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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

History of Canada

~11 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
8 sections

  • The History of Canada begins not with a flag or a parliament, but with a land bridge. Thousands of years ago, when falling sea levels exposed a strip of ground connecting Siberia to northwest North America, the first people crossed into a continent they would inhabit for millennia before any European ever saw its coastline. By the time Jacques Cartier planted a wooden cross in the Gaspé Peninsula in 1534 and claimed the territory for Francis I of France, there were already hundreds of distinct peoples living across the land, organized into intricate trade networks, guided by their own spiritual traditions and legal customs. What follows is a story of overlapping worlds: ancient civilizations and colonial empires, rebellion and confederation, war and peacekeeping. How did a collection of contested territories become a self-governing nation? What happened to the peoples who were already there? And why did Canada, for so long, remain tied to Britain long after the shooting stopped? The answers stretch across thousands of years, from the glacial margins of the last Ice Age to the shores of the modern nation that now calls itself home to ten provinces and three territories.

  • The Wisconsin glaciation, which lasted from roughly 100,000-75,000 years ago until about 11,000 years ago, shaped the conditions under which the Americas were first settled. Rising ice confined early migrants to Alaska and the Yukon for extended periods. Around 16,000 years ago, glacial melt opened routes south and east, and people began moving deeper into the continent. The Haida Gwaii islands, Old Crow Flats, and the Bluefish Caves contain some of the oldest known Paleo-Indian archaeological sites in Canada, where the remains of butchered large mammals and fluted stone tools testify to the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers.

    As climates stabilized around 8000 BCE, distinct regional cultures began to form. The Woodland cultural period, dating from about 2000 BCE to 1000 CE, saw the introduction of pottery in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime regions. The Hopewell Exchange System, flourishing between 300 BCE and 500 CE, linked cultures along American rivers all the way to the Canadian shores of Lake Ontario through a web of trade connections.

    By the time European ships appeared on the horizon, the peoples of what would become Canada were extraordinarily varied. The Ojibwe, according to oral tradition, formed the Council of Three Fires in 796 CE with the Odawa and the Potawatomi. The Iroquois Confederacy, which oral tradition dates to 1142 CE, wielded influence from northern New York into what is now southern Ontario and the Montreal area. On the Great Plains, the Cree depended on vast bison herds. Along the British Columbia coast, the Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Nuu-chah-nulth built complex cultures around the western red cedar, producing wooden ocean-going canoes, totem poles, and elaborately carved potlatch items. In the Arctic, the Dorset peoples, whose culture traced back to around 500 BCE, were eventually replaced by the ancestors of today's Inuit by around 1500 CE.

  • The Norse arrived around 1000 CE and constructed a small settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, a site carbon-dated to 990-1050 CE. It remains the only confirmed Norse site in North America outside of Greenland, associated in the historical record with Leif Erikson's attempted settlement of Vinland.

    The European presence that would prove permanent began in 1497 when the Italian navigator John Cabot, sailing under letters patent from King Henry VII of England, sighted land on the 24th of June at a northern location believed to be somewhere in the Atlantic provinces. Official tradition placed his first landing at Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland. The Spanish Crown, citing the Treaty of Tordesillas, quickly claimed territorial rights over Cabot's discoveries, while Portuguese explorers like João Fernandes Lavrador continued to chart the north Atlantic coast, which is why the name Labrador appeared on period maps. In 1501 and 1502, the Corte-Real brothers explored Newfoundland and Labrador for Portugal, claiming these lands as part of the Portuguese Empire. King Manuel I of Portugal created taxes on the cod fisheries there in 1506.

    French interest in the region grew from a different motivation. Francis I sent Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 to navigate the coast between Florida and Newfoundland in hopes of finding a Pacific route. Jacques Cartier followed in 1534, planting a cross in the Gaspé and claiming the land for France. The following summer the region called Canada was formally designated. Cartier had sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as the Lachine Rapids, to the spot where Montreal now stands. A full-scale permanent French settlement would not follow for decades, but fishing fleets kept returning, trading with First Nations communities and establishing fishing outposts at places like Percé in 1603.

  • A fur trade monopoly granted in 1604 to Pierre Du Gua, Sieur de Mons, set in motion the machinery of permanent French colonization. Among Du Gua's lieutenants was Samuel de Champlain, a geographer who would shape the colony's early decades more than any other individual. On the 24th of June 1604, Champlain landed at Saint John Harbour; the feast of St. John the Baptist gave the city of Saint John, New Brunswick, and the Saint John River their names. In 1608, Champlain founded what is now Quebec City, which became the capital of New France. He encountered Lake Champlain in 1609, and by 1615 had canoed through the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing, and Georgian Bay to reach Huron country near Lake Simcoe.

