A Brief History of Canada: Peoples, Empires, and the Art of Staying Together

Companion piece: If I Was Born in Canada: Multiculturalism, Ice Hockey, and the Culture of Care (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).

On 5 October 2026, voters in Quebec elected the Parti Québécois, whose founding purpose is to make Quebec an independent country. Its leader had promised a third referendum on sovereignty. That same autumn, Statistics Canada reported that the country's population had grown by just 0.5 percent in a year, the slowest pace since the First World War, after two years of growth at a pace almost unheard of in a rich country. And Canada was negotiating, again, with a United States whose president had spent much of 2025 suggesting it become the 51st state.

Each of those stories is new. None of them is surprising to anyone who knows Canadian history. This is a country built out of negotiations: between Indigenous nations and European empires, between French and English, between provinces and Ottawa, between newcomers and those already here, and between Canada and the giant to its south. It has survived by compromise more than by conquest, though there was conquest too. Here is the whole story, from the first peoples to the autumn of 2026.

In this history

1. First peoples (to 1500)
2. New France (1534–1763)
3. Conquest and the Loyalists (1754–1815)
4. Rebellion and responsible government (1815–1864)
5. Confederation and the West (1864–1896)
6. The residential schools (1831–1990s)
7. Wheat, immigrants and the Great War (1896–1919)
8. Between the wars and the Second World War (1919–1945)
9. Building the modern state (1945–1968)
10. Quebec: the Quiet Revolution, the October Crisis and the referendums (1960–1995)
11. Patriation, the Charter and multiculturalism (1968–2000)
12. Canada in the 21st century, and in 2026 (2000–2026)
13. How to understand Canada today

Part 1 — First peoples (to 1500)

People reached what is now Canada at least 14,000 years ago, and possibly much earlier. In the Yukon, at Old Crow Flats and the Bluefish Caves, archaeologists have found some of the oldest traces of human life in North America. Marks on a mammoth bone from Bluefish Caves, apparently made by human tools, have been radiocarbon dated to about 12,000 years ago, and some researchers argue for even older dates there; others are not convinced. What is not in doubt is that by the time Europeans arrived, the land had been home to people for hundreds of generations.

Canada today recognises three groups of Indigenous peoples in its Constitution: First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The first two were here long before Europeans. The Métis are a distinct people who emerged later, from the meeting of the two worlds (more in Part 2).

A continent of nations

First Nations were never one people. They spoke languages from many unrelated families, and their ways of life were shaped by very different lands.

The Haida of Haida Gwaii, off the northern coast of British Columbia, show how wrong the old stereotype of a "simple" wilderness people is. Their villages of great cedar houses, their carved poles recording family histories, and their seagoing trade made them one of the most sophisticated societies on the continent, with little farming, because the sea and the forest provided so much.

The Inuit are the most recent of the old peoples to arrive. Their ancestors, the Thule, spread east from Alaska across the Arctic from around the year 1000, with dogs, sleds and whaling technology, and replaced the earlier Dorset people, whom Inuit tradition calls the Tuniit. In a single great migration, they made one of the harshest environments on Earth their home.

Life, law and belief

Most of these societies were organised around extended families and clans, and land was not owned as private property in the European sense: it was held, used and cared for by communities, with rights to hunt, fish or gather often shared through kinship and agreement. Many nations governed themselves through councils that sought consensus. Among the Haudenosaunee, clan mothers chose and could remove chiefs. Spiritual life was bound up with the land, the animals and the obligations between people and the rest of creation, ideas that shape how many Indigenous people think about land rights and treaties to this day.

Nobody knows how many people lived in what is now Canada before contact. Estimates for North America north of Mexico as a whole range from under one million to well over ten million, with most current scholarship between about 2.5 and 7 million; Canada's share is impossible to pin down. The first Canadian census, in 1871, counted about 102,000 Indigenous people, after centuries of epidemic disease.

The first Europeans

About a thousand years ago, Norse sailors from Greenland built a small settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland. It is the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas, and it did not last. The Norse sagas tell of fighting with the local people, whom they called Skrælings; who exactly they were is uncertain.

Five centuries later, Europeans came back to stay, drawn first by fish. The cod of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland were so thick, sailors said, that they could be scooped up in baskets. Basque, Portuguese, French and English fishing fleets crossed the Atlantic every summer from the early 1500s, long before anyone built a colony.

