Indigenous societies before European settlement
See how different peoples adapted to Canada’s regions, how contact with Europeans changed their lives, and which older terms the guide uses.
Long before European ships arrived, every region of what is now Canada was home to Indigenous peoples. The guide uses the older terms “Aboriginal” and “Indian.” The second came from early explorers who wrongly believed they had reached the East Indies. Today “Indigenous” and “First Nations” are the usual words, but recognize all of them, because test questions follow the guide’s wording.
Each people’s way of life fitted the land it lived on: some raised crops, others hunted and gathered. Around the Great Lakes, the Huron-Wendat and the Iroquois combined farming with hunting. In the Northwest, the Cree and Dene were hunter-gatherers. On the plains, the Sioux were nomads who moved with the bison (buffalo) herds. The Inuit depended on Arctic wildlife, and West Coast peoples preserved fish by drying and smoking it.
These societies were neither identical nor always at peace. Indigenous groups frequently waged war on one another over territory, resources and prestige. Those rivalries mattered once Europeans arrived, because they shaped the alliances newcomers formed—for example, Champlain’s alliance with nations that were already enemies of the Iroquois. Keep this in mind when the guide describes a century of war between New France and the Iroquois.
Contact brought traders, missionaries, soldiers and settlers, and Indigenous life changed for good. Lacking immunity to diseases carried from Europe, very large numbers of Indigenous people died. Yet during roughly the first 200 years of contact, Indigenous peoples and Europeans also built strong economic, religious and military relationships. The guide treats those partnerships, above all in the fur trade, as part of the foundation on which Canada was built.
Vikings, Cabot, Cartier and the name Canada
Build the opening exploration timeline and connect each explorer with the right country, coastline and achievement.
The first Europeans known to have reached Canada were Vikings (Norse) from Iceland. Roughly 1,000 years ago, having already colonized Greenland, they also landed in Labrador and on Newfoundland. What survives of their settlement, at L’Anse aux Meadows, is now a World Heritage Site. Because that stay did not grow into lasting settlement, the guide dates serious European exploration from almost five centuries later.
That exploration got under way in 1497 with John Cabot, an Italian who had immigrated to England. Sailing for England, he came ashore on Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island—the guide names both possibilities—and claimed the “New Founde Land” for the English Crown. Cabot drew the first map of Canada’s Atlantic coast. Even so, the English did not settle there until 1610, more than a century later.
France’s claim came through Jacques Cartier, who made three Atlantic crossings between 1534 and 1542 and claimed the land for King Francis I. No European before him had explored the St. Lawrence River or seen the places that are now Québec City and Montreal. His voyages gave France its claim to the St. Lawrence valley, which became the heart of New France.
Cartier also handed the country its name, almost by accident. Two captured guides used the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning “village,” and by the 1550s the name Canada was appearing on maps. An easy way to keep the explorers apart: Cabot means England, 1497 and the Atlantic coast; Cartier means France, 1534–1542 and the great river. Questions sometimes offer “land” or “river” as the meaning of kanata, so remember the exact word: village.
New France and the fur-trade world
Follow French settlement from Acadia to Québec, the alliances it relied on, and the fur trade and early businesses that shaped the economy.
France’s first lasting foothold came in 1604, when Pierre de Monts and Samuel de Champlain founded the first European settlement anywhere north of Florida. Their colonists began on St. Croix Island, today part of Maine, and then moved to Port-Royal in Acadia, now Nova Scotia; French settlers in that region became the ancestors of today’s Acadians. In 1608 Champlain built a fortress on the site of present-day Québec City, where the newcomers struggled through a harsh climate.
Champlain’s allies were the Algonquin, Montagnais and Huron—long-time enemies of the Iroquois. The Iroquois were a confederacy of five First Nations (later six), and they fought the French settlements for about a century until the two sides made peace in 1701. This is the cause-and-effect to remember: allying with some First Nations drew New France into a long war with others.
The colony’s economy ran on furs, above all beaver pelts, which Europeans wanted for fashionable hats. The French and Indigenous peoples worked together in this huge trade. The voyageurs and coureurs des bois—skilled, daring men who travelled by canoe—built strong alliances with First Nations. In 1670 England’s King Charles II gave the Hudson’s Bay Company a monopoly on trade across every territory whose rivers empty into Hudson Bay, and for roughly a century the Company competed with Montreal-based traders.