    Champlain's military alliance with the Wendat people drew the French into direct conflict with the Iroquois Confederacy, a rivalry that produced what became known as the French and Iroquois Wars. They continued until the signing of the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. After Champlain's death in 1635, the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuit establishment became the dominant force in New France. In 1642, Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve founded Ville-Marie, the precursor to present-day Montreal, sponsored by the Sulpicians.

    In 1663 the French crown took direct control of the colonies from the Company of New France. Despite low immigration rates, the birth rate among settlers was exceptional. As historian Yves Landry observed, Canadians had an exceptional diet for their time, owing to abundant meat, fish, pure water, and good food preservation conditions in winter. The 1666 census conducted by France's intendant Jean Talon recorded 3,215 people in the administrative districts of Acadia and Canada, with a notable imbalance of 2,034 men against 1,181 women.

  • By the early 1700s, some 16,000 settlers were established along the St. Lawrence and parts of Nova Scotia. Yet the English and Scottish settlers in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the southern Thirteen Colonies outnumbered the French approximately ten to one by the 1750s. There were four French and Indian Wars and two additional conflicts in Acadia and Nova Scotia between 1688 and 1763, reshaping the map of North America repeatedly.

    During King George's War (1744-1748), a New England army of 4,000 men mounted aboard 90 vessels captured the Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745 within three months. Britain returned Louisbourg to France under the peace treaty, but the gesture prompted them to found Halifax in 1749 under Edward Cornwallis. When the French and Indian War reignited conflict, the British ordered the expulsion of approximately 12,000 Acadians from their lands in 1755, shipping them to destinations across Britain's North American holdings, to France, to Quebec, and to the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue. Many of those Acadians who settled in southern Louisiana created what became Cajun culture.

    Britain secured Quebec City after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the Battle of Fort Niagara in 1759, and captured Montreal in 1760. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 formalized France's withdrawal from mainland North America. France secretly transferred its vast Louisiana territory to Spain in the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau before that treaty was revealed to other countries in 1764. Voltaire had famously dismissed Canada as "quelques arpents de neige" , a few acres of snow , while Britain returned to France Guadeloupe, which at the time produced more sugar than all the British islands combined.

  • The American Revolution tested loyalties throughout British North America. An invasion of Quebec by the Continental Army in 1775 was halted at the Battle of Quebec by Guy Carleton with the help of local militias. When Britain evacuated New York City in 1783, Loyalist refugees poured into Nova Scotia and southwestern Quebec. So many arrived along the St. John River that a separate colony, New Brunswick, was carved out in 1784. Quebec was then divided in 1791 into predominantly French-speaking Lower Canada and anglophone Upper Canada, with its capital established by 1796 in York, present-day Toronto. Saint John, New Brunswick, had become the first incorporated city in what would later be Canada in 1785.

    The War of 1812 produced its own mythology. American forces took control of Lake Erie in 1813, killing the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and breaking the power of his confederacy. British officers Isaac Brock and Charles de Salaberry, assisted by figures like Laura Secord, helped hold the line. The war ended without boundary changes through the Treaty of Ghent of 1814, but it etched a lasting wariness of American intentions into Canadian consciousness.

    Rebellions erupted in both Upper and Lower Canada in 1837. In Lower Canada, rebel leader Robert Nelson read the Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada to a crowd at Napierville in 1838. The British government dispatched Lord Durham, who spent five months in Canada before returning with his Durham Report, which strongly recommended responsible government. The two Canadas merged into the Province of Canada under the Act of Union 1840, and responsible government was achieved in 1848. Confederation followed in 1867, when the Province of Canada joined New Brunswick and Nova Scotia through the British North America Act, 1867, forming the Dominion of Canada on the 1st of July that year.

  • The promise of a transcontinental railway drew British Columbia into Canada in 1871, Prince Edward Island in 1873, and eventually tied the country together coast to coast. John A. Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, created the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Northwest Territories and prevent possible American encroachments. Their most significant early mission was suppressing the Métis independence movements: the Red River Rebellion of 1869 and the North-West Rebellion of 1885, led by Louis Riel.

