Canadian History Questions

Answer question based on the book attached (HCP, pp. 299-320.)

Main Theme: What happens when two cultures “encounter” each other in ‘place’? What are the central notions of progress that are reflected in the attitudes and beliefs of Newcomers? What is the result of the interaction between a people of place (ie: indigenous peoples and nations) and a people conditioned by the notions of Progress (ie: miners and settler society)? How are natural resources understood by both groups? 

Content: You should read all of the content found in the side tabs and primary documents (all of them) as found under the main tabs of “Context”, “Contenders”, and “Aftermath”. 

Questions to Consider:

1. What was the Klondike Gold Rush? How did it represent the ‘age of progress’?  How did the notion of a ‘base precious metal’ that is “found” (ie: discovered) in “nature” represent some notions of progress (ie: remember the ‘origins’ in the Railway Trilogy)?  Do you think the Klondike Gold Rush was an idea, an event, or an opportunity (or all three)?  Who could access this wealth (ie: ‘white’ males who could stake a claim) that appeared to be ‘free for the taking’? 

2. How did the miners and other newcomers view the land and people of the Yukon?  How did the concept of a “virgin land” (ie: idea that land was unproductive or under utilized) provide legitimacy for their utilitarian approach to land and exploitative treatment of people? How did the miner’s and newcomer’s understanding of their place (ie: did they consider themselves to be permanent residents or temporary workers?) and their role (ie: get in, strike it rich, and get out) shape their attitudes and perceptions?  What specific evidence can you cite to support your analysis?  

3. How did First Nation’s view the land and the mining activity?  Are you able to spot the diverse and dynamic ways in which First Nations responded to this massive influx of outsiders?  What were some of the strategies that First Nations used to respond to the Gold Rush (ie: partners, participants, withdrawal)?  The Yukon is a First Nation’s homeland so can you identify the ways some viewed the Gold Rush as an economic opportunity (ie: an extension of the fur trade), while some First Nations thought of it as a threat to their way of life (ie: disease, alcohol, mistreatment)?  In what ways did First Nations try to lessen the impact of the Gold Rush?  Do you recognize the indigenous diplomacy of the “custom of the country” (ie: intermarriage) at work in this history?

4. How would you characterize or describe the relationship between First Nations and Newcomers? If you just look at the surface of this UCM, who is acting and shaping history?  Who is presumed to have agency? Does it make a difference to your interpretation of the Klondike Gold Rush if you look for and recognize two diverse and dynamic societies that are interacting?  Is it possible to understand different kinds of ‘agency’, one that is disruptive, often violent, and imposing and another that is adaptive, diplomatic and hospitable?  How does this approach to history change the overall story line of “progress”? 

5. What is the role of Race, Nationalism and Gender in this history?  Why was the ‘discovery’ of gold (ie: Who, specifically, started the rush?) so important to Canada’s nationhood?  Why do you think it was so important that a “Canadian” man (ie: Henderson) get credit for the Gold Rush’s origin?  How did this conclusion satisfy the needs of a nation that desperately wanted to be characterized as ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’? If we recognized an indigenous woman (ie: Kate) as being the one who discovered gold in the Klondike, how would this change the narrative of this important event in Canada’s formation as a nation?

2997 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

mainly English-born Torontonians making a living as
commercial artists, had begun travelling north into
the Georgian Bay and Algonquin wildernesses as early
as 1911. This group captured the iconographic essence
of wilderness Canada: a bleak and sombre but none-
theless curiously beautiful landscape of Jack pines,
rock outcroppings, and storm-driven lakes, totally
uninhabited by people.

Other Identities
We can easily make too much of the political and
religious arena. The elaboration of competing and
occasionally incompatible identities by and for its cit-

izens characterized the Victorian Age. As well as their
national and provincial loyalties, most Canadians had
firm allegiances to their ethnic origins, whether these
were French Canadian, Acadian, or British. French
Canada further elaborated its cultural identity in this
period, and the Acadians began self-consciously to
develop one. As for those people whose origins were
in the British Isles, they simultaneously thought of
themselves as British as well as Welsh, Scottish, Irish,
or English. Indeed, British Canadians may well have
thought of themselves as more British (as opposed to
Welsh or Scottish) than did their compatriots at home.

The state did not weigh heavily on the daily lives of
most Canadians in this era, although the administrative
state had begun its development before Confederation.

“Odabin Cottage,” the summer house of Charles Howard Millar, the local postmaster, Drummondville, Quebec, c. 1903. Canadians’
fascination with the summer cottage had already taken hold before 1914. Except for some ostentatious present-day “cottages” on
some lakes, this cottage of more than a century ago is little different from those that Canadians rush to in the summer months
today. Such cottages are perhaps most notable for how they blend into—as opposed to stand out from—the surrounding natural
environment, in this case even with the decking built around small trees. © McCord Museum.

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300 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Taxation had not yet become ubiquitous and occurred
mainly as tariffs and duties. Moreover, the state—as
represented by province, nation, or city—did not nor-
mally provide social benefits or solace when people got
sick, lost jobs, retired, or died. For some, politics and gov-
ernment were a source of employment or patronage. For
most Canadians, however, government had very little to
do with their lives. For many people, political allegiance
to the state was therefore not as important as loyalty to
the caring institutions: family, ethnic group, religion,
and fraternal organization. Churches and religion were
most important. Canada was a Christian country and
few of its citizens openly defied Christian norms and
values. By the 1880s the mobility of many Canadians
contributed to the tendency to belong to a good many
other voluntary organizations beyond the church. In an
earlier period, voluntary organizations supplemented
or provided municipal services such as water, light,
fire, and libraries as well as charity. By the 1880s some
organizations had begun providing entertainment and
companionship for their members.

Technically independent of the churches, but closely
connected in overlapping membership and social goals,
were reform organizations like the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union. Letitia Youmans (1827–96), a pub-
lic school teacher and Sunday school teacher in the
Methodist Church, founded the first Canadian local
of the WCTU in December 1874 in Picton, Ontario.
The WCTU spread rapidly across Canada in the 1880s,
preaching that alcohol abuse was responsible for many
of the social problems of contemporary Canada and
campaigning for public prohibition of the sale of alco-
holic beverages. Most of its membership came from the
middle class, and much of its literature was directed
at demonstrating that poverty and family problems
among the lower orders could be reduced, if not elim-
inated, by cutting off the availability of alcohol to the
male breadwinner.

Canadians of the time tended to associate
Orangeism with political matters—organizing parades
on 12 July, opposing Roman Catholics, objecting to the
1870 execution of Thomas Scott—and with the Irish.
Nevertheless, the Orange Order’s real importance and
influence continued to rest on the twin facts that its
membership united British Protestants of all origins

and that it served as a focal point on the local level for
social intercourse and conviviality. As a “secret” society,
it had elaborate initiation rites and a ritual that appealed
to men who spent most of their lives in drudgery or
dull routine. Lodges provided a variety of services for
members, including an elaborate funeral. But if local
fraternity was the key to Orangeism’s success, its public
influence was enormous. In 1885 John A. Macdonald’s
government would prefer to risk alienating Quebec by
executing Louis Riel than alienating Orange Ontario by
sparing him.

The Orange Order was not the only fraternal organ-
ization that grew and flourished in Canada. Because
most of these societies were semi-secret, with rites based
on Freemasonry, they appealed mainly to Protestants.
The Masons themselves expanded enormously during
the mid-nineteenth century. They were joined by a num-
ber of other orders, such as the Independent Order of
Oddfellows (founded in England in 1813 and brought
to Canada by 1845), the Independent Order of Foresters
(founded in the United States in 1874 and brought to
Canada in 1881), and the order of the Knights of Pythias
(founded in Washington, DC, in the early 1860s and
brought to Canada in 1870). The Knights of Labor was
an all-embracing labour organization that owed much
to the lodges. Fellowship and mutual support were the
keys to the success of all of these societies. Their success
led to the formation in 1882 of the Knights of Columbus
as a similar fraternal benefit society for Roman Catholic
men, although the first chapters in Canada were prob-
ably not founded until the early 1890s. While few of these
societies admitted women directly, most had adjunct or
parallel organizations for women. By the 1880s many
Canadians belonged to one or more of these societies.
Membership offered a means of social introduction into
a new community, provided status and entertainment to
members, and increasingly supplied assurance of assist-
ance in times of economic or emotional crisis.