Those early fishermen met peoples who had their own trade networks, diplomacy and wars, and who would decide, as much as any European king, what happened next. That is the thread that runs through the next four centuries of Canadian history: newcomers could not survive, trade or claim land in the north without dealing with the nations already there, and the terms of those dealings, fair or not, honoured or broken, are still being argued over in courts and treaty negotiations today.

"Canada" itself comes from an Indigenous word. In 1535, people near today's Quebec City used the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, "village" or "settlement", to direct the French explorer Jacques Cartier to their town, Stadacona. Cartier applied it to the whole region, and the name spread from there.

Part 2 — New France (1534–1763)

Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534 and up the river the next year, claiming the land for France. His attempts to found a colony failed, and France then largely ignored the region for half a century, apart from its fishermen and fur traders.

The fur trade changed that. Europeans wanted beaver pelts for felt hats, and Indigenous trappers and traders could supply them. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain founded the settlement of Quebec with 28 men, at a narrowing of the St. Lawrence. In 1642 a group of devout settlers led by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve founded Ville-Marie, which became Montreal.

Built on alliances

New France could not have survived without Indigenous allies. Champlain allied with the Wendat, Algonquin and Innu, who controlled the trade routes into the interior, and joined them in war against their enemies, the Haudenosaunee. That choice set off generations of conflict between the French and the Haudenosaunee, who were allied first with the Dutch and then the English. The Wendat confederacy, devastated by European epidemics and by Haudenosaunee attacks, was destroyed as a nation in the mid-17th century; some of its survivors still live at Wendake, near Quebec City.

The wars ended with the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701, signed by the French and dozens of Indigenous nations, including the Haudenosaunee. It remains one of the great diplomatic achievements of colonial North America, negotiated on Indigenous terms of gift-giving, speeches and wampum as much as on European ones.

Jesuit missionaries lived among the Wendat and other nations, learned their languages and wrote detailed accounts of them, the Jesuit Relations, which are still one of the main sources on 17th-century Indigenous life. Several were killed; the Catholic Church later made eight of them saints. To the nations they lived among, the missionaries were also agents of a foreign religion that divided communities.

A small colony

New France stayed small. The British colonies to the south, by contrast, held more than a million people by the 1750s. To boost the population, Louis XIV's government sent about 800 young women, the filles du roi ("the king's daughters"), between 1663 and 1673, with dowries paid by the Crown, to marry settlers. A large share of today's French Canadians descend from them.

Ordinary life in the St. Lawrence valley was organised by the seigneurial system: land granted to seigneurs (lords) in long, narrow strips running back from the river, farmed by habitants who paid them modest dues. You can still see the strip pattern from the air today. The Catholic Church ran the schools, hospitals and parishes. Young men went west as coureurs des bois and voyageurs, paddling canoes loaded with trade goods thousands of kilometres into the interior.

Rivals and the Métis

New France had competitors. In 1670 King Charles II of England chartered the Hudson's Bay Company, giving a group of investors a monopoly over trade in all the lands draining into Hudson Bay, a territory they called Rupert's Land, covering a vast part of what is now Canada. For two centuries the company was, in effect, the government of much of the Northwest. It survived for 355 years as a fur trader and then a department-store chain, before going into creditor protection in 2025 and being wound up; its royal charter was sold at auction.

On the Atlantic coast, French settlers in Acadia (today's Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) built farms behind dykes on the tidal marshes of the Bay of Fundy. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France ceded mainland Acadia, Newfoundland and Hudson Bay to Britain, keeping Île Royale (Cape Breton), where it built the great fortress of Louisbourg.

Out on the fur-trade frontier, a new people was being born. From the mid-17th century, French (and later Scottish and English) traders married First Nations women, often Cree, Ojibwe or Saulteaux, and their descendants developed a distinct culture, language (Michif) and identity: the Métis. By the early 19th century, the Métis of the Red River valley, in what is now Manitoba, saw themselves as a nation, with buffalo hunts run like military campaigns and a fierce sense of their own rights.

New France also held slaves, on a small scale: the historian Marcel Trudel found records of 2,087 enslaved people over its history, about four in five of them Indigenous captives (often called panis), the rest of African descent. It is a part of the story that was long left out.