Capable leaders turned New France into a continental power. Under figures such as Jean Talon, Bishop Laval and Count Frontenac, French territory stretched from Hudson Bay all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Frontenac is remembered for defying the English in 1690: told to give up Quebec, he replied that his cannons would answer. Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, a hero of New France, defeated the English many times in the late 1600s and early 1700s, in places ranging from James Bay to the Caribbean island of Nevis.
The fur trade produced Canada’s first companies, formed under both French and British rule. The Hudson’s Bay Company, whose staff included French, British and Indigenous employees, came to dominate the northwest trade. Several of its posts—Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), Fort Edmonton, Fort Langley near Vancouver and Fort Victoria—later grew into cities. Financial institutions first appeared in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and the Montreal Stock Exchange followed in 1832. For centuries the economy relied on farming and on resource exports such as fur, fish and timber, moved by road, lake, river and canal.
The struggle for a continent and the Quebec Act
Understand how Britain won New France in 1759 and then chose to accommodate, rather than suppress, its French Catholic majority.
English colonies had lined the Atlantic seaboard since the early 1600s, and in time they outgrew New France in both wealth and population. Throughout the 1700s, France and Great Britain fought for control of North America. The turning point came in 1759 at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Québec City, where the British defeated the French. Both commanders, Brigadier James Wolfe for Britain and the Marquis de Montcalm for France, were killed leading their troops. The battle ended France’s empire in America.
After the war, the British gave the colony a new name: the “Province of Quebec.” Its French-speaking Catholic people, called habitants or Canadiens, now lived inside an English-speaking empire ruled by Protestants, and they worked hard to preserve their language, faith and customs. How Britain would govern them became one of the central questions of Canadian history. Britain chose accommodation rather than forced assimilation, as the Quebec Act below shows—a contrast with Lord Durham’s later advice that French Canadians should assimilate.
Two related events of these years appear in the guide’s chapter on who Canadians are. Between 1755 and 1763, during the war between Britain and France, more than two-thirds of the Acadians were deported from their homeland, an ordeal known as the Great Upheaval. And King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 first guaranteed Indigenous territorial rights and became the basis for negotiating treaties.
Britain’s answer to the Canadiens was the Quebec Act of 1774, which the British Parliament passed to govern the French Roman Catholic majority more effectively. Instead of imposing British ways, the Act adapted British institutions to the province’s reality. Catholics gained religious freedom and the right to hold public office—something not yet allowed in Britain itself. French civil law, which governs private matters such as property, came back into force, while British criminal law remained. The guide calls the Act one of Canada’s constitutional foundations and the start of a tradition of accommodation.
Sir Guy Carleton, later Lord Dorchester, championed this approach as Governor of Quebec and stood up for the rights of the Canadiens. In 1775 he beat back an American invasion of Quebec, and in 1782–83 he oversaw the settlement of Loyalists arriving in Nova Scotia and Quebec. Carleton ties three themes together: protecting French-Canadian rights, keeping Quebec out of the American Revolution and settling the Loyalists who came next.
Loyalists, Black history and abolition
Trace the Loyalist migration after the American Revolution and the steps by which slavery ended in British North America.
In 1776 the 13 British colonies south of Quebec declared independence and became the United States, and North America was again split by war. Over 40,000 people who stayed loyal to the Crown, known as Loyalists, fled persecution during the American Revolution and resettled in Nova Scotia and Quebec. Their arrival reshaped British North America and helps explain why Upper Canada was created in 1791 as a mainly Loyalist, English-speaking province.
The Loyalists were remarkably varied. Their origins included Dutch, German, British, Scandinavian and Indigenous peoples, and their faiths ranged from Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist to Quaker, Jewish and Catholic. Joseph Brant led thousands of Mohawk Loyalists into Canada. About 3,000 Black Loyalists, both free and enslaved, came north seeking a better life. In 1792 some Black Nova Scotians, left with poor land, departed to help found Freetown, Sierra Leone, a new British colony in West Africa for freed slaves.