Culture
In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, most Canadians
continued to amuse themselves at home by making
music and playing numerous parlour games. Outside

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3017 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

the home, the amateur tradition remained strong. In
most fields of artistic endeavour, Britain and the United
States remained the dominant influences. Perhaps
the outstanding original achievements in Canadian
cultural production in this period occurred in fiction.
Three developments stand out. One was the creation of
the Canadian social novel. A second was the rise of a
major figure in Canadian humour to carry on the ear-
lier tradition of Haliburton and McCulloch. The third
development, related to the previous two, was the emer-
gence of several Canadian authors as international
bestsellers. Some of these authors were women. All the
successful authors were at their best in writing about
the values of rural and small-town Canada at the end of
the nineteenth century.

The best example of the social novel—also a novel
of ideas—was The Imperialist by Sara Jeannette Duncan
(1862–1912). Duncan had been born in Brantford and
educated at the Toronto Normal School. She then
became a pioneering female journalist, working for a
long list of newspapers in the United States and Canada.
In 1888 she and a female friend began a trip around
the world, which she subsequently fictionalized. In
1904 she produced The Imperialist, a novel intended to
describe the Imperial Question from the vantage point
of the “average Canadian of the average small town . . .
whose views in the end [counted] for more than the
opinions of the political leaders” (quoted in Klinck,
1965: 316). Duncan drew on her childhood experiences
in Brantford to describe conditions in Elgin, a “thriv-
ing manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute,
eleven churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for
the deaf and dumb, to say nothing of a fire department
unsurpassed for organization and achievement in the
Province of Ontario” (Duncan, 1971 [1904]: 25). The
opening chapter began with an account of the celebra-
tions in Elgin on 24 May, the Queen’s Birthday. Duncan
interwove the issue of imperialism with the social
values of late Victorian Canada. For her protagonist,
young politician Lorne Murchison, Canada’s continu-
ation as a British nation was of moral rather than stra-
tegic importance.

Duncan was perhaps the first Canadian writer to rec-
ognize the literary potential of small-town Canada, espe-
cially for satirical purposes, but she was not the greatest.

Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) had been born in England,
but grew up on a farm near Lake Simcoe. Educated at
Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and the
University of Chicago, Leacock published a successful
college textbook, Elements of Political Science, in 1906. He
produced his first volume of humorous sketches, Literary
Lapses, in 1910, and two years later published Sunshine
Sketches of a Little Town. This was an affectionate satirical
look at life in Mariposa, a fictionalized version of Orillia,
the nearest town to his boyhood home. Leacock per-
fectly captured the hypocrisy, materialism, and inflated
notions of importance possessed by Mariposa’s residents.
He followed this triumph with a much more savage sat-
ire of a North American city, obviously the Montreal in

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) sold the rights to her
highly successful novel Anne of Green Gables to an American
publisher for $500. Anne has gone on to become a mythic
Canadian heroine, equally popular in Japan as in Canada
itself. Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward
Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery 3110-1.

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302 A History of the Canadian Peoples

which he lived and taught (at McGill University). The
work was entitled Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
(1914). In this book, which he pretended to set somewhere
in the United States, Leacock began the transference of
his satire from Canada to North America. He moved on
from these early works to produce a volume of humorous
sketches virtually every year, increasingly set in an inter-
national milieu. His books were very popular in Britain
and the United States. Many critics feel that Leacock’s

best work was his early Canadian satire, in which he
scourged Canadian pretensions.

Duncan and Leacock both achieved international
reputations as writers of fiction, and they were joined by
several other Canadians in the years between 1900 and
1914. One was the Presbyterian clergyman Charles W.
Gordon (1860–1937), who under the pseudonym “Ralph
Connor” was probably the best-selling writer in English
between 1899 and the Great War. Born in Glengarry

The Spell of the Yukon

Document

I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.

No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.

You come to get rich (damned good reason);
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end.

British-born Robert W. Service (1874–1958) was the most popular poet in Canada at the end of the
nineteenth century, best known as the “poet of the Yukon.” His poem, “The Spell of the Yukon,”
reprinted below, suggests his attraction.

The Chilkoot Pass. This iconic photograph suggests some of the
difficulties gold seekers endured to reach the Yukon. © World
History Archive/Alamy.

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3037 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

County, Canada West, and educated at the University
of Toronto and Edinburgh University, Gordon became
minister of a Presbyterian church in Winnipeg, where
he lived for the remainder of his life. Ralph Connor’s first
three books, published between 1899 and 1902, sold over
five million copies. One of these, Glengarry School Days:
A Story of Early Days in Glengarry (1902), was probably
the best book he ever wrote. Like Duncan and Leacock,
Connor excelled at the evocation of small-town life and

mores, drawing from his personal experiences as a boy. He
was not a great writer but knew how to sustain a narrative
and to frame a moral crisis. Some of his work—including
novels in which clerical examples of muscular Christianity
faced a variety of frontier challenges—obviously struck a
responsive chord in an international audience. Connor’s
heroes triumphed over sin, anarchy, and unregenerate
people by sheer force of character, Christian conviction,
goodness, and even physical strength; they represented

I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.

The summer—no sweeter was ever;
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness—
O God! how I’m stuck on it all.

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.

There’s a land where the mountains are
nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.

They’re making my money diminish;
I’m sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish
I’ll pike to the Yukon again.
I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;
It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;
And it’s better than this by a damsite—
So me for the Yukon once more.

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

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304 A History of the Canadian Peoples

A wooden church in the French Gothic style located

on Prince Edward Island, St Mary’s Church in

Indian River was designed by William Critchlow Harris

(1854–1913), perhaps the leading architect in the

Maritime  provinces in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Harris was born near Liverpool,

England, and immigrated with his family to the Island

in 1856. One of seven children, he attended Prince

of Wales College and spent his life in the Maritimes,

a residential choice that may have cost him the

opportunity to achieve a national or even inter-

national reputation as did his elder brother Robert

Harris, the painter. Harris began designing churches

in 1880, most of them located on PEI or in Nova

Scotia. Although he frequently built with stone, his

most characteristic and iconic churches are, like St

Mary’s, renderings in wood of buildings in the Gothic

style. Indeed, his adaptation of wood to a Victorian

vocabulary was his most original contribution to the

architectural landscape of the region. The buildings

stand out today partly because they are painted in

bright colours. Harris began working in High Victorian

Gothic, but gradually shifted to French Gothic, as

exemplified in St Mary’s. A keen amateur musician,

Harris’s churches were invariably acoustical triumphs,

in effect musical instruments rendered as buildings.

This church was decommissioned by 2009 and is

presently used as a concert hall. Harris’s designs were

distinguished by multi-paned pointed-arch Gothic

windows and often by circular side-towers, as well

as clipped gable roofs and bargeboards with drilled

holes as decoration. The tower at Indian River also

contains representations of the 12 apostles, perhaps

a tribute to the Cathedral at Chartres. Harris’s willing-

ness to adapt wood to the Gothic style is an obvious

repurposing of a specific material culture tradition

to Canada. The use of classic architectural forms to

produce distinctively regional churches is a repeated

theme of colonial encounters, but in St Mary’s we see

that trend continuing even after Canada has become

an established nation. That the building now hosts

concerts and other musical events is a holdover from

the interests of its architect, but also an adaptation of

the space to present needs.

Material Culture

St Mary’s Church. © Bill Gozansky/Alamy.

St Mary’s Church, Indian River, Prince Edward Island

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3057 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

what his generation saw as the forces of civilization and
progress. Fellow Presbyterian Nellie McClung (1873–1951)
also had great success with similar material, even less art-
fully rendered, in books such as Sowing Seeds in Danny
(1908); her fame was more in the political arena.

A much superior artist was Lucy Maud Montgomery
(1874–1942), whose Anne of Green Gables also first appeared
in 1908. Montgomery’s books lovingly described rural
life and presented some of the standard dilemmas faced
by her readers, ranging from growing up to having to
leave the farm.

