Canada’s History

Chapter at a glanceThe Master Timeline

If you learn nothing else, learn this sequence. Every other section of this summary hangs off one of these dates.

Citizenship test topic: Who discovered Canada

Before contactAboriginal Peoples

Every region of Canada was already inhabited when Europeans arrived. The newcomers called the inhabitants Indians, a name that stuck because the earliest explorers believed they had landed in the East Indies. All of these peoples drew their living from the land — some as hunters and gatherers, others as crop farmers.

Fighting between Aboriginal groups was frequent; territory, resources and prestige were all contested. Native life was changed for good once European colonists, soldiers, missionaries and traders appeared, and European diseases, against which Aboriginal people had no immunity, killed them in great numbers. Yet over the first 200 years of living side by side, the two groups also built strong economic, religious and military ties — and those ties are the foundation Canada rests on.

~1000 – 1550sThe First Europeans

About 1,000 years ago, Vikings from Iceland who had settled Greenland sailed on to Labrador and the island of Newfoundland. Their settlement at l’Anse aux Meadows survives as a World Heritage site. Exploration proper started in 1497 with John Cabot, an Italian who had emigrated to England: he produced the first map of Canada’s East Coast, landed on Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island, and claimed the New Founde Land for England. Even so, the English did not settle until 1610.

Jacques Cartier crossed the Atlantic three times between 1534 and 1542 and claimed the territory for King Francis I of France. No European before him had explored the St. Lawrence River or seen the sites of Quebec City and Montreal. Two captured guides used the Iroquoian word kanata — “village” — in his hearing, and by the 1550s mapmakers were writing Canada.

1604 – 1759Royal New France and the Struggle for a Continent

The first European settlement north of Florida dates from 1604, when Pierre de Monts and Samuel de Champlain planted a French colony — first on St. Croix Island (now in Maine), then at Port-Royal in Acadia (today’s Nova Scotia). Champlain went on to fortify the site of Quebec City in 1608; the harsh climate made life hard for the settlers.

Champlain’s allies were the Algonquin, Montagnais and Huron. Their long-standing enemies, the Iroquois — a confederation of five (later six) First Nations — fought the French settlements for a hundred years, until peace came in 1701. French and Aboriginal people were partners in an enormous fur trade that existed because Europe wanted beaver pelts. Under leaders such as Jean Talon, Bishop Laval and Count Frontenac, France’s North American empire came to stretch from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Frontenac, asked to hand Quebec to the English in 1690, answered: “My only reply will be from the mouths of my cannons!” Another hero of the period, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, beat the English again and again, from James Bay in the north to Nevis in the Caribbean.

King Charles II of England chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, giving it a monopoly on trade across every river that drains into Hudson Bay. Montreal-based traders were its rivals for the next 100 years. The bold canoe-men of the trade, the voyageurs and coureurs des bois, forged strong alliances with First Nations.

England’s Atlantic seaboard colonies, founded in the early 1600s, eventually outstripped New France in wealth and population, and the 1700s saw France and Britain at war for the continent. The decisive blow fell in 1759 at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, Quebec City: a British victory that ended France’s empire in America. Neither commander survived: the Marquis de Montcalm and Brigadier James Wolfe both fell leading their men.

Citizenship test topic: Responsible government

1763 – 1791The Province of Quebec, the Loyalists and the First Assemblies

Britain gave the conquered colony a new name, the Province of Quebec. Its French-speaking Catholic population — the habitants or Canadiens — set out to keep their way of life inside an empire that was English-speaking and Protestant-ruled. Parliament’s answer to governing this French Roman Catholic majority was the Quebec Act of 1774, one of Canada’s constitutional foundations. Catholics received religious freedom and could hold public office (still forbidden in Britain itself); French civil law came back, while British criminal law stayed.

The 13 colonies to the south broke away in 1776 to form the United States, and more than 40,000 Loyalists escaped the American Revolution for Nova Scotia and Quebec. Thousands of Loyalist Mohawk followed Joseph Brant into Canada. Loyalists were British, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Aboriginal and more, and their faiths ran from Anglican, Baptist, Catholic and Jewish to Methodist, Presbyterian and Quaker. Around 3,000 black Loyalists — freedmen and slaves — also came north; some black Nova Scotians, given poor land, left in 1792 to found Freetown, Sierra Leone, a British colony for freed slaves.

As Governor of Quebec, Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester) stood up for the Canadiens, beat back an American invasion in 1775, and managed the Loyalist migration of 1782–83.