Slavery has existed around the world, and it existed in early Canada too. The first campaign against the transatlantic slave trade took shape in the British Parliament in the late 1700s. Upper Canada took the Empire’s first provincial step toward abolition in 1793, led by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, a military officer and Loyalist. Simcoe, the province’s first Lieutenant Governor, also founded the town of York, which is now Toronto.
Britain then acted for the whole Empire in two steps. In 1807 Parliament outlawed the slave trade—the buying and selling of people—and in 1833 it abolished slavery itself throughout the Empire: 1807 ended the trade, 1833 ended slavery. Because slavery remained legal in the United States, thousands of enslaved people escaped by following “the North Star” to Canada, helped by the Underground Railroad, a Christian anti-slavery network.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an outspoken campaigner against slavery in the United States. She became Canada’s first woman publisher in 1853, when she helped launch and edit The Provincial Freeman, a weekly paper. It opposed slavery, encouraged Black immigration to Canada, promoted temperance (drinking less alcohol) and supported British rule. Questions may describe her by any of these roles, so link her name with “first woman publisher” and an anti-slavery newspaper.
The first assemblies and the Constitutional Act
See how elected assemblies spread through British North America and why the Province of Quebec was divided in 1791.
Canada’s democratic institutions grew gradually and peacefully, without a revolution. Nova Scotia led the way: its first representative assembly was elected at Halifax in 1758. Prince Edward Island elected one in 1773, and New Brunswick in 1785. In a representative assembly, voters chose members to pass laws, but real executive power still lay with the governor and the advisers he appointed. Closing that gap is what later reformers set out to do.
The Loyalist migration created a new situation in the Province of Quebec: a large English-speaking Protestant population now lived beside the French-speaking Catholic majority. The Constitutional Act of 1791 dealt with this by dividing the province in two. Upper Canada, later Ontario, had a mostly Loyalist, English-speaking and Protestant population. Lower Canada, later Quebec, was heavily Catholic and French-speaking. The split let each population be governed largely by its own majority.
The Act also gave each of the two Canadas its first legislative assembly chosen by voters, and it made the name Canada official—it has stayed in use ever since. Together, the two Canadas and the Atlantic colonies were known as British North America. A painting in the guide shows Lower Canada’s first elected Assembly meeting in Québec City on January 21, 1793, to debate whether both French and English should be used—an early sign of the language questions that run through Canada’s history.
Keep the two stages of self-government apart. Representative government, from 1758 onward, let people elect a legislature. Responsible government, won in the late 1840s, went further: the governor’s ministers needed the support of that elected legislature to stay in office. The rebellions of 1837–38 and the reforms that followed, covered after the War of 1812, are what carried the colonies from the first stage to the second.
The War of 1812 and the defence of Canada
Connect the war’s causes, defenders and battles with its lasting result: a Canada that stayed separate from the United States.
The War of 1812 grew out of Britain’s long struggle against Napoleon Bonaparte. After the Royal Navy destroyed Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Britain ruled the seas, and the British Empire, Canada included, fought to stop Napoleon from dominating Europe. British interference with American shipping during that fight angered the United States. Believing Canada would be easy to conquer, the Americans invaded in June 1812. They were badly mistaken.
Canada was defended by British soldiers backed by Canadian volunteers, French-Canadian militiamen and First Nations, including Shawnee warriors led by Chief Tecumseh. In the summer of 1812, Major-General Sir Isaac Brock took Detroit. Later that year he was killed at Queenston Heights, near Niagara Falls, while repelling an American attack—yet the Americans still lost the battle. Brock and Tecumseh are remembered together as the leading defenders of 1812.
In 1813 Lieutenant-Colonel Charles de Salaberry and 460 soldiers, most of them French Canadiens, stopped 4,000 American invaders at Châteauguay, south of Montreal. That same year Laura Secord, a pioneer wife and mother of five, walked a dangerous 30 kilometres (19 miles) to alert Lieutenant James FitzGibbon that the Americans were planning an attack. Her warning helped the British win the Battle of Beaver Dams, and she is still honoured as a heroine.
The fighting reached capitals and waterways too. At York (now Toronto) in 1813, American troops set fire to Government House and the Parliament Buildings. The British struck back in 1814: Major-General Robert Ross sailed from Nova Scotia with an expedition that burned public buildings in Washington, D.C., including the White House. Ross died in battle shortly afterward and received a funeral with full military honours in Halifax. At sea, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Shannon brought the captured USS Chesapeake into Halifax harbour in 1813, and the two sides also fought naval battles on the Great Lakes.
