Canada's history: independence passed in London over 115 years

Who lived in Canada before Europeans arrived

The first people reached what is now Canada from Beringia, the land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska while sea levels were low. The Laurentide ice sheet held them in Alaska and the Yukon until the glaciers began to melt, and about 16,000 years ago people could move south and east into the rest of the country. The Bluefish Caves, Old Crow Flats and Haida Gwaii hold some of the earliest sites.

By the time Europeans came, the land was divided among peoples with separate languages, economies and systems of government. Algonquian speakers, among them the Mi'kmaq, the Abenaki and the Ojibwe, held a belt of country from Hudson Bay to Nova Scotia. The Haudenosaunee, centred in northern New York from at least 1000 CE, reached into southern Ontario and the Montreal area, and their oral tradition dates the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy to 1142. The Plains Cree lived off the bison herds. On the Pacific coast the Haida, the Kwakwaka'wakw and the Nuu-chah-nulth built plank houses, seagoing canoes and totem poles out of western red cedar, on an economy of salmon and shellfish. In the Arctic the Dorset culture, traced to around 500 BCE, had given way to the ancestors of the Inuit by 1500 CE.

The first Europeans left little behind. Norse voyagers built a small settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, carbon dated to between 990 and 1050 CE. John Cabot sighted land somewhere in the Atlantic provinces on 24 June 1497, sailing for Henry VII of England. What followed was a fishery before it was a colony: Basque, Breton and Norman crews worked the Grand Banks from the early sixteenth century, and by 1550 they were drying fish on shore and taking furs home as a sideline.

How France built a colony along one river

Jacques Cartier planted a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula in 1534 and claimed the land for Francis I. His attempt at a colony in 1541 failed, as did others on Sable Island in 1598 and at Tadoussac in 1600. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608, and fur kept it alive while farming lagged: from 1627 to 1663 the Company of One Hundred Associates held the colony, and in 1663 it counted barely more than 3,000 people, with less than 1% of the land it had granted under cultivation.

Louis XIV took New France under direct royal rule in 1663 and made it a province of the kingdom, with a governor for war and diplomacy and an intendant for justice, police and money. The Carignan-Salières Regiment forced a peace on the Haudenosaunee, and 400 of its soldiers stayed to farm. The crown then sponsored the migration of some 850 young women of marriageable age, the filles du roi. In 1663 there had been one woman in the colony for every six men; twenty years later the numbers were roughly equal, and from then on the colony grew from its own births.

The shape of that settlement is still visible from the air. Under the seigneurial system each farm was a long narrow strip running back from the St. Lawrence, because the river was the only road, and when the first row was taken a second and a third were laid out behind it. By the early eighteenth century Canada, as the French called the St. Lawrence colony, held about 20,000 people, most of them farmers on that ribbon of land between Quebec City and Montreal. A dirt road first joined the two towns in 1735. Fur still made up 70% of exports in the long peace between 1713 and 1744, and 80% of the colony's budget went on the military.

Why Britain kept Canada after the conquest

The Seven Years' War set the British colonies, with about 1,500,000 people, against a French colony of about 70,000. British forces expelled around 12,000 Acadians from Nova Scotia from 1755, took Louisbourg in 1758, and landed 4,500 men above Quebec on 13 September 1759. The battle on the Plains of Abraham killed both commanders, James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm. The French won a second battle on the same ground in April 1760 abandoned its siege of Quebec when British frigates arrived in the St. Lawrence that May, and surrendered at Montreal on 8 September 1760.

France chose what to keep at the peace. By the Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1763 it gave up Canada, recovered the sugar island of Guadeloupe, and kept fishing rights off Newfoundland with the two small islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon to dry the catch on. Voltaire had dismissed the colony as quelques arpents de neige, a few acres of snow.

The British then made two decisions that the country still rests on. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognised Aboriginal title and stated that Indigenous peoples kept every land they had not ceded or sold. The Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteed the French-speaking Catholics their religion and their civil law, which survives as the Civil Code of Quebec.

What the conquest meant is argued along the language line. French-Canadian historians have read it as an economic and social disaster that removed a merchant class and left the Church in charge, and also as the event that let a French Catholic society survive under a Protestant crown. English-Canadian historians have mostly read it as a British victory that benefited the conquered.

