Development of Canada

Development of Canada

Introduction

Canada today confronts serious challenges that involve all of the great political issues of our times. Can Canada remain a united country under the strains of deep divisions of language, of ethnic and cultural diversity, and of regional conflict? Can it maintain its independence under the pressures of its close economic, social, cultural and political ties with a neighbour that is the most powerful country in the world?

Why is there widespread discontent with the processes of democratic government in Canada? How well do new directions in policy conform with the liberal-democratic ideals of freedom, equality of opportunity and justice? Can the government of Canada govern effectively under the strains of fiscal stringency, economic globalization, and the dislocation engendered by radical technological change?

These are some of the questions we will address in this text.

Politics is an inherently controversial subject. It engages us in discussion about our most fundamental beliefs and values. Thus in the study of politics we encounter many different points of view. The approach in this text is to deal explicitly with the controversies at the core of politics and the study of politics. For each subject we will consider different opinions—both about HOW things work and how they OUGHT to work. In the realm of opinion there are no final answers. But through analysis of the clash of opinion we can sharpen our critical perspective and find a deeper understanding.

The purpose of this first chapter is to establish the context for the analysis of this and the other volume in this set—Canadian Democracy in Critical Perspective. The chapter will describe some of the principal features of Canada's geography and settlement, its historical origins as a separate political community, and its economic, social and political development.

Development of Canada

Geography

To understand Canada's politics, one must first understand some fundamental aspects of its geography.

Canada is the second largest country[1] in the world—only the Russian Federation has a larger surface area. It is surrounded by three oceans—the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic—and its 244,000 kilometres of coastline is the longest in the world. However, in proportion to its size, it has a relatively small population—about 30.7 million in 2000. Its northern climate and enormous expanses of harsh terrain have effectively limited the extent of human settlement, and most of the population remains clustered in the southern part of the country. More than 90 percent of Canadians live within 600 kilometres of its border with the United States—distributed from east to west across a continental expanse of some 8,000 kilometres (McCann, 1987, 5; Warkentin, 1997, 3; Matthews and Morrow, 1995, 10).

The Canadian landscape can be divided into a number of different geographic regions[2]. The most imposing of these is the Canadian Shield, which covers just under half of the entire country. The others include the lowlands alongthe Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River (home to one out of every two Canadians), the Appalachian mountain system which underlies the Atlantic provinces, the western plains or prairies, and the mountain ranges and plateaus of the western Cordillera (Matthews and Morrow, 1995, 10, 18).

The physical features of these different regions have determined the pattern of settlement and economic activity across the country. Those areas where soil and climate proved suitable for agriculture—the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence lowlands, the southern prairies, and the fertile valleys of British Columbia and the Maritimes—were able to support relatively large early settlements. These in turn provided a sufficient base, in terms of both population and accumulated wealth, for subsequent industrialization and economic expansion. By contrast, many settlements in the less fertile or more mountainous regions of the country have remained small and dependent for their survival on single industries or on the extraction of a single natural resource.

While Canada's northern climate and its large expanses of rugged terrain are forbidding, the country contains a vast supply of rich natural resources. Canada has more forests than any other country in the world, is the world's largest reservoir of fresh water, and has the world's greatest variety of commercially exploitable minerals (Matthews and Morrow, 1995, 22, 40). These natural resources made it attractive to European settlement and investment, and have provided the foundation for the creation of one of the wealthiest economies in the world. From the sixteenth century onward, Canada's economic development has been fuelled by the export of raw materials including fish, fur, forest products, wheat, minerals, and oil and gas. Today, natural resources continue to constitute over one-third of Canada's total exports, and the country ranks as the world's largest producer of such products as uranium, zinc, hydro-electricity, and newsprint (Matthews and Morrow, 1995, 22-23, 40).

Despite the country’s rich natural resources, Canada's geography has presented formidable obstacles to the country’s national development.

Its sheer size is one factor.

A second factor is the way in which geography divides the country into a number of separate and distinctive regions. Those regions which have become the most populated—the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence lowlands, the western plains, and the valleys and coastal harbours of British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces—are separated from one another by enormous physical barriers. These include the Rocky and coastal mountains in the west, the Appalachian mountain system in the east and, in the central and northern parts of the country, the vast Canadian Shield.

The creation of cultural and economic links capable of uniting people separated by great distances and substantial physical barriers has been a major challenge.

In addition, regional variations in physical resources, climate, economic resources and activity, and patterns of settlement have laid the foundation for the development of distinctive regional communities, each with its own particular history, culture, and political interests.