Democratic institutions arrived gradually and without bloodshed. Halifax, Nova Scotia elected the first representative assembly in 1758; Prince Edward Island had one by 1773 and New Brunswick by 1785. The Constitutional Act of 1791 then divided the Province of Quebec in two: Upper Canada (later Ontario — English-speaking, Protestant and largely Loyalist) and Lower Canada (later Quebec — French-speaking and heavily Catholic). For the first time each had a legislative assembly elected by the people, and Canada became the official name. The two Canadas plus the Atlantic colonies were known together as British North America.

1793 – 1853Abolition of Slavery and a Growing Economy

Organized opposition to the transatlantic slave trade first appeared in the late 1700s, in the British Parliament. Upper Canada acted in 1793: its Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe — a Loyalist officer who also founded the City of York (Toronto) — made it the first province anywhere in the Empire to move against slavery. Britain outlawed the buying and selling of slaves in 1807, and in 1833 slavery ended across the whole Empire. Thousands of American slaves fled north by following “the North Star” along the Underground Railroad, an anti-slavery network run by Christians.

Mary Ann (Shadd) Carey, a vocal campaigner against slavery in the United States, became Canada’s first woman publisher in 1853 as a founder and editor of The Provincial Freeman, a weekly that argued for abolition, black immigration to Canada, temperance (drinking less alcohol) and British rule.

Canada’s earliest companies, under both the French and British regimes, fought over the fur trade. Employing French, British and Aboriginal workers, the Hudson’s Bay Company took control of the northwest from trading posts that grew into cities: Fort Victoria, Fort Langley (near Vancouver), Fort Edmonton and Fort Garry (Winnipeg). Banks and other financial institutions appeared in the late 1700s and early 1800s; the Montreal Stock Exchange dates from 1832. For centuries the economy rested on farming and on exports of fur, fish and timber, carried by road, lake, river and canal.

1812 – 1814The War of 1812

Once the Royal Navy had destroyed Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet at Trafalgar (1805), Britain ruled the seas and used that power in its struggle against Napoleon. American shipping suffered from British interference, and resentment grew. Convinced Canada would be an easy conquest, the United States invaded in June 1812 — and was proved wrong, as Canadian volunteers and First Nations (including Shawnee under Chief Tecumseh) fought alongside the British regulars.

Major-General Sir Isaac Brock took Detroit in July 1812 but died at Queenston Heights, near Niagara Falls, repelling an attack the Americans went on to lose. 1813 was a busy year: Lieutenant-Colonel Charles de Salaberry, with 460 mostly French-Canadien soldiers, drove 4,000 invaders back at Châteauguay south of Montreal; Laura Secord trekked 19 miles (30 km) to alert Lieutenant James FitzGibbon to a coming attack, helping win the Battle of Beaver Dams; the frigate HMS Shannon brought the captured USS Chesapeake into Halifax; and American troops burned Government House and the Parliament Buildings at York (Toronto). Major-General Robert Ross answered in 1814 by sailing from Nova Scotia to burn the White House and other Washington public buildings; killed in battle soon after, he was given a burial with full military honours in Halifax.

The American bid to conquer Canada had collapsed by 1814. Britain then paid for expensive defences — Fort Henry at Kingston, the naval drydock at Halifax and the Citadels at Halifax and Quebec City — all popular historic sites today. Today’s Canada–U.S. border is partly a product of the war, which kept Canada out of American hands. The Duke of Wellington, Napoleon’s conqueror in 1815, had sent some of his best troops to Canada in 1814; he later picked Bytown (Ottawa) as the terminus of the Rideau Canal, one link in a chain of forts against another invasion — giving him a direct hand in founding the national capital.

1837 – 1849Rebellions and Responsible Government

By the 1830s, reformers in both Canadas thought democracy was coming too slowly; a few wanted American-style republicanism or even union with the United States. Armed risings broke out in 1837–38 near Montreal and in Toronto, but without enough popular support they were crushed by British regulars and Canadian volunteers. Some rebels were hanged, others exiled (a few later returned).

Sent from England to investigate, the reformer Lord Durham proposed two things: unite Upper and Lower Canada, and grant responsible government — a system in which the Crown’s ministers can govern only with the backing of a majority of the elected representatives. His third idea was the controversial one: that the Canadiens should assimilate into English-speaking Protestant culture. It showed he understood nothing of French Canadians, who were determined to preserve French Canada’s distinct identity. Several reformers of this era — Sir Étienne-Paschal Taché, Sir George-Étienne Cartier and Sir John A. Macdonald (who had served in Upper Canada’s volunteer government militia) — went on to become Fathers of Confederation.

