The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor

by Oscar D. Skelton

In the valley of the Red River there were some twelve thousand metis, or half-breeds, descendants of Indian mothers and French or Scottish fathers. The Dominion authorities intended to give them a large share in their own government but neglected to arrange for a formal conference. The metis were left to gather their impression of the character and intentions of the new rulers from indiscreet and sometimes overbearing surveyors and land seekers. In 1869, under the leadership of Louis Riel, the one man of education in the settlement, able but vain and unbalanced, and with the Hudson's Bay officials looking on unconcerned, the metis decided to oppose being made "the colony of a colony." The Governor sent out from Ottawa was refused entrance, and a provisional Government under Riel assumed control. The Ottawa authorities first tried persuasion and sent a commission of three, Donald A. Smith (afterwards Lord Strathcona), Colonel de Salaberry, and Vicar General Thibault. Smith was gradually restoring unity and order, when the act of Riel in shooting Thomas Scott, an Ontario settler and a member of the powerful Orange order, set passions flaring. Mgr. Tache, the Catholic bishop of the diocese, on his return aided in quieting the metis. Delegates were sent by the Provisional Government to Ottawa, and, though not officially recognized, they influenced the terms of settlement. An expedition under Colonel Wolseley marched through the wilderness north of Lake Superior only to find that Riel and his lieutenants had fled. By the Manitoba Act the Red River country was admitted to Confederation as a self-governing province, under the name of Manitoba, while the country west to the Rockies was given territorial status. The Indian tribes were handled with tact and justice, but though for the time the danger of armed resistance had passed, the embers of discontent were not wholly quenched.

The extension of Canadian sovereignty beyond the Rockies came about in quieter fashion. After Mackenzie had shown the way, Simon Fraser and David Thompson and other agents of the NorthWest Company took up the work of exploration and fur trading. With the union of the two rival companies in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company became the sole authority on the Pacific coast. Settlers straggled in slowly until, in the late fifties, the discovery of rich placer gold on the Fraser and later in the Cariboo brought tens of thousands of miners from Australia and California, only to drift away again almost as quickly when the sands began to fail.

Local governments had been established both in Vancouver Island and on the mainland. They were joined in a single province in 1866. One of the first acts of the new Legislature was to seek consolidation with the Dominion. Inspired by an enthusiastic Englishman, Alfred Waddington, who had dreamed for years of a transcontinental railway, the province stipulated that within ten years Canada should complete a road from the Pacific to a junction with the railways of the East. These terms were considered presumptuous on the part of a little settlement of ten or fifteen thousand whites; but Macdonald had faith in the resources of Canada and in what the morrow would bring forth. The bargain was made; and British Columbia entered the Confederation on July 1, 1871.

East and West were now staked out. Only the Far North remained outside the bounds of the Dominion and this was soon acquired. In 1879 the British Government transferred to Canada all its rights and claims over the islands in the Arctic Archipelago and all other British territory in North America save Newfoundland and its strip of Labrador. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the North Pole, now all was Canadian soil.

Confederation brought new powers and new responsibilities and thrust Canada into the field of foreign affairs. It was with slow and groping steps that the Dominion advanced along this new path. Then—as now—for Canada foreign relations meant first and foremost relations with her great neighbor to the south. The likelihood of war had passed. The need for closer trade relations remained. When the Reciprocity Treaty was brought to an end, on March 17, 1866, Canada at first refrained from raising her tariff walls. "The provinces," as George Brown declared in 1874, "assumed that there were matters existing in 1865-66 to trouble the spirit of American statesmen for the moment, and they waited patiently for the sober second thought which was very long in coming, but in the meantime Canada played a good neighbor's part, and incidentally served her own ends, by continuing to grant the United States most of the privileges which had been given under the treaty free navigation and free goods, and, subject to a license fee, access to the fisheries."