Imperialism, Reform,
and Racism
Contemporaries often characterized Canadian political
life in this era in terms of its lack of ideology and its pre-
dilection for what the French observer André Siegfried
called the “question of collective or individual interests
for the candidates to exploit to their own advantage”
(Siegfried, 1907: 142). Lurking only just beneath the sur-
face, however, were some serious and profound issues.
First was the so-called Canadian question, which bore in
various ways upon the very future of the new nation. It
often appeared to be a debate between those who sought
to keep Canada within the British Empire and those who
wanted it to assume full sovereignty. Into this discus-
sion other matters merged subtly, including the “race”
question and the reform question. The former involved
the future of French Canada within an evolving Anglo-
American nation. The latter concerned the institution
of political and social change through public policy.
Debate and disagreement over the three loosely linked
issues—imperialism, Anglo–French antagonisms, and
reform—kept political Canada bubbling with scarcely
suppressed excitement from the 1880s to the beginning
of the Great War. Canada’s involvement in the military
conflict of Europe would bring those issues together,
although it would not resolve them.

Imperialism

The period from 1880 to 1914 saw a resurgence of imper-
ial development around the world. The French, the

Germans, even the Americans, took up what Rudyard
Kipling called the “White man’s burden” in underdevel-
oped regions of the world. About the same time, Great
Britain began to shed its “Little England” free trade
sentiments. The world’s shopkeeper discovered that
substantial windfall profits came from exploiting the
economies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, espe-
cially the last. Canada first faced the implications of
the resurgence of Britain’s imperial pretensions in 1884
when the mother country asked it to contribute to an
expedition to relieve General Charles Gordon, besieged
by thousands of Muslim fundamentalists at Khartoum
in the Egyptian Sudan. Sir John A. Macdonald’s immedi-
ate response was negative, but he ultimately found it
politic to allow Canadian civilian volunteers to assist
the British army. By the end of the century Joseph
Chamberlain at the Colonial Office in London was
advocating that Britain’s old settlement colonies be
joined together in some political and economic union,
the so-called Imperial Federation.

Encouraged by a new infusion of immigrants from
Britain—nearly half a million between 1870 and 1896
and a million between 1896 and 1914—many anglophone
Canadians began openly advocating Canada’s active
participation in the new British Empire. Their sense of
imperial destiny was not necessarily anti-nationalistic.
They saw no inconsistency between the promotion of
a sense of Canadian unity and a larger British Empire.
“I am an Imperialist,” argued Stephen Leacock in 1907,
“because I will not be a Colonial.” Leacock sought “some-
thing other than mere colonial stagnation, something
sounder than independence, nobler than annexation,
greater in purpose than a Little Canada” (quoted in
Bumsted, 1969, II: 78). Such pan-Britannic national-
ism came to express itself concretely in demands for
Imperial Federation. It was most prevalent in the prov-
ince of Ontario.

Unfortunately for the imperialists, not all Canadians
agreed with their arguments. Several strands of anti-
imperial sentiment had emerged by the turn of the cen-
tury. One strand, most closely identified with the political
journalist Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), insisted that the
geography of North America worked against Canadian
nationalism. Smith advocated Canadian absorption into
the United States. Fear of this development led many
Canadians to oppose a new reciprocity agreement with

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306 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Born in Chatsworth, Ontario, Nellie McClung (née
Mooney) (1873–1951) moved with her family to Manitoba
in 1880. After attending normal school in Winnipeg, she
taught in rural Manitoba for many years. She was active
in temperance work and in suffrage agitation. In 1896 she
married Robert Wesley McClung, a druggist, who prom-
ised, Nellie later reported, that “I would not have to lay
aside my ambitions if I married him.” Her emergence to
prominence began when she entered an American short
story competition in 1902 and was encouraged by an
American publisher to expand the story into the novel
that became Sowing Seeds in Danny, a lighthearted look at
village life on the prairies published in 1908. The book sold
over 100,000 copies, was in its seventeenth edition at the
time her death, and brought her both fame and fortune.

She and her husband moved to Winnipeg with their
four children in 1911, where she helped organize the
Political Equality League in 1912. Frustrated with the
difficulty of arousing male politicians to suffrage reform,
after some humiliating experiences she turned herself
into a first-rate platform speaker. In 1914 she organized
the Mock Parliament of Women, in which women played
all the political roles. McClung herself was Manitoba
Premier Rodmond Roblin, one of the major opponents of
women’s right to vote. McClung and her associates, sup-
porting the Liberal Party, were unable to defeat Roblin’s
government in the 1914 election, but it soon fell under
the weight of a construction scandal. The Liberal govern-
ment of Tobias Crawford soon made Manitoba the first
province in Canada to grant women the right to vote.

Meanwhile, the McClungs had moved to Edmonton,
where Nellie again led the fight for female suffrage. She
was also a strong supporter of the war effort and the Red
Cross. In 1921 she was elected to the Alberta legislature,
where she championed a host of radical measures of
the time, ranging from mothers’ allowances and dower
rights for women to sterilization of the mentally unfit.
She was defeated in 1926 when her temperance stance
became unpopular. Nellie subsequently helped in the
successful fight for Canadian woman senators. The
McClungs moved to Victoria in 1933. In her west coast
years, she became a CBC governor (1936–42), a delegate
to the League of Nations (1938), and an advocate of
divorce reform.

Throughout her life she was an active Methodist
and subsequently a member of the United Church, and
was prominent at the national and international levels
in her church work. Apart from her first novel, none of
her subsequent fiction has withstood the test of time
very well. McClung did better with her autobiograph-
ical memoirs, all of which were highly regarded and
reprinted. Like many early feminists, she was clearly
a figure of her own time. She supported the Great War
with almost bloodthirsty enthusiasm and was an active
advocate of eugenics.

Nellie McClung. CP PHOTO.

Nellie Letitia McClung

Biography

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3077 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

the United States in 1911. Another strand, led by John
S. Ewart (1849–1933), insisted on Canada’s assumption
of full sovereignty. Ewart argued that “Colony implies
inferiority—inferiority in culture, inferiority in wealth,
inferiority in government, inferiority in foreign rela-
tions, inferiority and subordination” (Ewart, 1908: 6). Yet
another perspective was enunciated by Henri Bourassa
(1868–1912), who advocated a fully articulated bicultural
Canadian nationalism. He wrote, “My native land is all
of Canada, a federation of separate races and autono-
mous provinces. The nation I wish to see grow up is the
Canadian nation, made up of French Canadians and
English Canadians” (quoted in Monière, 1981: 190). The
Bourassa version of nationalism was considerably larger
than the still prevalent traditional nationalism of French
Canada. As the newspaper La Vérité put it in 1904, “what
we want to see flourish is French-Canadian patriotism;
our people are the French-Canadian people; we will
not say that our homeland is limited to the Province of
Quebec, but it is French Canada.”

The most common confrontations over the role of
Canada within the Empire occurred in the context of
imperial defence. At Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebra-
tion in June 1897, Laurier had fended off a regulariz-
ation of colonial contributions to the British military.
The question arose again in July 1899 when the mother
country requested Canadian troops for the forthcom-

ing war in South Africa against the Boers. When the
shooting began on 11 October 1899, the popular press
of English Canada responded with enthusiasm to the
idea of an official Canadian contingent. But news-
papers in French Canada opposed involvement. As
La Presse editorialized, “We French Canadians belong
to one country, Canada: Canada is for us the whole
world, but the English Canadians have two countries,

Professor Stephen B. Leacock, Montreal, 1914. Leacock was
both a successful Canadian writer of humorous fiction and a
skilled polemicist on the subject of Imperialism for Canada.
© McCord Museum.

We speak of “our Empire.” Have you ever considered

how little we Canadians count in that Empire, the most

wonderful fabric of human organization that has ever

existed. Of course, as far as land is concerned, and

water, and rocks, and mines, and forests, we occupy

a large portion of the Empire. As to population we are

only seven millions out of over four hundred millions.

