$Unique_ID{COW00722} $Pretitle{408} $Title{Canada Chapter 2A. The People and Their Heritage} $Subtitle{} $Author{Ivan P. Fellegi} $Affiliation{Statistics Canada} $Subject{canada quebec new rights canadian government british french provincial province} $Date{1990} $Log{Norse Settlement, 1000 A.D.*0072201.scf Signal Hill*0072203.scf Champlain monument*0072205.scf Farming*0072206.scf Ottawa*0072208.scf } Country: Canada Book: Canada Handbook Author: Ivan P. Fellegi Affiliation: Statistics Canada Date: 1990 Chapter 2A. The People and Their Heritage History Canada's history has been shaped by two factors; the perennial debate about the proper relationship between anglophones and francophones and the evolution of Canada's links with both Great Britain and the United States. Since the late 18th century there has been conflict about the degree of recognition which our institutions should provide to francophones in an endeavour to promote and maintain their existence. As the country has developed out of a group of wholly dependent British colonies into a separate nation-state, much attention has focused upon the growing ties which have been forged with the vastly more powerful United States. At times of crisis in the Canadian past, such as the 1830s, the era of Confederation and World War I, these problems have become intertwined with one another as changes in the international situation have affected the relations between the two great linguistic groups. [See Norse Settlement, 1000 A.D.: L'Anse aux Meadows, Nfld., a Norse settlement believed occupied about 1 000 A.D. Viking explorers from Iceland and Greenland made voyages to Labrador and the Island of Newfoundland.] Early exploration began on the coast of the easternmost part of Canada. Viking explorers from Iceland and Greenland made voyages to Labrador and the Island of Newfoundland. A Norse settlement, l'Anse aux Meadows, Nfld. was believed occupied about 1 000 A.D. The Europeans' search for natural products, fish and later furs led French traders to establish the first permanent settlement at Quebec in 1608. By the 1670s French explorers had penetrated as far west as the Mississippi River. Rivalry for dominance over Canadian territory had begun as the English penetrated Hudson Bay, chartering the trading company which bore its name in 1670. Thus commenced decades of struggle as the French sought to expand to the west and north while the English endeavoured to monopolize trade in the vast watershed of the Bay. Pressure upon New France came also from English settlements to the south and east. Acadia, on the Atlantic Coast, became a zone of contention where the two empires collided with one another. As a result New France was drawn into an almost continuous series of wars with the English in the 17th and 18th centuries; the Indians allying with one or another of them. In this contest New France seemed outmatched. In 1663, the French Crown took over control of the colony from the private traders. Although no more than 10,000 immigrants came to settle there throughout the entire history of New France, the population had grown to about 60,000 by 1760. It was British seapower that cut the tenuous links between the colony and the mother country. In 1759 the major fortress of Quebec fell at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and the remaining French forces capitulated at Montreal a year later. The new imperial rulers found themselves facing the difficult problem of ruling a population of Europeans who differed in language and religion. In Britain, Catholics lacked certain civil rights, and if this were to be extended to Canada the colony would be ruled exclusively by imperial officials and a small number of immigrants from the British Isles. Eventually Governor Sir Guy Carleton concluded that civil and religious rights must be conceded to the francophones, whose numbers were rapidly rising through natural increase, doubling in size each generation. The Quebec Act of 1774 granted legal status to the Roman Catholic church, to the seigneurial system of landholding and to French civil law. When the 13 colonies in North America exploded into revolution against Britain in the mid-1770s, Quebec was expected to join the uprising but the people of Quebec neither joined the uprising nor rallied to the British cause as their clerical and seigneurial leaders wished. When peace was restored in 1783 Canada remained in British hands, but the American Revolution had a dramatic effect. Thousands of Loyalists moved northward. More than 30,000 people entered the Atlantic colonies which then contained only a few thousand people engaged in fishing and farming. As a result of the influx, a new colony, named New Brunswick, was hived off from Nova Scotia for the Loyalists in 1784. Another 7,000 refugees moved northward to Montreal and were settled along the north shore of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario. These Americans had been used to representative institutions. While Nova Scotia had been granted an elected assembly in 1758, Quebec still had none. The