Canada

Canada's human past begins with the long tenure of the indigenous societies, followed by the 500-year collision between those peoples and the newly arrived Europeans. European colonization gave way after 1867 to the era of the Canadian nation-state. In the 20th century Canada became one of the world's small group of wealthy, highly industrialized, technologically advanced, and heavily urbanized democracies. Yet regional tensions, ethnic rivalries, global pressures, and the powerful neighboring presence of the United States continued to challenge Canada's political unity and cultural identity. First Inhabitants Prehistory The indigenous peoples say they have been in Canada as long as the landscape itself, and evidence of their presence dates from roughly 14,000 to 11,000 years ago, during the time when the land reappeared from under the great ice sheets that had covered most of the country during the Pleistocene Ice Age. Dry land, largely ice-free, linked Asia and Alaska during the Pleistocene Epoch, and Canada's first immigrants used this isthmus to cross into North America, perhaps 30,000 years ago. These first people seem to have been nomads who hunted mammoth, bison, and caribou. They expanded their range as the ice sheets retreated. As the climate stabilized and northern North America developed its modern ecological zones, such as tundra, forest, and prairie, the hunters adapted to local conditions. Other migrants from Asia came later, perhaps as recently as 4000 years ago, bringing new languages and different types of tools and weapons. Distinct cultures and nations developed throughout Canada. They comprised at least 11 separate language groups with hundreds of individual languages and a variety of ways of living. Indigenous Peoples in 1500 In 1500, on the eve of regular European contact, there may have been 300,000 people living in Canada, although some estimates run much higher. More than half were clustered in two regions, southern Ontario and the Pacific coast. Despite divisions due to distance, language, and culture, trade networks stretched far across the continent, as did diplomatic alliances, rivalries, and warfare. Each nation had its own myths, heroes, and spiritual practices, but they all shared a reverence for nature and a sense of the spiritual presence in all living things. The societies of the Algonquian language family, the most widespread in North America, extended from the Atlantic coast to the Rockies. Micmac, Maliseet, Montagnais, and other groups on the Atlantic coast made extensive use of fish and coastal marine life. Most Algonquian speakers, however, were hunter-gatherers: They hunted deer and other large animals, and gathered nuts and wild grains. They lived in small bands of related families, in the forest that stretches across Canada from west to east. Some moved into the Interior Plains to make their living by hunting bison. In many Algonquian groups, women had equal status with men. Another language group, the Athapaskan speakers, were also hunter-gatherers. They lived mainly in the northwestern forest, but some groups lived on the plains, along with some Algonquian groups. These plains people wintered in sheltered river valleys and followed the bison herds. They planned and executed well-organized drives to stampede bison over cliffs. From the bison they got not only food but also clothing, tools, and many other necessities. These societies began their golden age in the mid-1700s when they got horses, imported to North America via Mexico. With the new mobility that horses provided, mounted bison hunters such as the Blackfoot and Plains Cree flourished on the Interior Plains. North of the forest, in the tundra lands reaching to the Arctic Ocean, lived the Inuit, who developed ingenious inventions to help them survive in one of the world's most forbidding climates. The Inuit lived in small bands as hunters, with a diet almost wholly of sea animals, although some followed the caribou herds. They spoke a common language, in several dialects, that spread eastward from Alaska to Greenland barely a thousand years ago. It is part of the Eskimo-Aleut language group, which has branches in Siberia and thus is the only indigenous language group with a clearly identified Asian connection. The temperate rain forest of the mountainous Pacific Northwest was the most densely populated part of indigenous Canada and had the greatest diversity of languages. Speakers of at least five distinct language groups lived here. The coastal nations were blessed with abundant food sources, particularly salmon, and lived in substantial, permanent towns of elaborately decorated cedar-plank houses. They produced sophisticated works of art, the most famous of which were the totem poles that decorated houses and proclaimed the lineages of their owners. They traveled, raided, and hunted whales in large, oceangoing canoes. These were complex societies consisting of chiefs, nobles, commoners, and slaves. Another area of large populations and complex societies was the woodlands of the lower Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence valley, inhabited by Iroquoian-speaking peoples. About 500 AD the Iroquoians began growing corn, beans, and squash. Once established, agriculture supported much larger populations than hunting and gathering. The Iroquoian farmers lived in large, fortified towns surrounded by cornfields. Some groups formed rival confederacies known as the Huron, Neutral, and Iroquois (or Five Nations, later Six Nations). Each confederacy had its own elaborate political systems and ceremonies. European Contact 985-1600 The Viking Voyagers Viking colonists of Iceland and Greenland were the first Europeans known to have reached North America. They began to visit the northeast coast of Canada about 985 AD, when they settled Greenland. Leif Ericson of Greenland sailed west about 1000 AD to a place he called Vinland and built a settlement there. This may have been L'Anse-aux-Meadows, a place in Newfoundland where remains of a Viking village were found in the 1960s. Although the colony did not last long, Viking contact with indigenous people may have been widespread on the northeast coast. This contact seems to have been marked by conflict despite some evidence of trading exchanges. Contact with North America had ceased entirely by the time Europe lost contact with Greenland in 1410. Search for the Northwest Passage Later in the 15th century, Europe's seafarers began extending the range of their voyages. John Cabot, a Venetian in the service of England, renewed contact with northern North America when he sailed to Newfoundland in 1497. Cabot sought a Northwest Passage, a westward sea route to the wealthy empires known to exist in Asia. He was soon followed by Portuguese and other explorers who were seeking a water route to Asia through or around North America. In 1576 Martin Frobisher sailed to Baffin Island. In 1585 John Davis found and named Davis Strait. In 1610 Henry Hudson sailed into Hudson Bay. Hudson was marooned there by his mutinous crew, and Sir Thomas Button's unsuccessful search for him (1612-1613) confirmed that there was no western exit from the bay. Well into the 18th century, however, hopeful explorers looked for navigable rivers that might form a water route if connected by short portages. All of these explorations helped to map Canada and bring its natural resources to the attention of people in Europe. In 1534 Francis I, King of France, dispatched Jacques Cartier to seek the Northwest Passage in the region Cabot had explored. Sailing beyond Newfoundland, Cartier found the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, where he met Iroquoian people who told him of wealthy kingdoms in the north. In his three voyages to the gulf (1534, 1535, 1541), however, he found no such kingdoms and no Northwest Passage. In 1535 he explored up the Saint Lawrence river as far as the Iroquoian town of Hochelaga (the present site of Montréal). There he found his way blocked by the Lachine Rapids, confirming that the Saint Lawrence did not provide a sea route to Asia. Cartier's men spent the winter at Stadacona, an Iroquoian village where Québec city now stands. On Cartier's third voyage, his main object was to establish a colony, but this venture too was unsuccessful. First Commercial Ventures Whale oil, cod, and furs brought a steadier, less publicized stream of European sailors to Canada. From the early 1500s until after 1600, Basques, people from southern France and northern Spain, came each year to Labrador and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to hunt whales. English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese fishers came to catch cod on the shallow, bountiful Grand Banks off the Atlantic coast, often drying the catch on the shores. The fishing industry led to several attempts to start colonies in Newfoundland and elsewhere. Few endured, although the fishing season regularly brought a throng of fishers to some harbors. In 1583 English adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert arrived at busy St. John's Harbour in Newfoundland and found it crowded with boats. Although Spanish and Portuguese boats shared the harbor with the English, Gilbert claimed Newfoundland for England. In the 1600s, after the Spanish and Portuguese quit fishing in the Grand Banks, permanent English communities grew up around Newfoundland's Avalon peninsula, and French communities grew up on the island's south coast. About the same time, whalers and fishers began to develop a trade in furs with indigenous nations they met along the coasts. Europe's hatters discovered that beaver hair, when shaved and matted into a stiff felt, was the finest hat-making material available. The Canadian fur trade, destined to be the backbone of the economy for some 200 years, was born. European-Indigenous Relations For several hundred years, there were few European settlers across much of Canada, and thus there were few conflicts between them and the indigenous peoples over control of the land. Trading relations, rooted in the fur trade that eventually spread across the continent, were often more important. The fur trade changed indigenous societies by adding new European goods to their way of life, encouraging them to concentrate on trade with the newcomers, and often leading them into new alliances or conflicts based on trade. But trade rarely put the indigenous nations under European domination. Missionaries, who often accompanied the early traders, tried to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity but were frequently disappointed by their lack of success. So long as the indigenous societies remained independent, they rarely showed great enthusiasm for European religions. For centuries after the arrival of Cabot, most of them retained control over their contacts with Europeans. In these early years, disease was the greatest effect of European contact. The Europeans brought with them diseases that were unknown in North America, and the indigenous people lacked immunity to them. The result was devastating epidemics that ran through the Americas long before any Europeans moved inland to report them. The population began to decline as soon as the Europeans arrived. Some scholars have estimated that the Micmac lost 90 percent of their population between 1500 and 1600. As contact moved gradually north and west, so did epidemics. Interior Plains nations suffered devastating epidemics in the late 1700s; the Pacific Northwest suffered similar catastrophes in the mid-1800s; and many Inuit groups were hard hit by illnesses as they came into regular contact with Europeans in the 20th century. Indigenous populations in Canada declined continuously from about 1500 to about 1930. New France 1600-1763 When the French government saw the potential value of the fur trade, the fishing industry, and other resources of northern North America, it began to take more interest in the region, which came to be known as New France. New France comprised Canada (the area drained by the Saint Lawrence), Acadia (now the Maritime provinces), the island of Newfoundland (shared unwillingly with the English), and later Louisiana (the valley of the Mississippi River). France claimed and defended this vast area as its possession. For the most part, however, the inhabitants continued their way of life unaffected by French laws or customs, and dealt with the French primarily as customers for their furs. The French claim was contested by the English, who tried persistently to divert the fur trade or to occupy parts of the territory. Early Years To confirm its claims to North American territory, France needed to build permanent forts and settlements. But settlements were expensive, and in order to pay for them, commercial colonizers sought a monopoly of the fur trade. Pierre du Guast, sieur de Monts, acquired such a monopoly from the king of France, and in 1604 he established a post in Acadia. It had a rocky start, with half the settlers dying of scurvy the first winter, and it was not self-sufficient for a long time. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain, an explorer hired by de Monts, founded a settlement at Québec on the Saint Lawrence River. Champlain, who became the champion of French colonization, understood that a monopoly of the inland fur trade could be better protected there, where the river narrowed, rather than at sites on the open coast of Acadia. Consequently, French colonization began to focus on the Saint Lawrence valley. Eventually, Champlain convinced Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII, of the importance of North America to the economic development of France. In 1627 Richelieu organized the Company of One Hundred Associates to develop and administer New France using the principles of mercantilism. Under this system, the company would export North America's raw materials to France and would buy all its manufactured goods from France. Trade with other countries was prohibited, and local manufacturing was discouraged. To maintain his settlement and develop the fur trade on the Saint Lawrence, Champlain had to form alliances with the local Algonquian nations and their inland allies, the Huron confederacy. These indigenous allies brought the furs to Québec, and with their assistance Champlain was able to travel widely and to map eastern North America from Newfoundland to the Great Lakes. Under the company, the Canada colony continued to grow after Champlain died at Québec in 1635. More settlements were founded, notably at Trois-Rivières (1634) and Montréal (1642). However, the colony remained small in population and dependent on the fur trade. Fur traders also maintained a small French presence in Acadia, and in the 1640s a small, settled Acadian community took root around Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal) on the Bay of Fundy. In the 1640s New France was forced to aid its ally, the Huron confederacy, in a war with the Iroquois. When the Iroquois defeated and scattered the Huron in 1649, New France's fur trade was devastated, and Montréal and Québec were exposed to attack. The danger was so great that for a time the French considered abandoning New France. The colony survived, however, and the fur trade rebounded after the Ottawa, Ojibwa, and other Algonquian nations replaced the Huron as French allies and suppliers. New France's trader-explorers also began to venture inland from Montréal in search of new sources of furs. Two of them, Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre Esprit Radisson, explored the west side of Lake Superior in the 1650s. Development of the Colony In 1663, when New France still had barely 3000 people, Louis XIV's finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert abolished the One Hundred Associates, ending the era of company rule. Thenceforth, New France was a royal province ruled from Québec by a governor-general, who commanded the military forces and symbolized royal authority. In addition, an intendant oversaw colonial finances, justice, and daily administration. Both officials reported to the Minister of Marine in the king's court, since all French colonies were administered by the naval department. An appointed Superior Council advised the governor and acted as a supreme court, but there were no elective bodies in the government of New France. With royal support, the defenses of New France were improved. A veteran military force of 1200, the Carignan-Salières regiment, arrived in 1665 and waged a campaign against the Iroquois. After the regiment devastated their villages and cornfields, the Iroquois negotiated a peace settlement. About 400 members of the Carignan-Salières regiment stayed on in Canada as settlers. During the first decade of royal rule, the crown also subsidized immigration from France, notably of some 700 unmarried women, who were called filles du roi (daughters of the king) because the king paid for their transportation and dowries. Their arrival helped balance the male-female ratio, which was overwhelmingly male. Thereafter immigration from France was slight; the 10,000 settlers reported on the 1681 census became, by natural increase, the ancestors of almost all the 6.3 million French-speaking Canadians of the late 20th century. Soon after the peace settlement with the Iroquois, New France acquired a permanent garrison of colonial troops. Soldiers for the colony came from France, but they were commanded by what became a hereditary aristocracy in New France. Military officers explored new territory, built forts, and participated in diplomacy, trade, and warfare with the indigenous peoples. Trade and Exploration Colbert in 1664 organized a new company, the Company of the West Indies, to hold the fur trade monopoly. As a settled rural population developed in the Saint Lawrence valley, the fur trade moved westward and northward. After 1670, there was a new competitor in the fur trade. In that year the English, who had coveted the northern fur trade for years, granted a trade monopoly in the area of Hudson Bay to a group of London gentlemen, the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). The fur trade merchants of Montréal were, however, able to compete successfully. They combined the fur trade with exploration and missionary work. Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette began exploring the Mississippi River, and René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, reached the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. Around 1700 King Louis XIV authorized development of a chain of forts linking the colony on the Saint Lawrence to Louisiana, newly founded at the mouth of the Mississippi. During the time that New France was a royal province, the French government attempted to control the fur trade more closely. The government feared that the trade disrupted the colony by drawing away young men whose energies should have been devoted to agriculture and town building. Consequently the government began a licensing system, issuing a limited number of licenses to trade in furs. But young men took to the woods anyway as unlicensed traders called coureurs de bois (woods rangers). They lived most of their lives away from the settlements, adopting indigenous ways of life, often marrying indigenous women, and helping to push the frontier toward the northwest. In the 1680s as much as 10 percent of the population may have been living this rugged life. Their mixed-blood descendants made a living by serving the fur trade, forming communities around the northwestern forts and trading posts. They were called métis (French for "mixed"). French Colonial Society Religion The Roman Catholic Church was a powerful element in colonial society: it controlled the morals, education, and social welfare of the colonists. Although France had many Protestants at the time, its official religion was Roman Catholicism, and this was the form of Christianity that France desired to spread in North America. Thus Protestants were prohibited from settling in New France, and Roman Catholic religious organizations were charged with maintaining and spreading the Catholic faith. The first religious organization to send missionaries to New France was the Franciscan Récollet group, who arrived in 1615. In 1633 they were replaced by the richer, better-organized Society of Jesus or Jesuits. Missionary activity was not highly successful, and the church gradually reoriented itself to serving the settler community. Members of the Ursulines, an organization of nuns-women devoted to the religious life-came in 1639 to start schools for girls. Sulpician priests, who ran seminaries to educate future priests, arrived in 1657. The Diocese of Québec was established in 1674 by Bishop François de Laval, who had led the colonial church since 1659. It was supported by mandatory tithes-taxes at a rate of 10 percent-levied on the farmers' produce. Religious bodies ran hospitals and schools and often owned large estates called seigneuries. New France, however, was never abundantly supplied with clergy. Though the people were overwhelmingly Catholic, rural communities might see a priest only a few times a year. Land Tenure New France developed as a largely rural society, as farmers cleared land along the Saint Lawrence and adjacent rivers. These farmers, called habitants, held their land under the seignorial system. Land in New France was granted in the form of seigneuries to large landlords or seigneurs, who in turn granted acreages to farming families. In return the farmers had to pay annual dues to the seigneur in the form of produce, labor, or sometimes money. New France's farm families lacked export markets-they were hundreds of miles from the ocean-and so they produced mainly for themselves rather than for sale. The members of large farm families worked together to raise wheat, vegetables, and livestock. As younger family members grew up and married, they cleared new land. The farmers had little opportunity for education, but they lived better than most peasants in France at the time. Seigneurial lands usually brought little income to their owners, but ownership of large tracts of land was nevertheless a sign of prestige for the colonial elite. Although seigneurs in France were nobles, many of the seigneurs in New France were not nobles. However, the seigneurs of New France nevertheless enjoyed the respect traditionally given to a seigneur. For example, the front pew in the parish church was reserved for the seigneur and his family. Few seigneurs lived on their estates; most lived in the towns and had military careers. French and British Rivalry Territorial Disputes In the 1680s New France was again at war with the Iroquois, partly over control of the fur trade but also as an offshoot of war between France and England. The Iroquois confederacy was an ally of the English, and England and France were locked in a worldwide struggle for political and military power. Europe was one battlefield, and other campaigns were fought in colonial areas like North America. In North America the English colonies along the Atlantic Ocean (the Thirteen Colonies) were hemmed in by the French colonies in Acadia and Canada on the north and by French expansion in the Mississippi Valley on the west. At the same time, the French were caught between the Hudson's Bay Company on the north and the Thirteen Colonies on the south. The English and their Iroquois allies attacked the settlements on the Saint Lawrence in King William's War (1689-1697), but New France now had a permanent garrison and could strike back. New France's soldiers, notably Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, raided the frontiers of New York and New England with their indigenous allies and seized most of the English trading posts on Hudson Bay. After almost a decade of guerrilla warfare, the Peace of Ryswick (1697) merely confirmed each country's possessions before the war, even returning Acadia, which the English had captured, to the French. In 1701 the Iroquois made a comprehensive peace with New France and remained neutral in future conflicts between the two countries. In 1702 a new war, Queen Anne's War, broke out between France and Great Britain (a new union of three countries headed by England). France did badly in this war, losing Acadia to the British in 1710. By the Peace of Utrecht that ended the war, France was compelled to yield its land in Newfoundland, although it kept seasonal fishing rights on the north side (the French Shore), and its claims to Hudson Bay. The Acadian mainland was also ceded to Great Britain. However, the French kept their forts and trading posts on the north side of the Bay of Fundy, maintaining that this was Micmac land that had never become part of Acadia. The Acadians who lived under British rule became the neutral French, tied to neither the French nor the British, but always distrusted by the British. They and the Micmac were the only people living in the colony, which the British called Nova Scotia, until the seaport of Halifax was founded in 1749. France kept Cape Breton Island and Isle Saint-Jean (now Prince Edward Island), organizing them as the colony of Isle Royale. After 1713 the French fishing industry focused on Cape Breton Island, where the fortified town of Louisbourg was founded that year. Louisbourg soon became a successful fishing and trading port as well as a military base. In the peaceful decades that followed, New France continued to grow and prosper, from 18,000 people in 1713 to 40,000 in 1737 and 55,000 in 1755. Most of these people lived in the long-established farming communities of the Saint Lawrence valley, the heartland of New France. The Fur Trade Fur trade forts dotted the continent, and Montréal's merchants continued to control the lion's share of the fur trade, which grew and spread westward. The French approached the fur trade differently than the HBC. The French went into the back country to collect furs, but the HBC generally preferred to establish posts at shipping ports and let the indigenous trappers bring their furs to the posts. Although the HBC made a generous profit, its trade was often intercepted upstream by Montréalers who met the trappers on their home ground and bought the best of their furs. The French fur trade operations were extended far to the west by military officer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, and his sons. They explored almost to the Rocky Mountains in the 1730s and 1740s and established a string of fur trading forts. The fur traders who followed them established routes along the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers. The French forged alliances, based on the trade, with the indigenous peoples of the west, and this meant that French soldiers, traders, and missionaries could move with relative ease across the continent. But since the indigenous nations trapped and traded the pelts and European hatters processed them, the fur trade never provided work for more than a few hundred French colonists. Partly for that reason, the population of New France remained many times smaller than that of the Thirteen Colonies. The French and Indian War With the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Great Britain began a relentless attack on France's colonies. The conflict began in the Ohio Valley, where Britishers from the Thirteen Colonies were beginning to settle. This British expansion threatened Louisiana's links with the rest of New France. The British also threatened the French on the Atlantic coast, where British fleets drove out the French cod fishing fleet in 1755. The same year, Great Britain rounded up and deported some 7000 Acadians, destroying the century-old Acadian society of Nova Scotia. The Acadians were replaced by settlers from New England, who occupied the productive diked farmlands that the Acadians had created by the Bay of Fundy. Some of the deported Acadians went to France, and some went to Louisiana, where their present-day descendants are known as Cajuns. Some retreated to the woods to avoid being sent away and settled farther north on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. In 1764 the British allowed the deportees to return, and in the last part of the 18th century thousands came back to join the refugees in these new settlements. For several years New France's forces, led by the experienced French general the Marquis of Montcalm, held their own against the large and very costly assault by British forces. In a global military contest, Great Britain was compelled to devote one-seventh of its army-20,000 soldiers-to face down a few thousand French troops, supported by militia and indigenous allies, in North America. But Louisbourg fell in 1758, and part of its population was deported to France. In 1759 three British armies pushed toward the Saint Lawrence heartland. After a summer-long siege of Québec, the young British general James Wolfe won the battle of the Plains of Abraham and captured the city. Montréal fell the following summer, and as a result French Canadians call 1760 the year of the conquest. The conquest did not end all the fighting. The final stage was a widespread indigenous campaign in the spring of 1763, under Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa, against the western posts where British garrisons had recently replaced the French. Most of these posts were in the southern and western territories of Canada that now form the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The indigenous nations of the area resented the Thirteen Colonies' westward expansion onto their lands, and joined the uprising to force them back. However, they were unable to sustain their attack or to sever British supply lines. British North America 1763-1841 By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, New France with its 65,000 settlers (except western Louisiana) was ceded to Great Britain. At that point, what is now Canada comprised the British colonies of Québec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Rupert's Land. Québec was the new name for the colony of Canada, which had reached from Labrador to Missouri but was now reduced to the lower Saint Lawrence valley. Nova Scotia comprised all of what had been Acadia and Isle Royale, and Newfoundland included Labrador. Rupert's Land, which was the name for the Hudson Bay drainage area, was confirmed as a monopoly of the HBC. King George III of Great Britain sought to pacify Pontiac's allies with his Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized indigenous sovereignty with certain qualifications. It committed Great Britain to negotiating treaties with the indigenous peoples to acquire land before allowing settlers to move in. The land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, including Canada outside the lower Saint Lawrence valley, was set aside as a reserve, the so-called Lands Reserved for the Indians. This angered people in the Thirteen Colonies, who felt they were being deprived of rights to western land that had been given or implied in their original colonial charters. Consolidating British Rule When Great Britain conquered New France, it expected to impose British institutions, including a colonial assembly that would be open only to Protestants. Military governors James Murray and Guy Carleton found that policy unworkable. In 1774 by the Quebec Act, Great Britain agreed to preserve a regime with no elective institutions. The Quebec Act entrenched the old French civil law and the seignorial system of landholding and officially recognized the Roman Catholic Church, including its right to impose tithes. By shoring up the society of French Québec, the Quebec Act helped reconcile its key leaders, the church and the seigneurs, to British rule. The French Canadian farming economy of the Saint Lawrence valley and its language, religion, and customs continued largely unchanged. The Quebec Act also restored to Québec the land between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, which had been included in the Lands Reserved for the Indians. This helped preserve Montréal's fur trade and encouraged the indigenous nations to form alliances with the British. All of the northern colonies were theoretically under the authority of the governor-general at Québec city, but in practice there were few links among them. Each colony continued to develop in isolation from the others. In Newfoundland, English and Irish settlements had been growing during the 18th century. By the end of the century, Newfoundlanders, rather than fishing fleets from England, caught most of the cod that was exported to Europe and the Caribbean. Newfoundland was not entirely British after 1763, however; France kept fishing rights on the north and west coasts and was allowed the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon as a base for its fishing fleets. Nova Scotia attracted only a few settlers from New England and Great Britain, but its capital, Halifax, became important as a military base and seaport. Halifax was the site of the first newspaper in what is now Canada (1752) and of the first elected assembly (1758). After 1770 migration from the highlands of Scotland produced a substantial Gaelic-speaking minority in Nova Scotia. Prince Edward Island (called Saint John's Island until 1799) became a separate colony in 1769. In Québec, the population grew, commerce expanded, rural villages developed, and prosperity increased, but French-speaking society, particularly rural society, continued largely unchanged from the days of French rule. The world of most French colonists continued to center on the farm and the parish. Because the church, which ran the schools, did not have enough clergy, there were few schools, and most of the colonists were unable to read and write. Rural prosperity aided the seigneurs, who for the first