Fully unified only since 1949, and still plagued by the Québec
imbroglio, Canada is a country of intertwining histories rather than a
single national evolution. Not only does each of its provinces maintain
a high degree of autonomy, but each grouping of native peoples can claim
a heritage that cannot be fully integrated into the story of white
Canada. Such a complex mosaic militates against generalization -
although Canadians themselves continue to grapple with the nature of
their own identity - but nonetheless what follows attempts to identify
key events and themes
The ancestors of the aboriginal peoples of North America first entered
the continent around 25,000 years ago, when vast glaciers covered most
of the northern continents, keeping the sea level far below that of
today. It seems likely that North America's first human inhabitants
crossed the land bridge linking Asia with present-day Alaska - they were
probably Siberian hunter-nomads travelling in pursuit of mammoths, hairy
rhinos, bison, wild horses and sloths, the Ice Age animals that made up
their diet. These people left very little to mark their passing, apart
from some simple graves and the grooved, chipped-stone spear-heads that
earned them the name Fluted Point People . In successive waves the
Fluted Point People moved down through North America, across the isthmus
of Panama, until they reached the southernmost tip of South America. As
they settled, so they slowly developed distinctive cultures and
languages, whose degree of elaboration depended on the resources of
their environment.
About 3000 BC another wave of migration passed over from Asia to North
America. This wave was made up of the first group of Inuit migrants who
- because the sea level had risen and submerged the land bridge under
the waters of today's Bering Strait - made their crossings either in
skin-covered boats or on foot over the winter ice. Within the next
thousand years the Inuit occupied the entire northern zone of the
continent, moving east as far as Greenland and displacing the earlier
occupants. These first Inuits - called the Dorset Culture after Cape
Dorset, on Baffin Island in the Northwest Territories, where
archeologists first identified their remains in the 1920s - were
assimilated or wiped out by the next wave of Inuit. These crossed into
the continent 3000 years ago, creating the Thule culture - so called
after the Greek word for the world's northernmost extremity. The Thule
people were the direct ancestors of today's Inuit.
The first recorded contact between Europeans and the native peoples of
North America occurred in around 1000 AD, when a Norse expedition
sailing from Greenland landed somewhere on the Atlantic seaboard,
probably in Newfoundland . It was a fairly short-lived stay - according
to the Icelandic sagas, the Norse were forced to withdraw from the area
they called Vinland due to the hostility of the natives.
In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain were finally persuaded to
underwrite Christopher Columbus 's expedition in search of the westward
route to Asia. Columbus bumped into the West Indies instead, but his
"discovery" of islands that were presumed to lie off India encouraged
other European monarchs to sponsor expeditions of their own. In 1497
John Cabot , supported by the English king Henry VII, sailed west and
sighted Newfoundland and Cape Breton. On his return, Cabot reported
seeing multitudes of cod off Newfoundland, and his much-publicized
comments effectively started the Newfoundland cod fishery. In less than
sixty years, up to four hundred fishing vessels from Britain, France and
Spain were making annual voyages to the Grand Banks fishing grounds
around the island. Soon some of the fishermen established shore bases to
cure their catch in the sun, and then they started to over-winter here -
which was how settlement of the island began.
By the end of the sixteenth century the cod trade was largely controlled
by the British and French, and Newfoundland became an early cockpit of
English-French rivalries, a colonial conflict that continued until
England secured control of the island in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht
Meanwhile, in 1535, Jacques Cartier , on a voyage paid for by the French
crown, made his way down the St Lawrence, also hoping to find Asia.
Instead he stumbled upon the Iroquois, first at Stadacona, on the site
of Québec City, and later at Hochelaga, today's Montréal. At both places
the Frenchman had a friendly reception, but the Iroquois attitude
changed after Cartier seized one of their sachems and took him to
France. For a time the Iroquois were a barrier to further exploration up
the St Lawrence, but subsequently they abandoned their riverside
villages (possibly as a result of an epidemic brought about by contact
with Europeans and their diseases), enabling French traders to move up
the river buying furs , an enterprise pioneered by seasonal fishermen.