The American Revolution filled the British side. Loyalist refugees arrived after 1783, so many on the St. John River that New Brunswick was split off as its own colony in 1784, and in 1791 Quebec was divided into a French-speaking Lower Canada and an English-speaking Upper Canada. The War of 1812 brought American invasions across the Great Lakes and ended in the Treaty of Ghent of 1814 with no change to the border.

How the colonies argued their way into Confederation

Rebellions broke out in both Canadas in 1837. Lord Durham, sent to investigate, recommended responsible government and also a union of the two colonies intended to assimilate the French. The Act of Union of 1840 merged them in 1841, and responsible government arrived in 1848. The union then seized up. Canada West wanted seats by population once it outgrew Canada East, Protestants and Catholics fought over school funding, and by 1864 four short-lived governments had come and gone.

The way out was a larger federation. John A. Macdonald's Conservatives and George Brown's Clear Grits formed the Great Coalition in 1864, with George-Étienne Cartier's Parti bleu carrying Canada East on the promise that French Canadians would have their own legislature again in Quebec City. The American Civil War sharpened the case. The victorious North had a large army, the United States ended its reciprocity treaty with the colonies, and in 1867 it bought Alaska.

Delegates met at Charlottetown from 1 September 1864 and at Quebec City a month later, where they adopted 72 resolutions: an elected House of Commons by population, an appointed Senate split evenly between three regions, and a federal promise to build the Intercolonial Railway to the Maritimes. The resolutions were written in a legal, contractual tone, deliberately unlike the revolutionary language of the American Constitution drafted eighty years before.

The Atlantic colonies were harder to convince. About 65% of Nova Scotians opposed Confederation; their premier, Charles Tupper, went ahead anyway, and his government faced no election until the union was done. Newfoundland rejected it at the polls in 1869. Prince Edward Island held out until 1873, when Canada agreed to take over the loan payments on its railway. Indigenous peoples, who held treaties with the Crown they regarded as agreements between nations, were not invited to any of the conferences.

The London Conference turned the resolutions into the British North America Act, which Queen Victoria signed on 29 March 1867 and which came into force on 1 July 1867 with four provinces: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario.

How the Dominion spread across the continent

The Hudson's Bay Company sold Rupert's Land to Canada in 1870, a territory equal to about a third of the country that would come of it. The Métis at Red River resisted in 1869 under Louis Riel, and Manitoba entered as a province in 1870. British Columbia joined in 1871 on the promise of a line to the Pacific. The North-West Mounted Police, formed in 1873, went west to hold the prairies against American encroachment, and in 1885 Ottawa put down a second Métis rising, the North-West Rebellion, after which Riel was tried and executed. That campaign cost the Conservatives most of their support in Quebec.

Settlement required land title, and between 1871 and 1921 the federal government signed eleven numbered treaties with First Nations across the prairies and the north. In exchange for money, reserves and other promises, the signatories ceded their territories. The Canadian Encyclopedia records that most of the promises went unfulfilled and that what the signatories were told they were agreeing to remains disputed. British Columbia went a different way: its governor, James Douglas, had claimed all its land for the Crown by proclamation in 1859, so most of the province was never ceded by treaty, and in 2014 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that title to land not ceded rests with the Indigenous nation that holds it.

The Indian Act of 1876 put First Nations under the Department of Indian Affairs. It replaced hereditary leadership with elected band councils, defined who counted as an Indian in law, and stripped status from a woman who married a man without it. The potlatch was banned in 1884, and in 1895 the ban was widened to any festival, dance or ceremony.

Newfoundland took longest. It gave up self-government in 1934 when its finances collapsed, voted in two referendums in 1948 on its future, and joined as the tenth province in 1949. The last change to the map came in 1999, when Nunavut was carved out of the Northwest Territories as part of a modern land claim agreement.

What the residential schools did to Indigenous children

The Mohawk Institute at Brantford took its first boarding pupils in 1831, but the system dates from 1883, when Ottawa opened three industrial schools on the prairies and worked with the churches to build a national network. Amendments to the Indian Act in 1894 and 1920 made attendance compulsory. At the peak, in 1931, there were 80 schools; the Roman Catholic Church ran three fifths of them and the Anglican Church a quarter. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2007 recognises 140 schools that operated between 1831 and 1997, and about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children passed through them.