Loyalists also chafed under the seigneurial tenure and the French civil law, and in 1791 Britain decided to create two colonies, Upper and Lower Canada. Both were to have assemblies, but the institutions retained from the French regime survived only in the lower province. In addition, for fear of the spread of revolution, the British governors were to retain sweeping powers to rule their colonies. After years of friction, war between Britain and the United States broke out in 1812. A small force of British regulars aided by the Indians was able to hold off the Americans until peace was restored in 1814. When peace returned the imperial government in an effort to strengthen the colonies, undertook steps to assist immigrants to come to British America. Many others went of their own accord, and between 1815 and 1855 one million Britons landed at Halifax, Saint John and Quebec. Though a substantial number of these moved on to the United States, those who remained permanently altered the ethnic composition and rendered the francophones a minority of the whole colonial population. In Lower Canada francophones remained a majority. Difficulties caused by rapid population increase, a shortage of available land and declining agricultural productivity were translated by the Parti Patriote into an agitation for wider self-government. Serious uprisings occurred in the colony in 1837 and 1838 (with fainter echoes in Upper Canada). Militarily suppressed, the Rebellion of 1837 brought to the colonies Lord Durham, who recommended that the Canadas be joined into a single United Province where an anglophone majority might rule. This tactic failed. French Canadian nationalism, born in the turmoil of rebellion, survived and even prospered under the new regime. Britain's adoption of free trade, in the 1840s, and the colonies' self-government in local matters prompted the colonials to forge an agreement on reciprocal free trade in natural products with the United States in 1854. Closer ties to the continental economy were also forged by the construction of a network of railways during the 1850s. By 1860 British North America was moving perceptibly out of the imperial orbit toward closer relations with the United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, however, presented serious problems. Britain's decision to remain neutral offended the North, and when it became clear that the South would be defeated many British North Americans were apprehensive that the victorious armies would be unleashed upon them to annex them to the United States. Colonial politicians began, therefore, to consider closer inter-colonial ties, though previously the Canadas had little to do with Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. In 1864 George Brown, John A. Macdonald and George-Etienne Cartier formed an unexpected coalition to seek a federal union of all the colonies, and at the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences that autumn hammered out an agreement with representatives from the Atlantic colonies. Ultimately popular antagonism to the new arrangement led Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island to remain aloof (although the latter relented in 1873 owing to financial hardship). In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick there was also widespread opposition but the political skills of Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley, backed by unswerving pressure from Britain, brought those colonies into the federation with Quebec and Ontario. The British North America Act was passed in London and became law on July 1, 1867. [See Signal Hill: Guards fire noon-day salute at historic Signal Hill, St. John's, Nfld.] When the Dominion of Canada purchased the vast western territories controlled by the Hudson Bay Company in 1869, the Metis of Manitoba, a people created by the intermingling of French and Indians in the fur trade, feared that their rights might be ignored. Led by Louis Riel, they forced the federal government to grant provincial status to Manitoba in 1870. Sir John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister, then extended Canadian territory all the way to the Pacific by securing the entry of the colony of British Columbia in 1871 with the promise of a railway to the Pacific within 10 years. In 1885, when the Canadian Pacific Railway was almost complete, a second Metis rising broke out, again led by Louis Riel. The railway was used to rush a large force of soldiers to the scene who quickly suppressed the revolt. Confederation had been intended to reduce ethnic and religious conflict, but it could not eliminate them. Many Quebecois saw the execution of Louis Riel for his part in the 1885 rising as the symbol of a campaign to restrict French and Catholic rights outside Quebec, a conviction reinforced by restrictive legislation in Manitoba in 1890. The election of Liberal Wilfrid Laurier as the first francophone Prime Minister in 1896 came about because he convinced voters he could achieve a compromise on this issue. Yet the question of educational