The transcontinental railway

With the addition of British Columbia, Canada extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To maintain that vast area and to ensure its independence from the United States, it was necessary to build a railway to the west coast. In 1872 an effort was made to organize a company to undertake this enterprise—one much greater than any railway yet built anywhere—but Sir John Macdonald’s government, charged with corruption in its dealing with the head of the new company, fell on the eve of the global financial crisis that began in 1873. The railway thereafter could be built only piecemeal until Macdonald returned to power in 1878. An economically revived Canada, fortified with new protectionist tariffs, incorporated the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1881, and the line was pushed ahead rapidly with government grants of land and money.

Even so, the railway soon needed new loans from Parliament, and its funds ran out as economic depression returned. Had it not been for the Riel Rebellion of 1885, which underscored the need for the railway in moving troops, the last loan might have been refused. Despite the victory in the creation of Manitoba, many of the Métis—finding life impossible with the influx of new settlers—sold their lands and trekked westward to the Saskatchewan River. Even there they were followed by the government land survey. The bison herds were vanishing, and the railway would supersede transport by boat and cart, from which many of them earned their living. The Plains peoples, alarmed by the depletion of the buffalo and unhappy with the government’s treaties, were also restless. The Métis again organized to claim their rights as they saw them and sent for Riel, who was then living in exile in Montana Territory in the United States. Riel returned and a new armed resistance was formed. Canada rushed a military force to the northwest, where the new railway, though not quite completed, proved its worth, as did the company’s steamers that operated on the Saskatchewan River. The rebellion subsequently was suppressed, and the railway obtained the grant that enabled it to complete its track across the Rockies. Riel, with several associates, was tried and, despite evidence that he was of unsound mind, convicted of treason, though with a recommendation for mercy. Macdonald, as minister of justice and prime minister, refused clemency. The last spike of the Pacific railway was driven on November 7, 1885, nine days before Riel was hanged at Regina.

Reaction of Quebec

Canada had united its new and old territories, but there was a fierce reaction in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Riel, who had not gained much French sympathy in 1870, was now viewed by nationalist French Canadians as a martyr to the cause of French Canadian rights. A clerical-nationalist government was elected in Quebec by a narrow margin, producing a reaction in Protestant Ontario, which, in turn, led in 1890 to the abolition of the confessional schools in Manitoba, where the Roman Catholic schools were almost wholly French-speaking. French Canadians thereafter fell back on the provincial rights of Quebec to maintain the rights of French Canadians—a reaction with serious consequences for the Canadian federation. The Liberal-Conservative Party, hampered by Macdonald’s death in 1891, lost control of the federal government in 1896 largely because of what became known as the Manitoba Schools Question. The Liberal Party, under the French Canadian Wilfrid Laurier, came to power by virtue of a large majority in Quebec. Canada, it seemed, was not to be governed without the support of Quebec, even though the west retained only traces of French-speaking population.