The American bid to conquer Canada had failed by 1814. That year the Duke of Wellington sent some of his finest troops to Canada. Afterward Britain paid for an expensive defence network, including the Citadels at Halifax and Québec City, Fort Henry at Kingston and a naval drydock at Halifax, all popular historic sites today. Wellington, who defeated Napoleon in 1815, picked Bytown, now Ottawa, as the end point of the Rideau Canal, one link in a chain of forts meant to deter another invasion—so he played a direct part in founding the national capital.
The war’s meaning is what the test cares about most. It was a successful defence against invasion that kept Canada independent of the United States, and today’s Canada–U.S. border is partly a result. It was not a war for independence from Britain: Canada stayed in the British Empire. Also keep the two burnings straight—Americans burned York in 1813, and the British burned Washington in 1814.
Rebellions, union and responsible government
See how failed rebellions and Lord Durham’s report led to a government that must answer to elected legislators.
By the 1830s, reformers in both Canadas felt that progress toward full democracy was far too slow. Some admired American republican values, and a few even wanted to join the United States. Armed rebellions broke out in 1837–38 in the area outside Montreal and in Toronto. The rebels lacked enough public support to succeed, and British troops and Canadian volunteers put the uprisings down. Some rebels were hanged or exiled, and some of the exiles later returned to Canada.
Britain sent Lord Durham, an English reformer, to report on the rebellions. He recommended merging Upper and Lower Canada and giving them responsible government, meaning the Crown’s ministers would need the support of a majority of elected representatives in order to govern. More controversially, he argued that the Canadiens would advance fastest by assimilating into English-speaking Protestant culture. The guide judges that this showed no real understanding of French Canadians, who were determined to keep French Canada’s distinct identity.
Durham’s first idea came true in 1840, when the two Canadas were joined into a single Province of Canada; his idea of assimilation did not. The reform era also produced future nation-builders. Two reformers of the period, Sir Étienne-Paschal Taché and Sir George-Étienne Cartier, went on to become Fathers of Confederation. So did Sir John A. Macdonald, who had served on the government side, in Upper Canada’s volunteer militia.
In the Province of Canada, Robert Baldwin and Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine worked as partners with British governors to win responsible government, while journalist and newspaper owner Joseph Howe led the same effort in Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia succeeded first, becoming the first British North American colony with full responsible government in 1847–48. In 1848–49, Lord Elgin, the governor of the united Province of Canada, introduced responsible government there with London’s encouragement.
Responsible government is the system Canada still uses: a government that loses a confidence vote in the elected assembly must resign. In 1849 La Fontaine, a champion of democracy and of French language rights, became Canada’s first head of a responsible government—roughly the role of a prime minister. His alliance with Baldwin showed that French- and English-speaking reformers could govern together.
This is a favourite area for test questions, so keep the people in their places. Joseph Howe belongs to Nova Scotia; La Fontaine and Baldwin to the Province of Canada. Lord Durham wrote the report, and Lord Elgin, the governor, put responsible government into effect. La Fontaine led a responsible government in 1849, eighteen years before Macdonald became the first Prime Minister of the Dominion in 1867.
Confederation and the growth of the Dominion
Learn who created Canada in 1867, how the federal system divided power, where the name Dominion came from and the order in which provinces and territories joined.
Between 1864 and 1867, with Britain’s backing, delegates from the Province of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia worked together to create a new country. History knows them as the Fathers of Confederation. The guide’s regions chapter calls Prince Edward Island the birthplace of Confederation (the guide gives no reason; historically, the first of these meetings was held in Charlottetown in 1864), yet the Island itself did not join until 1873.
The Fathers designed a federation with two levels of government: a federal government for the whole country and a government for each province. They divided the old Province of Canada into two new provinces, Ontario and Quebec, which joined Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the Dominion of Canada. Every province would choose its own legislature and run areas such as education and health. That division let French-speaking, Catholic Quebec manage matters close to its own culture while sharing a national government.