time could hope to live as country gentlemen on the dues paid by the habitants. The English-speaking population, most of whom were involved in trade, government, or the garrisons, lived mainly in the towns. The American Revolution Removal of the French threat, which eliminated the need for British military protection, encouraged the Thirteen Colonies to grow away from their ties to Great Britain. Barely 15 years after the conquest of New France, these colonies took up armed resistance to British rule, and the American Revolution began. In 1775 American forces harassed Nova Scotia and invaded Québec. They did not win the support of the Nova Scotians, who still depended on British connections. The Americans seized Montréal and besieged Québec City in the winter of 1775 to 1776, but they found little support, and British forces drove them out early in 1776. For the rest of the war, Great Britain used the forts and seaports of the northern colonies as springboards for its campaigns against the Americans. The American Revolution created not one but two new nations in North America. When the independence of the United States of America was confirmed in 1783, only the northern part of British North America, the future Canada, was left to the British Empire. Loyalist Immigration The British were immediately confronted with incorporating a dramatic increase in population. Some 40,000 Loyalists-people from the Thirteen Colonies who were loyal to Great Britain-came as refugees during and immediately after the revolution (see United Empire Loyalists). Others, called late Loyalists, arrived in subsequent years. Some of the Loyalists were former members of the urban elite of the Thirteen Colonies, but most were ordinary farmers or townspeople. A third of the Loyalists in Atlantic Canada were blacks, mostly escaped slaves who had joined the British cause. Part of the Iroquois confederacy that had allied itself with Great Britain also joined the migration. Thayendanegea, or Joseph Brant, founded an Iroquois community on the Grand River north of Lake Erie. Great Britain supported Loyalist refugees for several years and provided them with generous land grants in British North America. Almost overnight, Loyalists tripled the population of Nova Scotia. Their arrival caused two new colonies to be carved out of Nova Scotia: New Brunswick and Cape Breton Island (reunited with Nova Scotia in 1820). In Québec, which received about 10,000 Loyalists, Governor Frederick Haldimand decreed that the English-speaking newcomers should not be merged into the French communities. At his direction, most Loyalists in Québec migrated in 1784 to new settlements on the upper Saint Lawrence and Lake Ontario. Here the Loyalists soon formed militias and kept a wary eye on their former countrymen to the south. The Constitutional Act of 1791 Loyalist leaders soon joined British merchants of Québec city and Montréal in agitating against the Quebec Act. It did not provide the British legal institutions, legislatures, and systems of land tenure that the Loyalists and others of British background expected. In response, in 1791 Great Britain divided Québec into two colonies, Lower and Upper Canada, and gave a new constitution to each. In mostly French Lower Canada, French civil law, the rights of the Catholic Church, and seignorial land tenure were preserved. In mostly English Upper Canada, Protestant churches, particularly the Church of England, were favored, and English laws and land tenure were installed. The War of 1812 In 1812 the United States declared war on Great Britain, which was again fighting a global war against France. Both Britain and France had confiscated U.S. ships that were attempting to trade with the other side. This angered the United States, which was neutral in the conflict. The United States figured that the British were the worse offenders and declared war. One of its first moves in the War of 1812 was to invade Upper Canada. American leaders expected success, rather than a repeat of 1775, because most Upper Canadians had only recently come from the Thirteen Colonies. They were wrong. Great Britain's professional army, with the support of the colonial militias and indigenous allies led by Tecumseh of the Shawnee, inflicted a series of defeats on the large but ill-trained American invasion forces. In 1812 British general Isaac Brock secured the Canadian frontier at Niagara and captured Detroit. There was no direct threat to Atlantic Canada because its nearest U.S. neighbors, the New England states, largely opposed the war. In fact, Nova Scotian shipowners enjoyed a bonanza; their vessels went on privateering expeditions, capturing and confiscating American ships. The Americans never effectively threatened Lower Canada. They attempted to capture Montréal in 1813, but the attempts were blocked by British victories at Crysler's Farm and Chateauguay. However, the 1813 American naval victory at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie renewed the threat to Upper Canada, whose survival depended on command of the Saint Lawrence and the Great Lakes. American forces occupied parts of the colony and burned its capital, York (now Toronto), but got little support from the inhabitants. When the war ended in 1815, the attempted American conquest had been defeated. The war had strengthened anti-American feeling, particularly in Upper Canada, and increased the belief that British North America had a separate destiny. Expansion The Fur Trade and Western Exploration Bringing all of the northern regions under British rule did not stop the fur trade competition between Montréal and Hudson Bay. The French merchants of Montréal were replaced by Scots, who hired French Canadian traders and used the old French posts and trade routes in defiance of the HBC's monopoly. Gradually the Montréalers formed a cartel, the North West Company (NWC). Competition from the Nor'Westers, as the NWC people were called, forced the HBC to move inland from its posts on the bayshore, and the companies fought a fierce, costly battle from 1775 to 1821. The rivalry accelerated exploration of the west as fur traders sought new routes and suppliers. Nor'Wester Sir Alexander Mackenzie followed the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 1789, and in 1793 he reached the Pacific. Nor'Wester Simon Fraser reached the mouth of the Fraser River, near modern Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1808. David Thompson, who followed the Columbia River to its mouth in 1811, mapped much of western Canada for the NWC. The fur trade shaped development on the Pacific coast. Sea otters, which bear one of the world's finest furs, ranged along that coast from Alaska to California. Russian and Spanish traders exploited this resource, but Great Britain pushed them out of what is now British Columbia after explorations by its captains James Cook (1778) and George Vancouver (1792). In a brief period, the fur traders nearly exterminated the sea otter, although a few survived in Alaska. The enmity of the companies colored the history of western settlement. Assiniboia, the first colony west of the Great Lakes, was begun at Red River in Rupert's Land in 1812. It was the project of a major HBC stockholder, Lord Selkirk. The Nor'Westers saw it as an HBC attempt to block their east-west trade route, which ran through Red River. The Métis, mixed-blood offspring of fur traders and indigenous people, already had communities in Red River; they sided with the Nor'Westers. The colony's first governor, Miles Macdonell, set the tone when he issued restrictions on trade. In 1816 the second governor, Robert Semple, and 20 men were killed in a gunfight with Métis while trying to enforce the restrictions. Other violence occurred as the HBC and NWC vied for dominance. In 1821 the competition between the fur trade companies ended when the NWC merged into the HBC. The HBC took over the NWC's trading area and also administered the Oregon Country, claimed by both Great Britain and the United States (see Northwest Boundary Dispute). Montréal's trade dwindled as Hudson Bay became the major shipping point for furs going to Europe. The HBC came to dominate British interests on the Pacific, developing a network of trading forts. In 1843 the HBC built Fort Victoria (now Victoria, capital of British Columbia) on Vancouver Island as its Pacific headquarters. As population grew around the forts, able HBC administrators, notably Sir James Douglas, the father of British Columbia, played important roles in making the transition to colonial government. Gradually the fur trade's role in the Canadian economy faded, although a commercial fur trade continued in the west and north. Immigration and Settlement At the beginning of the 19th century a flood of immigrants came to British North America from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Probably a million people migrated from these countries to British North America between 1815 and 1850. By the 1840s, British North America had 1.5 million people: 650,000 in Lower Canada, 450,000 in Upper Canada, and more than 300,000 in Atlantic Canada. About half the immigrants were English, but Irish immigrants became more numerous than English in the 1830s, and particularly after 1845 to 1847, when famine was common in Ireland. Scots immigration increased when tenant farmers in the Scottish Highlands were evicted from their land to allow large-scale sheep farming. The immigrants from Ireland and Scotland included both Catholics and Protestants, and Catholics became a sizable minority in all the English-speaking colonies. Other immigrants were recruited by people who had acquired land and wanted to establish colonies. Lord Selkirk encouraged immigration not only to Red River, but also to Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada. The Canada Company, a land company chartered by the British monarchy, sought settlers for the large tract of Upper Canada that it acquired in 1826. Most people, however, came on their own. They risked the dangers of the passage and periodic outbreaks of shipborne cholera (particularly in 1832) and typhus (1847). The greatest number of these immigrants settled in Upper Canada, which was considered a good country for a poor man because immigrants willing to work hard for a generation or more could acquire potentially valuable farmland. Upper Canada became the fastest-growing part of British North America. Atlantic Canada also attracted many immigrants, though fewer went to Newfoundland than to the other colonies. In Lower Canada, immigration caused the English-speaking population to grow in Québec City, the Ottawa River valley, Montréal, and the Eastern Townships (east of Montréal). French Canadians, however, remained the largest ethnic group. Immigration made the colonies more British. It also made the indigenous nations minorities in most areas east of the Great Lakes. Land cession treaties gave them small reserves, but the hunting rights and other guarantees made to them in these treaties were rarely respected. Few immigrants went far west or north, and the indigenous nations remained dominant in the vast HBC lands. On the plains, the mounted hunting societies, who did not depend on the fur trade, lived independently on the still-abundant bison. The Red River colony continued, but the additions to its population were chiefly Métis, who were proud of their role as a new people different from both the indigenous peoples and the Europeans. There was little contact with the colonies to the east before midcentury. Then, however, as Upper Canada's farm population grew, some of its leaders began considering the west as potential space for expansion. Industrial Growth Great Britain continued to be important to the economic development of its North American colonies, supplying trade opportunities and investment. During its wars with France, Great Britain was cut off from its timber sources in Europe, and it turned to British North America for timber. Timber production became a vital industry, and wood quickly replaced furs as the leading export of British North America. The timber trade encouraged shipbuilding, and by midcentury Atlantic Canada was building and operating a long-distance sailing fleet. Merchants prospered in Halifax and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia; Saint John, New Brunswick; St. John's, Newfoundland; and other seaports. The Fraser River gold rush of 1858 brought new settlers and new interest to the Pacific coast. The colony of British Columbia was formed that year out of the HBC territory, and in 1866 it incorporated the colony of Vancouver's Island (the old name of Vancouver Island), which had been created in 1849. Its settlers, a mix of British, Canadians, and Americans, with a few Chinese, had begun to ship timber, salmon, and coal, as well as gold, from the colony, but they were still outnumbered by the indigenous population of the coast. Political Changes Growth of Self-Government The act of 1791 established assemblies, in both Upper and Lower Canada, that were representative in that most adult males could vote in elections for these bodies. Great Britain conceded that its colonists were entitled to representative institutions, but it did not want a repeat of the American Revolution. It was widely believed among the British that the revolution had resulted from allowing too much independence in the Thirteen Colonies. Great Britain therefore wanted to bind the British North Americans more securely to the British Empire-the group of dominions, colonies, and other territories around the world that owed allegiance to the British crown-by establishing a colonial elite similar to the powerful British landed aristocracy. To that end, Britain balanced the power of elected assemblies with the authority of the governor-general and lieutenant governors from Great Britain, who were assisted by an appointed legislative council for each colony. The council members were drawn from the elite (English speakers in Upper Canada, and both English and French speakers in Lower Canada). Ties to Great Britain were fostered by feelings of rivalry toward the United States. Edward Winslow, a Loyalist founder of New Brunswick, believed that British North America would be the envy of the United States. John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, welcomed American settlers because he believed that Upper Canada would show them that the British system of government was superior to American republicanism. Even in French-speaking Lower Canada, the church and the aristocracy accepted British rule. The rural population in Lower Canada also had no wish to be assimilated by the alien Americans, since its way of life was protected by British rule. Radicals and Reformers A colonial aristocracy never developed in British North America. Most colonists were small farmers, fishermen, or artisans. In an increasingly commercial society, commerce was a more important source of wealth and influence than land, and egalitarian values were much more strongly entrenched in Canada than in Europe. The appointed councils, as intended, dominated government in all the colonies; however, they were not accepted as leaders by most Canadians, who criticized them as self-seeking cliques of office holders. Council members tried to fend off their critics by pointing to the prosperity and growth achieved under British rule and equating change with disloyalty and Americanism. The autocratic rule of the appointed councils was opposed by two groups-radicals and reformers. The radicals looked to American and French political models and called for republican institutions, elections for all public offices, and the overthrow of all forms of privilege and inequality. By the mid-1820s, the fiery Scots-born Upper Canadian journalist and politician William Lyon Mackenzie was the most vigorous advocate of the radical platform. The more moderate reformers defended British institutions and ties to the British monarchy and empire. They campaigned for responsible government, meaning a parliamentary system where the monarchy's advisors in each colony would be picked from, and responsible to, an elected legislature. Prominent reformers included Anglo-Irish lawyer W. W. Baldwin in Upper Canada, French Canadian journalist Étienne Parent in Lower Canada, and journalist Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia. Throughout British North America, the movement for change was a political struggle. In Lower Canada, however, it threatened to become a revolution as well. Lower Canada's farming economy suffered from overcrowding and soil exhaustion. French Canadian society was threatened with a decline in living standards and gradual impoverishment. Ethnic conflict exacerbated this economic challenge. French Canadians were concentrated in the hard-pressed countryside while British immigrants dominated the towns, where they controlled commerce and industry and had