Development of Canada

Settlement

The first settlers of the territory that became Canada—the Aboriginal peoples—arrived over 12,000 years ago. According to the 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the most widely accepted estimate of the Aboriginal population of Canada at the time of sustained contact with Europeans is 500,000, divided into over 50 distinct cultural or linguistic groups. But diseases brought by the Europeans "reduced the population drastically" (RCAP, 1996, Vol. 1, 13). By 1871, the indigenous population was only 102,000.

The indigenous peoples served the interests of the Europeans during the early stages of their expansion into North America. But once they were no longer needed as suppliers for the fur trade or as military allies against rival European powers, they came to be looked upon by the growing European population in Canada as an obstacle to agricultural and economic development. Thus those who survived the ravages of disease soon faced displacement from their lands, whether through military conquest and forcible removal to reserves, expropriation, or the destruction of the ecosystem upon which the survival of their communities depended. In the eyes of the governors of Canada, this displacement was necessary to enable the European colonists "to pursue an economic development program increasingly incompatible with the rights and ways of life of the Aboriginal peoples on whose land this new economic activity was to take place" (RCAP, 1996, Vol. 1, 138-39; see also Finkel, Conrad and Strong-Boag, 1993, 120).

The French established the first permanent European settlement in 1608 on the banks of the St. Lawrence River at what is now Quebec City. Over the next 150 years the population of the colony of New Francegrew steadily, reaching approximately 70,000 by the time the territory was ceded by France to England in 1763 (McVey and Kalbach, 1995, 34). While there was no significant immigration from France after 1763, as a result of natural increase the French-speaking population of the territory (now known as Quebec) continued to grow. By the time of confederation it had reached 890,000 (the combined English- and French-speaking population of Quebec at the time was 1,185,000 (Dickinson, 1993, 111).

In addition to the lands along the shores of the St. Lawrence, the French also established settlements in Atlantic Canada—chiefly in the area of present-day Nova Scotia—and in the West. In the Atlantic region, the French settlers, known as the Acadians, numbered approximately 13,000 by the middle of the eighteenth century.

In 1713, most of the territory occupied by the Acadians came under English control, and in 1755 the English authorities—preoccupied with their ongoing conflict with France for control of Canadian territory—ordered the expulsion of the Acadians from the colony. Between 1755 and 1764, approximately 11,000 were deported (Conrad, Finkel and Joenen, 1993, 235-38). They were scattered across other British colonies, and their lands confiscated and distributed to English and American settlers. However, several thousand Acadians evaded expulsion, while many others eventually returned. Most moved north and east to escape further harassment, settling in areas of what later became the province of New Brunswick (see Roy, 1982).

The first British settlement occurred in what is now the Atlantic provinces early in the sixteenth century when English fishermen began to establish year-round quarters along the coast of Newfoundland. But it was not until after the founding of the British naval base at Halifax in 1749 that English-speaking immigrants from Britain and New England began to settle the Atlantic region in large numbers.

While Britain gained control of Quebec and all of the Maritimes in 1763, the number of English-speaking immigrants into these colonies did not increase dramatically until after the American Revolution—when some 40,000 to 50,000 American Loyalists[3] moved north from the newly formed United States (Knowles, 1992, 19). As a result of this influx, two new colonies[4] were established on the east coast—New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island—while the colony of Quebec was divided into the separate colonies of Upper and Lower Canada.

After the War of 1812—fought between the United States and British North America—there was a steady flow of immigrants to Upper and Lower Canada from the British Isles. Most of the newcomers settled in Upper Canada; by 1861 it had become the most populous of the British North American colonies, with a population of nearly 1.4 million. New immigrants from England, Scotland and Ireland also settled in the Atlantic colonies, where the population grew from 84,000 in 1800 to 515,000 in 1841 (McVey and Kalbach, 1995, 35; Beaujot and McQuillan, 1982, 21; Bercuson, Abel, Akenson, Baskerville, Bumsted and Reid, 1992, 242; see also Overbeek, 1980,11; Knowles, 1992, 43).

Meanwhile, the intensification of the fur trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had led to the creation of an expanded network of trading posts in the vast territory west and north of the Great Lakes. By the end of the eighteenth century, some 1,500 European traders were wintering in this territory, officially known as Rupert’s Land (Conrad, Finkel and Joenen, 1993, 307). In 1812, the Red River settlement was founded near present-day Winnipeg, marking the beginning of more permanent, agriculturally based European settlement in the northwest. In the late 1850s, the non-indigenous population of Canada's west coast began to increase, prompted mainly by the discovery of gold in the Fraser River valley (McVey and Kalbach, 1995, 35).