Canada was created by law, not by revolution. In 1867 the British North America Act was passed by the British Parliament, and the Dominion of Canada officially came into existence on July 1 of that year. Until 1982 the anniversary was celebrated as Dominion Day, honouring the day Canada became a self-governing Dominion; its official name today is Canada Day. Dominion Day is a common answer option, so know both names for the same holiday.
The name came from Sir Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick, an elected politician and Father of Confederation, who proposed “Dominion of Canada” in 1864. His inspiration was Psalm 72, which speaks of “dominion from sea to sea.” The phrase captured the dream of a strong, united, prosperous and free nation stretching across the continent. The title appeared in the Constitution, stayed in official use for roughly a century and is still part of Canada’s heritage. A 1923 Dominion $1 bill pictured in the guide shows King George V, who in 1921 gave Canada its national colours, red and white.
Canada’s first Prime Minister, who took office in 1867, was Sir John Alexander Macdonald, himself a Father of Confederation. He was born in Scotland on January 11, 1815, and moved to Upper Canada as a boy. He practised law in Kingston, Ontario, and was known as a talented politician with a colourful personality. Parliament recognizes his birthday, January 11, as Sir John A. Macdonald Day. The guide places his portrait on the $10 bill; note that the newer $10 note issued in 2018 features Viola Desmond, although older $10 notes showing Macdonald are still legal tender.
From Quebec, the key architect of Confederation was Sir George-Étienne Cartier, a Montreal railway lawyer, a close ally of Macdonald and a patriotic Canadien. He brought Quebec into Confederation and helped negotiate the admission of Manitoba, the Northwest Territories and British Columbia. Like Taché, he had been a reformer before Confederation. Cartier was never Prime Minister of Canada; a question about the first Prime Minister always points to Macdonald.
The Dominion then grew in stages. Manitoba and the Northwest Territories joined in 1870, British Columbia in 1871 and Prince Edward Island in 1873. The Arctic Islands were transferred to the Northwest Territories in 1880. Yukon Territory was created in 1898, Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905, Newfoundland and Labrador joined in 1949 and Nunavut was created in 1999. In the 1920s some people even proposed that the British West Indies join Canada; that never happened, but Canada keeps close ties with Commonwealth Caribbean countries and territories.
Métis resistance, the Mounties and the national railway
Understand the conflicts, institutions and railway behind Canada’s expansion from the Red River to the Pacific.
In 1869 Canada acquired the vast northwest from the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose flag had flown over Western Canada for some 200 years before Confederation. Nobody asked the roughly 12,000 Métis living along the Red River for their views. Louis Riel responded by leading an armed uprising and taking Fort Garry, the territorial capital. The country’s future was at stake: a Dominion meant to reach from sea to sea could not succeed without control of the interior.
Ottawa dispatched soldiers in 1870, and they recaptured Fort Garry. Riel escaped to the United States, and Canada created a new province, Manitoba. Riel was later voted into Parliament but never took his seat. In 1885, with westward settlement again threatening Métis and First Nations rights, a second rebellion broke out in present-day Saskatchewan; Gabriel Dumont was the Métis’ greatest military commander. Riel was tried for high treason and executed, a decision that drew strong opposition in Quebec. Many people honour Riel as a hero who defended Métis rights and as the father of Manitoba.
Following the first Métis uprising, Prime Minister Macdonald set up the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873 to keep the peace in the West and to assist in negotiating with First Nations. Its posts, including Fort Calgary and Fort MacLeod, grew into today’s cities and towns, and Regina served as its headquarters. The force lives on as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP, “the Mounties”), Canada’s national police and one of its most recognizable symbols. Among its famous members was Major General Sir Sam Steele, a frontier legend and soldier.
British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871 on Ottawa’s promise of a railway to the Pacific coast. British and American investors financed the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), and European and Chinese labourers built it. On November 7, 1885, the CPR’s Scottish-born director Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona) drove the last spike (at Craigellachie, British Columbia, a place the guide does not name). After years of heroic work, the “ribbons of steel” made a national dream real and became a powerful symbol of unity, physically linking the country from sea to sea.
The railway’s story also includes injustice. Once the line was finished, Chinese immigrants faced discrimination, notably the Head Tax, an entry fee charged on the basis of race; Ottawa formally apologized for it in 2006. Note that 1885 is a double date: the last spike, and the second Métis rebellion with Riel’s execution. And keep Donald Smith separate from Sir Sandford Fleming, whom the guide’s Modern Canada chapter credits with inventing the world system of standard time zones.
