Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0072/00722.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 26KB | 427 lines

$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