    As the government negotiated treaties with First Nations beginning with Treaty 1 in 1871, those agreements extinguished aboriginal title on traditional territories and created reserves. The Indian Act of 1876 further governed these relations, and under it the government established the Residential School System with the explicit aim of converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity and extinguishing their native languages and cultures.

    Saskatchewan and Alberta were admitted as provinces in 1905, growing rapidly on the strength of Ukrainian and Northern and Central European immigration drawn by abundant wheat crops. Wilfrid Laurier, who served as Prime Minister from 1896 to 1911, declared that the 20th century would belong to Canada. The Alaska boundary dispute of 1903, in which the British delegate sided with the Americans in arbitration, sharpened a recurring Canadian anxiety: that Britain would sacrifice Canadian interests to maintain its relationship with the United States. That anxiety would echo across decades of Canadian foreign policy long after the boundary question was settled.

  • Canada declared war on Nazi Germany on the 10th of September 1939, one week after Britain, a deliberate pause to signal independence. Of a population of approximately 11.5 million, 1.1 million Canadians served in the armed forces during the Second World War. The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, signed in December 1939, ultimately trained half the airmen from Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. The Canadian army fought through the failed Dieppe Raid of August 1942, the Allied invasion of Italy, and the highly successful invasion of France and the Netherlands in 1944-45.

    The post-war decades brought prosperity and a reshaping of Canadian society. Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 after a referendum in which voters chose between remaining a crown colony, returning to Dominion status, or joining Canada; British and Canadian governments arranged that joining the United States was not on the ballot. Lester B. Pearson, Secretary of External Affairs, conceptualized the United Nations Emergency Force that helped resolve the 1956 Suez Crisis, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. The Queen granted Royal Assent to the Canada Act 1982 on the 29th of March 1982 , exactly 115 years to the day after Queen Victoria granted Royal Assent to the Constitution Act, 1867 , and on the 17th of April 1982, the Proclamation was signed on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, patriating the constitution and completing Canada's full legal independence from Britain.

    In the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, the proposal for sovereignty-association was rejected by a margin of 50.6% to 49.4%. Canada became the fourth country in the world and the first in the Americas to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide with the Civil Marriage Act in 2005. The arc from Cartier's cross in the Gaspé in 1534 to a fully sovereign, bilingual, multicultural federation took well over four centuries, shaped at every turn by the tension between those who arrived and those who were already there.

Common questions

When did Canada become a country?

Canada became a self-governing Dominion on the 1st of July 1867, when the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia were united under the British North America Act, 1867. Canada achieved full legal independence from Britain when the Constitution Act, 1982 was proclaimed on the 17th of April 1982.

Who were the first people to live in Canada?

Indigenous peoples have inhabited the lands of present-day Canada for thousands of years, having migrated from Siberia across the Bering land bridge during the last glacial period. Archaeological sites at locations such as Haida Gwaii, Old Crow Flats, and the Bluefish Caves represent some of the earliest known Paleo-Indian settlements in Canada.

What was the Expulsion of the Acadians?

The Expulsion of the Acadians, also known as le Grand Dérangement, was the forced removal of approximately 12,000 Acadians from their lands ordered by the British in 1755 during the French and Indian War. Acadians were shipped to destinations across British North America, France, Quebec, and the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue; many of those who settled in southern Louisiana gave rise to Cajun culture.

Who was Samuel de Champlain and what did he do in Canada?

Samuel de Champlain was a French geographer who founded Quebec City in 1608, making it the capital of New France. He was the first known European to encounter Lake Champlain in 1609 and by 1615 had explored by canoe as far as Huron country near Lake Simcoe. He also landed at Saint John Harbour on the 24th of June 1604, and the city of Saint John, New Brunswick, takes its name from that date.

What was the Great Depression like in Canada?

Canada was severely affected by the Great Depression that began in 1929. Between 1929 and 1933, Canada's gross national product dropped 40 per cent, unemployment reached 27 per cent by 1933, and Canadian exports shrank by 50%. Wheat prices collapsed from 78 cents per bushel on the 1928 crop to 29 cents in 1932, and construction fell by 82 per cent over the same period.

When did the Iroquois Confederacy form according to oral tradition?

According to Iroquois oral tradition, the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) was formed in 1142 CE. The Five Nations were centred from at least 1000 CE in northern New York, with their influence extending into what is now southern Ontario and the Montreal area of modern Quebec.

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All sources

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