Western settlement, the South African War and the First World War
Link the settlement boom with Canada’s service in two wars, from Paardeberg to Vimy Ridge and the Hundred Days.
During the economic boom of the 1890s and early 1900s, Canada grew more industrial and attracted one million British and one million American immigrants. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first French-Canadian prime minister since Confederation, encouraged settlement of the West; the guide notes that he appears on the $5 bill. The railway made that settlement possible. Before 1914, settlers who included 170,000 Ukrainians and 115,000 Poles, along with tens of thousands of Germans, French, Norwegians and Swedes, made their homes in the West and built a thriving farm economy.
Most Canadians of the time were proud to belong to the British Empire. More than 7,000 volunteered for the South African War (1899–1902), commonly called the Boer War, and more than 260 died. In 1900 Canadians fought in the victories at Paardeberg (“Horse Mountain”) and Lillefontein, which strengthened national pride. Keep this war separate from the First World War: it was more than a decade earlier and was fought in Africa.
The First World War began in 1914 when Germany attacked Belgium and France and Britain declared war. Ottawa responded by forming the Canadian Expeditionary Force, later known as the Canadian Corps. Over 600,000 Canadians served, mostly as volunteers, from a population of only eight million. Women served too: more than 3,000 nurses, nicknamed “Bluebirds,” joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, and 2,500 of them went overseas. Canadian soldiers, who had used the maple leaf as an emblem since the 1850s, proved tough and innovative on the Western Front.
Their best-known battle came in April 1917, when the Canadian Corps took Vimy Ridge in France, at a cost of 10,000 killed or wounded. The victory won them a reputation for bravery as the “shock troops of the British Empire,” and the guide describes it as the first British victory of the war. One Canadian officer said that seeing soldiers from coast to coast attack together was like witnessing the birth of a nation. April 9 is now marked as Vimy Day, and the Vimy Memorial in France pays tribute to everyone who served and died in the battle.
The war also brought one of the guide’s “regrettable” episodes. Between 1914 and 1920 Ottawa held more than 8,000 former Austro-Hungarian subjects, most of them Ukrainian men, in 24 labour camps across the country as “enemy aliens,” despite British advice against doing so. Many belonged to the same wave of Prairie immigration described above. Expect questions that pair wartime achievements with wartime injustices.
In 1918 the Canadian Corps was commanded by General Sir Arthur Currie, a reserve officer whom the guide calls Canada’s greatest soldier. Alongside French and British Empire forces, it advanced through the war’s last hundred days, winning at Amiens on August 8, 1918—a defeat the Germans named “the black day of the German Army”—and then fighting at Arras, Canal du Nord, Cambrai and Mons. Once Germany and Austria surrendered, the Armistice of November 11, 1918, ended the war. Canada’s toll was 60,000 killed and 170,000 wounded. The war deepened both national and imperial pride, especially in English Canada.
Women get the vote
Follow the suffrage movement from Dr. Emily Stowe to the federal vote in 1918 and Quebec’s provincial vote in 1940.
At Confederation, only adult white men who owned property could vote, a limit that was common in most democracies of the time. Women’s campaign to win the vote is called the women’s suffrage movement. Dr. Emily Stowe, the first Canadian woman to work as a doctor in Canada, founded the movement here. Change came first at the provincial level: Manitoba led in 1916, becoming the first province to let women vote.
The First World War sped up change in federal politics. In 1917, with Dr. Stowe and other suffragettes having led the way, Sir Robert Borden’s government extended the federal vote in stages: first to military nurses at the front, then to women whose male relatives were on active wartime service. A year later, in 1918, most female citizens aged 21 and over won the federal vote.
Women soon entered Parliament as well. Agnes Macphail, a farmer and teacher, was elected in 1921 as the first woman member of Parliament (MP). Provinces granted the vote at different times; in Quebec, thanks largely to Thérèse Casgrain and other campaigners, women won the provincial vote in 1940, more than two decades after the federal vote. Note that Macphail’s election came only three years after most women won the federal vote.
