carried the same campaign. Howe got there first. In 1847 and 1848 Nova Scotia became the first colony in British North America to attain full responsible government.

The Canadas followed a year later. In 1848 and 1849 Lord Elgin, the Governor of United Canada, introduced responsible government there, and in 1849 La Fontaine became the first leader of a responsible government in the Canadas. A French-speaking Catholic now led the colony Durham had wanted to make English, and nobody had fired a shot to get there.

From 1864 to 1867, representatives of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada met, argued and drafted, with British support, to build a new country out of separate colonies. They are the Fathers of Confederation. Their problem was how to join very different places. Their answer was two levels of government, federal and provincial. Each province would elect its own legislature and keep control of education and health.

The old Province of Canada was split in two again, this time as Ontario and Quebec. Together with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia they formed the Dominion of Canada. The British Parliament passed the British North America Act in 1867, and the new country was officially born on July 1 of that year. Until 1982 Canadians called that holiday Dominion Day. It is now officially Canada Day.

The name came from a Father of Confederation from New Brunswick, Sir Leonard Tilley, who proposed the term Dominion of Canada in 1864. He had taken it from Psalm 72 in the Bible: “dominion from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.” At the time the country did not yet reach the Pacific. The title was written into the Constitution and used officially for about a hundred years.

Sir John Alexander Macdonald, a Father of Confederation, became Canada’s first Prime Minister in 1867. He was born in Scotland on January 11, 1815, came to Upper Canada as a child and practised law in Kingston, Ontario. Parliament has recognized January 11 as Sir John A. Macdonald Day, and his portrait is on the ten dollar bill.

Macdonald could not have done it alone. Sir George-Étienne Cartier, a Montrealer, a railway lawyer and a patriotic Canadien, was the key architect of Confederation from Quebec and Macdonald’s close ally. Cartier led Quebec into Confederation and then helped negotiate the entry of the Northwest Territories, Manitoba and British Columbia.

The country they started kept growing for another 132 years, one province or territory at a time. Four joined in 1867. Manitoba and the Northwest Territories came in 1870, British Columbia in 1871, Prince Edward Island in 1873. The Arctic Islands were transferred to the Northwest Territories in 1880, the Yukon Territory was created in 1898, Alberta and Saskatchewan joined in 1905, Newfoundland and Labrador in 1949, and Nunavut in 1999.

In 1869 Canada took over the vast northwest region from the Hudson’s Bay Company. Nobody consulted the 12,000 Métis who already lived along the Red River, and they found out that their homeland had changed hands without them. Louis Riel led an armed uprising and seized Fort Garry, the territorial capital.

Ottawa sent soldiers to retake Fort Garry in 1870 and Riel fled to the United States. The uprising still got results: Canada created a new province, Manitoba, and Riel was elected to Parliament, though he never took his seat. A second rebellion broke out in 1885 in what is now Saskatchewan. It ended differently. Riel was captured, tried and executed for high treason, a decision Quebec opposed strongly and has never forgotten. Many Canadians see him as a hero, a defender of Métis rights and the father of Manitoba.

Between the two rebellions, Prime Minister Macdonald created a police force for the new territory. He established the North West Mounted Police in 1873. Its officers founded Fort Calgary, Fort MacLeod and other centres, and Regina became its headquarters. Today that force is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties, Canada’s national police force.

British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, and it named its price: a railway to the West Coast. Building it took British and American money and the labour of European and Chinese workers. The Chinese workers faced open discrimination, including the Head Tax, a fee charged to enter Canada because of their race. The Government of Canada apologized for that policy in 2006. On November 7, 1885, Donald Smith, the Scottish-born director of the Canadian Pacific Railway, drove the last spike.

The line changed what the country could be. It carried settlers to land that had been all but out of reach. Canada industrialized during the economic boom of the 1890s and early 1900s, and one million British and one million American immigrants arrived in those years. Before 1914 the West also took in 170,000 Ukrainians and 115,000 Poles, along with tens of thousands of people from Germany, France, Norway and Sweden. Canadians also served abroad in those years: in the South African War of 1899 to 1902, over 7,000 volunteered and over 260 died, fighting at Paardeberg and Lillefontein in 1900.

The prime minister who urged them west was Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first French-Canadian prime minister since Confederation. He encouraged immigration to the West and presided over the years when the prairie provinces filled up and Alberta and Saskatchewan joined the country. His portrait is on the five dollar bill.