The union came in 1840, creating the Province of Canada. There, Robert Baldwin and Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine — and Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia — pressed British governors for reform. Nova Scotia got there first, winning full responsible government in 1847–48; Governor Lord Elgin, with London’s encouragement, brought it to United Canada in 1848–49. La Fontaine, who fought for democracy and French language rights, became in 1849 the first head of a responsible government in the Canadas — a role similar to a prime minister.

Citizenship test topic: Confederation, 1867

1864 – 1867Confederation

Between 1864 and 1867, delegates from the Province of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia — backed by Britain — designed a new country. We call them the Fathers of Confederation. Their design had two levels of government, federal and provincial, and split the old Province of Canada into Ontario and Quebec; with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, these four made up the Dominion of Canada. Each province elected its own legislature and ran fields such as education and health.

Westminster’s British North America Act of 1867 created the Dominion, which came into being on July 1, 1867. That anniversary was Dominion Day until 1982, recalling the day Canada became a self-governing Dominion; it is now Canada Day.

The word Dominion was Sir Leonard Tilley’s idea. A Father of Confederation from New Brunswick, he suggested it in 1864 after reading Psalm 72 — “dominion from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth” — which fit the dream of a powerful, united, wealthy and free country spanning the continent. The title went into the Constitution, served officially for about 100 years, and is still part of our heritage. In 1921 King George V gave Canada its national colours, white and red — today’s flag colours.

1867 – 1999Expansion of the Dominion

A 1920s idea that never came off: bringing the British West Indies, Britain’s Caribbean territories, into Canada. Ties with the Commonwealth Caribbean remain close nonetheless.

1867 – 1885The First Prime Minister and the Challenge in the West

Canada’s first Prime Minister, from 1867, was Sir John Alexander Macdonald, himself a Father of Confederation: Scottish-born on January 11, 1815, brought to Upper Canada as a boy, and later a Kingston, Ontario lawyer with a gift for politics and a colourful personality. January 11 is Sir John A. Macdonald Day by act of Parliament, and his face is on the $10 bill. Quebec’s key architect of Confederation was Sir George-Étienne Cartier, a Montreal railway lawyer and close Macdonald ally who brought Quebec in and helped negotiate the entry of Manitoba, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.

Canada bought the vast northwest from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1869 without asking the 12,000 Métis of the Red River. Louis Riel answered with an armed rising and seized Fort Garry, the territorial capital — a direct threat to the dream of a Dominion from sea to sea. Soldiers from Ottawa retook the fort in 1870; Riel fled to the United States, and Manitoba was born as a new province. Riel won a seat in Parliament but never occupied it. When settlement again threatened Métis and Indian rights, a second rebellion in 1885 in today’s Saskatchewan ended with Riel tried and executed for high treason — a decision Quebec bitterly opposed. Many regard him today as a hero who defended Métis rights, and as the father of Manitoba; Gabriel Dumont was the Métis’ finest military leader.

After the first rising, in 1873, Macdonald founded the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) to bring order to the West and help negotiate with the Indians. Its posts — Fort MacLeod, Fort Calgary and others — grew into towns and cities, and Regina became its headquarters. Its successor, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP, “the Mounties”), is Canada’s national police force and one of its most recognizable symbols; Major General Sir Sam Steele is the best-known of the colourful heroes it produced. Before Confederation, the Hudson’s Bay Company flag had flown over Western Canada for 200 years.

Ottawa’s promise of a railway to the Pacific brought British Columbia into Confederation in 1871. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was finished on November 7, 1885, when its Scottish-born director Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona) drove the last spike — a powerful symbol of unity. British and American investors paid for it; European and Chinese labour built it; and its “ribbons of steel” fulfilled a national dream. Chinese workers were then subjected to discrimination including the race-based Head Tax, for which the Government of Canada apologized in 2006.

1890s – 1914Moving Westward

An economic boom in the 1890s and early 1900s industrialized the economy and drew one million British and one million American immigrants. Sir Wilfrid Laurier — the first French-Canadian prime minister after Confederation, and the face on the $5 bill — pushed settlement of the West. By rail came 170,000 Ukrainians, 115,000 Poles and tens of thousands of Swedes, Norwegians, French and Germans, who by 1914 had turned the West into a thriving farming region.

1899 – 1918The South African War and the First World War

Most Canadians were proud of the British Empire. The South African War (1899–1902), better known as the Boer War, drew more than 7,000 Canadian volunteers, of whom over 260 died. Victories in 1900 at Paardeberg (“Horse Mountain”) and Lillefontein fed national pride.