As to imperial powers, we have none. The people of

the British Kingdom, forty millions in number, possess

as their sole property the rest of that Empire. Suppose

you except Canada with her seven millions, Australia

with her four millions and a half, New Zealand with one

million, and South Africa, with a little over one million

of white people: apart from those semi-free states, the

whole empire of India, the hundreds of Crown colonies,

and those immense protectorates in Africa or Asia, no

On Imperialism and Nationalism
One of the opponents of Canadian imperialism was Henri Bourassa (1868–1952). In 1912 he
explained his position in an address to the Canadian Club.

Continued…

Contemporary Views

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308 A History of the Canadian Peoples

one here and one across the sea.” The government com-
promised by sending volunteers, nearly 5,000 before
the conflict was over. The defence issue emerged again
in 1909, this time over naval policy. Under imperial
pressure, Canada finally agreed to produce a naval
unit of five cruisers and six destroyers. Both sides
attacked Laurier’s compromise Naval Service Bill of
January 1910. The anglophone Tories insisted it did

not provide enough assistance for the British, while in
Quebec nationalists and Conservatives joined forces
to fight for its repeal.

Reform

The reform movement of this period was rich and var-
ied in its interests. It ranged from the women’s suffrage

more belong to us than they belong to the Emperor of

Germany, or to the President of the French Republic.

We have no more to say as regards the government,

the legislation, the administration, the revenue and the

expenditure, and the defence of that territory, compris-

ing four-fifths of the total population of the Empire, than

have the coolies of India or the Zulus of Matabeleland!

I am not saying this in disparagement of the system; I

am simply putting our position as it is. At the present

time, the seven millions of people in Canada have less

voice, in law and in fact, in the ruling of that Empire,

than one single sweeper in the streets of Liverpool, or

one cabdriver on Fleet Street in London; he at least has

one vote to give for or against the administration of that

Empire, but we, the seven million Canadians, have no

vote and no say whatever.

When I hear splendid phrases, magnificent ora-

tions, sounding sentences, about that “Empire of ours,”

I am forcibly reminded of the pretension of a good

fellow whom I had hired to look after the furnace of a

building of which I had the management in Montreal.

Every year, when the time came to purchase the coal

for the winter, he used to exclaim, with a deep sense

of his responsibilities: “How dear it costs us to keep

up our building!” Our right of ownership, of tutelage,

of legislation, in the British Empire is exactly what the

right of partnership of that stoker was in that building.

. . . [A]t the sixth Imperial Conference, the dele-

gates from Australia, representing a courageous,

intelligent, progressive British community, with a

high sea trade amounting in imports and exports to

$650,000,000 a year, asked the representatives of the

British  Government why the British authorities, with-

out even thinking of asking the opinion of Canada, of

Australia, of South Africa, and of New Zealand, had

concluded with the great maritime powers the inter-

national treaty known as the Declaration of London,

which may affect beneficially or otherwise the trade of

the world in future naval wars. They enquired also if it

would be possible to have at least one representative

from the self-governing British colonies on the Board

of Arbitration, eventually to be constituted, under the

terms of that treaty, to adjudicate upon the seizures

of trade and ships in times of war. Sir Edward Grey,

undoubtedly one of the ablest men in British public

life to-day, showed there, I think, his great tact and his

extraordinary command of words and of diplomatic

means. But, when all the courteous terms and all the

frills were taken off, his answer amounted to this: On that

board the negro President of Hayti could sit, the negro

President of Liberia could sit, but the Prime Minister of

Canada or of Australia could not sit, simply because

Hayti and Liberia are nations, whilst Canada or Australia

are not nations. He explained that the colonies were

not consulted because they exist only through Great

Britain, and that the moment Great Britain accepted that

treaty it applied to us as to her. Undoubtedly true and

another evidence, I think, to show that in the “imperial

partnership,” in the enjoyment of that imperial citizen-

ship of which we hear so much, there still remains a

slight difference between the British citizen in England,

Scotland and Ireland, and the British citizen of Canada:

one is a member of a sovereign community, the other

is the inhabitant of a subjected colony.

Source: H. Bourassa, Canadian Club Addresses 1912 (Toronto: Warwick Bros & Rutter, 1912), 78–80.

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3097 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

movement to various efforts at social and humanitarian
change. Mainstream Canadian reform movements had
some features in common, however. Their leaders were
members of the middle and professional classes who
shared assumptions of the age about regeneration and
social purity. Those of Protestant backgrounds tended
to predominate, particularly in temperance/prohibition,
public health, education, and women’s suffrage. Women,

because of their general nurturing role in society, played
a major role in most reform movements. These women
were often less concerned with restructuring gender
roles in society than with the need for inculcating
middle-class virtues or with helping the poor. French-
Canadian women were significantly under-represented
in most national reform movements, partly because of
the political isolation of Quebec and partly because the

The average age of school children is from six to six-

teen years. During this time both mind and body are

undergoing development. Throughout school per-

iod the growth of the body is continued until almost

completed. There are unusual demands, therefore,

upon the functions of absorption and assimilation.

The food must be abundant, and of the charac-

ter to furnish new tissue, and to yield energy in the

form of heat and muscular activity. The food should

also contain salts of lime to meet the requirements

of formation of the bones and teeth. Many children

acquire habits of dislike for certain articles of food,

which become so fixed in later life that they find it

very inconvenient, especially when placed in circum-

stances, as in travelling, where one cannot always

obtain the accustomed diet; it therefore is unwise

to cultivate such habits, which are often a serious

obstacles to normal development. . . . An important

consideration in school diet is to avoid monotony,

which becomes so common from economic rea-

sons, or more often from carelessness. It is much

easier to yield to routine and force of habit than to

study the question. The hours for study and for

meals should be regulated that sufficient time will be

allowed before each meal for children to wash and

prepare themselves comfortably without going to the

table excited by hurry, and they should be required to

remain at the table for a fixed time, and not allowed

to hastily swallow their food in order to complete an

unfinished task or game. An interval of at least half an

hour should intervene after meals before any men-

tal exertion is required. Constant nibbling at food

between meals should be forbidden; it destroys the

appetite, increases the saliva, and interferes with gas-

tric digestion. . . . [C]hildren should have their meals

made tempting by good cooking and pleasant var-

iety, as well as an agreeable appearance of the food.

Meat which is carved in unsightly masses and vege-

tables which are sodden and tasteless will be refused,

and an ill attempt is made to supply the deficiency in

proper food by eating indigestible candy, nuts, etc.

Children often have no natural liking for meat, and

prefer puddings, pastry or sweets when they can

obtain them; it is therefore more important that meat

and other wholesome foods should be made attract-

ive to them at the age when they need it.

A Few General Rules Regarding Diet for School Children
Adelaide Hoodless (1858–1910) was the leading advocate of domestic science in Canada before the
Great War. She was also the inspiration for the organization of Women’s Institutes, and with her friend
Lady Aberdeen (the wife of the Governor General) she was the co-founder of the National Council
of Women of Canada, the national YWCA, and the Victorian Order of Nurses. In 1898 she published a
textbook entitled Public School Domestic Science, from which the following is an excerpt.

Contemporary Views

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310 A History of the Canadian Peoples

ideology of the traditional society greatly limited the
place of women in that province.

The suffrage movement did emphasize the gender
question. It addressed women’s political powerless-
ness by attempting to win for them the right to vote.
The movement was chiefly an urban one, dominated
by well-educated women who saw political power as
necessary to bring about other legislative change. The
suffragist leaders were almost exclusively Canadian or
British-born and belonged to the mainline Protestant
churches. Well over half of these women were gainfully
employed, mostly in journalism and writing. The suffra-
gists gradually lost contact with working-class women,
who were suspicious of the class biases in both the suf-
frage and reform movements. They also failed to gain
the support of farm women because they did not under-
stand rural issues, especially the concern over rural
depopulation. Many rural women became involved
in their own organizations designed to deal with
their own problems, such as the Women’s Institutes.
Adelaide Hoodless (1858–1910) founded the first
Institute at Stoney Creek, Ontario, in 1897. (In Henry
James Morgan’s biographical compilation The Canadian
Men and Women of the Time, 2nd edn, 1912, Hoodless is
listed under the entry for her husband John, who was an
obscure furniture manufacturer in Hamilton.) Women’s
Institutes promoted appreciation of rural living, as
well as encouraging better education for all women for
motherhood and homemaking. In 1919 the Federated
Women’s Institutes of Canada organized with its motto
“For Home and Country.”

