9 - English-Canadian Literature, 1867–1918: The Making of a Nation

Summary

THE PERIOD FROM CONFEDERATION to the First World War saw the slow emergence of a strong national economy and a vibrant national literature. The nation started with four provinces under the British North America Act of 1 July 1867: Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. They were followed by Manitoba in 1870 (after the previous year's Red River Insurrection), British Columbia in 1871, Prince Edward Island in 1873, and Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905. The next year, the Latin phrase that became the national motto, “A mari usque ad mare” (“from sea to sea”) was inscribed on the head of the mace of the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly. It was the era of John A. Macdonald, prime minister from 1867 to 1873 and again from 1878 to 1891, and Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister from 1896 to 1911. While very different in character, both combined a deep respect for British political traditions with a pragmatic Canadian nationalism. As Donald Creighton writes in Dominion of the North (1944), Macdonald followed “three interrelated national policies of western settlement, transcontinental railways, and protective tariffs.” The railway was completed in 1885, the same year in which Louis Riel was executed in Manitoba for his role in the Northwest Rebellion (1885) — clearly, nationality was never without its discontents, especially in Quebec, where sympathy for Riel led to a movement away from Macdonald's Conservative Party. The tariff was a response to an American one as well as an expression of Macdonald's own economic nationalism and the growing manufacturing interests of central Canada.