the ear of government. Continued immigration threatened French Canadian predominance, even in the countryside. French Canadian lawyers, journalists, and others blamed French Canada's problems on British domination. They warned that French Canadians would become merely the impoverished servants of British commercial interests and argued that the solution lay in a French Canadian nation. Nationalism, an almost unknown concept in the 18th century, became a powerful factor in Lower Canadian politics. The Rebellions of 1837 Lower Canada's assembly became the center of conflict between English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians. The assembly was dominated by the Patriote Party, which was supported by French Canadian voters and led by French Canadian middle-class professionals. Some English-speaking reformers also supported it. The assembly, however, was constantly thwarted by British governors and their appointed councils. In 1834 the assembly requested fundamental changes, embodied in a document called the Ninety-Two Resolutions. Great Britain rejected the Ninety-Two Resolutions in 1837 and authorized the governor to override the assembly almost entirely. Mass protests were called and soon turned into armed rebellion. (See Rebellions of 1837.) The Patriote leader, Louis Joseph Papineau, a seigneur who wanted to preserve or restore many aspects of traditional French Canadian society, was a reluctant revolutionary who soon fled across the border to exile in the United States. But radical urban professionals and disgruntled rural peasants joined forces against British rule. In November 1837 they defeated British soldiers at Saint-Denis, but about two weeks later at Saint-Eustache, the British prevailed in a fierce conflict in which several hundred were killed or wounded. Within a few days after that battle, the British military dispersed all the rebel forces. The constitution was suspended, and British control in the colony was soon restored. In November 1838 a second brief outbreak, organized by Patriote exiles in the United States, was also quelled. The rebellion in Lower Canada coincided with unrest in Upper Canada caused by a brief economic downturn that had caused difficult times for farmers. Attempts to get relief through the Upper Canadian assembly were fruitless because it was controlled by supporters of the Family Compact, and radicals had lost hope for peaceful change. So when Upper Canada's lieutenant governor sent the Toronto garrison to help put down the rebellion in Lower Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie called on his radical supporters in rural Upper Canada to march on the undefended capital. The small, ill-organized rising in December 1837 was quickly defeated by loyal citizens, with only one death in the fighting around Toronto. Mackenzie and many supporters fled to the United States and attempted to start further uprisings from a base on Navy Island in the Niagara River. The Union Period, 1841-1867 The Durham Report Defeat shattered the radical cause in both Lower and Upper Canada, but the outbreak of rebellion also discredited the office-holding cliques and the constitutions of 1791. The beneficiary was the moderate approach of the reformers, which had been overshadowed during the rebellions. Lord Durham, a British reformer sent as governor-general in 1838, condemned the ruling elites of the Canadas and urged that responsible government be implemented. Durham was alarmed by ethnic conflict in Lower Canada, where he said he found "two nations warring in the bosom of a single state." He recommended reuniting Upper and Lower Canada in order to help the English-speaking majority assimilate the French Canadians. The British government soon acted on Durham's report. In 1841 the Act of Union (1840) created the province of Canada, which had two sections-Canada West (which had been Upper Canada) and Canada East (Lower Canada). French Canadians protested because English-speaking Canada West was given as many legislative seats as French-speaking Canada East, which had a larger population. In addition, English was to be the only official language. The arrangement was apparently designed to advance Durham's goal of assimilation, but his recommendation for responsible government was given very little support. Governors-general sent from Great Britain were expected to seek the support of the elected assembly but did not depend on it. As it turned out, however, assimilation failed and responsible government triumphed. Reformers from Canada West and East, led respectively by Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, joined forces in a coalition that overrode ethnic divisions and showed that success in Union politics depended on bicultural support. Baldwin and LaFontaine repeatedly insisted that the governors-general take the assembly's advice in making official appointments. When one governor-general refused, in 1843, they resigned and dissolved the administration. Finally, in 1848, Great Britain sent out a new governor-general, Durham's nephew Lord Elgin, with instructions to appoint a Canadian government supported by the majority party in the assembly and to approve its policies whether he liked them or not. Responsible government had been achieved. Joseph Howe's reform party had already won the same victory in Nova Scotia earlier in the year. Responsible government soon followed in New Brunswick in 1848, in Prince Edward Island in 1851, and in Newfoundland in 1855. Great Britain retained authority for foreign affairs, defense, and other matters and still appointed the governors, but British North America had full local self-government with one of the broadest electoral franchises in the world. All men could vote provided they held land worth a certain amount, and many of them qualified. However, the secret ballot did not come until the 1870s, the universal vote for adult males came only gradually, and women had no vote until 1917. Although there were many political factions, two broad party coalitions developed throughout the colonies. Reformers or liberals, nicknamed Grits in Canada West and Rouges in Canada East, promoted universal education, individual rights, and the interests of farmers and small businessmen. Conservatives, called Tories in Canada West and Bleus in Canada East, built a coalition that combined loyalty to Great Britain and respect for tradition with a willingness to use state power to support capitalist enterprise. Conservative allies John Alexander Macdonald, who later became the first prime minister of Canada, and George-Étienne Cartier, a Patriote rebel turned railroad lawyer, were the most successful politicians of the period. Industrial Progress The Union period saw great changes in British North America. Population growth continued and was particularly rapid in Canada West. Commerce and industry encouraged urban growth. The cities, and colonial society generally, came to be dominated and defined by a confident, prosperous middle class. The first Canadian passenger railroad was built near Montréal in 1836, and in the 1840s and 1850s thousands of kilometers of track and telegraph lines were laid. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 reduced customs tariffs and increased trade between British North America and the United States. The Union period was Atlantic Canada's golden age, when it prospered from building wooden ships and sailing them in overseas trade. British North America's shipping fleet was exceeded only by those of Great Britain and the United States. Shipyards all over the region produced a quarter of the British Empire's merchant fleet and helped launch careers like that of Sir Samuel Cunard, the Halifax-born founder of the Cunard shipping line. The merchant elite, with ties to London, Boston, and other major cities, became wealthy and supported schools and universities. Nova Scotia saw itself as the cultural capital of British North America. Nineteenth-Century Society English-Speaking Society The Union period saw great changes in English-speaking society. Population growth continued and was particularly rapid in Canada West. Commerce and industry encouraged urban growth. The cities, and colonial society generally, came to be dominated and defined by a confident, prosperous middle class. Most of the English-speaking population was proud of its connection to the British Empire and wished to maintain it, although aspiring at the same time to move from colonial status to greater self-rule. It was generally believed that hard work, industrialization, and attention to commerce would inevitably achieve the progress that would bring this about. The symbol of the era to English speakers was Great Britain's monarch, Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901), whose personal stability and moral uprightness seemed to personify British virtues. Protestant churches were important in English-speaking society; most people belonged to the Church of England, the Methodists, or the Presbyterians. The churches provided social services, a role that the state had yet to take on. Middle-class citizens embarked on moral crusades to defeat the liquor traffic, protect the Sabbath, eliminate prostitution and gambling, ban lewd literature, and improve the moral education of schoolchildren and the poor. The Union period saw the beginning of public English-speaking school systems. The function of schooling was removed from the churches, partly because there was not one church as in French Canada. In addition, English Canadians shared a consensus on the values to be taught and believed these values were crucial to a stable society. They therefore wanted them taught to all children. English-speaking schools promoted identification with Protestant Christianity and British customs. Women of English-speaking society in that era were expected to restrict themselves to domestic concerns. They were excluded from most new fields of commerce and higher education as well as from politics. Men and women were expected to operate in so-called separate spheres of life. This meant, however, that women had greater authority in the home and over the young, and also in defining public morals and social standards. Women gradually came to dominate elementary teaching and many areas of social and charitable work, and they were crucial leaders and supporters of religious campaigns and temperance crusades. French-Speaking Society Under responsible government in Canada East, French Canadians had the voting power to ensure the status of the French language and to continue the Catholic Church's control of the education system. Thus the union that was intended to assimilate French Canada actually protected its individuality. More municipal and local governments were formed, and these governments invested in expanded public education, transportation, and other public services. The seignorial system was abolished and the old French civil law modernized. During the Union era, French Canada's rural crisis began to ease. Farm communities became better connected to markets, and farmers began to shift into mixed commercial farming and dairying. A migration to the cities, to frontier areas, and to New England relieved rural population pressure. The Catholic Church greatly expanded its social action and its political influence. Under dynamic leaders like Ignace Bourget, bishop of Montréal from 1840 to 1885, the church for the first time was abundantly provided with French Canadian clergy. They developed schools, hospitals, and other social services that were elsewhere run by the state. Education and literacy for the first time became widely available to rural French Canada. The church, however, was very slow to accept social change. It fought hard to control French Canada's cultural life and to discredit the secular ideas of the radicals of 1837, such as separation of church and state. Reformist ideas survived, however, among supporters of the minority Rouge party. Building the Nation 1867-1929 Confederation The establishment of Vancouver's Island as a British colony in 1849, and British Columbia in 1858, caused British North Americans to think in terms of a union of all the colonies north of the United States. A railroad across the northern half of the continent, to link all the colonies, was proposed. There were already several local lines, from the Great Lakes to the Maritimes. But the cost of linking these sections was too great for the scattered colonies. When colonies did act together on ambitious public projects, their dealings often produced more bickering than trust, as when plans for an Intercolonial Railway between Canada and Nova Scotia collapsed in 1862. Union was encouraged by the American Civil War (1861-1865). During the war relations deteriorated between Canada and the United States because the British sympathized with the rebellious Confederacy. The U.S. government became strongly anti-British and extended this hostility to Canada even though Canada did not favor the Confederacy. In 1864, agents of the Confederacy, using neutral Canada as a base, raided Saint Albans, Vermont. They were arrested in Canada but were set free by a Montréal magistrate. The United States thereupon announced that it would end the Reciprocity Treaty that had stimulated trade across the border since 1854. This unfriendly gesture seemed to threaten the survival of the British North American colonies, and raised a feeling that they should unite for their common defense. Union also promised increased trade and economic expansion to help offset the trade losses caused by the ending of the Reciprocity Treaty. Developing the Plan of Union Serious discussion of a union got under way in 1864 with a proposal to unite the three Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Delegates from the legislatures of the three colonies agreed to discuss union at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. At the last minute, delegates from the province of Canada joined them. The Canadian decision to attend resulted from a political crisis over representation in Canada's assembly. Canada West's Reform Party, led by the journalist George Brown, objected to Canada West's having the same number of legislative seats as Canada East. Canada West had grown much larger than Canada East, and the Grits demanded representation by population. Canada East, fearing the power of an English-speaking majority, refused to accept this. Thwarted, Brown proposed federalism: Canada East and West would become separate provinces, either in a loose union between them or in a federation of all of British North America. In June 1864 Brown's Grits joined the Tories, led by Macdonald, and the Bleus, led by Cartier, in a three-way coalition pledged to explore those options. The Charlottetown meeting in September gave the coalition the chance to propose a British North American union to the Maritime colonies. The plan, which came to be called Confederation, fired the imaginations of the delegates at Charlottetown. The potential for a transcontinental nation and a national destiny inspired enthusiasm. The delegates agreed to meet again at a larger, longer meeting in Québec in October 1864. At this Québec Conference, delegates of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland approved the Seventy-two Resolutions, which were a draft constitution for Confederation. The Québec Conference proposed a centralized federation, with most powers granted to a central government responsible to a parliament. There would also be provincial governments with specified powers over language, education, religion, and generally all matters of local concern. Special protection for religious and linguistic minorities reassured the French Canadian leaders in Canada East. The status of the monarch of Great Britain as the head of state and the ceremonial status of the governor-general were preserved unchanged. Confederation did not confer full national independence, for Canadian opinion still favored a link to Great Britain as a guarantee against American domination. Great Britain retained control of foreign affairs and could theoretically veto Canadian legislation. Nevertheless Canada's status as a dominion-a locally autonomous state within the British Empire-became the model for the future evolution of the British Commonwealth of Nations as a partnership of equals. The Approval Process The Seventy-two Resolutions had to be ratified by the colonial assemblies, written up in legal form in conference with British officials, and then voted into law by Great Britain's Parliament. Confederation was debated vigorously in the colonies from 1864 to 1867. It was popular in Canada West but more controversial in Canada East because French Canadians would be a minority in the new nation. The Rouges accused Cartier and his allies of betraying French Canada, but most politicians and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Canada East