One female reform organization, the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, had both rural and urban
memberships. Founded in 1874 in Picton, Ontario, the
WCTU claimed 10,000 members by 1900 and had an
influence far beyond that number. Despite its name, the
WCTU wanted prohibition, soon seeing the elimination
of alcoholic beverages as a panacea for many of the ills
currently besetting Canadian society, such as crime,
the abuse of women and children, political corruption,
and general immorality. The WCTU was only one of sev-
eral members of the Dominion Alliance for the Total
Suppression of the Liquor Traffic. Like most Canadian
reform movements, prohibition required state inter-
vention to be effective, and this eventually led some
of its supporters to women’s suffrage. Laurier held a

national referendum on prohibition in 1898. Although
its supporters won a narrow victory, the Prime Minister
refused to implement national legislation because only
20 per cent of the total electorate had supported the
principle. The prohibitionists turned to the provinces,
succeeding in getting legislation passed in Prince
Edward Island in 1900 and in Nova Scotia in 1910. The
local option was even more effective, since it involved
local communities where prohibitionist sentiment
could be strong. Prohibitionism exemplified both
the best and the worst features of reform. It had little
Catholic or urban working-class support. Moreover,
it tended to clothe its single-minded arguments with
intense moral fervour, often of the social purity variety.

Humanitarian reform, usually of urban abuses,
often focused on the human victims of disastrous indus-
trial social conditions. One of the main spearheads of
such reform was the social gospel. Beginning in the
Methodist Church and expanding to all Protestant
denominations in Canada, the social gospel saw Christ
as a social reformer and the institution of the Kingdom
of God on earth as its (and his) mission. The growth of
city missions and church settlement houses led to the
establishment of the Social Services Council of Canada
in 1912. The most prominent social gospeller was J.S.
Woodsworth (1874–1942). Another branch of humani-
tarian reform involved various professionals who
became concerned with social problems through their
professional practices. Thus doctors, for example, were
active in promoting a public health system and in recom-
mending ways of improving public health care. Among
the medical profession’s public health recommendations
was compulsory medical inspection of schoolchildren.

Schools and members of the teaching profession
were also in the front lines of humanitarian reform.
In this period educators pushed not only for improved
schooling but for the schools to assume much of the
burden of social services for the young by acting in
loco parentis for the children of slum and ghetto dwell-
ers. The pressure for compulsory school attendance
legislation, extended on a province-by-province basis
across the nation by 1914, was partly reformist in
nature. Regular school attendance would provide a more
suitable environment for children than roaming the
streets or working in factories. The children might learn
skills that would lift them out of their poverty and (in

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3117 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

The Americanization of Canada

Document

In 1850, 147,711 persons of Canadian birth were living
south of the border—about one-sixteenth of the num-
ber of people living in the British possessions at the
same time. In 1860 the Canadian-born population of
the United States had increased to 249,970, a gain of
76 per cent, while the general population of the Union
was increasing at the rate of 35.6 per cent, and that of
the British provinces at about 33.6. In 1870 there were
493,464 Canadians in the United States, an increase of
97.4 per cent for the decade against 22.6 per cent for that
of the population of the Republic as a whole, and 16.2
per cent for that of the British colonies, now united in
the Dominion of Canada. . . . While the population of the
Republic was a little more than tripling in fifty years, and
that of Canada was being multiplied by less than two
and a half, the little Canada south of the boundary line
saw the number of its inhabitants multiplied by eight. Of
all the living persons of Canadian birth in 1900, more
than one-fifth were settled in the United States. But if
the statement stopped there it would be incomplete. In
addition to the native Canadians in the United States in
1900, there were 527,301 persons of American birth but
with both parents Canadian. There were also 425,617
with Canadian fathers and American mothers, and
344,470 with Canadian mothers and American fathers.
Thus there were in all 2,480,613 persons in the United
States of at least half Canadian blood, which is more
than half the number of similar stock in Canada. . . .

In density of Canadian population, ignoring all
other elements, Massachusetts stands first, exceeding
any province of Canada, and Rhode Island second. The
relative rank of the various Provinces and States previ-
ously named on this basis is:

Canadian population per square mile
1 Massachusetts 64.2
2 Rhode Island 64.0
3 Prince Edward Island 45.36
4 Nova Scotia 20.6
5 New Brunswick 11.2
6 Connecticut 10.9
7 New Hampshire 10.8
8 Ontario 8.4
9 Michigan 7.1
10 Vermont 6.8 . . .

Classified in the same way, the principal Canadian
cities in 1900–1 were:

1 Montreal 267,730
2 Toronto 208,040
3 Boston 84,336
4 Quebec 66,231
5 Chicago 64,615
6 Ottawa 49,718
7 Detroit 44,592
8 New York 40,400 . . .

In 1907 the American journalist Samuel E. Moffatt published a book entitled The Americanization
of Canada, which extended Goldwin Smith’s earlier arguments about the extent of Canadian
integration into the United States.

Source: Samuel Erasmus Moffatt, The Americanization of Canada (1907).

the case of immigrants) they would become assimilated
to the values of Canadian society.

Educators clearly believed that using schools for
reform purposes was in the best interests of Canadian

society. It was also in their best interest. Compulsory
education opened more employment and introduced
the educator as social expert, a professional who
knew more about what was important for children than

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312 A History of the Canadian Peoples

parents, particularly the parents of the disadvantaged.
Compulsory education, medical examinations, school
nurses, and lunch programs all were part of a new
form of social engineering that would only increase in
emphasis over the century.

In the course of time, many of the private agen-
cies of reform became conscripted as quasi-public ones
under provincial legislation. They served as arms of
the state in the intermediate period before the estab-
lishment of permanent government bureaucracies.
Thus private child welfare programs became officially
responsible for abandoned, abused, and delinquent
children. Despite this trend towards a public approach,
the framework remained that of individual morality.
The humanitarian reformers commonly linked vice,
crime, and poverty. Even those who focused on poverty
tended to attribute it to almost every other cause than
the failure of the economic system to distribute wealth
equitably. The concept of a basic minimum standard of
living as the right of all members of society was slow
to develop in Canada. Attacks on poverty in this period
retained a certain class overtone, with a “superior” class
helping an “inferior” one.

Another whole category of reformers sought
structural alteration within the Canadian system.

Their model was often sound business practice, for
the leaders of this movement were usually successful
businessmen. They sought the elimination of wasteful
graft and corruption through political reform, the cre-
ation of publicly operated (and profitable) utilities to
reduce unnecessary taxation, and the introduction of
public planning. They tended to focus on the big city,
although they spilled over in various directions. These
reforms, which in the United States were associated
with the Progressive movement, all found allies within
associated middle-class and professional groups. The
City Beautiful Movement, for example, received much
of its support from an expanding community of profes-
sional architects, who combined an urge to plan the city
as a whole with aesthetic considerations of coherence,
visual variety, and civic grandeur. Like Americans,
many Canadians saw cities as the culmination of civil-
ization, and many grand plans made their appearance
on paper. Cities settled for a few monumental new
buildings, such as the imposing legislative structures
completed in many provinces before the war. Political
reform of municipal government concentrated on
“throwing the rascals out,” combined with structural
changes to reduce the damage they could do when they
were in. The changes often included the replacement of

Sample Questions for Junior Grade Examinations, May 1911

Document

1. If there are before you two tumblers of colorless
liquid and you are told one contains water and the
other alcohol, by what four tests can you determine
which contains alcohol?

2. Explain how the juices of raspberries, cherries and
currants are turned into wine. Why is the use of such
home-made wines objectionable?

3. Explain the real cause of the so-called “stimulating”
effect of alcohol on the heart.

4. Explain why employers do not wish to employ per-
sons who use alcoholic liquors, tobacco or narcotics.

5. Why is alcohol which quickens action, hurtful, while
exercise, which does the same thing, useful?

6. What is sleep? Show the necessity for it, and the evil
effects of narcotics upon it.

Source: Canadian White Ribbon Tidings, May 1911, as quoted in Sharon Anne Cook, “Through Sunshine and Shadow”: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,
Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 121.