These dates form a ladder worth memorizing: Manitoba (1916), wartime federal votes for nurses and soldiers’ relatives (1917), most women aged 21 and over federally (1918), the first woman MP (1921) and Quebec (1940). The right to vote kept widening after that—the guide’s Modern Canada chapter covers Japanese Canadians in 1948 and Aboriginal people in 1960—and today every citizen aged 18 or older may vote.
The Depression and the Second World War
Follow Canada from the Commonwealth and the Great Depression through a global war fought on land, at sea, in the air and in the Pacific.
After the First World War, the British Empire gradually turned into a free association of states, the British Commonwealth of Nations. Canada is still one of its leading members, alongside other countries that grew out of the Empire—India, Australia and New Zealand, for example, and several nations in Africa and the Caribbean. At home, the “Roaring Twenties” were boom years, with prosperous businesses and low unemployment.
The stock-market crash of 1929 ended the boom and brought on the Great Depression, nicknamed the “Dirty Thirties.” By 1933 unemployment stood at 27% and many businesses had collapsed. Western farmers suffered most, squeezed by low grain prices and severe drought. Canadians increasingly asked government for a social safety net: minimum wages, a standard work week and programs like unemployment insurance. In 1934 the Bank of Canada was set up as a central bank that manages the money supply and steadies the financial system. Immigration fell, and Canada turned away many refugees, among them Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany in 1939.
War came again in 1939, when Adolf Hitler, Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) dictator, invaded Poland and then conquered much of Europe. Canada joined its democratic allies to defeat tyranny by force. Over one million Canadians and Newfoundlanders served (Newfoundland was then a separate British entity) from a population of 11.5 million—a high proportion—and 44,000 were killed. The early battles were costly: Canadians fought bravely but lost in the defence of Hong Kong against Imperial Japan in 1941 and in the failed raid on Nazi-held Dieppe, on the French coast, in 1942.
Canada’s air and sea efforts were enormous. The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) fought in the Battle of Britain and supplied a high share of Commonwealth aircrew in bombers and fighters over Europe. Through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, more than 130,000 Allied aircrew trained in Canada, making Canada the largest Commonwealth contributor to the Allied air war. The Royal Canadian Navy’s finest hour came in the Battle of the Atlantic, where it guarded merchant convoys against German submarines, and Canada’s Merchant Navy helped keep Britain fed, clothed and supplied. By war’s end Canada had the world’s third-largest navy.
On land, the Allies invaded Nazi-occupied Europe to defeat Nazism and Fascism. Canadians helped free Italy in 1943–44. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, during the invasion of Normandy in northern France, 15,000 Canadian soldiers landed and took Juno Beach from its German defenders, a proud national feat depicted in a painting by Orville Fisher. About every tenth Allied soldier on D-Day was Canadian. Canadian troops went on to liberate the Netherlands in 1944–45 and helped bring about Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, ending six years of war in Europe.
The war against Japan touched Canada directly. Japanese forces invaded the Aleutian Islands, attacked a lighthouse on Vancouver Island and sent fire balloons over British Columbia and the Prairies, and Canadian prisoners of war taken at Hong Kong were treated with great cruelty. Four years of war in the Pacific ended when Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945. That gives the war two end dates to remember: May 8 in Europe and August 14 in the Pacific.
The war, together with public opinion in British Columbia, also led to a grave injustice. The federal government forcibly moved Canadians of Japanese origin away from their homes and sold their property without compensation, although the military and the RCMP had advised Ottawa that they were little threat to Canada. In 1988 the Government of Canada apologized for these wartime wrongs and compensated the victims. Compare it with two other wrongs in this chapter: the First World War internment of Ukrainians and the Chinese Head Tax, apologized for in 2006.
Remembrance Day and honouring veterans
Learn how Canadians remember those who served, the symbols used on November 11 and the numbers that tie the wars together.
Every November 11, on Remembrance Day, Canadians honour the veterans and fallen of all the wars Canada has fought in, up to today. The date recalls the Armistice that ended the First World War at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918. People wear a red poppy, and at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month they fall silent for a moment.
The day honours more than a million Canadians who have served and 110,000 who gave their lives. The maple leaf carved on fallen soldiers’ headstones, overseas and in Canada, is another reminder of that sacrifice. Those totals cover all of Canada’s wars together, so don’t confuse them with the figures for single wars: 60,000 killed in the First World War and 44,000 in the Second. Knowing which number belongs where is a common test trap.