It was over these fisheries that friction first developed.* Canadian statesmen were determined to prevent poaching on the inshore fisheries, both because poaching was poaching and because they considered the fishery privileges the best makeweight in trade negotiations with the United States. At first American vessels were admitted on payment of a license fee; but when, on the increase of the fee, many vessels tried to fish inshore without permission, the license system was abolished, and in 1870 a fleet of revenue cruisers began to police the coast waters. American fishermen chafed at exclusion from waters they had come to consider almost their own, and there were many cases of seizure and of angry charge and countercharge. President Grant, in his message to Congress in 1870, denounced the policy of the Canadian authorities as arbitrary and provocative. Other issues between the two countries were outstanding as well. Canada had a claim against the United States for not preventing the Fenian Raids of 1866; and the United States had a much bigger bill against Great Britain for neglect in permitting the escape of the Alabama. Some settlement of these disputed matters was necessary; and it was largely through the activities of a Canadian banker and politician, Sir John Rose, that an agreement was reached to submit all the issues to a joint commission.

* See "The Path of Empire".

Macdonald was offered and accepted with misgivings a post as one of the five British Commissioners. He pressed the traditional Canadian policy of offering fishery for trade privileges but found no backing in this or other matters from his British colleagues, and he met only unyielding opposition from the American Commissioners. He fell back, under protest, on a settlement of narrower scope, which permitted reciprocity in navigation and bonding privileges, free admission of Canadian and Newfoundland fish to United States markets and of American fishermen to Canadian and Newfoundland waters, and which provided for a subsidiary commission to fix the amount to be paid by the United States for the surplus advantage thus received. The Fenian Raids claims were not even considered, and Macdonald was angered by this indifference on the part of his British colleagues. "They seem to have only one thing in their minds," he reported privately to Ottawa, "that is, to go home to England with a treaty in their pocket, settling everything, no matter at what cost to Canada." Yet when the time came for the Canadian Parliament to decide whether to ratify the fishery clauses of the Treaty of Washington in which the conclusions of the commission were embodied, Macdonald, in spite of the unpopularity of the bargain in Canada, "urged Parliament to accept the treaty, accept it with all its imperfections, to accept it for the sake of peace and for the sake of the great Empire of which we form a part." The treaty was ratified in 1871 by all the powers concerned; and the stimulus to the peaceful settlement of international disputes given by the Geneva Tribunal which followed* justified the subordination of Canada's specific interests.

* See "The Path of Empire"

A change in party now followed in Canada, but the new Government under Alexander Mackenzie was as fully committed as the Government of Sir John Macdonald to the policy of bartering fishery for trade advantage. Canada therefore proposed that instead of carrying out the provisions for a money settlement, the whole question should be reopened. The Administration at Washington was sympathetic. George Brown was appointed along with the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Thornton, to open negotiations. Under Brown's energetic leadership a settlement of all outstanding issues was drafted in 1874, which permitted freedom of trade in natural and in most manufactured products for twenty-one years, and settled fishery, coasting trade, navigation, and minor boundary issues. But diplomats proposed, and the United States Senate disposed. Protectionist feeling was strong at Washington, and the currency problem absorbing, and hence this broad and statesmanlike essay in neighborliness could not secure an hour's attention. This plan having failed, the Canadian Government fell back on the letter of the treaty. A Commission which consisted of the Honorable E. H. Kellogg representing the United States, Sir Alexander T. Galt representing Canada, and the Belgian Minister to Washington, M. Delfosse, as chairman, awarded Canada and Newfoundland $5,500,000 as the excess value of the fisheries for the ten years the arrangement was to run. The award was denounced in the United States as absurdly excessive; but a sense of honor and the knowledge that millions of dollars from the Alabama award were still in the Treasury moved the Senate finally to acquiesce, though only for the ten-year term fixed by treaty. In Canada the award was received with delight as a signal proof that when left to themselves Canadians could hold their own. The prevailing view was well summed up in a letter from Mackenzie to the Canadian representative on the Halifax commission, written shortly before the decision: "I am glad you still have hopes of a fair verdict. I am doubly anxious to have it, first, because we are entitled to it and need the dollars, and, second, because it will be the first Canadian diplomatic triumph, and will justify me in insisting that we know our neighbors and our own business better than any Englishmen."