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3137 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

The pioneering woman in the Canadian legal profes-
sion was Clara Brett Martin (1874–1923), who graduated
with high honours in mathematics from Trinity College,
Toronto, in 1890. In 1891 she petitioned the Law Society
of Upper Canada to be registered as a student. The pe-
tition was denied, and she was advised to “remove to

the United States,” where more than 20 states admitted
women to the bar. Instead of leaving the country, Martin
found an Ontario legislator willing to introduce a bill into
the provincial legislature that would explicitly define the
word “person” in the Law Society’s statutes as including
females. This initiative was supported by Dr Emily Stowe,
leader of the Dominion Woman’s Enfranchisement
Association, who gained the approval of Premier Oliver
Mowat for the new legislation. By the time it was passed
in 1892, the legislation was emasculated so that women
could only become solicitors (not barristers), and then
only at the discretion of the Law Society.

The Law Society subsequently again refused admis-
sion to Martin, and Oliver Mowat himself attended the
next Law Society Convocation to move her admission.
The Law Society agreed by the narrowest of margins, and
Clara Martin became a student-at-law, accepted as an
articling student by one of the most prestigious law firms
in Toronto. Martin met much disapproval from within
her law firm and was forced to change firms in 1893.
She was also harassed in the lecture halls of Osgoode
Hall and missed as many lectures as she possibly could.
She eventually completed her degree and easily passed
the bar examinations. Martin also pressed for revision of
the legislation that allowed women to act only as solici-
tors, not barristers. She won this battle, too, and then had
to face the Law Society again. A final controversy came
over the dress code for female barristers, when women
were required to wear their gowns over a black dress.
Martin was finally admitted as a barrister and solicitor
on 2 February 1897, the first woman in the British Empire
entered into the legal profession. She practised for most
of her legal career in her own firm in Toronto.

Clara Brett Martin, first female lawyer in the British Empire.
Law Society of Upper Canada Archives, Archives Department
collection, “Photograph of Clara Brett Martin,” P291.

Clara Brett Martin

Biography

elective councils with more professional government
by commission. Businessmen reformers also fought
fierce battles over the question of the ownership of
utilities. While the utilities barons complained of the

attack on private enterprise, the corporate reformers
countered by arguing that utilities were intrinsic mon-
opolies that should be operated in the public interest.
Much of the impulse behind reform of all sorts came

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314 A History of the Canadian Peoples

from fear of class warfare and moral degeneration. The
reformers did for the poor rather than with the poor.
The results were a vast increase in the public concerns
of the state and the beginning of the growth of a public
bureaucracy to deal with social matters.

Racism: The Darker Side of
Canada’s Growth

Racialist thinking was at its height during this period.
Part of the “race question” in Canada was not about
“race” at all, of course, but about the conflict between
French and English Canada. While there was no racial
barrier between French and English, contemporaries
accepted race-based arguments and analyses as “scien-
tific.” Many imperialists regarded the historical prog-
ress of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada as
evidence of the special genius of the “Anglo-Saxon race.”
The French were acceptable partners because they, too,
were a northern people. Out of the scientific theories of
Charles Darwin came the conviction that inheritance
was the key to evolution. Races were formed by natural
selection, exhibiting quite unequal characteristics. In
almost everyone’s hierarchy, the dominant Canadian
population was at the progressive top of the racial scale.
Newcomers who could not or would not assimilate
would inevitably lower the Canadian “standard of civil-
ization.” Sexual morality was an important component
of the racism of the time.

Canadians saw the new immigration after 1896
as particularly troubling. Even that secular saint J.S.
Woodsworth, the Methodist minister and social worker
in Winnipeg who would become a leftist federal par-
liamentarian and the first leader of the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation (CCF), associated crimin-
ality with the newcomers. Many feared the potential
degeneracy of the “great northern race” through com-
mingling with lesser stocks. Others concentrated on
the campaigns for social purity, mixing restrictions on
the consumption of alcoholic beverages with hostility
to prostitution, venereal disease, and sexual exploita-
tion. The first serious efforts at large-scale immigration
restriction, designed mainly to keep out the “degener-
ates,” began in the early years of the century. Campaigns
for social purity, immigration restriction, and exclusion

of Asians all came out of the same stock of assumptions
about heredity and environment that informed many
other reform movements of the period. The reformers
often emphasized social and moral aspects, directing
their efforts chiefly against newcomers.

Immigration restrictions came in three senses. One
was an insistence on the good health, good character,
and resources of the individual immigrant. A second
was an equally strong insistence on preventing group
immigration by certain peoples deemed unassimil-
able, headed by Asians but also including American-
born blacks. Efforts at a broader exclusionary practice
involved bilateral negotiations with foreign nations
to restrict the departure of their nationals, such as an
exclusionary agreement with Japan in 1907 that fol-
lowed anti-Asian riots in Vancouver. The third involved
provincial legislation, mainly in British Columbia, to
limit the rights of the unwanted. By 1907, the British
Columbia legislature had disenfranchised nationals of
China, Japan, and imperial India. Federal immigration
policy was expressed mostly in informal ways before
1906, but thereafter, immigration authorities became
much more concerned with formal regulation of the flow
of newcomers, emulating the Americans in this regard.

In 1906 a new Immigration Act consolidated many
earlier laws, barring large categories of people, including
prostitutes and pimps, the insane, the mentally retarded,
epileptics, and the “deaf and dumb.” An expanded immi-
gration service in 1908 for the first time began to monitor
the border with the United States at 38 border crossings
across the continent—before this time the border had
been wide open with little checking of those crossing it in
either direction—and was allowed to deport individuals
who belonged to prohibited categories or become public
charges. In 1908, another amendment to the Immigration
Act provided that all immigration to Canada had to
come via a continuous journey on a through ticket from
the country of origin. This “continuous journey” proviso
was intended to make it more difficult for immigrants
to Canada to evade immigration restrictions placed by
the governments of their homelands, often established
at Canadian insistence, and it effectively cut off immi-
gration from India. Another restrictive Immigration Act
in 1910 gave the cabinet the power to regulate immigra-
tion according to race and to keep out “prohibited and

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3157 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

undesirable classes.” Any group deemed unsuited to the
climate or requirements of Canada could be deported
on grounds of political or moral undesirability. Political
grounds for rejection included the advocacy by a person
not a Canadian citizen of the overthrow by force or vio-
lence of the government of Great Britain or Canada. The
Act also introduced a head tax on all immigrants except
the Japanese, who had been paying $500 since 1903 (9–10
Edward VII Chap 27, An Act respecting Immigration).

Perhaps the most extreme example of Canadian
exclusionism occurred in May of 1914, when the
Japanese vessel Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver
harbour with 376 passengers aboard. Of these, 165 had
boarded at Hong Kong, 111 at Shanghai, 86 at Maji, and
14 at Yokohama. Of the passengers, 340 were Sikhs, a
people who had been arriving in British Columbia for
more than a decade. Most had been males from the Jat
Sikh community in rural Punjab who came to Canada as
sojourners, intending to return to their homes; accord-
ing to official Canadian statistics, the number of East
Indian adult females who entered Canada over the
years 1904–7 was 14, and the number of children was
22. The East Indian community soon began to become
organized and articulate. The Khalsa Diwan Society, a
fraternal organization with nationalist overtones, was
organized in Vancouver in 1907. East Indian revolu-
tionary agitators began their work in North America,
including Canada. Separating the activities of Indian
nationalists into those directed at abuses at home and
in host countries is not easy. Much of our knowledge
about the nationalists comes from information collected
by police undercover agents, and must be understood in
this context. The agents were convinced that the leading
nationalists were advocates of violence and terrorism.

The Komagata Maru’s organizer expected that
the Canadians would overlook the continuous voyage
requirement when the ship docked in Vancouver and that
the local community would raise the money for the head
tax. He was right on the second count but wrong on the
first. The Canadian government—backed by Vancouver
municipal authorities and the British Columbia govern-
ment, both of which became quite hysterical—refused to
allow the passengers to land. Conditions on board ship
deteriorated rapidly, and the incident quickly became
an international one. Canadian immigration authorities

attempted to storm the vessel by force but were driven
off. Eventually the ship sailed out of Vancouver harbour
under naval escort and headed back to India, a powerful
symbol of Canada’s exclusionism.