The development of this trade aroused the interest of the French king,
who in 1603 commissioned Samuel de Champlain to chart the St Lawrence.
Two years later Champlain founded Port Royal in today's Nova Scotia,
which became the capital of Acadie (Acadia), a colony whose agricultural
preoccupations were soon far removed from the main thrust of French
colonialism along the St Lawrence. It was here, on a subsequent
expedition in 1608, that Champlain established the settlement of Québec
City at the heart of New France , and, to stimulate the fur trade,
allied the French with those tribes he identified as likely to be his
principal suppliers. In practice this meant siding with the Huron
against the Five Nations, a decision that intensified their traditional
hostility. Furthermore, the fur trade destroyed the balance of power
between the tribes: first one and then another would receive, in return
for their pelts, the latest type of musket as well as iron axes and
knives, forcing enemies back to the fur trade to redress the military
balance. One terrible consequence of such European intervention was the
extermination of the Huron people in 1648 by the Five Nations, armed by
the Dutch merchants of the Hudson River.
As pandemonium reigned among the native peoples, the pattern of life in
New France was becoming well established. On the farmlands of the St
Lawrence a New World feudalism was practised by the land-owning
seigneurs and their habitant tenants, while the fur territories -
entered at Montréal - were extended deep into the interior. Many of the
fur traders adopted native dress, learnt aboriginal languages, and took
wives from the tribes through which they passed, spawning the mixed-race
people known as the Métis . The furs they brought back to Montréal were
shipped downriver to Québec City whence they were shipped to France. But
the white population in the French colony remained relatively small -
there were only 18,000 New French in 1713. In the context of a growing
British presence, this represented a dangerous weakness.
The rise of the British
In 1670 Charles II of England had established the Hudson's Bay Company
and given it control of a million and a half square miles adjacent to
its namesake bay, a territory named Rupert's Land, after the king's
uncle. Four years later
In 1670 Charles II of England had established the Hudson's Bay Company
and given it control of a million and a half square miles adjacent to
its namesake bay, a territory named Rupert's Land, after the king's
uncle. Four years later the British captured the Dutch possessions of
the Hudson River Valley - thereby trapping New France. Slowly the
British closed the net: in 1713, they took control of Acadia, renaming
it Nova Scotia (New Scotland), and in 1755 they deported its
French-speaking farmers. When the Seven Years War broke out in 1756, the
French attempted to outflank the British by using the Great Lakes route
to occupy the area to the west of the British colonies and then, with
the help of their native allies, pin them to the coast. In the event the
British won the war by exploiting their naval superiority: a large force
under the command of General James Wolfe sailed up the St Lawrence in
1759 and, against all expectations, successfully scaled the Heights of
Abraham to capture Québec City. Montréal fell a few months later - and
at that point the French North American empire was effectively finished,
though they held onto Louisiana until Napoleon sold it off in 1803.
For the native peoples the ending of the Anglo-French conflict was a
mixed blessing. If the war had turned the tribes into sought-after
allies, it had also destroyed the traditional inter-tribal balance of
power and subordinated native to European interests. A recognition of
the change wrought by the end of the war inspired the uprising of the
Ottawas in 1763, when Pontiac , their chief, led an unsuccessful assault
on Detroit, hoping to restore the French position and halt the progress
of the English settlers.
Moved largely by a desire for a stable economy, the response of the
British Crown was to issue a proclamation which confirmed the legal
right of the natives to their lands and set aside the territory to the
west of the Appalachian Mountains and the Great Lakes as " Indian
Territory ". Although colonial governors were given instructions to
remove trespassers on "Indian Land", in reality the proclamation had
little practical effect until the twentieth century, when it became a
cornerstone of the native peoples' attempts to seek compensation for the
illegal confiscation of their land.