supported Confederation. It was quickly approved by the joint assembly of Canada. Confederation was more controversial in the Atlantic colonies, where many were reluctant to join a union that Upper and Lower Canada were sure to dominate. The assemblies of Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland refused to ratify the Seventy-two Resolutions. In New Brunswick, vigorous opposition forced elections that were won by candidates opposed to Confederation. Public opinion changed, however, after raids in 1866 by Fenians, anti-British rebels based in the United States. The raids created a sense of crisis and national solidarity, and the same year New Brunswick reelected the government of Confederation supporter Samuel Leonard Tilley. In Nova Scotia, opposition to the Seventy-two Resolutions was led by Joseph Howe, and at first the province refused to ratify Confederation. However, once New Brunswick had committed to Confederation, the Nova Scotia assembly voted to send delegates to the conference where Canadians worked with British officials to draft a final version of the Resolutions to submit to Parliament. The colonial delegates made some small changes to the resolutions, and the result was the British North America Act, which was passed by the British Parliament. On the first of July 1867, the Dominion of Canada, with four provinces-Québec (formerly Lower Canada), Ontario (formerly Upper Canada), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia-came into being. Ottawa was chosen as the national capital. Macdonald was appointed as the first prime minister of the Dominion, and an election was set for August. Macdonald's Conservative Party, into which he had drawn many members of the Confederation coalition, won the election. Nova Scotia, however, overwhelmingly supported anti-Confederation candidates, and it appeared for a while as if Nova Scotia might secede. Macdonald negotiated with Howe, and the danger of secession was removed in 1869 when Howe, acknowledging that Great Britain would not repeal Confederation, joined Macdonald's government. In 1871 Macdonald participated, under British supervision, in negotiating the Treaty of Washington on Canadian-American relations. The treaty acknowledged that Canada would remain closely allied to Great Britain but that this allegiance would not pose a threat to American interests. Great Britain withdrew its last garrisons from Canada in 1871, confirming that the British Empire would not challenge the supremacy of the United States in North America. Completing the Design Territorial Expansion Westward expansion was an early Canadian priority. In 1869 the Hudson's Bay Company agreed to sell to Canada its northern territories-Rupert's Land and The North-Western Territory-which together became the Northwest Territories. This new territory made Canada, with just 3.7 million people, one of the world's largest nations in land area. Annexation, however, was resisted by the traditionally autonomous Métis of Red River, who had never been consulted. They feared that they would lose their land and be overwhelmed by farmers migrating west from Ontario. They organized in the Red River Rebellion to protect their land rights, their way of life, and-for the French-speaking Métis-their language and religion. Louis Riel, a young Red River Métis educated in Montréal, declared a provisional government for the Red River area and blocked the arrival of Canadian officials. Negotiations resulted in Red River entering the Confederation as the province of Manitoba, and the French language, Catholic education, and other rights were protected. The Canadian government promised to reserve 566,580 hectares (1.4 million acres) of land for the Métis. However, when British troops established Canadian authority in Red River, anti-Métis feeling was so strong that Riel was obliged to go into exile. Waves of immigration from Ontario soon made the Métis a minority in Manitoba, and the newcomers were hostile to them. In addition, most of the land that had been promised to the Métis was delayed by the government. As a result, many of the Métis who were bison hunters migrated farther west to the Saskatchewan River valley. Confederation soon expanded in the west, east, and north. British Columbia agreed to join after Canada committed to building a railroad to the Pacific coast within ten years. It became the sixth province in 1871. On the east coast, Prince Edward Island became the seventh province in 1873 after Ottawa promised to build the long-delayed Intercolonial Railway. That railway was completed east to Halifax in 1876. Great Britain transferred the Arctic Archipelago to Canada in 1880, completing the Canadian territory except for Newfoundland and Labrador, which remained separate until 1949. Also in 1880, land was taken from the Northwest Territories to enlarge Manitoba. In 1912 Manitoba received another grant of land, and the remainder of the Northwest Territories on the south and east of Hudson Bay was divided between Ontario and Québec. Treaty Making In 1873 Canada created the Northwest Mounted Police, now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or Mounties, to administer the territories and keep order there. Part of their charter was to negotiate treaties with the indigenous nations, with the intention of opening the Interior Plains to agriculture. Eleven numbered treaties were signed with the indigenous nations across Canada between 1850 and 1929, opening their lands to occupation. In general, the treaties provided some material compensation for transfer of lands to Euro-Canadians and provided for the establishment of reserves across the country. However, there were lapses in coverage: In British Columbia, there were only a few small places where treaties were signed, while in the Northwest and Yukon territories, treaties were not signed at all. The once-nomadic peoples of the plains were crowded into reserves. The reserve lands were allotted by headcount. In addition to land, the government typically was to provide schools; farm tools and agricultural assistance; and fishing and hunting rights as these had previously been enjoyed, subject to government regulation. Few of these commitments were honored by governments intent on assimilating the indigenous peoples. In some areas, for instance, the reserves were smaller than promised or were never provided at all. By 1901 Canada's indigenous peoples numbered about 100,000, barely 2 percent of the country, and were confined to reserves everywhere outside the far north. Railroad to the Pacific Building the transcontinental railroad was essential for Canada to expand all the way to the Pacific. The great challenge of Confederation was, first, to charter a company to do the work, and then to surmount the physical obstacles. Macdonald plunged forward but made a tactical and ethical misstep that set the project back by five years. Concerned that the Conservatives were going to lose some seats in the 1872 elections, Macdonald and Cartier solicited money from banker Sir Hugh Allan with which to bribe electors. After the election, Macdonald awarded the charter to Allan's consortium. When news of the deal became public, it resulted in the Pacific Scandal of 1872 to 1873, which brought down the Conservative government. The new prime minister, Liberal Alexander Mackenzie, was lukewarm about the railroad commitment, particularly during the economic recession that began during his term. The recession helped to bring down Mackenzie's government in 1878. Macdonald returned to power, the economy improved, and the railroad advanced again. The Canadian Pacific Railway, a private company supported by generous federal land grants and other assistance, was incorporated in 1881 to complete the project and operate the railroad. A dynamic American general manager, William C. Van Horne, pushed the rails across the plains, through the Canadian Shield, and into the previously unsurveyed Rockies. Particularly in British Columbia, laborers imported from China dug the tunnels, built the trestles, and laid the track, enduring deadly hazards at low pay. The transcontinental line was completed in 1885. In 1886 the Canadian Pacific founded the Pacific coast metropolis of Vancouver as a new western end point and extended the line 32 km (20 mi) from Port Moody. The Northwest Rebellion (1885) A second Métis rising, the Northwest Rebellion, flared up in 1885, not in Manitoba but among newer Métis settlements in the Saskatchewan valley farther west. Settlement was moving west from Manitoba and catching up with the Métis who had moved there; once again they feared being overrun and dispossessed. They summoned Louis Riel back from exile to help defend their interests. Riel, driven by dreams of founding a French-speaking, Catholic religious empire, led Métis fighters in a brief war against Canadian authority. His general, veteran bison hunter Gabriel Dumont, defeated the Mounties at Duck Lake and drove them from Fort Carleton. A few renegades of the Cree nation joined in the rebellion, attacking settlers and Canadian forces. Like the Métis, the Cree and other plains indigenous nations were struggling with poverty, loss of independence, and the loss of the great bison herds. Indigenous leaders, notably Pitikwahanapiwiyan, or Poundmaker, of the Cree and Isapo-muxika, or Crowfoot, of the Blackfoot, sought to avoid armed conflict, but they were not entirely successful. Canada rushed troops westward on the new railroad, and the Métis were overwhelmed at the battle of Batoche, May 12, 1885. Riel was tried for treason. He rejected an insanity defense and was hanged in November 1885. The Métis defense of their community's rights in the West elicited the sympathy of many people in Québec, and Riel's execution spurred French Canadian resentment against British dominance in the Confederation. Growth of Provincial Power Prime Minister Macdonald was committed to a strong central government, but he was unable to prevent provincial governments from securing new authority. In 1881 Macdonald lost a major battle over the extent of central government power when he tried to draw new boundaries for an expanded Manitoba. The boundary change would have given Manitoba the region from Thunder Bay to Lake of the Woods. Oliver Mowat, premier of Ontario, told Macdonald that the region was part of Ontario, that it always had been, and that the federal government could not take land away from Ontario. Mowat's interpretation was supported in a series of rulings from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a British appeals court that at that time had jurisdiction over Canadian disputes. After these rulings, the central government rarely tried to overrule the provinces, and the powers granted the provinces at Confederation ensured them an important place in Canadian political life. Mowat did not fight his campaign alone. Honoré Mercier, premier of Québec from 1887 to 1891, linked provincial rights with French Canadian nationalism. He promoted Québec's provincial government as the defender of the French Canadian nation within Canada. Father Antoine Labelle, a member of Mercier's government, promoted French Catholic colonization of frontier areas of Québec and northern Ontario as an alternative to emigration and assimilation in New England. In 1887 Mercier called a conference of provincial premiers, where he and Mowat and three more of the seven premiers demanded less federal interference in the provinces. Macdonald ignored the conference, but the issues did not go away. Federal-provincial rivalries became an essential part of Canadian politics. Growth and Development Industrial Growth Except for the five-year interruption of the Mackenzie government, Macdonald was prime minister from 1867 to 1891. Nation building and loyalty to monarch and empire were the trademarks of his later administrations. In 1878 his Conservative Party introduced the National Policy. This was a package of tariffs, or taxes on imports from abroad, designed to make them more expensive and thereby give a price advantage to Canadian manufacturers. Gradually the term was broadened to cover all of Macdonald's nation-building activities, including railroads and immigration. The policy also included links, both symbolic and practical, with Great Britain and the empire. The Conservatives used National Policy as a slogan into the 1930s. All parts of Canada hoped to benefit from industrial development. The new cities on the CPR track, like Vancouver and Winnipeg, wanted products to ship by rail. The Atlantic provinces were looking for new industry because their golden age of shipbuilding was declining as steel and iron ships replaced wooden ones. Some industrial projects did develop in Nova Scotia, but the main areas of industrialization were southern Ontario and Montréal. Industry grew rapidly in these areas, and population shifted from rural areas to cities. Many central Canadian industries became national enterprises, shipping their products west and east on the new railroads. Eaton's, a Toronto department store, became a national retailer. The Massey-Harris Company of Toronto became the largest corporation in Canada and the largest farm-implements firm in the empire. Montréal had been the economic and financial capital of Canada, but now it was challenged by Toronto in its new role as a center of industry. The spread of industrial capitalism also saw more Canadians become wage-earning urban workers, who organized to improve their situation. Wage labor and labor rights movements were not new to Canada. Skilled tradesmen such as printers, coopers, and bakers had begun organizing as early as the 1830s; and in the 1840s workers on canal-building projects had rioted for better conditions. During the 1870s labor organizations began to campaign for the nine-hour workday. The first Canadian law legalizing labor unions was passed in 1872. The Trades and Labour Congress linked unions across Canada in the 1880s, while the radical Knights of Labor sought to unite all workers regardless of skill, sex, or race. In 1894 Labour Day-the first Monday in September-became an official national holiday. In 1898 gold was discovered in the Klondike region of Yukon Territory, and thousands of people rushed there to search for gold. This was just one economic bonanza for Canada at the turn of the 20th century. Industry and commerce expanded in central Canada, and the country's vast mineral wealth and hydroelectric power resources were being rapidly developed. As small-scale manufacturing evolved into large corporate enterprises, Canada acquired a new class of millionaires. Railroads sprouted everywhere; eventually there were three competing transcontinental rail systems, the Canadian Pacific, Canadian Northern, and National Transcontinental. Immigration As prosperity increased, immigration also grew. Late in the 19th century, new arrivals had barely exceeded those leaving Canada, most often for the United States. In the first decade of the 20th century, however, more than a million people came and stayed. The population grew 34 percent from 1901 to 1911, and another 22 percent-to 8 million-by 1921. The great majority of the immigrants came to the English-speaking areas of Canada. The immigrants came partly from Britain and the United States, but for the first time Canada recruited large numbers from eastern Europe. They left their homes to escape poverty and political strife, and were attracted to Canada by promises of free land made to them by Canadian recruiters. They crossed the Atlantic on steamships run by the Canadian Pacific and headed west on immigrant trains to settle on the vast tracts of farmland that the Canadian Pacific had been granted by the government. They lived in sod huts, broke the prairie soil, and planted Marquis wheat, a new variety that Canadian government scientists had developed for prairie conditions. Settlement expanded across the prairie lands, and two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, were created out of the Northwest Territories in 1905. Many Canadians, however, feared and resented the presence of non-British foreigners. A powerful backlash developed against them, as it did against the Asian immigrants to British Columbia and the Jewish, Italian, and other migrants to the eastern cities. For instance, a head tax was imposed on Chinese immigrants in the 1880s, which prevented most Chinese men from bringing their families to Canada. During World War I (1914-1918), wartime fears were added to existing suspicions, and thousands of aliens were interned. In addition, aliens from enemy countries who had been naturalized after 1902 were stripped of the right to vote. Canada and the Empire Laurier Prime Minister Macdonald died in office in 1891, and his Conservative Party was swept from power in 1896. The centralized power that the Conservatives promoted had lost popularity, and the 1896 election was won by the Liberals, the party