Germany’s 1914 attack on Belgium and France brought Britain into war, and Ottawa raised the Canadian Expeditionary Force, later renamed the Canadian Corps. From a population of eight million, over 600,000 Canadians served, most of them volunteers. In April 1917 the Corps stormed Vimy Ridge — the first British victory of the war — at a cost of 10,000 killed or wounded, earning the Canadians a reputation as the “shock troops of the British Empire.” One officer said he had watched “the birth of a nation.” April 9 is Vimy Day, and the Vimy Memorial in France honours the dead. (Canada’s soldiers had worn the maple leaf since the 1850s.)

There was a dark side: between 1914 and 1920 Ottawa held over 8,000 former Austro-Hungarian subjects — chiefly Ukrainian men — in 24 labour camps as “enemy aliens,” despite Britain advising against it. In 1918 the Corps, commanded by General Sir Arthur Currie (Canada’s greatest soldier), fought through the last hundred days beside French and British Empire forces: Amiens on August 8, 1918 — to the Germans “the black day of the German Army” — then Arras, Canal du Nord, Cambrai and Mons. Germany and Austria gave up, and the Armistice of November 11, 1918 ended the fighting. Canada had lost 60,000 dead and 170,000 wounded; pride in both nation and Empire rose, most of all in English Canada.

1916 – 1940Women Get the Vote

When Canada was founded, only property-owning adult white males could vote — normal for democracies of the day. The women’s suffrage movement set out to change that; its Canadian founder was Dr. Emily Stowe, who was also the first woman in Canada to practise medicine. In the war, over 3,000 nurses — the “Bluebirds” — served with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, some 2,500 of them overseas.

November 11Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day, November 11, honours the veterans and the fallen of every war Canadians have fought, up to the present. Canadians wear the red poppy and fall silent at 11 a.m. on November 11, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, in memory of the more than one million who served and the 110,000 who died. The poem most often recited that day, “In Flanders Fields,” was written in 1915 by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian medical officer.

1919 – 1939Between the Wars

Out of the post-war British Empire grew a free association of states, the British Commonwealth of Nations. Canada is still a leading member, together with other former parts of the Empire — Australia, New Zealand, India and a number of Caribbean and African countries. Prosperity and low unemployment marked the “Roaring Twenties,” but the stock market crash of 1929 brought the Great Depression — the “Dirty Thirties.” By 1933 unemployment stood at 27%, businesses had collapsed, and Western farmers, facing drought and low grain prices, were hit hardest of all.

Canadians began demanding a social safety net: a minimum wage, a standard work week, and programs like unemployment insurance. A central bank, the Bank of Canada, was created in 1934 to manage the money supply and stabilize the financial system. Immigration dwindled and many refugees were refused — among them Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany in 1939. One bright spot: Phil Edwards, born in British Guiana, took bronze for Canada at three Olympics (1928, 1932, 1936), then graduated from McGill’s medical school, served as an army captain in the Second World War and became a Montreal expert in tropical diseases.

1939 – 1945The Second World War

In 1939 Adolf Hitler, Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) dictator, invaded Poland and overran much of Europe; Canada went to war beside its democratic allies. More than one million Canadians and Newfoundlanders served (Newfoundland was still a separate British entity) from a population of just 11.5 million, and 44,000 of them died. Early defeats came at Hong Kong (1941), where Canadians fought Imperial Japan in a doomed defence, and at Dieppe (1942), a failed raid on the Nazi-held French coast.

The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) flew in the Battle of Britain and made up a large share of Commonwealth aircrew over Europe; through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, over 130,000 Allied aircrew learned to fly in Canada — a bigger contribution to the air war than any other Commonwealth country made. The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN)’s finest hour came in the Battle of the Atlantic, escorting merchant convoys past German submarines, while the Merchant Navy kept Britain fed, clothed and supplied. When the war ended, only two navies in the world were larger than Canada’s — it was the third-largest.

Canadians helped free Italy in 1943–44. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, 15,000 Canadian troops took Juno Beach in Normandy from the German Army — a national achievement captured in Orville Fisher’s painting — and roughly one in ten Allied soldiers landing that day was Canadian. The Canadian Army then liberated the Netherlands (1944–45), helping bring about Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, after six years of war in Europe.

Japan, meanwhile, occupied the Aleutian Islands, shelled a lighthouse on Vancouver Island, sent fire balloons drifting over B.C. and the Prairies, and brutally mistreated the Canadians captured at Hong Kong; it surrendered on August 14, 1945, ending four years of Pacific war. At home, wartime fear and public opinion in B.C. led the federal government to forcibly relocate Canadians of Japanese origin and sell off their property with no compensation — even though the military and the RCMP had said they posed little danger. In 1988 the Government of Canada apologized and compensated the victims.