Early History of Canada

Canadian history is not the most exciting subject in the world. This in turn is often a concern to educators, who feel the fundamental dullness of Canadian history has left the nation apathetic and ignorant towards our own roots.

The main problem is that Canada does not have a particularly memorable "founding story" or any inspiring revolutions, myths, symbols, or leaders that can be associated with the formation of the modern Canadian nation.

Canada has existed for most of her life as a British colony, with independence coming through compromise and consent, rather than rebellion and war. Though this has given Canadians a long legacy of peace, it has certainly not made Grade 10 Social Studies class very interesting. Here is my quick synopsis on the early history of Canada:

In 1534, a French explorer named Jacques Cartier landed in North America and claimed the land for France. A bunch of other French colonists soon followed, and in a few years the thriving colony of New France was established. Meanwhile, ever since those Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, the British were busily creating colonies of their own all across the east coast of the continent. It would not take long before the two groups would clash.

In its early days, Canada was mainly used by the European Powers as a gigantic fur-trading post. Beaver fur as well as moose and bear fur were all very popular with Europe's fashion scene, which made the North American fur industry a very profitable business indeed. In 1670 a British fur company called the Hudson's Bay Company was established. For many years the company controlled almost all of the land in Canada, and was the primary source of employment for the nation's young settlers. (The Hudson's Bay company still exists to this very day, although it no longer has any political power and rarely sells fur. It's now just another hokey Wal-Martesque department store chain where you can buy towels, frying pans, and sweaters, although they continue to hype the fact that they are "North America's Oldest Company." In 2006 the company was purchased by a financier from the US, so I guess that's the end of that.)

By 1663 New France was a big, prosperous colony. The British colonists resented this, and the HBC wanted access to the vast fur markets that were currently under French control. So in 1756 Britain declared war on France. The French colonial forces were led by General Montcalm, while the English forces were led by General Wolfe. Seven years later, the appropriately named Seven Years War had ended with England victorious. After the French General Montcalm surrendered at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, New France (now known by it's colloquial name, Quebec) fell under British military rule. The Frenchies were quite humiliated by this loss, and their embarrassment soon turned to fear as they begun to worry that it would just be a matter of time before their unique French culture, language, and religion would be crushed under the oppressive yolk of the British.

In an attempt to keep the two feuding races apart, the British separated Quebec into two distinct colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada. The name "Canada" came from an Native American word meaning "village" that had been used to described the territory for many years.

Lower Canada would be the home of the French-speakers, while Upper Canada would hold the English. The French were allowed to continue with some of their cultural and religious customs, but the British imperial elites who ruled the colony would continue the current process of attempting to assimilate them into proper English society. The hope was that the French would eventually be wiped out entirely, and to speed this up English immigration into Lower Canada was encouraged. Luckily a major immigration boom was just around the corner.

Thirteen British colonies on the east coast of North America declared independence in 1776, and after a lengthy war were able to establish their own sovereign republic in 1781. It became the United States of America. The rebel general George Washington tried to encourage all North Americans living under British rule to join in on the revolution and overthrow their oppressive colonial rulers, but the people in the Canadian colonies resisted. After the revolution, thousands of British Loyalists left the US and fled to Quebec and the the previously underpopulated Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

This period is now known as "the Loyalist Migration" and is considered one of the key "founding myths" of Canada. The traditional interpretation of Loyalist motivations goes something like this:

For a long time this story was very fashionable, because people used to like to think of Canada as a fundamentally "conservative" nation founded according to certain British principles of restraint, dignity, and honor. In recent years, however, this version of the Loyalist story has been subject to considerable revisionism. Many contemporary Canadian historians now argue the Loyalists who fled the United States after the revolution were not actually more conservative or Toryist than those who stayed. Instead, the revisionist perspective argues that the refugees simply wanted to avoid living in a revolutionary war zone, and honestly didn't care if they had a king or a president, just as long as it meant they could live in peace. As far as ordinary people were concerned, the US-Canadian border was pretty irrelevant until at least the mid 19th Century.

Regardless of whether or not the majority of Loyalist migrants were actually Tory monarchist-loving Anglophiles, Canada's colonial governors certainly were, and as a result in the years following the Revolutionary War the British government continued to do everything in its power to make life difficult for the new American republic.

The Brits blockaded key American trading ports and began commandeering and seizing American ships, as well as forcing American sailors into British service. This outraged many American politicians, and in 1812 the Congress voted to scrap America's initial plans of being a neutral nation and take a preemptive strike on the British colonies in Quebec. Thus began the War of 1812, a very brutal war that both sides would eventually claim to have won.

Though the British originally claimed to only be protecting their colonies, it didn't take long before they used this new war as a way of re-claiming all the land they had lost in the American Revolution. British troops were able to burn down the White House and capture many key American cities, but they quickly abandoned the entire war and returned everything once the Americans started winning. In 1814 a peace treaty was signed, formally ending the war. Neither country was significantly better off, but both had learned something. The British learned that they should start to respect the U.S. as a sovereign nation, and the Americans learned that the Canadian colonies had no interest in sacrificing their allegiance to the British king in favor of American-style democracy and republicanism.