New France never had many people. What it had was alliances, rivers and canoes, and for a century and a half that was enough to hold half a continent against far more numerous rivals.

Part 3 — Conquest and the Loyalists (1754–1815)

The long rivalry between France and Britain in North America came to a head in the Seven Years' War (in the American colonies, the French and Indian War). In 1755, with war looming, the British authorities in Nova Scotia demanded that the Acadians swear unconditional loyalty to the British Crown. When they refused to promise to take up arms against France, the British began the Expulsion of the Acadians, which Acadians call le Grand Dérangement.

Families were separated and farms burned. Many Acadians who were sent to France later sailed to Spanish Louisiana, where Acadien became Cadien and then, in English, Cajun. Others hid in the woods or eventually returned. Today's Acadian communities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island descend from the survivors and the returnees.

The Plains of Abraham

The decisive battle came outside Quebec City on 13 September 1759. British troops under General James Wolfe climbed the cliffs from the river at night and formed up on the Plains of Abraham. The battle against the French under the Marquis de Montcalm lasted about an hour. Both commanders were mortally wounded. Quebec surrendered five days later, Montreal in September 1760, and by the Treaty of Paris of 1763 France ceded New France to Britain.

For French Canadians the Conquest is the founding trauma of their history, la Conquête. For English Canadians it was long told as a heroic victory. Both memories are still alive: Quebec's licence plates carry the motto Je me souviens, "I remember".

Two foundational documents

Britain now ruled some 70,000 French-speaking Catholics, and it had to decide what to do with them, and with the Indigenous nations of the interior.

1. The Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763 reserved the lands west of the Appalachians for Indigenous peoples, barred colonists from settling there, and banned private purchases of Indigenous land: only the Crown could acquire it, at a public meeting with the nations concerned. It is often called the "Indian Magna Carta", the first legal recognition of Aboriginal title, and it is still part of Canada's constitutional order. The treaty-based approach to Indigenous land in Canada, imperfect as its practice has been, grows from it.
2. The Quebec Act of 1774 went the other way from what the American colonists wanted. It let Catholics hold office without renouncing their faith, restored the Church's right to collect tithes, kept French civil law for property and civil matters (English criminal law remained) and restored the seigneurial system. Quebec's civil-law tradition, unique in Canada, dates from it. To the Thirteen Colonies it was one of the "Intolerable Acts", and the Declaration of Independence listed it among their grievances.

When the American Revolution came, the Canadiens mostly stayed out of it. The Quebec Act's concessions had kept the seigneurs and the clergy loyal, though many habitants had little enthusiasm for either side.

The Loyalists

The Revolution created English Canada. Tens of thousands of Americans who had stayed loyal to the Crown fled north after the war.

New Brunswick was split from Nova Scotia in 1784 to govern the newcomers. The Loyalists were not all wealthy Anglican gentlemen, as later myth had it; they came from every class, and some later went back. Black Loyalists, many of them people who had escaped slavery by fighting for Britain, were given poorer land, and in 1784 white veterans rioted against them in Shelburne, Nova Scotia; disillusioned, many left for Sierra Leone. Loyalists also brought about 2,000 enslaved people with them.

Indigenous allies of Britain came north too. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) led many Haudenosaunee to new lands along the Grand River in Ontario, where Six Nations of the Grand River is today one of the largest First Nations communities in Canada.

The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the old province in two: Upper Canada (English-speaking, upriver, today's Ontario) and Lower Canada (French-speaking, today's Quebec), each with an elected assembly. In 1793 Upper Canada passed an Act Against Slavery, banning the import of enslaved people and freeing the children of enslaved women at age 25: a gradual law, but one of the first anywhere in the British Empire to limit slavery. Slavery was abolished across the empire from 1 August 1834.

The War of 1812

The United States declared war on Britain in 1812, and its armies invaded the Canadas. Many Americans expected an easy conquest. They were wrong. British regulars, Canadian militia and Indigenous warriors led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh turned back invasion after invasion. Laura Secord walked through enemy territory to warn British troops of an American attack. American troops burned York (Toronto); British troops later burned Washington. The Treaty of Ghent (signed in December 1814) restored the pre-war borders.

