Canada

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Canada is the second-largest country in the world by total area, yet most of its people cluster in a thin band near a single neighbour. About 80 percent of Canadians live within 150 kilometres of the border with the contiguous United States. Half of them live south of 45.7 degrees north. Above that line stretches an immense, sparsely peopled expanse reaching into the Arctic Ocean, holding the world's longest coastline at 243,042 kilometres. The country's far north hosts Canadian Forces Station Alert, the world's northernmost settlement, sitting just 817 kilometres from the North Pole. How does a place this vast and this empty hold together as one nation of over 41 million people? Why do two official languages, English and French, share the same federal government? And how did a cluster of British colonies become a constitutional monarchy that severed its last legal ties to a parliament across the ocean? The answers run through ice, fur, treaties, and a name borrowed from a village by a river.

• 2. A Word For Village

  ›

  Kanata meant something like village in the St. Lawrence Iroquoian language, and that small word became the name of a nation. In 1535, Indigenous inhabitants near present-day Quebec City used it to direct the French explorer Jacques Cartier toward the settlement of Stadacona. Cartier stretched the word past one village. He applied Canada to the whole area under Donnacona, the chief at Stadacona, and by 1545 European books and maps were labelling that strip along the Saint Lawrence River as Canada. For nearly two centuries the name marked only the part of New France along that river. After the British conquest, the territory became the Province of Quebec from 1763 to 1791. In 1791 it split into Upper Canada and Lower Canada, known together as the Canadas, until they merged into the Province of Canada in 1841. The word kept climbing. At the London Conference, Canada was chosen as the legal name for the new country formed at Confederation, paired with the title dominion to mark its self-governing status inside the British Empire. That title did not last forever. In 1951, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent told the House of Commons that dominion no longer fit, and the federal government dropped it; the national holiday later changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day.

• 3. Before The Ships

  ›

  At least 14,000 years ago, the first inhabitants of North America are thought to have crossed from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge. Some of the oldest known sites of human habitation in Canada are the Paleo-Indian locations at Old Crow Flats and Bluefish Caves. These early societies built permanent settlements, practised agriculture, formed complex hierarchies, and ran trading networks; some had collapsed before European explorers arrived and survive only through archeology. Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada include the First Nations, the Inuit, and the Métis, the last of whom emerged in the mid-17th century when First Nations people married European settlers and their descendants developed a distinct identity. Estimates of the Indigenous population at first European settlement range between 200,000 and two million, with a figure of 500,000 accepted by Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. What followed was catastrophe. As a consequence of European colonization, the Indigenous population fell by forty to eighty percent, driven by introduced diseases against which they had no immunity, conflicts over the fur trade, clashes with settlers and colonial authorities, and the loss of their lands. First Nations and Métis peoples were central to the fur trade, guiding the coureurs des bois and voyageurs across the continent. Friendship and peace treaties gave way to dispossession through treaties. From the late 18th century, Indigenous peoples were forced to assimilate, a process that climaxed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A period of redress began in 2008 with a reconciliation commission formed by the Government of Canada, which acknowledged cultural genocide and addressed issues including missing and murdered Indigenous women.

• 4. Crosses And Conquests

  ›

  Around 1000 AD, the Norse explorer Leif Erikson reached the east coast and the Norse built a short-lived camp at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, occupied off and on for perhaps 20 years. No further European exploration came until 1497, when the seafarer John Cabot claimed Canada's Atlantic coast for Henry VII of England. On the 24th of July 1534, Jacques Cartier explored the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and planted a ten-metre cross bearing the words long live the King of France, taking possession of New France for King Francis I. Permanent footholds came slowly and through war. The French set up their first seasonal trading post at Tadoussac in 1600, and Samuel de Champlain founded the first permanent year-round settlements at Port Royal in 1605 and Quebec City in 1608. A series of four wars erupted in colonial North America between 1689 and 1763, the later ones forming the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War. Mainland Nova Scotia passed to British rule under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, and Canada with most of New France came under British rule in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. The 1763 Royal Proclamation established First Nation treaty rights and created the Province of Quebec. To calm Quebec, the Quebec Act of 1774 expanded its territory and restored the French language, the Catholic faith, and French civil law, which helped stave off an independence movement there even as the Thirteen Colonies grew restless.