The other great problem the British faced in the 1760s was how to deal
with the French-speaking Canadiens of the defunct New France - the term
Canadiens used to distinguish local settlers from those born in France,
most of whom left the colony after the British conquest. Initially the
British government hoped to anglicize the province, swamping the
French-speaking population with English-speaking Protestants. In the
event large-scale migration failed to materialize immediately, and the
second English governor of Québec, Sir Guy Carleton , realized that - as
discontent grew in the American colonies - the loyalty of the Canadiens
was of vital importance.
Carleton's plan to achieve this was embodied in the 1774 Québec Act ,
which made a number of concessions to the region's French speakers:
Catholics were permitted to hold civil appointments, the seigneurial
system was maintained, and the Roman Catholic Church allowed to collect
tithes. Remarkably, all these concessions were made at a time when
Catholics in Britain were not politically emancipated.
During this period economic expansion was principally generated by the
English-speaking merchants who now controlled the Montréal-based fur
trade, organized as the North West Company . Seeking political changes
that would enhance their economic power, they wanted their own
legislative assembly and the universal application of English law, which
of course would not have been acceptable to the French-speakers.
In 1791, through the Canada Act , the British government imposed a
compromise, dividing the region into Upper and Lower Canada , which
broadly separated the ethnic groups along the line of the Ottawa River.
In Lower Canada, the French-based legal system was retained, as was the
right of the Catholic Church to collect tithes, while in Upper Canada,
English common law was introduced. Each of the new provinces had an
elective assembly, though these shared their limited powers with an
appointed assembly, whilst the executive council of each province was
responsible to the appointed governor, not the elected assembly. This
arrangement allowed the assemblies to become the focal points for vocal
opposition, but ultimately condemned them to impotence. At the same
time, the plutocrats built up chains of influence and power around the
appointed provincial governments: in Upper Canada this grouping was
called the " Family Compact ", in Lower Canada the " Château Clique ".
By the late 1830s considerable opposition had developed to these
cliques. In Upper Canada the Reform Movement led by William Lyon
Mackenzie demanded a government accountable to a broad electorate, and
the expansion of credit facilities for small farmers. In 1837 both
Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau , the reform leader in Lower Canada,
were sufficiently frustrated to attempt open rebellion. Neither was
successful and both were forced into exile in the United States, but the
rebellions did bring home to the British Government the need for
effective reform, prompting the Act of Union of 1840, which united Lower
and Upper Canada with a single assembly.
The rationale for this arrangement was the racist belief that the
French-Canadians were incapable of handling elective government without
Anglo-Saxon guidance. Nevertheless, the assembly provided equal
representation for Canada East and West - in effect the old Lower and
Upper Canadas. A few years later, this new assembly achieved responsible
government almost accidentally. In 1849 the Reform Party, which had a
majority of the seats, passed an Act compensating those involved in the
1837 rebellions. The Governor-General, Lord Elgin, disapproved, but he
didn't exercise his veto - so, for the first time, a Canadian
administration acted on the vote of an elected assembly, rather than
imperial sanction.
The Reform Party, which pushed through the compensation scheme, included
both French- and English-speakers and mainly represented small farmers
and businessmen opposed to the power of the cliques. In the 1850s it
became the Canadian Liberal Party , but this French- English coalition
fell apart with the emergence of "Clear Grit" Liberals in Canada West in
the 1860s. This group argued for "Representation by Population" - in
other words, instead of equal representation for the two halves of
Canada, they wanted constituencies based on the total population. As the
English-speakers outnumbered the French, the "Rep by Poppers" rhetoric
seemed a direct threat to many of the institutions of French Canada. As
a consequence, many French-Canadians transferred their support to the
Conservative Party , while the radicals of Canada East, the Rouges ,
developed a nationalist creed.