Canadians remember the war as the moment they refused to become American. Tecumseh, killed in 1813, and the nations who fought with him lost the most: their hopes of an Indigenous homeland in the Great Lakes region died with the peace.

Part 4 — Rebellion and responsible government (1815–1864)

After 1815, British North America filled with immigrants from Britain and Ireland: farmers clearing the forests of Upper Canada, Irish labourers digging canals, Scots in the fur trade and the Maritimes. Timber, wheat and fish were shipped to Britain. Life on a backwoods farm meant years of brutal labour to clear land, isolation, and long winters; it also meant land of one's own, which few of these immigrants could have dreamed of at home.

The worst year was 1847, during the Irish famine. Of nearly 90,000 emigrants who sailed for Canada from British ports that year, more than 5,000 died at sea, and 3,452 died at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle, downriver from Quebec City, most of them from typhus. Thousands more died in the "fever sheds" of Montreal and in hospitals in Quebec City, Kingston and Toronto. Many of the orphans were adopted by French-Canadian families, which is why some Quebeckers today have Irish surnames.

Canals, timber and the fear of the Americans

After the War of 1812, Britain built for defence as much as for trade. The Rideau Canal, completed in 1832, linked Kingston to the Ottawa River by a route safely away from the American border on the St. Lawrence; as many as a thousand of its workers, mostly Irish and French-Canadian labourers, died during construction, mainly of malaria. The canal, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is still in use, as a summer waterway and, in Ottawa, a winter skating rink.

The economy turned on timber, squared logs and later sawn lumber floated down the Ottawa and St. Lawrence to Quebec City for shipment to Britain, and on wheat from Upper Canada's new farms. In 1854 the Province of Canada and the Maritime colonies won a Reciprocity Treaty with the United States, which allowed free trade in natural products and brought a decade of prosperity.

On the Pacific, gold was found on the Fraser and Thompson rivers in 1858, and about 30,000 men poured into Victoria within a month of the news. Britain created the colony of British Columbia that year to keep control. The miners clashed with the Nlaka'pamux people of the Fraser Canyon, in what is known as the Fraser Canyon War.

The rebellions of 1837–38

Politically, both Canadas were run by small elites close to the appointed governors: the "Family Compact" in Upper Canada and the "Château Clique" in Lower Canada. Elected assemblies had little real power. Reformers demanded it, and in 1837 both provinces rose in rebellion. In Lower Canada the Patriotes led by Louis-Joseph Papineau fought British troops; in Upper Canada William Lyon Mackenzie led a smaller, quickly defeated uprising near Toronto. Further risings in 1838 also failed. Rebels were hanged or transported to Australia.

Britain sent Lord Durham to investigate. His 1839 report made two recommendations that shaped the next century. The first was responsible government: the colonial cabinet should answer to the elected assembly, not to the governor. The second was to unite the two Canadas so that the French would be outnumbered and, he hoped, assimilated; he described French Canadians as a people with no history and no literature. The first idea was a gift to Canadian democracy. The second was an insult that French Canadians have never forgotten.

Union, and an unusual partnership

The Act of Union joined Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada from 10 February 1841. Assimilation failed. Instead, reformers on both sides of the language divide made common cause. Robert Baldwin, an English-speaking reformer from Toronto, and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, a French-speaking reformer from Montreal, built an alliance that won a majority. On 11 March 1848, Governor General Lord Elgin swore in their ministry, and responsible government arrived in the Province of Canada, a month after Nova Scotia (2 February 1848). In 1849 Elgin signed a bill compensating people in Lower Canada for property losses in the rebellions, against fierce Tory opposition; a mob burned the parliament building in Montreal in protest. The principle held: the elected majority governed.

The Baldwin–LaFontaine partnership set a pattern that recurs throughout Canadian history: governing the country requires an alliance across the French–English divide.

Freedom's northern terminus

For enslaved Americans, British North America was the end of the Underground Railroad. Between 30,000 and 100,000 freedom-seekers reached it in the years after the United States' Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Black communities grew in Canada West (Ontario), around Chatham, Windsor and St. Catharines. They found freedom, but not equality: segregated schools and discrimination were common. One of them, Mary Ann Shadd, founded the Provincial Freeman in 1853, becoming the first Black woman newspaper publisher in North America; she used it to urge Black Americans to come north and to demand equal treatment once they arrived.