Canada’s Entrance into the
Great War
The sudden arrival of the Great War in September of
1914 would subsume events such as those in British
Columbia, as it would virtually everything in Canadian
life. Canada officially went to war at 20:45 hours (Ottawa
time) on 4 August 1914, as an automatic consequence of
the British declaration of war on Germany. If Canada
had no voice in the decision to go to war, it did have some
control over the extent of its involvement, and it chose to
plunge into the maelstrom quickly and completely. The
Canadian Minister of Militia was Colonel Sam Hughes,
who had long expected that Canadians would eventu-
ally meet Germans on the battlefield. On 10 August, an
Order-in-Council permitted him to call 25,000 men to
the colours. By this time, some militia units had already
begun appealing for recruits. In Winnipeg, for example,
Lieutenant-Colonel J.W. de C. O’Grady had mustered
his unit, the 90th Winnipeg Rifles, in their drill hall
and announced that he had promised that the regiment
would turn out “not only [in] full strength but one thou-
sand strong. Who goes?” (Tascona and Wells, 1983: 63).
The response was overwhelming, and on 9 August—
the day before the Order-in-Council—the Rifles held
a recruiting parade on the streets of Winnipeg. When
formal sign-ups began after 10 August, one of the rules
was that married men had to have the permission of
their wives, many of whom dragged their spouses out of
the ranks while brandishing their marriage certificates.
These early volunteers had virtually no uniforms or
equipment, and were sent for first training aboard trams.

By the time the Canadian Parliament met on
18 August the die was cast. Canadian volunteers would
participate in the war on a massive scale. On 22 August
Parliament passed “An Act to confer certain powers upon
the Governor in Council in the event of War, Invasion, or
Insurrection”—the famous War Measures Act—enabling
the government to act in the defence of the realm with-
out consulting Parliament. Before August was over,

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316 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Sam Hughes had created a vast training camp north-
west of Quebec City at Valcartier—a tent city capable of
housing 32,000 men. Before the end of September the
first contingents of soldiers from Valcartier were board-
ing the passenger liners that would take them to Britain.
The fleet sailed on 3 October and arrived at Plymouth
11 days later. “Canada’s Answer,” as the British called
the new arrivals, numbered 31,200. Sent to bivouac on
Salisbury Plain, they were finally reviewed by King
George V on 4 February 1915, and before the end of
the month they were suffering their first casualties on
the front lines in France. One of the advantages of the
breathtaking speed with which Hughes had moved to
create Canadian regiments was that Canadian troops

were kept together as units rather than being broken up
and integrated into the British forces.

World War I brought to fruition several major
trends of the period between 1885 and 1914. It marked a
triumph of sorts for Canadian imperialism, for example,
as Canada subordinated its substantial military effort
to the needs and direction of Great Britain. It also
rejuvenated Canadian reform. The patriotic fervour of
the war and the eventual political isolation of French
Canada made possible a sweeping program of reform,
much of which French Canada had opposed. Reform has
always required an active state, and wartime conditions
encouraged the Canadian government to intervene in
almost all areas of life and work.

How History Has Changed: Aboriginal Peoples
and Christian Missions

Susan Neylan, Wilfrid Laurier University

For a long time, histories of Christian missions to Aborig-
inal peoples in Canada privileged the churches’ perspec-
tives and valorized heroic missionaries. They highlighted
conversion experiences and, for the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, emphasized what was termed
the “civilizing” project. Historians told the story of how
Aboriginal people encountered Christianity through the
teachings of Euro-Canadian missionaries and cast aside
former belief systems for the new religion and, often,
its Western associations. Aboriginal spiritualities and
Christianity were cast in opposition to one another.

Parallel to the rise of Native history as a distinct
field of Canadian historical scholarship in the 1970s and
1980s, a new generation of mission historians arose who
gave far more attention to the role of Aboriginal peoples.
Scholars stressed either their agency or victimization
by casting a critical eye on the churches and mission-
aries. John Webster Grant’s Moon of Wintertime (1984)

argues that Aboriginal peoples accepted Christianity at
a moment of severe cultural disruption; as missionaries
arrived on the scene bent on transforming Aboriginal
cultures, Native spiritual systems were thrown into
crisis. First Nations were not helpless in this encounter,
yet they had little input beyond the local context.

However, this generation of scholars also high-
lighted the importance of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis
in the narrative. Many actively resisted the encroach-
ment of missions through rejection and opposition;
others embraced elements of Christianity and assumed
roles of leadership within the missions and churches.
Such latter individuals were cast as cross-cultural medi-
ators who enabled the transmission and the translation
of religious ideas. Accordingly, biographies of Aboriginal
men and women abound in the literature, ranging from
those who enthusiastically spread the gospel as mission
employees to others who walked in two worlds. Winona

Historiography

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3177 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

Wheeler’s study (2003) of Askeenootow (Charles Pratt)
demonstrates how adopting Christianity was never a
clear-cut replacement of his Cree-Assiniboine identity
with the Christian one.

The third scholarly generation was influenced
by the so-called “cultural turn” of the 1990s that drew on
theories from anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics,
and literary studies, notably post-colonial literature. It
encouraged historians to look at the big picture, particu-
larly when it came to culture, and the socially constructed
nature of all human reality. Historians recognized the
place of missions within older frameworks of Indigenous
histories of change and continuity and broader patterns
of systemic colonialism. Accordingly, the encounter bet-
ween Aboriginal peoples and Christians came to be
represented in far more nuanced terms than the mission
hagiographies of the first generation or the agency/vic-
timization or Aboriginal spirituality/Christianity mod-
els of the second.

Scholars proceeded from the idea that Christianity
can be translated and incorporated as an integral
part of an authentic Indigenous identity without hav-
ing to wholly replace what came before. Adopting a
post-colonial interpretation, Aboriginal spiritual practi-
ces were seen to have altered Christianity itself. Hence
the Aboriginal–Christian encounter could be studied
from points on meeting and similarities, instead of only
underscoring distance and differences. Susan Neylan
(2003) studies the role in mission work of the first gen-
eration of Aboriginal Christian converts, highlighting
their contributions to mission forms in ways that did not
forsake older spiritual traditions, despite the negative
effects of missions. Many turned to Christianity for
more than its spiritual appeal and resonance. They
were seeking citizenship in a wider Western framework
that would allow them to survive as Indigenous people
regardless of the political, economic, and cultural chan-
ges instituted under colonialism.

Third-generation scholars demonstrate Aboriginal
creativity and initiative alongside missionary coer-
cion and dogma, and analyze the impact of the
Indigenization (whereby Christianity is made cultur-
ally relevant and naturalized as their own), syncretism
(the creation of new beliefs and practices through the

compatibility of religious forms and traditions), and
genuine conversion. However, there is no denying the
part Christian churches played in the colonial pro-
cess itself, which included the attempted destruction
of Aboriginal cultures, identities, lands, and resour-
ces. Aboriginal residential schools are probably the
best-known tool of Christian colonialism. J.R. Miller’s
Shingwauk’s Vision (1996), John Milloy’s A National
Crime (1999), and studies authored by residential
school survivors expose this dark, shameful aspect of
Aboriginal–Christian relations.

Whether talking about first-generation scholars
or those of the twenty-first century, the trajectory of
this historical scholarship has also been heavily influ-
enced by changes in methodologies. Initially, church
records and missionary accounts comprised the bulk
of the primary sources used as evidence. There were
Aboriginal voices within this colonial archive, but
usually very few, or the materials had to be read closely
“against the grain” to find Aboriginal perspectives. This
changed with the application of ethnohistorical meth-
odologies. Ethnohistory is an approach to the study of
the Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal encounter that consid-
ers textual, oral, and material sources in its analysis.
Scholars sought to evaluate Native responses to Christian
missions in as much detail as they had invested in the
examination of missionary goals and criteria.

