By P. E. Bryden
Before Europeans arrived in North America, by far the most heavily populated part of the continent was the Pacific Coast. Perhaps as many as three-quarters of Canada’s First Nation population lived west of Ontario. But all these First Nations communities, and the lands that they called home, were nothing more than [...more]

By P. E. Bryden
Quebec is Canada’s oldest province. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain established the first continuous permanent settlement in North America in 1608 on the shores of the St. Lawrence River at what would become known as Quebec City. The area had already long been inhabited by Iroquois and Algonquin First [...more]

How does Canada’s government work? How do its regions work? Who are our great prime ministers? This past Friday, our General Editor J.L. Granatstein spoke with Marc Montgomery on RCI’s The Link about these and other

By P. E. Bryden
A popular song in the 1960s declared Ontario “a place to stand and a place to grow.” As Canada’s most populous province, and the centre of the majority of Canadian business, it has certainly proven to be both a place to stand and a place to grow for many Canadians — more [...more]

By Patrick Brennan
After 1841, the colony of Canada comprised Canada West, overwhelmingly English-speaking and Protestant, and Canada East, predominantly French-speaking and Roman Catholic, though with a substantial English-Protestant minority. By the early 1860s, the legislature, which gave Canada East and West equal weight, had become paralyzed and the Canadas were headed for divorce. Canada West [...more]

By J.L. Granatstein
In 2009, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney announced the end of the nation’s heritage languages programme. He told a journalist that “I think it’s neat that a fifth-generation Ukrainian Canadian can speak Ukrainian — but pay for it yourself.”

By J.L. Granatstein
“When I would speak at the United Nations on anything that had to do with human rights or human security,” recalled one experienced Canadian diplomat, “I (always) got a very respectful hearing.” Why? The ambassador explained: “In terms of welcoming others and integrating them into society, nobody does it better than we do [...more]

By Robert Bothwell
The uneasy compromises that governed relations between English and French Canadians began to break down in the 1950s. French-Canadians had usually, if sometimes grudgingly, accepted that they were part of a Canadian nation, even if it meant that they had to cohabit with an English-speaking majority. A better-educated and more prosperous population in [...more]

Just last Thursday, we posted an item about a recent conversation happening on the website of our affiliated project, Bring Back the Act.  (You can read that post by clicking here.)  Today brings another exchange on the uniqueness of Canada’s Constitution that we hope is of interest to our Canadian Experience readers; it was sparked [...more]

By Robert Bothwell
One of the problems of a bilingual country is, inevitably, national unity. In Canada, national unity usually — though not always — refers to relations between English and French Canadians. Put another way, if the English-language majority leads, will the French minority follow?

An interesting online discussion came up on the website of our affiliated project, Bring Back the Act.  If you’re not familiar with this initiative, we are enlisting the help and support of all Canadians to bring back Canada’s original Constitution, The British North America Act of 1867 (The BNA Act), currently in London, England. As [...more]

By Robert Bothwell
The Conquest of 1760 was the culmination of 70 years of sporadic warfare between Great Britain and France. France’s main North American colony, New France, stretched from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Mississippi valley and prevented the British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard from expanding into the interior. The British colonies [...more]

By J.L. Granatstein
Let me begin with one simple fact: Toronto’s public schools declare themselves the most multicultural in the world. One school, Thorncliffe Park Public School in Toronto’s east end, has 1,913 students speaking 54 languages. What that means is obvious —  Canada today is a nation of immigrants.

By Patrick Brennan
Fifty years after its founding by Samuel de Champlain in 1608, New France, with fewer than 3,000 settlers, was little more than a collection of fur trade outposts. Preoccupied with European wars, France would never show much interest in the colony’s fate. Settlement took the form of the feudal seigneurial system, which provided [...more]

By Pat Brennan
According to scientists, stone-age nomadic hunters from Siberia crossed the Bering land bridge and migrated into the Americas some 15-20,000 years ago. By 1000 CE, with the Inuit occupation of the high Arctic, all of present-day Canada was at least thinly inhabited. Apart from brief visits by Vikings some five centuries earlier, [...more]

First, a quick site update:  due to the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend, next week’s instalment will be uploaded here the following day, on Tuesday, October 12.  Next week, The Canadian Experience begins the “Peoples” chapters of the series. Covering 8 columns, authors J.L. Granatstein, Patrick Brennan, and Robert Bothwell explore Canada’s First Nations, the early [...more]