rights for Catholics and francophones outside Quebec plagued Laurier throughout his term of office, particularly when the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were created in 1905. Laurier had the good fortune, however, to hold power in an era of rapid growth. Beginning in 1897 Canada attracted large numbers of immigrants from Europe and the US, who filled up the cities and cultivated millions of acres of new land on the western prairies. Favourable world circumstances created excellent markets for Canada's wheat, forest products and minerals. Nonetheless, there remained discontent with some of Laurier's policies. Not only did some francophones think him too weak in defending their rights outside Quebec, but serious disagreements arose between anglophones and francophones over Canada's proper relationship to the British Empire. When Laurier's government negotiated an agreement with the United States to permit reciprocal free trade in natural products in 1911, he was ousted from office by English Canadian voters who saw it as a move away from close ties with Britain toward annexation by the Americans, while French Canadians were displeased that he had failed to stand up more strongly against the imperialists. The greatest challenge which faced Laurier's Conservative successor, Robert Borden, was to manage Canada's participation in World War I. In 1917 Borden bowed to pressure to reinforce the volunteer army through conscription despite the opposition of Laurier and most other French Canadian leaders. Borden persuaded those English Canadian Liberals who supported his policies to join him in a coalition. But the discontent of many farmers, immigrant groups and trade unionists with the government's management of the war effort, contributed to the gradual disintegration of Borden's coalition and the return to power of the Liberals in 1921. [See Champlain monument: Champlain monument at Orillia, Ont.] Through a combination of guile and skill, the new Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, dealt with the 65 MPs of the Progressive Party, elected by disgruntled farmers and by the mid-1920s the Progressives gradually disappeared as a significant force. Although the new prosperity was unevenly distributed between the regions, the late 1920s were a time of increasing Canadian wealth as new resources and products found expanding markets at home and abroad. Branch plants of American firms (encouraged to locate in Canada by the protective tariff which had originated with Macdonald's National Policy in 1879) were more and more familiar as another stage was reached in the integration of the country into a continental economic system dominated by its southern neighbour. Governments at all levels had no idea how to cope with the dramatic collapse of the Canadian economy during the 1930s. By 1933, with one-fifth of the labour force unemployed, the federal government was forced to spend large sums of money on relief. The depression convinced many Canadians that their constitution needed an overhaul, for problems like unemployment were provincial responsibilities while only the national government had the means to deal with them. By the 1940s, war-induced prosperity had begun to cure the country's problems and constitutional change lost its priority. The government of Mackenzie King concentrated upon mobilizing the economy for war and avoiding the deep divisions between anglophones and francophones over conscription which had developed during World War I. King's efforts to resist the imposition of conscription for overseas service until late 1944 did not go unnoticed in Quebec. That province remained loyal to the Liberal party in the 1945 election, while the actions of the Conservatives in 1917 continued to deny them any real success in Quebec. Wartime growth made Canada, if only temporarily, one of the world's leading military and industrial powers, and King made efforts to ensure that individual workers benefited from this by adopting new fiscal policies designed to maximize employment. The 20 years after 1945 were marked by a gradual extension of welfare state policies in Canada to meet the needs of its highly urbanized and industrialized society, although fishing, farming and natural resource production obviously retained a vital significance in certain regions of the country. Despite provincial responsibility for such areas of jurisdiction, federal funds were spent on programs of pensions, hospital and medical insurance and aid to the unemployed and handicapped. Such programs were a factor in persuading Newfoundlanders to become citizens of Canada's tenth province in 1949. Only the province of Quebec and to a lesser extent Ontario expressed reservations about the centralization of authority over such matters. The "have-not" provinces also were favoured by the introduction of formal equalization payments in the late 1950s, which were intended to reduce regional disparities. [See Farming: Farming, near Montreal, Que. The rural landscape of southern Quebec, with its long narrow farms, is distinct within