of Mowat and Mercier, which was sympathetic to provincial and local interests. The Liberals also benefited from Québec's hostility to the Conservative government that had hanged Louis Riel. The new prime minister was Wilfrid Laurier, a charming, cultivated Québec lawyer who spoke both French and English fluently. Although Laurier had opposed Confederation in his youth, once in power he shrewdly took over popular Conservative policies. He came to favor the tariffs of the National Policy and to support ties to Great Britain. For many British Canadians, support for Great Britain included support for the British Empire. These people, known as imperialists, believed it was Canada's destiny to help run the empire. When the South African War, or Boer War (1899-1902), broke out, the imperialists were eager for Canada to fight alongside Great Britain. French Canadians, however, were largely hostile to imperialism and wanted no part of Great Britain's wars on other continents. Laurier often used compromise to reach a balance between French-speaking and English-speaking interests. His compromise regarding the Boer War was to decide that Canada would participate, but its involvement would be limited mostly to volunteers. This policy lost him the support of the most strident imperialists and of the French Canadian nationalists who were led by Liberal legislator Henri Bourassa. Bourassa broke with Laurier's Liberals and came to express French Canadian opposition to the policies of the majority. He reflected the growing opinion among French Canadians that Québec was the only place in Canada where French language and culture were respected. The treatment of the Métis and Riel, the surge of imperialism, and the great population growth of English-speaking areas contributed to this opinion. In addition, there seemed to be a campaign to restrict the French language, which Laurier was unable to halt. Manitoba had abolished its French-speaking public schools in 1890; Laurier attempted to compromise and restore them, but the attempt failed. Again in 1905, when Alberta and Saskatchewan dropped their French schools on becoming provinces, Laurier's token effort to retain the schools was unsuccessful. His support in Québec dwindled. At the same time, Laurier lost more support among the imperialists. In 1910 he was under heavy pressure from the British government to contribute to the British navy. Instead he created a separate small navy for Canada, consisting of five cruisers and six destroyers, , to fight alongside the British navy. For the imperialists this so-called tin-pot navy was too little support for Great Britain, while for Bourassa it was too much. The final straw for the imperialists was Laurier's support of a treaty with the United States that called for mutual cuts in tariffs and customs duties. British Canadians were concerned over American ambitions because the United States was itself an imperial power competing with Great Britain. It did not help the Liberals' cause when prominent American politicians hailed the treaty as a step toward the annexation of Canada. The bill was stalled in Parliament, and Laurier called a general election to secure public support. It was a disaster for him. Laurier's opponents denounced the treaty as a threat to jobs and to the empire, and Laurier was rejected in British Canada even as Bourassa undermined his base in French Canada. The Conservative Party won the 1911 election, and Robert Borden became prime minister. World War I Although Canada had governed its own domestic affairs since the 1840s, it still had no independent foreign policy when World War I began in August 1914. Great Britain's declaration of war on Germany meant that the entire empire, including Canada, was at war. The strength of the imperial tie was demonstrated in Canada's ready response. After a massive recruiting effort, the first contingent of 32,000 men went overseas in October. In April 1915 the Canadians suffered 6000 casualties and endured the war's first poison-gas attack at Ieper, Belgium. Canada increased its commitment to 150,000 men. In 1916 Borden promised a half-million-man Canadian army, all volunteers, from a population still under 8 million. Canadian soldiers achieved notable victories, particularly at Vimy Ridge in the spring of 1917. Canada's army was overwhelmingly English-speaking but included some French Canadian units, notably the distinguished 22nd Battalion. Many Canadians also served in the Royal Flying Corps (a separate Royal Canadian Air Force was created in 1918). The small Canadian navy served mostly in home waters. As the war went on, it began to demand enormous efforts not only from Canadian army recruiters, but also from industry and agriculture. The government coordinated industrial production for military needs, and scandals erupted over corruption and war profiteering. To help pay for the war, the federal government introduced the first Canadian income tax as a temporary measure in 1917. The war effort encouraged social changes too. Women took over men's places in industry and agriculture. Women's groups often supported the war effort vigorously. In 1917 women secured the right to vote in federal elections if they had close relatives in the armed forces; in 1918 they got that right without restriction. (Not until 1940 did Québec province, the last holdout, allow women to vote in provincial elections.) The war also began to provoke increased tension between English- and French-speaking Canadians. Bourassa had helped elect Borden's government, but the nationalists and the imperialists were odd allies. Québec became increasingly cool to what seemed to be an imperial crusade rather than a Canadian cause. Relations became worse in 1917 when national conflict arose over Ontario's attempt to limit French education for its French-speaking minority. Borden, meanwhile, was demanding more Canadian participation in planning and directing the imperial war effort. With so many Canadians fighting and dying, deference to British authority became difficult to support. Gradually Canadian forces were consolidated into a Canadian Corps with Canadian commanders, answering to the Canadian government. To achieve and hold that authority, however, Canada had to provide the troops, and the army could not recruit enough volunteers to meet its needs. In 1917 Borden proposed forming a coalition government with the opposition Liberal Party in order to introduce military conscription. Most of the English-speaking Liberals joined the coalition; most of the Québec Liberals, including Laurier, did not, and the Liberal Party was split. Helped by the votes of soldiers and their newly enfranchised female relatives, the coalition won the 1917 wartime election, and conscription began early in 1918. Although conscription provided few troops for the war effort, it split the country. It was overwhelmingly unpopular in Québec, where there was massive resistance to military service. It left a lasting conviction in Québec that in a crisis the English-speaking majority would ignore French Canada's views, no matter how strong they were. Meanwhile the Canadian Corps, commanded by Canadian general Arthur Currie, helped spearhead the final advances of Great Britain and its allies before an armistice ended the war in November 1918. Postwar Reorganization Canada had entered the war as part of the British Empire, but the huge commitment and terrible losses (60,000 Canadians died) strengthened its sense of nationhood. Thus Canada insisted on acting as a sovereign power in treaty negotiations after the war and in the new international body, the League of Nations. In 1926 the British government acknowledged the equality of the dominions with Great Britain itself, and in 1931 the British Statute of Westminster confirmed that Canada was a sovereign state sharing a common monarch with Great Britain. There were some leftover details: Canadian Supreme Court decisions could be appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council until 1949, and Canada had no procedure for amending its own constitution (which was an act of the British parliament) until 1982. Canada and Great Britain remained economically and politically linked, but Great Britain and the empire grew less effective as counterweights to American influence. After the war, Great Britain began to lose its preeminence in world affairs, and the United States replaced it as the largest foreign investor in Canada. Most of the American money was direct investment: the purchase of Canadian companies or the establishment of branch operations of American companies. American cultural influence also expanded with the increasing popularity of film, broadcasting, and other mass media. In reaction to American influence, Canadians established the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in the 1930s. The CBC operated French-language and English-language networks in radio and later in television. Canadian achievements in art (notably the Group of Seven landscape painters), in science (the discovery of insulin), and in other fields spurred Canadian national pride. The 1920s, which were called the Roaring Twenties in the United States, did not roar in Canada. There was no surge of prosperity. There were difficulties in absorbing soldiers and converting industry from war production. One result was growing industrial unrest. General strikes erupted in several cities, particularly Winnipeg, which was rocked by a violent labor conflict in 1919. The postwar years also saw the spread of wild fears that Canadian democracy would be overthrown in favor of Russian Communism or socialism, both of which would drastically redistribute wealth. Both doctrines did gain small footholds among workers and immigrants. This in turn intensified negative feelings toward the labor movement and foreigners. In Atlantic Canada, attempts at industrialization had failed to stop the economy's slide that began with the decline of shipbuilding, and the region was now relatively worse off than the rest of the country. Underemployment and labor unrest were constant, particularly in the coal and steel industries of Cape Breton Island. Residents, complaining that Confederation unfairly favored central Canada, founded the Maritime Rights movement, which sought to revive Atlantic Canada by changes to transportation, industrial, and tariff policies. Vancouver and the resource economies of western Canada benefited from the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, which increased Pacific shipping. Prosperity eluded many westerners, however, particularly on the prairies, and the prairie-based Progressive Party arose to argue that while central Canada got cheap access to western resources, westerners paid high prices for manufactured goods from central Canada. This was because the manufactures, protected from outside competition by tariffs, went for relatively high prices, while the prairie products-which were primarily food and raw materials-had no such price supports. The key political figure of the 1920s was William Lyon Mackenzie King, leader of the Liberal Party, which formed a government in 1921. King was the first Canadian party leader chosen by an American-style convention, in which ordinary party members had a voice in choosing their leaders. Formerly leaders had been chosen in party caucuses, where the party's members of Parliament chose and deposed leaders among themselves. King was a master politician who dominated national politics for almost thirty years. His wish to avoid international commitments and his resistance to imperialism were widely shared in postwar Canada. Although he was from Ontario and never learned French, he was acutely conscious of the support from Québec that kept his government in office. King was one of the first prominent Canadians not to accept a knighthood, and after 1935 Canadians ceased to be entitled to British honors. The Pursuit of Well-Being, 1929-1968 The Depression When the Great Depression, the worldwide hard times of the 1930s, began in 1929, world trade was cut by half. Canada was very dependent on trade with other countries and suffered immediately. Markets for Canada's resource industries, such as mining, timbering, and wheat farming, declined rapidly. In addition, foreign investors invested less money in Canada. The collapse spread throughout the economy, and by 1933 a third of the Canadian workers were unemployed. Factories went out of business or ran far below capacity. People who were still working faced uncertain prospects and deep wage cuts, though the cost of living fell even faster. Canada had few welfare programs, but 15 percent of all Canadians applied for the relief that was offered. Because the welfare programs were run by the provinces, nationwide coordination to attack the problem was lacking. Perhaps the worst situation was on the prairies. Not only did wheat prices fall by two-thirds, ruining many farmers who were already burdened by debt, but a prolonged drought made agriculture difficult or impossible for much of the decade. Things were little better in the rest of the country, and thousands of workers drifted across the country seeking work or food. Canada closed its doors to immigrants for the first time in centuries, and even deported non-Canadians who were on relief. Remedies and Reactions King's Liberal Party did little to relieve the depression, and this reluctance led to its defeat in the election of 1930. The new prime minister, Conservative Richard B. Bennett, was a wealthy Alberta lawyer. Bennett at first expected the depression to be cured by the business cycle, a cycle in which an economic downturn is ordinarily followed in a few years by an upturn. He promised to deal harshly with social protest. He sought to create jobs by securing preferential tariffs from Great Britain, which gave some help to agriculture and the timber industry but not to the manufacturing sector. Bennett became deeply hated by many depression victims. Automobiles without engines, pulled by horses because their owners could not afford gasoline, were called Bennett buggies. Unemployed men, collected into work camps in British Columbia, launched the On to Ottawa Trek in 1935 to confront Bennett and inform the nation of their need for better conditions. Bennett denounced them, and police broke up the march in Regina, Saskatchewan. Bennett then ordered the arrest of the leaders, which precipitated a riot in which a constable was killed and several dozen persons injured. There were several political responses to the depression. Communist and other revolutionary movements, mostly banned, flourished underground. Socialist movements from earlier decades united in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Led by Methodist minister J.S. Woodsworth, the CCF in 1933 issued its Regina Manifesto, in which it proposed that major industries be nationalized, or put under government control, and that a welfare state be established with unemployment insurance, health and welfare programs, and pensions for all workers. The CCF became an influential third party in federal politics; it also became a force in provincial politics, particularly in the west. Another clergyman, evangelical preacher William Aberhart of Alberta, launched Social Credit, a political movement that blamed the depression on the financial system. The Social Credit Party did not reject capitalism but proposed state regulation of prices and an increase in the money supply to boost purchasing power. The federal government moved slowly into the social welfare field by starting to pay large percentages of the provinces' costs for old-age pensions and unemployment relief. Then in 1935, with an election coming up and his popularity at a low ebb, Prime Minister Bennett launched the Bennett New Deal. This program was modeled on its American counterpart. It was designed to help the economy recover by investing in projects that provided work for the unemployed and by providing benefits for the jobless. It established minimum wages, maximum hours of work, and unemployment insurance. However, Bennett's New Deal did not prevent a crushing defeat for the Conservatives in the 1935 election. After Bennett left office, the courts ruled that most of his New Deal was unconstitutional. While the national government had the power to raise revenue, they said, only the provinces had the authority to intervene in the economy or launch social programs. Greater Federal Powers Although the economy stopped its decline about 1933, it did not recover completely until the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945). The constitutional bar to federal aid programs left many citizens deeply frustrated with the Canadian political system. In 1937 King appointed the Rowell-Sirois commission of inquiry, which recommended shifts in federal and provincial powers to address the problem. The increase in federal power was heatedly opposed by Québec