More recently, ethnohistorians have turned from
colonialism as the only way to assess the encounter
between the colonizers and the colonized. Change, even
when it first appears to be evidence of colonialist suc-
cesses at work, can simultaneously exemplify cultural
continuities. Canadian history can also be situated
within Aboriginal history and chronologies. Research
with rather than about Aboriginal peoples, employing
Indigenous research methodologies, has served to
accentuate Aboriginal voices, world views, and concep-
tualizations of the past. Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las
(2012) reconsiders one Christian Aboriginal woman’s
life in the context of both Kwakwaka’wakw systems of
prestige, knowledge, and status and colonial political
histories. By prioritizing Indigenous insights and writ-
ten as a collaboration, the study shifts from merely an
analysis of Aboriginal–Settler interactions to one that

Continued…

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318 A History of the Canadian Peoples

shows internal community dynamics and tension. After
all, history is also negotiated in the present.

Bibliography
Agnes, Jack, ed. Behind Closed Doors: Stories from

the Kamloops Indian Residential School, rev. edn.
Penticton, BC, 2006.

Axtell, James. “Some Thoughts on the Ethnohistory of
Missions.” Ethnohistory 29, 1 (1982): 35–41.

Bradford, Tolly. Prophetic Identities: Indigenous Missionaries
and British Colonial Frontiers, 1850–75. Vancouver, 2012.

Carlson, Keith Thor. The Problem of Place, the Problem of
Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness
in the Cauldron of Colonialism. Toronto, 2010.

Furniss, Elizabeth. Victims of Benevolence: The Dark
Legacy of William Lake Residential School, 2nd edn.
Vancouver, 1995.

Grant, John Webster. The Moon of Wintertime:
Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter
since 1534.Toronto, 1984.

Gray, Susan Elaine. “I Will Fear No Evil”: Ojibwa–
Missionary Encounters along the Berens River, 1875–
1940. Calgary, 2006.

Haig-Brown, Celia. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the
Indian Residential School. Vancouver, 1988.

Johnston, Basil H. Indian School Days. Toronto, 1988.
Lutz, John Sutton. Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal–

White Relations. Vancouver, 2009.
Miller, J.R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native

Residential Schools. Toronto, 1996.

Milloy, John. A National Crime: The Canadian Government
and the Residential School System, 1879–1986.
Winnipeg, 1999.

Neylan, Susan. The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-
Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian
Christianity. Montreal and Kingston, 2003.

Regan, Paulette. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian
Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation
in Canada. Vancouver, 2010.

Robertson, Leslie A., with the Kwagu’ł Gixsam Clan.
Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook
and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom.
Vancouver, 2012.

Rutherdale, Myra. Women and the White Man’s God:
Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field.
Vancouver, 2002.

Sellars, Bev. They Called Me Number One: Secrets and
Survival at an Indian Residential School. Vancouver,
2012.

Smith, Donald. Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones
(Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians, 2nd
edn. Toronto, 2013 [1987].

———. Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from
Nineteenth-Century Canada. Toronto, 2013.

Wheeler, Winona. “The Journals and Voices of a Church
of England Native Catechist: Askenootow (Charles
Pratt), 1851–1884.” In Jennifer S.H. Brown and
Elizabeth Vibert, eds, Reading Beyond the Words:
Contexts for Native History, 2nd edn, 237–61.
Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003 [1996].

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3197 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

Avery, Donald. Reluctant Host: Canada’s Response to
Immigrant Workers, 1896–1994. Toronto, 1995. The
best synthesis of the topic.

Bacchi, Carole. Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the
English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877–1918. Toronto,
1983. An analysis of English-Canadian suffragism,
emphasizing the distinction between maternal and
radical feminism.

Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of
Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. Toronto, 1970.
The pioneer study of these ideas in Canada, and still
easily the best.

Bliss, J.M. A Living Profit: Studies in the Social History of
Canadian Business, 1883–1911. Toronto, 1974. A col-
lection of stimulating essays on Canadian business
in a critical period.

Bradbury, Bettina. Working Families: Age, Gender, and
Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal. Toronto,
1993. A valuable study on the effect of industrializa-
tion on the family and its strategies.

Carbert, Louise. Agrarian Feminism: The Politics of Ontario
Farm Women. Toronto, 1995. The first full-length
analysis of what farm women were up to before 1914.

Christie, Nancy. Engendering the State: Family, Work,
and Welfare in Canada. Toronto, 2000. A controver-
sial work that locates the origins of the Canadian
welfare state in the quest for stability for the family.

Copp, Terry. The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of
the Working Class in Montreal 1897–1929. Toronto,
1974. An early study of the urban working class in
Montreal, probably still the best analysis available.

Courville, Serge, and Normand Séguin. Rural Life in
Nineteenth-century Quebec.Ottawa, 1989. A synthe-
sis of a good deal of secondary literature, which
emphasizes how similar rural French Canada was to
English Canada.

English, John. The Decline of Politics: The Conservatives
and the Party System, 1901–20. Toronto, 1977. The
best study of politics before the Great War.

Heron, Craig. Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada,
1883–1935. Toronto, 1988. A brilliant account of the

origins of steelmaking in Canada, especially strong
on labour issues.

Johnston, Hugh. The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The
Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar. Delhi, 1979. A
dispassionate recounting of the story.

Linteau, Paul-André. The Promoters’City: Building the
Industrial Town of Maisonneuve, 1883–1918. Toronto,
1985. A wonderful study of the creation of an indus-
trial suburb in French Canada.

McCormack, A.R. Reformers, Rebels, and Revolutionaries:
The Western Canadian Radical Movement, 1899–1919.
Toronto, 1977. A work that resurrects and brings to
life a collection of radicals previously neglected in
the traditional literature.

McDonald, R.J. Making Vancouver: Class, Status, and
Social Boundaries, 1863–1913. Vancouver, 1996.
Urban social history that takes advantage of all the
latest conceptualizations.

Magocsi, Paul Robert. Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples.
Toronto, 1999. A co-operative project by dozens of
scholars providing a vast compendium of material
on Canadian ethnicity.

Miller, Carman. Painting the Map Red: Canada and the
South African War, 1899–1902. Montreal, 1993. The
best study of Canada and the Boer War.

Parker, Roy. Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to
Canada, 1867–1917. Vancouver, 2008. A thorough
scholarly synthesis of an emotive subject.

Petryshyn, Jaroslav. Peasants in the Promised Land:
Canada and the Ukrainians, 1891–1914. Toronto,
1985. A careful study of the early Ukrainian
migration.

Rollings-Magnusson, Sandra. Heavy Burdens on Small
Shoulders: The Labour of Pioneer Children on the
Canadian Prairies. Edmonton, 2009. A recent study
that suggests how much the settlement of the West
depended on the work of children.

Sager, Eric, with Gerald Panting. Maritime Capital: The
Shipping Industry in Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914.
Montreal, 1990. A study, based on quantitative data,
of an important industry.

Short Bibliography

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320 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Troper, Harold Martin. Only Farmers Need Apply: Official
Canadian Government Encouragement of Immigration
from the United States, 1896–1911. Toronto, 1972. The
standard work on the topic.

Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral
Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto, 1991.
One of the few overall syntheses of the reform move-
ment, focusing particularly on its moral dimensions.

Voisey, Paul. Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community.
Toronto, 1988. Probably the best historical commun-
ity study ever executed in Canada.

Walden, Keith. Becoming Modern in Toronto: The
Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late
Victorian Culture. Toronto, 1997. A work in cultural
studies that deconstructs the Toronto Industrial
Exhibition.

Study Questions
1. What role did the patronage system play in Canadian political parties in the years before the Great War?

2. How did the industrialization of the period 1885–1914 differ from that of the 1850s and 1860s?

3. Compare the major problems of urban and rural life in Canada in the early years of the twentieth century.

4. Are the differences between child labour in factories and on farms significant?

5. What does the poem “Town Directory” tell us about Treherne, Manitoba, in 1895?

6. How was Canada selling the western region to newcomers in 1907?

7. Discuss the relationship between the small town and the development of Canadian fiction, 1890–1914.

8. What were the linkages among imperialism, reform, and racism before the Great War?

9. Was Canada a country truly open to immigrants in this period? What were the limitations?

Visit the companion website for A History of the Canadian Peoples, fifth edition for further resources.

www.oupcanada.com/Bumsted5e

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