By Michael Bliss
Jean Chrétien’s career shows how much can be accomplished in Canadian politics by someone who is ambitious, hard-working, and has good luck — even if they speak English with a very thick accent.
Chrétien did not speak English at all when he was elected to Parliament in 1963 from rural Quebec. He was only [...more]

Since late April, we’ve posted a total of 11 quizzes, based on some of The Canadian Experience columns.  So, a quick reminder for all as time is running out:  if you haven’t entered our random contest/draw for taking one of our quizzes, there’s still time. We will be closing this particular contest noon today, so [...more]

Our colleague and Multimedia Nova Board member Patrick Gossage has an illustrious 40-year career in the areas of journalism, broadcasting, politics and communications and public relations, including serving as Prime Minister Trudeau’s press secretary.  Today, we mark the 10th anniversary of Trudeau’s passing with a personal photograph and remembrance from Patrick.

By Michael Bliss

Brian Mulroney came from an Irish-Canadian working class family in the remote Quebec town of Baie-Comeau. He rose to be one of Canada’s most successful Conservative prime ministers, serving for two terms and nine years in the country’s highest office. In retirement Mulroney was proud of his achievements, especially the negotiation [...more]

By Michael Bliss
Pierre Trudeau, a Quebecer, went into politics to fight Quebec separatism. As Liberal prime minister from 1968–1979 and 1980 –1984 he kept Canada together and also changed the country forever. Trudeau was the father of a new constitution for Canada that included a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and guarantees of multiculturalism. And [...more]

By Michael Bliss
Lester “Mike” Pearson (1897-1972) was Canada’s greatest diplomat and the only Canadian ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Because of these achievements he won the leadership of the Liberal Party and served as prime minister from 1963 to 1968. His government had very important achievements to its credit, but was often in [...more]

By Michael Bliss

William Lyon Mackenzie King’s grandfather was a rebel, who probably would have been hanged if he had not fled to the United States. King himself became Canada’s longest-serving and one of its best prime ministers. King and the Liberal party governed the country most of the time from 1921 to 1948. During [...more]

By Michael Bliss
It was not hard to be Prime Minister of Canada 100 years ago.  In 1910 immigrants were pouring into the Canadian west. Canadian trade was booming. New transcontinental railways were being built. Great deposits of gold, silver and other minerals were being discovered all across the north. In 10 years the population of [...more]

By Michael Bliss
Canada’s first prime minister, and one of its greatest statesman, was an immigrant.
John Alexander Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1815, and came with his family to the Kingston area of Upper Canada (later Ontario) in 1820. Macdonald’s father was a shopkeeper and miller. Scots were the dominant group of immigrants to [...more]

By Robert Bothwell
The Bloc Québécois (BQ) is a provincially-based federal party dedicated to the achievement of an independent, French-language nation of Quebec. Although there had been individual separatists in the federal Parliament before, they had no organized political party behind them. The party roots lay in René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois which had come to power [...more]

The Canadian Experience Quiz series continues.  Information on the rules and prizes can be found by clicking here; and we will be posting Quiz #9 tomorrow morning, on (lucky) Friday August 13.  Since our last update here, we’ve posted quizzes #7 and #8; if you haven’t yet taken them, we hope you do.
UPDATE: Quiz #9 [...more]

By Robert Bothwell
Canada’s social-democratic left has been embodied in two successive political formations, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), from 1932 to 1961, and the New Democratic Party (NDP) from 1961 to the present day.
Canada, like other western, industrial countries, produced a variety of radical and socialist political movements, usually associated with or even embodied [...more]

By Robert Bothwell
The Liberal Party dates back to political struggles in Great Britain’s North American colonies in the 1820s and 1830s. The term Liberal originally applied to opponents of authoritarian royal government in Europe, and the opponents (reformers) of the British-appointed colonial governments easily adopted it. When democratic government was finally achieved in [...more]

By Robert Bothwell
In Canada there were politicians before there were parties, and the parties go back before there was Canada. Canada’s Conservative party was one of the first, starting out in the 1840s. By 1848, it was understood and accepted that any group that could form a majority in any colonial legislature or parliament would [...more]