Overall, the population of Canada[5] had reached 3,500,000 by the time of confederation, "…enough to transform the country from a scattered collection of settlements into a thriving young nation" (Beaujot and McQuillan, 1982, 26).

Development of Canada

The Formation of Canada

In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War, France ceded the colonies of Quebec and Isle St. Jean (later the province of Prince Edward Island) to Britain. This effectively left Britain as the sole colonial power in north-eastern North America—its territory stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Two decades later, 13 of its North American colonies formed the independent republic of the United States. The different course of action pursued by the remaining British North American colonies (Quebec, Nova Scotia and PEI) laid the groundwork for a distinctive political community on the northern part of the continent—one which has remained separate from the US. What explains the divergent paths taken by these colonies?

Perhaps the most important factor was the continuing presence of a large French-speaking population in the territory that had been brought under British authority in 1763. The majority of these French habitants were deeply rooted in the colony of Quebec; they "…were Canadian-born and many were several generations Canadian” (Beaujot and McQuillan, 1982, 6 and 10). Through the Quebec Act in 1774 Britain recognized the right of the French-speaking population of Quebec to retain its own religious institutions, social traditions, and the French civil law—an accommodation that helped ensure its neutrality when the American Revolution broke out in the following year. Although the Americans attempted to capture Quebec City in 1775, they were not welcomed by the French-speaking population and were decisively defeated by the British army, leaving the colony firmly under British control.

Second, a majority of the colonists in Nova Scotia—many of whom had only recently arrived from New England—also remained neutral during the Revolutionary War. Their neutrality was secured in part by Britain's unshakable military command of the colony, based on its superior naval strength centred in Halifax. In addition, whatever initial sympathy some residents may have had for the Americans was soon eroded as a result of the damage and hardship inflicted by American raids against the colony during the course of the war.

The Loyalist migration into the British colonies after the Revolutionary War was a third major event in the development of a separate British North America. It resulted in the spread of settlement into the agriculturally productive areas west of Montreal along the St. Lawrence River and the lower Great Lakes, thereby increasing both the population and the economic potential of the territory under British control. While differing from the French-speaking settlers of Quebec in language and culture, the Loyalists nonetheless shared their predisposition to live apart from the newly created republic of the United States.

Canada's separate development was further influenced by the war between the United States and Britain which broke out in 1812. The defeat of the American invasion of the settlements of Upper and Lower Canada by the combined forces of the British army, the local Canadian militia, and their Indian allies prevented the annexation of British North America by the United States. At the same time the experience of invasion, occupation, and occasional pillaging by the armies of the United States served to weaken the ties between the residents of Canada and their neighbours to the south: "...the American aggression had kindled the spark of nationalism, and beside the French Canadians of the lower province an English Canadianism was beginning to glow and flame in the province of the Lakes" (Morton, 1963, 212).

This growing sense of independence among the residents of British North America was evident in the position of democratic reformers who in 1837 rebelled in both Upper and Lower Canada against their British governors and their appointed local executive councils. The solution advocated by the majority of the rebels was political reform and the adoption of responsible government (with the executive accountable to an elected assembly), not the annexation of the colonies to the already democratic United States.

While these events help to explain why the British North American colonies resisted both the appeal of American republicanism and the threat of American expansionism, they do not explain their subsequent political union. The colonies in the different regions of British North America—Vancouver Island and British Columbia on the Pacific coast, Canada (Lower/East and Upper/West) in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, and Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland on the east coast—had developed in relative isolation from one another prior to confederation. Yet, with the exception of Newfoundland, all were united as one country by the middle of the 1870s.

There were economic, political, and military reasons for confederation.

The Economic Reasons

In 1846, Britain cancelled its colonies’ preferential access[6] to the British market. Canadian merchants initially sought to compensate for the loss of markets in Britain by increasing their trade with the US. In 1854 a Reciprocity Treaty was negotiated between the colonies and the US, allowing for free trade in minerals, fish, lumber and agricultural products (Francis, Jones and Smith, 1992, 279-82, 292-96; Bercuson, Abel, Akenson, Baskerville, Bumstead and Reid, 1992, 311-13). But a decade later, the Americans gave notice that they would cancel the Reciprocity Treaty, effective in 1866.