Pressures toward union

By the 1860s, the Province of Canada's politics had jammed. English and French halves of roughly equal weight, with a requirement for majorities in both, produced unstable governments and paralysis. The British colonies on the Atlantic wanted railway links and help with their debts. The United States ended its trade reciprocity treaty. And the American Civil War had produced a huge, battle-hardened army next door, with some Americans eyeing British territory and Irish-American Fenians launching raids across the border. Britain, for its part, wanted to stop paying for the colonies' defence. All of that pushed toward a bigger union.

Part 5 — Confederation and the West (1864–1896)

The deal was made at three conferences. At Charlottetown in September 1864, Maritime delegates meeting to discuss a union of their own were joined by politicians from the Province of Canada. At Quebec in October 1864 they agreed 72 resolutions. At London in 1866–67 they turned them into the British North America Act, which received royal assent on 29 March 1867 and took effect on 1 July 1867. Canada was born as a Dominion of four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The key leaders were John A. Macdonald of Canada West, a Conservative and the first prime minister; George-Étienne Cartier of Canada East, who persuaded French Canadians that a federation with their own province of Quebec would protect them better than the existing union; and George Brown of Toronto, a Reform rival who put aside his feud with Macdonald to make it happen. Nobody asked the Indigenous nations whose land most of the new country would cover.

A federation, not a melting

The 1867 constitution gave Ottawa the big national powers (defence, trade, banking, criminal law and "Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians") and gave the provinces control of education, civil law, health and local matters. That split let Quebec keep its language, Church and civil code. It is the root of a century and a half of arguments between Ottawa and the provinces.

Red River and Louis Riel

In 1869–70, the new Dominion bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company without consulting the people who lived there, including the Métis and other settlers of the Red River colony. Led by Louis Riel, a young, Montreal-educated Métis, they declared a provisional government in December 1869 and negotiated terms of entry. The result was the Manitoba Act of 1870, which created a province with guarantees for French and English, Catholic and Protestant schools, and Métis land. One act stained the resistance: on 4 March 1870 Riel's government executed an Ontario Protestant, Thomas Scott, which made Riel a hated figure in Ontario. He fled into exile. The promised Métis lands were largely lost to delays, fraud and speculators in the following years.

Treaties and the Indian Act

To open the Prairies for settlement and a railway, the Crown negotiated the Numbered Treaties, eleven of them between 1871 and 1921, covering a vast arc from northwestern Ontario across the Prairies and into the North. In return for the surrender of land title, the Crown promised reserves, annual payments, hunting and fishing rights on unoccupied Crown lands, schools, farm tools and, in Treaty 6, a "medicine chest" and famine relief. The First Nations who signed understood many of these agreements as sharing the land and establishing a lasting relationship of mutual obligation, not selling it; the written texts said cession. Promises made orally but left out of the written texts were disputed from the start. That gap between the two understandings is the heart of Canadian treaty law today.

The Indian Act of 12 April 1876 consolidated federal control over First Nations. It defined who counted as an "Indian", put reserves under the control of federal Indian agents, and was later amended to ban ceremonies such as the potlatch on the Pacific coast and the Sun Dance on the Prairies. It is still in force, much amended, and still defines status for First Nations people.

As the bison vanished in the late 1870s, Plains nations faced famine. The Cree chief Big Bear held out against Treaty 6's terms for years, until hunger forced him to adhere in 1883. Some historians, notably James Daschuk in Clearing the Plains (2013), argue that Ottawa deliberately withheld food to force nations onto reserves and clear the way for the railway; others stress drought, the collapse of the herds and administrative failure. That rations were withheld as a tool of control is well documented.

The railway and the North-West Resistance

British Columbia had joined Confederation on the promise of a railway to the Pacific. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed on 7 November 1885. About 17,000 Chinese labourers were brought in to build its most dangerous western sections, paid a third to a half less than white co-workers. The year the railway was finished, Parliament imposed a head tax of $50 on every Chinese immigrant.