Canada, and contrasts with the rectangular farms of southern Ontario.] The landslide victory of the Conservatives under John Diefenbaker in 1958 (in which the party even won 50 seats in Quebec) appeared to mark the opening of a new era in Canadian politics. In fact, Diefenbaker did not utilize his opportunity and was defeated in 1963, opening the way for the Liberals to return to power. Except for the brief Conservative span in 1979-80, they retained power until the Conservatives won their landslide majority of 211 seats in September 1984. The transformation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation into the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961 has not led it to the major party status, although its core of support has guaranteed it about a score of MPs at subsequent elections. Canadian politics since the 1960s has been marked by a noticeable regionalization of party support: the NDP has no firm backing east of Ontario while the Liberals have gradually been excluded from Western Canada, making them more dependent upon Quebec, although even Quebec capitulated to the 1984 Conservative victory, awarding that party 58 seats. Like every Canadian Prime Minister before or since, Diefenbaker found himself confronted with knotty problems in dealing with the US. His reluctance to arm our forces with American nuclear weapons during the cold war paved the way for his defeat. During his prime ministership widespread concern was first expressed over the level of American investment in Canada and its effect upon our sovereign independence. How to cope with this problem or whether to ignore it altogether have become important political issues in the succeeding two decades. It was the retirement of Pierre Trudeau and overwhelming victory of the Conservative Party under another Quebecker, Brian Mulroney, in 1984, which signalled a new phase in both the relations between anglophones and francophones and between Canada and the United States. At the time of the centennial of Confederation in 1967 attention began to be focused upon the long-dormant issue of constitutional change. Following a revival of Quebecois nationalism during the 1960s, Quebec was chafing at the restrictions imposed by the existing federal system, despite the efforts of Lester Pearson's government to reach accommodations. The selection of Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister in 1968 came about largely because of his reputation as a constitutional expert and as a Quebecois who favoured a strong central government. Quebec's failure to agree to the Victoria Charter in 1971, however, temporarily ended the negotiations. In the 1970s, attention shifted to economic issues. Rapidly rising petroleum prices slowed growth and added to inflationary pressures, while the flow of income to the oil and gas producing provinces in the west reduced the traditional preponderance of central Canada. The national energy program, designed to energy secure self-sufficiency for Canada and encourage Canadian ownership of the oil and gas industry, has spawned intense criticism among those who oppose its goals or its methods. By 1982, the rate of unemployment had reached 1930s levels and the Gross National Product was shrinking in real terms. The aggressive Quebecois nationalism of the 1960s seemed to have been checked by the October Crisis of 1970 when the government imposed the War Measures Act and sent 10,000 troops into the province in response to the terrorist activities of the Front de Liberation du Quebec. The vast majority of Canadians approved of this response though doubts later surfaced about the veracity of the "real or apprehended insurrection" which provoked it. Yet the election of Parti Quebecois in 1976 demonstrated that dissatisfaction among francophones remained significant. Although the government of Rene Levesque failed to win a mandate to negotiate Quebec's "sovereignty- association" with the rest of Canada in the provincial referendum of May 1980, his victory in the subsequent general election indicated that separatism had not lost its appeal for many Quebecois. The election of this government in Quebec helped to revive the lagging constitutional negotiations. In the referendum campaign the anti-separatist forces under Pierre Trudeau promised the people of Quebec a "renewed federalism," and when the provincial premiers failed to reach any agreement on changes the Prime Minister announced his intention to proceed unilaterally to patriate the constitution and include an amending formula and a charter of rights. Momentarily checked by the Supreme Court decision that such a course of action would be unconstitutional without substantial provincial consent, the Prime Minister nonetheless persevered. The outcome was the surprising agreement on constitutional changes reached on November 5, 1981 with only Quebec's Levesque registering a vigorous protest. On April 17, 1982 the Canada Act formally came into effect with a ceremonial proclamation by the Queen on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. [See