The Conservative Party represented the fusion of a number of elements,
including the rump of the business cliques who had been so infuriated by
their loss of control that they burnt the Montréal parliament building
to the ground in 1849. Some of this group campaigned to break the
imperial tie and join the United States, but, when the party fully
emerged in 1854, the old "Compact Tories" were much less influential
than a younger generation of moderate conservatives. The lynchpin of
this younger group was John A. Macdonald , who was to form the first
federal government in 1868. Such moderates sought, by overcoming the
democratic excesses of the "Grits" and the nationalism of the "Rouges",
to weld together an economic and political state that would not be
absorbed into the increasingly powerful United States.
In the mid-1860s "Canada" had achieved responsible party government, but
British North America was still a collection of self-governing colonies
. In the east, Newfoundland was almost entirely dependent on its cod
fishery, Prince Edward Island had a prosperous agricultural economy, and
both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had boomed on the backs of the
shipbuilding industry. Far to the west, on the Pacific coast, lay
fur-trading British Columbia, which had just beaten off American
attempts to annex the region during the Oregon crisis, finally resolved
in 1846, when the international frontier was fixed along a westward
extension of the original 49th parallel. Not that this was the end of
British Columbia's problems: in 1858 gold was discovered beside the
Fraser River and, in response to the influx of American prospectors,
British Columbia was hastily designated a Crown Colony - a process that
was repeated in 1895 when gold was discovered in the Yukon's Klondike.
Between Canada West and British Columbia stretched thousands of miles of
prairie and forest, the old Rupert's Land that was still under the
extremely loose authority of the Hudson's Bay Company.
The American Civil War raised fears of a US invasion of the incoherently
structured British North America, at the same time as "Rep by Poppers"
agitation was making problematic the status of the French-speaking
minority. These issues prompted a series of conferences to discuss the
issue of Confederation , and after three years of debate the British
Parliament passed the British North America Act of 1867. In effect this
was a constitution for the new Dominion of Canada , providing for a
federal parliament to be established at Ottawa; for Canada East and West
to become the provinces of Québec and Ontario respectively; and for each
province to retain a regional government and assembly. All of the
existing colonies joined the Confederation except British Columbia,
which waited until 1871; Prince Edward Island, till 1873; and
Newfoundland, which remained independent until 1949.
To say that the rest of Canada has become exasperated by the
interminable discussions over the future of Québec would be an
understatement - and was never more so than during the Meech Lake
conference of 1990, which conspicuously failed to agree on a new
decentralized constitution. The conference was convened by the
Conservative Brian Mulroney , who became the country's premier in 1984.
Mulroney had other pressing problems, too, though nothing as fractious
as Québec. To begin with, the free trade agreement (NAFTA) between the
US and Canada, which Mulroney pushed through parliament, came into
effect in 1989, destroying the country's protective tariffs and thereby
exposing its industries to undercutting and causing thousands of
redundancies. There was also the collapse of the North Atlantic cod
fishery, which brought Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to the brink of
economic ruin, whilst falls in wheat prices hurt the Prairies. Efforts
were made to deal with these issues, but few were satisfied and during
Mulroney's second term (1988-93), the premier became a byword for
incompetence, his party commonly accused of large-scale corruption. As a
result, the federal elections of November 1993 almost wiped out the
Conservatives and, equipped with a huge majority, the new Liberal
administration, under Jean Chrétien , once Trudeau's Minister of
Finance, set about rebuilding federal prestige. A cautious politician,
Chrétien has had some success, his pragmatic approach to politics
proving sufficiently popular to see him re-elected for a second term in
1997 and a third in 2000, albeit with reduced majorities. However, much
of Chrétien's electoral success is down to the balkanization of the
Canadian political scene. The Liberals are currently the only party with
any claim to a national presence - with the right-wing Canadian Alliance
(formerly the Reform Party), for instance, dominating much of the west,
but simply failing to show in the east. The long-term consequences of
this political reconfiguration are hard to predict, but certainly don't
bode well. The future is wide open to the prospect of further political
turbulence.
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