The stated aim was assimilation. On arrival boys' hair was cut, children were given uniforms and often new names, and in many schools they were forbidden to speak their own language, even in letters home. Until the late 1950s pupils spent half the day at work, which kept the schools cheap and taught little. Food was poor, buildings were overcrowded, and tuberculosis and influenza spread through them. Some schools ran nutrition experiments on pupils in the 1940s and 1950s without consent.

The number who died is not known, because the churches and the government kept poor records. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission counted at least 3,200 deaths; The Canadian Encyclopedia gives an estimate of 4,000. On 30 September 2019 the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation released the names of 2,800 children, and archivists reported another 1,600 still unnamed.

Ottawa took the schools away from the churches in 1969, and by 1986 most had closed or passed to First Nations. The last federally recognised school closed in 1997. The federal government apologised in 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its final report in 2015, and on 3 June 2021 the federal government recognised 30 September as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

How Canada took its constitution home from London

The First World War changed the relationship. Canada insisted on its own seat at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, refused in 1922 to back Britain in the Chanak crisis without a vote in Parliament, and opened its own mission in Washington in 1926, with Vincent Massey as its first envoy to a foreign capital. The Balfour Report of 1926 declared Britain and the Dominions equal in status, and the Statute of Westminster, passed on 11 December 1931 at the Dominions' request, gave them full legislative freedom. In 1939 Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September, a week after Britain, to show the decision was its own.

Why the amending power stayed in Britain

One power was held back in 1931 because Canadians asked for it to be. Ottawa and the provinces could not agree on a formula for amending the British North America Act, so the power to amend stayed with the British Parliament. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London remained the final court of appeal until 1949. The conference that opened on 8 September 1980 was the tenth round of constitutional talks since 1927.

How patriation passed without Quebec

After that conference failed, Pierre Trudeau announced on 2 October 1980 that Ottawa would ask Britain to patriate the constitution without the provinces. Eight provinces opposed the plan, and challenges went to the appeal courts of Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland. On 28 September 1981 the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that the request was legal and 6 to 3 that it broke a constitutional convention requiring substantial provincial consent. Talks resumed on 2 November. Two days later three attorneys general drafted the Kitchen Accord in a pantry of the conference centre, trading a clause that let legislatures override parts of the new Charter of Rights for provincial support.

That night officials from six provinces assembled a final package, and the Quebec delegation, lodged across the river, was not told until breakfast. Newfoundland's premier, Brian Peckford, says calls were made and went unanswered; others present say no attempt was made. In Quebec the episode is remembered as the night of the long knives. René Lévesque was the only premier who did not sign. The Canada Act received royal assent on 29 March 1982 and the Constitution Act, 1982 was proclaimed in the rain on Parliament Hill on 17 April 1982.

Why Quebec twice voted on leaving Canada

The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s overturned an establishment centred on the Catholic Church, modernised Quebec's economy and society, and produced a secular nationalism that wanted a state. In October 1970 the Front de libération du Québec kidnapped the British trade commissioner James Cross and the Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte, who was later found murdered. The Parti Québécois won the provincial election of 1976, and on 20 May 1980 it put sovereignty-association with Canada to a referendum. About 59% of voters rejected it.

Two attempts to bring Quebec into the 1982 constitution then failed. Talks on the Meech Lake Accord began in 1987 and it failed, and the Bloc Québécois was formed out of that failure. The Charlottetown Accord, which would have recognised Quebec as a distinct society, was rejected by a narrow margin in 1992.

The second Quebec referendum, on 30 October 1995, asked whether Quebec should become sovereign after offering Canada a new economic and political partnership. The No side won with 50.58% of the vote, amid disputes over rejected ballots and voter lists, and Premier Jacques Parizeau resigned. In 1998 the Supreme Court held that Quebec has no right to secede unilaterally, and that Ottawa and the other provinces would be obliged to negotiate if a clear majority voted for independence on a clear question. The Clarity Act, which sets out the terms of a negotiated departure, received royal assent on 29 June 2000. On 27 November 2006 the House of Commons adopted, by 266 votes to 16, a motion recognising that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.