Today, many Canadians treat the war of 1812 as a very patriotic battle in which "Canadians" were able to defeat the United States. Some will continue to say "the only war America ever lost was against Canada in 1812!" Well, of course there were no "Canadians" fighting in the War of 1812, only British colonialists fighting under the orders of the British Empire. There was no coherent Canadian state at this time, so the idea that the war was being fought between Canada and the United States is simply incorrect. As well, it is difficult to claim that America "lost" the 1812 War. She failed in her attempt to liberate the Canadian colonies from British rule, but at the same time she was able to avoid permanently losing any territory to the British army. If the Canadian territory had been liberated though, there probably would be no Canada today. Keeping the British in charge was very important to Canada's eventual development as a sovereign nation, so I suppose from this point of view, the 1812 War can be viewed as an important turning-point for Canada.

THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY

Inspired by the American defiance of British continental supremacy, as the 19th Century continued, the French Canadians began to rebel. There was very little democracy in the Canadian colonies at this time, with the powers of the few elected politicians subject to very tight restraints at the hands of the British governors who remained very much in control of day-to-day governance.

Many armed rebellions and attempted revolutions occurred during the period from 1815 to 1838, with well-educated Quebec elites demanding an end to colonial rule, and advocating the establishment of a democratic Canadian republic or annexation to the US. Though small and scattered, these revots caused enough violence and turmoil to prompt the British governors to send for advisors from London in an attempt to fix the situation. The advisors in turn said that Canada's partitian along language lines was hurting the colony, so in 1841 an Act of Union united both Upper and Lower Canada into a mega-colony known as The United Province of Canada. The colonial government became much more democratic as well, with the governors gradually surrendering more and more powers to the elected legislature.

The union had mixed results in the long term, however. Ethnic hatreds were still strong, and French and English politicians refused to get along. Each side thought the other was trying to wipe them out, and assimilate their culture and language out of existence.

By the early 1860's as the Canadian colonial economies continued to decline and another American invasion looked increasingly inevitable, the British were able to convince the French and English politicians to put aside their differences and start planning for the creation of a united, federal, self-governing Canadian nation. Canada was becoming too much of a hassle for the British to continue to devot such large amounts of time and money to, especially with other imperial crises looming in the background.

A good summary of this period can be found in the epic poem The Idylls of the King by the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. I like this passage because it neatly sums up the early 19th British attitude towards Canada:

In the Charlottetown Conferences of 1864 the Upper and Lower Canadian politicians decided the form of government they wanted (British-style), and presented their plan to Queen Victoria in London. The Queen approved, and on July 1st, 1867 a federal, self-governing state known as the Dominion of Canada was created, containing four provinces: Ontario (Upper Canada), Quebec (Lower Canada), plus New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, the two former Maritime colonies. The colonies of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island participated in the conferences, but refused to join. It was agreed that the four provinces would co-exist as equals within a democratic confederation, and thus, today the politicians who hammered out this deal are known as The Fathers of Confederation. The confederation system allowed the provinces to remain a high degree of independence over their own affairs- Quebec in particular was promised to retain complete sovereignty over language, religion, culture, and education.

In 1870 the new Canadian government made peace with the United States, and all British troops were withdrawn from North America.

THE DOMINION OF CANADA

Though Canada now had a powerful national Parliament, the British kept many key powers. They retained the right to veto any Canadian decisions they did not like, impose legislation on Canada, sign treaties for Canada, and dictate Canada's involvement in foreign affairs. The British continued to think of Canada as a colony, and continued to enforce and encourage the prominence of British culture in the new Dominion. This may sound heavy-handed, but at the time it was perfectly consistent with what most Canadians actually wanted. Proud and willing citizens of the Empire, few Canadians at this time thought of themselves as a culturally distinct people, and indeed were actually suspicious of those who felt Canada's interests were not identical to those of England. Perhaps Prime Minister John A. MacDonald summed it up best when he proudly declared "a British subject I was born, and a British subject I will die!"

Regardless of what they were calling themselves, by the late 19th century Canadians finally had control over most of their own domestic affairs and though they may have not realized it at the time, had made a key step towards political sovereignty.

Canada was not very geographically large when it became a dominion. In 1867 the country only ecompassed a tiny fraction of the land it does today, as you can see on the map above. Canada's first government, led by Prime Minister MacDonald, was keen to expand Canada's size as much as possible. To achieve this he built a giant railroad from one end of the continent to the the other, and aggressively promoted the migration and settlement of British pioneers into the west and north, and negotiated Canada's merger with a number of other surviving British colonies in North America.

In 1870 the revolutionary provisional government of the western territory of Manitoba, led by the charismatic Louis Riel, agreed to become Canada's fifth province. President Riel was a Metis, a minority group of half-natives, half-French who composed the majority of Manitoba's tiny population at the time. However, shortly after Manitoba joined Canada, Riel soured on the project. Resentful towards the influx of British settlers, he felt the Canadian government was no longer protecting the rights of his people. He then unsuccessfully tried to get Manitoba to secede, leading an on-again off-again armed rebellion for a couple years. He was eventually captured and executed for treason.

Around the same time, the colony of British Columbia and Vancouver Island joined confederation too. The far-western British Columbians had toyed with joining the United States for many years, but in the end their colonial governors were sufficiently bought off, and thus threw their lot in with Canada in June of 1871.

The tiny island colony of Prince Edward Island joined Canada in 1873. They had cockily refused to join the Dominion in 1867, but by 1873 they were so heavily in debt they had little choice.

The Hudson's Bay Company (remember them?) sold their vast fur-trading empire to the Canadian Government in 1868, and their land was turned the Canadian North-West Territory in 1870. By 1905 settlement to the CNWT had increased to the point where its previously vacant western claims had to be carved into three new provinces: Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Yukon. Canada now stretched from sea to sea to sea.