[1867 - 1914] Birth of a Dominion

On July 1st, 1867, a new country quietly appeared on the map of the world. There were no fireworks of revolution, no bloody battles for independence. The Dominion of Canada was born of ink and paper, of careful negotiation and a shared, pervasive fear. To the south, the United States, a battle-hardened giant fresh from its own brutal Civil War, cast a long and hungry shadow. For the scattered British colonies of North America, unity seemed the only path to survival. And so, under the guidance of men like the pragmatic, hard-drinking John A. Macdonald and the stately George-Étienne Cartier, a deal was struck. The British North America Act joined the provinces of Canada (soon to be split into Ontario and Quebec), Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a confederation. Its official motto, ‘A Mari Usque Ad Mare’ – From Sea to Sea – was, at the time, a breathtakingly audacious, almost ludicrous, statement of intent for a nation that was little more than a thin, populated shoreline along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. This new Dominion was an experiment, a grand gamble built on a vision. Macdonald articulated this vision in what became known as the National Policy, a three-part plan to forge a true nation. First, high tariffs on imported goods would protect and nurture fledgling Canadian industries in the east. Second, the vast, empty-seeming prairies of the west would be settled by waves of immigrants, creating a new agricultural heartland and a captive market for eastern factories. But the third part was the most critical, the most daring, the iron spine that would hold the entire, improbable creation together: a transcontinental railway. A ribbon of steel stretching over 4,600 kilometers from the Atlantic to the Pacific was the only way to bind the west to the east, to move settlers in and grain out, and to physically stake a claim to the land before the Americans did. It was a dream of impossible scale. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway is the central epic of this era. It was a saga of breathtaking engineering, political scandal, and immense human suffering. The project nearly bankrupted the young country multiple times and brought down Macdonald’s government in 1873 with the Pacific Scandal, a sordid affair of kickbacks and bribes. The physical challenge was monumental. Crews blasted their way through the Canadian Shield, a landscape of ancient, unforgiving granite and muskeg north of Lake Superior. In the west, they laid track through the treacherous Fraser Canyon in British Columbia, clinging to sheer rock faces high above the churning river. The sound of this era was the relentless clang of hammers on steel, the blast of dynamite echoing through mountain passes, and the whistles of locomotives pushing ever westward. The human cost of this iron dream was staggering. To build the most difficult sections through the Rocky Mountains, the CPR syndicate and the Canadian government actively recruited laborers from China. More than 15,000 Chinese men came, paid a fraction of what white workers earned and assigned the most dangerous tasks, including handling the unstable nitroglycerine used for blasting. It is estimated that for every mile of track laid through the Fraser Canyon, at least one Chinese worker died. They were buried in unmarked graves along the line they gave their lives to build. When the railway was completed in 1885, their sacrifice was met not with gratitude, but with racism. The Canadian government immediately passed the Chinese Immigration Act, imposing a $50 ‘head tax’ on every person of Chinese origin entering Canada—a punitive fee designed to halt immigration from the very people who had just built the nation’s unifying artery. Expansion westward was not into an empty void. The vast territory of Rupert’s Land, purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1869, was home to vibrant First Nations and the Métis people, a unique culture born from the intermarriage of French and Scottish fur traders and Indigenous women. The Métis, with their own language, semi-nomadic lifestyle, and deep connection to the land, saw the arrival of Canadian surveyors, with their rigid square lots, as a mortal threat to their way of life. This ignited two major conflicts led by the charismatic and tragic figure, Louis Riel. The Red River Resistance of 1869-70 resulted in the creation of Manitoba as a small province, with promises to protect Métis land rights. But as settlers poured in, those promises were broken. In 1885, a desperate Métis community in present-day Saskatchewan again called on Riel to lead them. The North-West Rebellion was short-lived, crushed by Canadian militia, now able to travel west with speed on the newly completed railway. Riel was captured, tried for high treason, and hanged. His execution created a political firestorm and an enduring wound, a symbol of the conquest of the west and a deep, bitter fault line between English and French Canada that has never fully healed. As the 19th century waned, life in the Dominion was one of sharp contrasts. In burgeoning cities like Montreal and Toronto, a new industrial elite grew wealthy. They built opulent Victorian and Edwardian mansions with intricate brickwork, soaring turrets, and parlours filled with heavy velvet drapery. The streets outside, once lit by gaslight and filled with the clatter of horses’ hooves on cobblestone, were now beginning to see the bright, stark glare of electric streetlights and hear the rumble of electric streetcars. Alexander Graham Bell's invention, the telephone, began to connect businesses and the homes of the affluent. Yet, just blocks away from these displays of wealth, working-class families crowded into poorly-built tenements, often without proper sanitation, while their members toiled for ten or twelve hours a day in dangerous factories for meagre wages. For women, life remained largely defined by the domestic sphere, whether as the manager of a wealthy household or a labourer in her own crowded flat. Corsets remained a daily reality, and public life was overwhelmingly a male domain. For the hundreds of thousands of European immigrants—Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, and Scandinavians—lured to the prairies by the promise of 160 acres of free land, life was a different kind of struggle. They arrived to find a vast, intimidating sea of grass, a landscape that demanded relentless labour. Many families spent their first brutal winter in a ‘soddy,’ a one-room house built from thick blocks of prairie turf, the only readily available building material. Isolation was a constant companion, broken only by the immense, crushing silence of winter or the howl of the wind. Life was a cycle of back-breaking work: breaking the sod, planting wheat, and racing against the weather to harvest. Yet here, communities were forged around the church, the one-room schoolhouse, and the shared hardship of building a future from nothing. This was the engine room of Canada's growth, turning the prairie into one of the world's great breadbaskets. The turn of the century brought a new optimism. In 1896, Canada elected its first French-Canadian prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier. He presided over an unprecedented economic boom, fueled by wheat production and a massive new wave of immigration. It was Laurier who famously, and perhaps hubristically, declared, “The twentieth century shall be the century of Canada.” Between 1896 and the outbreak of war in 1914, over three million people arrived on Canadian shores, forever diversifying the nation’s cultural fabric. The prairies filled so rapidly that two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, were created in 1905. The frantic Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-99 added a touch of madness to this era, as thousands of prospectors scrambled north to the Yukon in a desperate, and mostly fruitless, search for riches. But the sunlit optimism of the Laurier years was beginning to dim. Beneath the surface of prosperity, tensions simmered. Strikes and labour unrest grew more frequent in the industrial cities. Resentment still festered between French and English Canada. And for all its continental ambition and economic growth, the Dominion of Canada was not yet a master of its own house. It remained a loyal part of the British Empire, its foreign policy decided not in Ottawa, but in London. As the summer of 1914 approached, a web of imperial alliances and rivalries was drawing taut in Europe. The era of building railways and settling plains was about to come to a sudden, violent end, replaced by the grim duty of sending the nation’s youth to the trenches of a war an ocean away.