The poppy is closely associated with “In Flanders Fields,” a poem written in 1915 by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian medical officer. It speaks in the voice of soldiers buried beneath the poppies of Flanders, who pass a torch to the living and ask them not to break faith with the dead. The poem is often recited at Remembrance Day ceremonies, where groups such as Scouts lay wreaths.
The guide also profiles Phil Edwards, a Canadian who served. Born in British Guiana, he was a track-and-field champion who won Olympic bronze medals for Canada in 1928, 1932 and 1936 before earning his medical degree at McGill University. In the Second World War he was a captain in the Canadian Army, and as a Montreal doctor he became an expert in tropical diseases.
Key facts to remember
- Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows dates from about 1,000 years ago. John Cabot mapped part of the Atlantic coast in 1497.
- Jacques Cartier explored the St. Lawrence and heard the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning village. Samuel de Champlain established Québec in 1608.
- Britain defeated France at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. The Quebec Act of 1774 protected Catholic religious practice and restored French civil law while retaining British criminal law.
- Loyalists moved north during and after the American Revolution. British forces, First Nations and Canadian volunteers defended Canada during the War of 1812.
- Responsible government means ministers must retain the confidence of the elected assembly. Reformers including Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine and Robert Baldwin helped establish it.
- Confederation created the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867, beginning with Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
- The Canadian Pacific Railway became a symbol of national unity and western expansion. Provinces and territories joined or were created over time; Nunavut was established in 1999.
- Canada’s sacrifices in the First World War—especially at Vimy Ridge—and the Second World War were important in the country’s growing national identity and independence.
Check yourself
- What does kanata mean, and who brought the name into European maps?
- Kanata means village. Jacques Cartier recorded the word during his St. Lawrence explorations.
- Why are the Quebec Act, the War of 1812 and responsible government important?
- The Quebec Act protected Catholic practice and French civil law; the War of 1812 defended Canada; responsible government made ministers accountable to the elected assembly.
- Which four provinces formed Canada in 1867?
- Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
- What did the Canadian Pacific Railway and Vimy Ridge come to symbolize?
- The CPR symbolized national unity and westward connection; Vimy Ridge symbolized Canadian achievement and sacrifice in the First World War.
Practice questions
Eight questions shaped like the official test: one right answer out of four, with the reason it is right. The timed twenty-question exams are in the app.
Which explorer mapped part of Canada’s Atlantic coast in 1497?
- Jacques Cartier
- John Cabot
- Samuel de Champlain
- Alexander Mackenzie
Answer: John Cabot. John Cabot sailed for England and mapped part of the Atlantic coast in 1497.
What does the Iroquoian word kanata mean?
- River
- Village
- Northern land
- Alliance
Answer: Village. Jacques Cartier heard kanata, meaning village; it became the name Canada.
What did Samuel de Champlain establish at Québec in 1608?
- A railway terminus
- A fortress
- The first Parliament
- A British naval base
Answer: A fortress. Champlain built a fortress at what is now Québec City in 1608.
Who fought at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759?
- Brock and Tecumseh
- Wolfe and Montcalm
- Riel and Macdonald
- Cartier and Cabot
Answer: Wolfe and Montcalm. British commander James Wolfe defeated French commander the Marquis de Montcalm; both died.
What did the Quebec Act of 1774 preserve?
- French civil law and Catholic religious practice
- Only British criminal and civil law
- An elected Senate
- Compulsory military service
Answer: French civil law and Catholic religious practice. The Act accommodated the French-speaking Catholic majority and restored French civil law while retaining British criminal law.
What was an important result of the War of 1812?
- Canada joined the United States
- Canada remained independent of the United States
- The provinces abolished Parliament
- France regained New France
Answer: Canada remained independent of the United States. British North America resisted invasion and remained separate from the United States.
Which four provinces formed the Dominion of Canada in 1867?
- Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
- Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and Quebec
- Quebec, PEI, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia
- British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba
Answer: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The original provinces were Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
What did completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway symbolize?
- The end of provincial government
- National unity from sea to sea
- The start of New France
- The abolition of the Crown
Answer: National unity from sea to sea. The railway fulfilled a national promise and became a powerful symbol of unity.