Confederation and Expansion

Confederation—the creation of a federal system—had been suggested early in the 19th century and had been urged by the Earl of Durham. It was not until 1864, however, that steps toward that end were actually taken. First, a coalition government in Canada, composed of both reformers and conservatives and headed by longtime foes Macdonald and Brown, was formed in June to work for a federal union. Then, in September, representatives of East and West Canada met with the leaders of the Maritime Provinces at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Finally, in Quebec in October, a conference of delegates from Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island adopted a set of resolutions outlining a plan uniting British North America. These resolutions were contained in the British North America Act, which was passed by the British parliament in 1867 and came into force on July 1 of that year.

The act created the Dominion of Canada, consisting of the four provinces of Ontario (formerly Canada West), Quebec (Canada East), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. (Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island chose not to join at this time.) The capital of the new country was at Ottawa in Ontario. One of the first acts of the new government, headed by Conservative leader Sir John A. Macdonald, was to seek annexation of the lands still held by the Hudson's Bay Company, which consisted of Rupert's Land and, to the west, the Northwestern Territory. Under pressure from the British government, the company surrendered its territorial rights in 1869, but kept its trading posts and privileges and some land. The lands annexed by the government were joined and called the Northwest Territories.

Transfer of authority from the company to the dominion government brought on the Red River Rebellion, 1869–70, led by Louis Riel. Riel and other métis (people of French and Indian ancestry) believed that the change would mean the loss of their rights, which included use of the French language and denominational schools, and perhaps might even mean the loss of their lands. The end of the rebellion was followed immediately by the creation, in the Red River region, of Canada's fifth province, Manitoba, on July 15, 1870.

In 1871 British Columbia—a colony established in 1858 at the far western end of the continent—joined the confederation. Its condition for joining was that a transcontinental railway be built within a decade. In 1873 the North-West Mounted Police (later called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) was established to maintain law and order in the northwest and to be a visible symbol of Canadian sovereignty in the region. Also that year, Prince Edward Island entered the union, following the federal government's offer to absorb debt incurred in constructing a trans-island railway and provide money to buy out the many absentee English landlords who owned most of the island.

Continuing fear that their land claims were threatened led the métis to rebel for a second time, in 1885, in what was called the Saskatchewan (or Northwest) Rebellion. The métis were again led by Riel and were allied with Cree Indians, who had been reduced to near starvation by the virtual disappearance of the buffalo. They clashed with government troops at Duck Lake, Fish Creek, and Cut Knife Hill before being defeated at Batoche. Riel was executed, but the métis did win some concessions. Most Indians were returned to the reserves that the federal government had created for them following land cessions in the 1870's.

The purchase of Rupert's Land led to the development of the west. Thousands of homesteaders from Europe, the United States, and eastern Canada settled the western prairies. By 1901 there were almost 500,000 people in the old Northwestern Territory. In 1905 two new provinces were created out of the region—Alberta and Saskatchewan. Thus a solid row of provinces reached from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. In 1912 a further change was made by the northward expansion of the provinces of Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec into land that had been part of the Northwest Territories.