Ottawa: Ottawa, Canada's capital with the Parliament Buildings (foreground), the new National Gallery of Canada (right) and the Canadian Museum of Civilization (top left).] Government Although Canada became a fully sovereign state in principle in 1926, it was not until April 17, 1982, with the proclamation of the Constitution Act, 1982 that the last formal vestige of Canada's former colonial status was finally removed. The Constitution Act and its amendments provide only a skeleton framework of government, which is filled out by judicial interpretation, by various Acts of Parliament and of the legislatures and, most of all, by custom or "convention." The powers of the Crown are exercised, as the Fathers of Confederation put it, "according to the well understood principles of the British Constitution"-that is, according to the usages and understandings that gradually transformed the British monarchy into a parliamentary democracy. Canada has inherited and elaborated on these conventions to suit our own needs. The BNA Act, now renamed the Constitution Act, 1867, gives the Canadian Parliament power to "make laws for the peace, order and good government of Canada in relation to all matters...not...assigned exclusively to the Legislatures of the provinces." The Act added a list of examples of this general power, which includes legislating with respect to: defence; raising money by any kind of taxation; regulation of trade and commerce; navigation and shipping; fisheries; currency and banking; bankruptcy and insolvency; interest; patents and copyrights; marriage and divorce; criminal law and criminal procedure; penitentiaries; inter-provincial and international steamships, ferries, railways, canals and telegraphs; and any "works" situated within a province that are declared by Parliament to be "for the general advantage of Canada". An amendment in 1940 added unemployment insurance to the federal jurisdiction. The Act of 1867 gave Parliament and the provincial legislatures concurrent power over agriculture and immigration, with the federal law prevailing over the provincial in case of conflict. Amendments have since provided for concurrent jurisdiction over pensions, but with provincial law prevailing in case of conflict. The Constitution Act, 1982 established the equality of status of English and French in all the institutions of the Parliament and Government of Canada and of the legislature and government of New Brunswick. English and French may be used in the debates of the legislatures and in any pleading or process of the courts of Quebec and Manitoba and must be used in keeping the records and journals of the legislatures of those provinces. In addition to these language rights, the Constitution of Canada also provides for language of education rights for the linguistic minority, whether anglophone or francophone, in each province or territory, sets out certain educational rights for some denominational groups, and affirms and recognizes the rights of Canada's aboriginal peoples. Furthermore, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms contained in the Constitution protects the fundamental freedoms, the democratic rights, the mobility rights, legal rights and equality rights of all Canadians. Each provincial legislature has exclusive power over; the amendment of the provincial Constitution (except as regards the office of Lieutenant Governor, he legal head of the provincial executive); natural resources; direct taxation for provincial purposes; prisons; hospitals; asylums and charities; municipal institutions; licences for provincial or municipal revenue; local works and undertakings; incorporation of provincial companies; solemnization of marriage; property and civil rights; administration of justice; matters of a merely local or private nature; and education, subject to certain safeguards for denominational schools in Newfoundland and Protestant or Roman Catholic schools in the other provinces. Judicial decisions have given "property and civil rights" a very wide scope, including most labour legislation and much of social security. The unanimous consent of Parliament and the legislatures of all the provinces is required for certain amendments to the Constitution respecting matters such as the office of the Queen, the Governor General or the Lieutenant Governor of a province, and the composition of the Supreme Court. For other constitutional amendments of general application, the consent of Parliament and of seven provinces representing at least 50 per cent of the population is required. However, where an amendment derogates from the legislative powers, the proprietary rights or other any right or privilege of the legislature or government of a province, the legislative assembly of a province can express its dissent and the amendment will not have effect in that province. In such a case, if the amendment is one that transfers legislative powers to Parliament relating to education or other cultural matters, Canada shall provide reasonable compensation to any province to which the amendment does not apply.