• 5. Loyalists And A Railway

  ›

  After the American War of Independence, the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized the United States and ceded British territories south of the Great Lakes. The war drove a large out-migration of Loyalists, settlers who had fought against American independence, many of whom moved to Atlantic Canada and reshaped its demographics. Saint John, New Brunswick, was incorporated as Canada's first city. The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the province into French-speaking Lower Canada and English-speaking Upper Canada, each with its own elected assembly. The Canadas became the main front of the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom; peace came in 1815 with no boundaries changed. Then came the people and the provinces. New arrivals included refugees from the Great Irish Famine and Gaelic-speaking Scots displaced by the Highland Clearances, though infectious diseases killed between 25 and 33 percent of Europeans who immigrated before 1891. Following three constitutional conferences, the British North America Act, 1867 proclaimed Confederation on the 1st of July 1867, with four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. British Columbia joined in 1871 on the promise of a transcontinental railway to Victoria within 10 years, and Prince Edward Island followed in 1873. In 1898, during the Klondike Gold Rush, Parliament created the Yukon Territory; Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905. To settle the West, Canada built three transcontinental railways, passed the Dominion Lands Act, and founded the North-West Mounted Police, displacing many Indigenous peoples of the Prairies onto reserves and bringing famine as the Plains Bison collapsed.

• 6. Two World Wars

  ›

  Britain's declaration of war in 1914 automatically pulled Canada into the First World War, because Britain still controlled Canadian foreign affairs under the British North America Act, 1867. Volunteers became part of the Canadian Corps, which fought at the Battle of Vimy Ridge among other major engagements. The Conscription Crisis of 1917 broke out when a plan to add conscripts drew fierce objection from French-speaking Quebecers. Independence arrived in legal steps. Canada joined the League of Nations in 1919 on its own, the Balfour Declaration of 1926 set a path to full sovereignty equal to Britain's, and the Statute of Westminster, 1931 affirmed Canada's independence. War with Germany was declared effective the 10th of September 1939, by King George VI on the advice of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, seven days after the United Kingdom, a delay that underlined the country's autonomy. Over a million Canadians served in the Second World War. Canadian troops fought in the failed 1942 Dieppe Raid, the Allied invasion of Italy, the Normandy landings, and the Battle of the Scheldt in 1944. Canada gave asylum to the Dutch monarchy during the occupation and is credited by the Netherlands for major contributions to its liberation from Nazi Germany. Despite another conscription crisis in Quebec in 1944, the country finished the war with a large army and a strong economy.

• 7. Quebec And The Constitution

  ›

  Quebec rejected sovereignty by a margin of just 50.6 to 49.4 percent in a 1995 referendum, one of the closest votes in the country's modern history. The province had been transforming since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, which gave rise to a secular nationalist movement. The radical Front de libération du Québec set off the October Crisis with bombings and kidnappings in 1970, the Parti Québécois won power in 1976, and it held an unsuccessful referendum on sovereignty-association in 1980. The Meech Lake Accord, meant to accommodate Quebec nationalism, failed in 1990, spurring the Bloc Québécois in Quebec and the Reform Party of Canada in the West. After the 1995 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that unilateral secession by a province would be unconstitutional, and Parliament passed the Clarity Act setting terms for any negotiated departure. Meanwhile the country was redefining itself in symbols and law. It adopted the maple leaf flag in 1965, official bilingualism in 1969, and official multiculturalism in 1971. Another round of constitutional conferences produced the Canada Act 1982, patriating the constitution from the United Kingdom and creating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 1999, after negotiations with the federal government, Nunavut became Canada's third territory, with Inuktitut as the majority language there.

• 8. A Crown And A Parliament

  ›

  The reigning monarch of Canada is also monarch of 14 other sovereign Commonwealth countries and of Canada's 10 provinces, and is the source of sovereignty and authority in the country. The monarch appoints a governor general, on the advice of the prime minister, to carry out most ceremonial royal duties. Real direction of power lies with the Cabinet, a committee of ministers responsible to the elected House of Commons and headed by the prime minister, the head of government. The Prime Minister's Office is one of the most powerful institutions in government, initiating most legislation and selecting many Crown appointments. Parliament passes all federal statute laws and comprises the monarch, the House of Commons, and the Senate. Each of the 343 members in the House of Commons is elected by simple plurality in a riding, while the 105 senators serve until age 75 with seats apportioned by region. The Constitution Act, 1982 requires no more than five years between elections, and the Canada Elections Act fixes a date in October every four years. Canadian federalism splits responsibilities between the federal government and the 10 provinces, with the three territories holding powers delegated by Parliament rather than drawn directly from the Crown. The Supreme Court of Canada, led since 2017 by Chief Justice Richard Wagner, interprets laws and can strike down acts of Parliament. Common law prevails everywhere except Quebec, where civil law predominates, a division that traces straight back to the bargain struck in the Quebec Act of 1774.