premier Maurice Duplessis, a French Canadian nationalist, and Ontario premier Mitchell Hepburn, a strong provincial-rights advocate. The recommendations were never fully implemented, but a constitutional amendment in 1940 gave the federal government the power to administer unemployment insurance. The constitution at that time still had no amending formula, but a change could be made if, as in this case, all the provinces agreed to it. World War II When World War II broke out between the Allied Powers (Great Britain's side) and the Axis Powers, Canada entered the war grudgingly but with a widespread sense that it could not be avoided. King's government insisted that Canada control its own war effort, and King at first hoped that the training of aircrews and the production of arms might be Canada's main contributions. Both King and his powerful Québec lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, promised that there would be no conscription for overseas service. A Canadian army went to Great Britain, and with the tide of Axis victories in 1940, the Canadian commitment grew. The Canadian navy joined in the battle to defend Atlantic convoys against submarine attack. Canadian pilots and aircrews defended Great Britain and joined in a bomber offensive against the parts of Europe occupied by the Axis. Meanwhile, in 1940 and 1941, Canadian-American agreements on the defense of North America and the financing of the war effort marked the end of Canada's policy of relying on Great Britain to avoid American influence. The issue of conscription soon came up again. With recruits urgently needed, King's government held a plebiscite in 1942, asking to be released from its no-conscription pledge. The English-speaking majority consented; Québec did not. Although King was under pressure from the Conservatives to begin conscription immediately, he delayed and fired his pro-conscription defense minister, Colonel J. L. Ralston. When conscription was eventually introduced in late 1944, it remained unpopular in Québec, but King's obvious reluctance to impose it had eased the crisis. As in World War I, few conscripts served overseas. At home, industry and capital were mobilized to support the war effort, many products were rationed, and women returned to a booming labor force. After Japan entered the war in 1941, thousands of Japanese Canadians were interned and moved inland from Canada's Pacific coast. The government seized their assets and sold them. As the war spread across the world, the Canadian army fought unsuccessfully to defend Hong Kong against Japanese attack in 1941 and to recapture the German-held French seaport of Dieppe in 1942. Canadians fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944, and participated in the D-Day landings and the liberation of northern France and the low countries in 1944 and 1945. Naval and air forces continued grim struggles at sea and over Europe. Between 1939 and 1945, 42,000 Canadians died in the war. The war strengthened Canada's economy. Factories were dedicated to building tanks, guns, ships, and aircraft, notably fighter planes and Lancaster bombers. Canada's war production program was guided by C. D. Howe, the federal minister of munitions and supply, who imposed a system of central planning, with wage and price controls. At war's end Howe headed the Department of Reconstruction, converting the economy back to a free-enterprise system. Canada entered the postwar era with a much more diverse manufacturing capacity than it had had in 1939. Postwar Prosperity The Welfare State King continued in power after the war, retiring in 1948 as Canada's longest-serving prime minister. His Liberal Party stayed in power until 1956. During this period Canada moved toward vigorous federal intervention in the economy, following the theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who proposed that government spending should be used to create jobs when business investment was insufficient. Job creation and prosperity became state commitments, and many new social programs such as tax incentives, veterans' benefits, and family allowances (support payments to families with children) were introduced. The way had been paved for public acceptance of these programs during the war, when the federal government had begun some of them under its sweeping authority for wartime economic measures. Ottawa now had the legal power, under the 1940 constitutional amendment, to continue its social programs in peacetime, and it acquired more such power under another amendment passed in 1951. These programs were developed partly to help the Liberal Party hold off left-wing challenges. The socialist CCF, particularly, was innovative in devising social programs. The first government formed by the CCF was the provincial government that was elected in Saskatchewan in 1944. Led by Premier Thomas C. "Tommy" Douglas, Saskatchewan pioneered several social policy initiatives, particularly Medicare, a system of universal government-funded medical insurance. Medicare was introduced nationwide in 1966. Growth and Urbanization Fearing postwar depression, Canada got a boom instead. Pent-up demand from the war and the depression started a long period of sustained economic growth. With the rest of the world devastated, Canada and the United States had unparalleled opportunities in world trade. Canada attempted to rebuild its old trade network that had focused on Great Britain and Europe, but Canadian-American economic integration grew stronger, cross-border trade increased, and American investment flowed into Canada. Both manufacturing and resource industries grew, and the discovery of oil in Alberta gradually made that province one of Canada's wealthiest. Organized labor grew and its power increased. During the 1950s more than 30 percent of Canadian workers were unionized. Industrial growth was matched by population growth. In 1949 Newfoundland and Labrador, until then a British dominion separate from Canada, chose in a hotly contested referendum to become Canada's tenth province. Immigration, mostly from Europe, and the postwar baby boom (a great increase in the birth rate) raised Canada's population 50 percent, from 12 million to 18 million, between 1946 and 1961. By 1961 Canada, which had been 70 percent rural around the start of the century, had become 70 percent urban. Widespread home ownership and automobile ownership gave families an independence they had not had before. Suburban sprawl became a feature of urban life as the proliferation of automobiles made long-distance commuting possible. Television became available to most homes and imported, to an even greater extent than before, the popular culture of the United States. Canadians who feared the loss of their culture voiced their protests again as they had in the 1930s, and Canadian governments sought to promote Canadian culture and national identity as a counterweight to the American influence. Thus in the 1960s the federal Board of Broadcast Governors decreed that 55 percent of the television programming should have Canadian content. The deepening integration of the Canadian and American economies was not directly addressed, however, beyond some limited controls on foreign investment. International Activities Following the war, Canada took an active role in international relations. Canada joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance founded in 1949 to defend Europe against Communist attack. The North American Air (later Aerospace) Defense Agreement, signed in 1958, confirmed American involvement in defending North American airspace over Canada. Canada contributed forces to the United Nations campaign to defend South Korea in the Korean War (1950-1953). In 1950 Canada began foreign aid programs for underdeveloped nations as part of the Colombo Plan, launched by the Commonwealth of Nations to attack the poverty that was thought to breed support for Communism. Canadian diplomat and politician Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1956 for organizing a peacekeeping force to defuse the Suez Crisis. Peacekeeping became a frequent assignment for Canadian forces as Canada sought status in world affairs as a so-called middle power: too small to be a great power, but large enough and strong enough to act as an intermediary in world affairs. Diefenbaker and Pearson After running the national government continuously since 1935, the Liberal Party was defeated by the Progressive Conservatives (the new name for the Conservatives) in 1956. The new prime minister, John Diefenbaker, was a crusading country lawyer from Saskatchewan who built his campaign on growing resentment over the Liberals' long dominance and on opposition to the massive growth of the federal government. He also urged economic development of the far northern regions. An orator and a fighter for social justice and the ordinary citizen, Diefenbaker appealed to Canadian national pride. His disorganized administration, however, alienated potential allies and faced frequent crises. His government fell in a 1963 election contest with the Liberals under Pearson. The chief issues were Canada's role in NATO and Diefenbaker's opposition to the building of nuclear weapons bases in Canada. Pearson's achievements as prime minister included new and expanded social programs and a new, distinctive Canadian flag, the red maple leaf. Pearson's Liberals did not have a majority in the House of Commons but survived because opposition was divided. Among the new opposition parties was the New Democratic Party (NDP), formed in 1961 by a merger of the socialist CCF and Canadian labor organizations. The NDP campaigned for public ownership of key industries, wider social programs to promote economic equality, and controls on foreign (particularly American) investment. First led by former Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas, the NDP became a small third party competing with the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives. Social Change French Canadian Nationalism During Diefenbaker's time as prime minister, French Canadian nationalism moved into a phase that came to be called the Quiet Revolution. This was a transition, almost explosive in its suddenness, from traditional, rural, church-oriented values to full participation in business, industry, and government. Even though Québec had by that time become an urban industrial society, the French-speaking Québécois had minority ownership in it. English-speaking Canadians, many of whom considered French Canadians to be backward, had come to dominate public life in the province. Even in Montréal, Québec's largest city, English predominated in commerce and among the leaders of business and industry. Québécois, trained in an educational system that left them largely unprepared for a modern technological society, occupied the lower rungs of the commercial order. Political leader Maurice Duplessis, premier from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959, staunchly defended the old belief that preservation of a traditional rural society was the best way to protect French Canada from English and secular influences. Religion and agriculture, not government, were considered the vital defenses. The Catholic Church held a special role: its priests, nuns, and other religious figures ran educational, health, social, and cultural programs that in the rest of Canada were run by governments. The church's educational curriculum was weak in science and technology, and the percentage of graduates from secondary schools was low. Through support of the church and his party's control of political patronage, Duplessis maintained the status quo until his death in office in 1959. A new Liberal government led by Jean Lesage took power in Québec with plans to make French Canadians masters in their own house. Lesage planned to use state power to promote better education, health care, public industries, and French Canadian culture. The state replaced the church as the guardian of Québécois society, and the role of the church in operating secular institutions like schools and hospitals plunged dramatically. A Ministry of Education was established to modernize the curriculum and make postsecondary education more broadly available through a new system of community colleges. The government of this new Québec was also determined to secure new powers and reduce the role of the federal government within the province. The Liberals, particularly under Premier Robert Bourassa (1970-1976, 1986-1994), worked to revise the federal system to better accommodate French Canadian aspirations. A variety of opinions emerged in Québec over French Canadian aims. Premier Daniel Johnson (1966-1968), whose Union Nationale party governed between Lesage and Bourassa, called for a new Canadian constitution with special status for Québec as the homeland of one of the two founding peoples. Other movements were formed to advocate complete separation from Canada. One group, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), resorted to terrorism to achieve that end. Meanwhile, René Lévesque, formerly in Lesage's cabinet, left the Liberals and founded the Parti Québécois (PQ) to seek sovereignty-association. This was envisioned as a union in which Québec would be an economic partner with the rest of Canada but otherwise Québec would be fully independent. In the 1970 provincial election, the PQ won the support of almost a quarter of the voters. In the October crisis of 1970, the terrorist FLQ kidnapped a Québec politician, Pierre Laporte, and a British diplomat, James Cross, and demanded the release of FLQ members who were in jail. The Canadian government rejected the kidnappers' demands and invoked the War Measures Act, which authorized mass arrests and the deployment of army troops in the streets of Montréal. The murder of Laporte by his kidnappers added to the crisis. Cross was released by his captors in December in exchange for their safe passage to Cuba, and Laporte's killers were later tracked down, arrested, and convicted of murder. The violence discredited the FLQ's revolutionary approach to Québec nationalism, and the independence movement united behind the PQ's approach. Québec's demand for increased provincial powers was mirrored elsewhere in Canada. Other provincial leaders claimed the right to acquire any new constitutional powers Québec might receive. Western Canada, increasingly prosperous but still lacking the political clout of Ontario or Québec, resented Ottawa's preoccupation with central Canadian concerns. Challenges to the growing power of the federal government mounted in the provinces, but several federal-provincial constitutional conferences to try to resolve these issues, notably in 1964 and 1971, ended in deadlocks. New Voices of the Sixties The movement for greater independence in Québec province was only one social revolution among many in Canada in the late 1960s. There, as elsewhere in the developed world, youth culture and youth protest flourished, minorities asserted their rights, and women worked to transform their place in society. Women moved rapidly into the workforce, into higher education, and into feminist political and social campaigns against sexism and gender inequality. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, a federation of women's organizations, was formed in 1971 to lobby for abortion rights, equality legislation, and other feminist issues. In the 1960s Canada also gradually opened immigration to new racial and ethnic communities from southern Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, and much of the world. Concentrating in the cities, immigrants changed the face of urban Canada, producing a dynamic mix of people in communities that had long been dominated by people of British or French origin. In 1971 the federal government officially recognized multiculturalism-a policy of mutual respect among ethnic groups-as an important part of Canada. Government provided funds for ethnic organizations and festivals and for second-language instruction in the school systems. Contemporary Indigenous Relations Indigenous Canadians, the poorest and most marginal part of society throughout the century, slowly began a demographic and cultural renaissance. They formed organizations to assert rights rooted in long-neglected treaties, as well as other rights that had never been defined in a treaty. The courts have been important in helping to define aboriginal rights, the rights that the indigenous peoples have as first occupiers of the land. In the 1960s Ottawa introduced a policy to end what it claimed were the special rights and status of indigenous peoples. This policy was never implemented because of a court case, Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia, filed in 1969 by the Nisga'a nation of northern British Columbia. The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Calder (1973) determined that aboriginal rights to the land had been in place at the time of colonization. The court was divided on whether those rights had been ended by European settlement; however, Ottawa thereupon declared its readiness to negotiate agreements to recognize clearly defined aboriginal title and rights of self-government. Negotiations have been most successful in the Northwest Territories, where a 1970 proposal to lay a gas pipeline through the Mackenzie Valley provoked an Athapaskan organization (now called the Dene Nation) to demand participation in the decision. Their position was supported by the influential 1977 report of Mr. Justice Thomas Berger, which advised against any such development until native claims were settled. As a result, the pipeline project was shelved. Several contemporary treaties have been concluded, primarily in the territories and northern Québec. One such treaty in 1984, with the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta, settled their title to 242,000 sq km (93,400 sq mi). In another treaty in 1992, the Inuit of the eastern Arctic signed an agreement that confirmed to them 350,000 sq km (135,135 sq mi) of surface land and 36,000 sq km (13,900 sq mi) of subsurface mineral rights. Negotiations are under way with several other indigenous groups, and numerous statements of intent to negotiate have been brought forward to the government. In the 1980s Ottawa pledged to create two new territories out of the Northwest Territories, to be called Nunavut, with an Inuit majority, and Denendeh, with a Dene majority. In each region the indigenous residents would have broad powers of self-government. Planning for Nunavut progressed quickly, and the region was expected to achieve separate territorial status in 1999. Plans for Denendeh moved more slowly: an agreement covering Dene and Métis land claims for the whole Mackenzie Valley was reached in 1990 but was not ratified. Further negotiations have sought separate agreements for the five regional groups of the valley: Delta, Sahtu, North Slave, South Slave, and Deh Cho. An agreement was reached with the Delta Dene (Gwich'in) in 1992, and with the Sahtu Dene and Métis in 1994. Negotiations with the provinces have had mixed results. An early success was the 1975 agreement on the James Bay Project, which permitted Québec to proceed with a massive hydroelectric development only after conceding substantial compensation and self-government powers to the Cree of the James Bay region. The second stage of the project, known as James Bay II, was held up in the 1990s by lack of agreement about further compensation. However, failures to settle grievances have resulted in several episodes of armed resistance to authority. At Oka, Québec, in 1990, heavily armed Mohawk, resisting the development of land they claimed as aboriginal property, confronted police and troops for months before surrendering. It is too early to say what the overall impact of the resolution of land questions and aboriginal rights will be. In general, the public supports greater autonomy for indigenous peoples and some compensation for past injustices. In late 1996 the federal government was given the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the result of a five-year study of almost every aspect of indigenous life. It had more than 400 recommendations for governmental policy initiatives, including new federal departments, an independent tribunal for land claims, and an indigenous parliament to be called the House of First Peoples. The C$30 billion price tag of the reforms, to be spent over a 15-year period, got a cool reception from the cost-cutting Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. National Unity, 1968-1997 The Trudeau Years Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a Québécois law professor and longtime opponent of special status for Québec, entered federal politics in 1965 to promote French power in Ottawa. He argued that a bilingual, bicultural Canada could provide full scope for the aspirations of French Canadians without the need of new provincial powers. Trudeau succeeded Pearson as leader of the Liberals in 1968 and led his party to electoral triumph soon after; he held the prime minister's post almost continuously from 1968 to 1984 and received massive support from Québec voters even when they elected nationalists to govern the province. Trudeau promoted French Canadians within the federal civil service and increased the spending of federal money in Québec. In 1969 his government passed the Official Languages Act, which made Canada officially bilingual. The act required federal agencies to offer bilingual services coast to coast. Some English-speaking Canadians resented this assertion of French culture as much as they did Québec's political demands for greater provincial power. Economic Problems Trudeau came to power intending to modernize government and reform the constitution, but he soon found his agenda hijacked by economic troubles. Both inflation and unemployment rose, and expensive social and economic programs had led to large and continuing budget deficits despite high taxes. Canada's economic problems were compounded when the price of oil increased dramatically during the oil crisis of 1973. The crisis was provoked when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which included many of the major oil producing nations of the world, cut back on production. In an effort to shield Canadians from high oil prices, Ottawa tried to control sales of oil. These efforts were resented by the province of Alberta, a large oil producer. Westerners also resented federal investment in depressed regions, particularly Atlantic Canada and Québec. Not only Trudeau but every prime minister who came after him was to be dogged by Canada's continuing economic problems. Canada's economy has continued to grow, except for a recession in the early 1990s. However, unemployment has continued at a high rate due to the steady decline in manufacturing and such unfortunate events as the collapse of fisheries stocks. Québec Referendum In 1976 Québec elected René Lévesque's PQ as its provincial government. During the campaign, the PQ had pledged to consult the province in a referendum before implementing its policy of sovereignty-association. The PQ government introduced both social programs and nationalist measures. Rejecting bilingualism, the PQ legislated French as Québec's sole official language. French quickly challenged English as the language of commerce. The shift was particularly dramatic in Montréal, which had long been dominated by its English-speaking minority. In 1980 the promised referendum took place. Québec voters were asked to decide whether the province should negotiate with Ottawa toward achieving sovereignty-association. However, the vote was 60 percent against and 40 percent in favor, so the PQ deemphasized separatism and shifted its focus toward working with Ottawa. A New Constitution Trudeau had opposed the referendum campaign and had promised a new constitution as an alternative. He promised to patriate the British North America Act, making it a Canadian act that Canadians could amend. Up until then, the constitution had no amending formula, and thus no amendments could be made unless the provinces consented unanimously. Furthermore, because it was an act of the British Parliament, it could theoretically be amended by Great Britain without consulting Canada. Trudeau also wanted to add a Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect individual liberties. Both patriation and the charter were popular with the public, and both were included in the constitutional package. However, the package offered none of the additional powers the provinces had been seeking and made no concessions to Québec's uniqueness. Most of the provinces rejected the package at first. Trudeau secured the assent of nine provincial governments by making some concessions to demands for greater provincial power. He then went ahead and got parliamentary approval without waiting to secure the approval of Lévesque. The new Constitution of Canada went into effect in 1982 without Québec's assent. Lévesque and many Québécois were angry, claiming that the province's distinct nationality had been ignored. The Continuing Constitutional Debate Trudeau retired in 1984. Partly because his party had not been able to improve the economy, the Progressive Conservative Party soon swept into power, led by Brian Mulroney, a bilingual Québec lawyer. Mulroney had built support in Québec, traditionally a Liberal stronghold, by recruiting nationalists when sovereignty-association seemed unlikely to be achieved. He made national unity a high priority and sought to amend the new constitution so that Québec could accept it. Working closely with Québec premier Robert Bourassa, Mulroney negotiated the Meech Lake Accord, a package of changes to the constitution. This agreement between the federal and provincial governments was signed in June 1987. It gave all the provinces substantial new powers and gave Québec the undefined but potentially large powers of a "distinct society." The constitutional changes seemed assured of passage because the accord was signed by all the provincial premiers. However, all the provincial legislatures had to ratify the accord within a three-year period. Opposition soon emerged as public debate focused on the weakening of federal authority in Canada, on the distinct-society clause, and on complaints that the agreement had been reached during closed-door negotiations that were undemocratic. Trudeau spoke out from retirement to condemn the accord as a surrender of vital federal powers. Indigenous leaders, who had been campaigning for expanded self-government, protested their exclusion from the process. When the governments of three provinces changed in elections, the required unanimous consent of the provinces was lost. Ottawa worked desperately to save the accord, but a last-minute vote in the Manitoba legislature was blocked on a procedural technicality by a Cree member, Elijah Harper. Newfoundland also failed to ratify the accord. The time ran out, and the Meech Lake Accord died in June 1990. In Québec the failure of the accord was widely interpreted as a rejection of Québec itself, and support for sovereignty-association surged. The Mulroney government tried again, this time with widened public consultation and increased participation by indigenous leaders. The result was the Charlottetown Accord, which was endorsed by the premiers in 1992 and presented for ratification in a national referendum. However, this new accord was rejected by Québec nationalists as inadequate to Québec's needs, and it also failed to satisfy the growing aspirations of many groups and regions in the rest of Canada. It was defeated both in Québec and elsewhere. The PQ returned to power in Québec in the provincial election of 1994 with renewed determination to achieve sovereignty-association. The Conservative Alternative Mulroney had a different approach to solving Canada's economic problems. He advocated turning away from government intervention, which had been unable to defeat persistent unemployment and inflation. His government reduced public management of the economy, even in areas where state ownership had been seen as vital. Railroads were closed or sold, and the publicly owned airline and oil company were sold to private investors. Spending on Canadian cultural programs, including the CBC, was cut back. Mulroney's government also reduced its investment in developing depressed regions, a Trudeau priority that it condemned as expensive, wasteful, and ineffective. The cuts hit hard in Atlantic Canada, particularly in Newfoundland. At the end of the 1980s, Newfoundland's cod fishery, the mainstay of its economy since the 16th century, had almost completely collapsed. Both overfishing and changes in ocean climate were blamed for the decline in the cod population. A moratorium on fishing was imposed in 1992, along with a temporary program of assistance to fishery workers. Mulroney's economic agenda was capped in 1987 with the negotiation of a Canadian-American free trade treaty. Canada and the United States were already intimately linked economically, and each was the other's largest trading partner. Free trade was strongly supported by business but denounced by others as an avenue for American domination of the Canadian economy. Approval of the free trade agreement, delayed in the Canadian parliament, became the great issue of the 1988 election. The Progressive Conservatives won the election, and in 1994 free trade was expanded to include Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Early results seemed to confirm predictions that Canadian productivity and exports would benefit; in 1995, for example, exports of goods grew by 16 percent and imports by 11 percent. It remained uncertain to what extent the treaty would prohibit Canada from implementing social programs that could be interpreted as subsidies to commerce and, therefore, as interferences with free trade. Return of the Liberals When Mulroney retired in 1993, his popularity had declined because he had imposed new taxes, particularly the unpopular Goods and Services Tax, and had failed to reduce the deficit, solve economic problems, or end the constitutional crisis. His former allies among the Québec nationalists formed a new party, the Bloc Québécois, to work for sovereignty-association in the federal Parliament. Alienated westerners turned to the Reform Party, a new conservative movement led by Preston Manning of Alberta. Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, Canada's first woman prime minister, was overwhelmingly defeated by the Liberals in the 1993 national election after just four months in office. Her Progressive Conservative Party, which had been a force in national politics since Confederation, won only two seats in the 295-seat House of Commons. The New Democratic Party, usually Canada's third party, fared almost as badly, winning just nine seats. The new Liberal government was led by Québécois Jean Chrétien, a veteran politician and former member of Trudeau's governments. The Liberals continued many of the Progressive Conservatives' economic and social policies, including NAFTA, and, to the dismay of many of their supporters, sought to balance the federal budget rapidly. Chrétien cut spending while maintaining tax rates and supported private rather than public enterprise as the key source of economic growth. Governments dedicated to free enterprise took power in Alberta in 1993 and in Ontario in 1995, and both cut government spending and taxation significantly. Chrétien's government remained popular in its early years while its opposition was divided into a Québec bloc, a western bloc, and mere fragments of the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP. Unemployment remained high, however. Chrétien's failure to fulfill a promise to scrap Mulroney's Goods and Services Tax damaged his reputation for honesty. The country's reputation as an international peacekeeper was marred by scandals over the behavior of Canadian troops in Bosnia and Somalia. Above all, the Chrétien government remained vulnerable to constitutional crisis as sentiment for sovereignty-association remained high in Québec. In 1995 Québec premier Jacques Parizeau, a hard-line PQ separatist, held the province's second referendum on sovereignty-association. Even though there was widespread anger in Québec over the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, defeat was expected. However, Lucien Bouchard, the head of the Bloc Québécois, entered the campaign and revitalized it. Bouchard's passionate speechmaking and his promise of undefined ties with Canada after achieving sovereignty gave the prosovereignty side a late surge. The referendum was rejected by the barest margin: less than 1 percent divided the no votes (50.4 percent) from the yes votes (49.6 percent). Parizeau resigned, and Bouchard succeeded him as premier of Québec. The outcome challenged Chrétien's federal government, which had hoped that a clear victory in the referendum would enable it to focus on other issues. Bouchard was determined to continue the pursuit of sovereignty-association. Québec's economic difficulties forced him to sideline the issue temporarily, but he promised to hold another referendum in a few years. Meanwhile the Reform Party, on a platform opposed to concessions to Québec, increased its strength in the 1997 federal elections; while Chrétien's Liberals stayed in power, Reform received the second-highest vote and became the official opposition. This appeared to increase the sectionalism and polarization of Canadian politics. Thus Canada entered the late 1990s facing an unacceptable status quo, no consensus on change, and the threat of secession by Québec. This article, except for portions of the History section, was contributed by Daniel J. Hiebert and Maureen G. Reed.