In 1885 Riel returned from exile at the invitation of Métis in the Saskatchewan valley, whose land claims were being ignored. In March they declared a provisional government at Batoche. This time Ottawa sent troops on the nearly finished railway. Some Cree warriors fought too, though Big Bear himself tried to restrain them. The Métis were defeated at Batoche (9–12 May 1885). Riel was tried for treason in Regina; the jury found him guilty but recommended mercy. He was hanged on 16 November 1885. Eight Cree and Assiniboine men were hanged at Battleford the same month.

Riel's execution split the country along its oldest line. Ontario largely cheered. Quebec saw a French-speaking Catholic hanged for defending his people, and the backlash brought Honoré Mercier's nationalists to power in the province in 1886. Today Riel is recognised as a founder of Manitoba: Parliament said so in 1992, and in 2024 Manitoba formally named him its first premier.

Part 6 — The residential schools (1831–1990s)

This part describes abuse of children, including deaths. Many Survivors and their families are still living. In Canada, the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line offers support to former students and their families.

No part of Canadian history has been more painfully re-examined in the past two decades than the residential schools. They were boarding schools for Indigenous children, funded by the federal government and run mostly by churches (Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and later United, and Presbyterian). The first church-run residential school opened in 1831; the federal system expanded from the 1880s, after the government decided to establish large industrial schools in the West; the last federally supported residences closed in the late 1990s.

The purpose was assimilation: to separate children from their families, languages and cultures and raise them as Christian, English- or French-speaking Canadians. Children were often taken far from home, sometimes by force or under threat of penalties to their parents. Many were punished for speaking their own language. Schools were underfunded and overcrowded; children were badly fed, worked hard, and died of tuberculosis and other diseases at rates far above those of other Canadian children. Physical and sexual abuse was widespread, and many abusers were never punished.

The real death toll is unknown. Records were incomplete, often destroyed, and many children were buried in school cemeteries that were later neglected or forgotten. The Commission's chair, Justice Murray Sinclair, said the true number may be far higher.

Survivors, the courts and the Commission

Survivors spoke up for decades before the country listened. From the late 1990s thousands sued the federal government and the churches. The result was the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which compensated former students and, in 2008, created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

On 11 June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose in the House of Commons to apologise. "The Government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness" of Indigenous peoples, he said, for the schools and what they did.

Over six years the TRC heard from about 6,500 Survivors and witnesses and reviewed millions of documents. It released its final report, with 94 Calls to Action, in 2015. Its central finding was blunt:

"The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as 'cultural genocide.'" — Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (2015)

The Commission defined the policy it was describing: for over a century, it wrote, Canada aimed to eliminate Aboriginal governments, ignore Aboriginal rights, terminate the treaties and, through assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct peoples.

Since the Commission

Progress on the Calls to Action is disputed. The federal government says more than 85 percent of the 76 calls that require its leadership are complete or well underway, citing the Indigenous Languages Act (2019), a 2020 law giving Indigenous communities authority over child welfare, and a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on 30 September, a federal holiday since 2021. Independent trackers are much less generous: CBC News's Beyond 94 project counted 15 of the 94 calls as complete in May 2025.

In May 2021 the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that a ground-penetrating radar survey of part of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School had found what it described as the likely graves of 215 children; the specialist who led the survey later described about 200 "probable burials" or "targets of interest". Other First Nations announced similar findings at other former schools. The announcements produced national grief: flags were lowered for months, and in 2022 Pope Francis travelled to Canada to apologise for the role of members of the Catholic Church, later describing what happened as genocide.

The findings have also become a subject of controversy. Radar cannot confirm human remains, and at Kamloops no excavation had taken place and no remains had been confirmed as of early 2025. Some commentators argue that early reporting presented possible graves as confirmed mass graves; many Indigenous leaders and historians respond that the deaths of thousands of children are documented in the archives regardless, that communities have the right to decide whether to disturb burial sites, and that the debate over one site has been used to cast doubt on the whole history. Both points can be held at once: the specific claims at particular sites remain to be verified, and the system's documented toll does not depend on them.

Many Indigenous Canadians trace present-day problems, from lost languages to family breakdown, addiction and the over-representation of Indigenous children in foster care and of Indigenous adults in prison, to the intergenerational effects of the schools and of the child-welfare removals that followed them, known as the Sixties Scoop.

Part 7 — Wheat, immigrants and the Great War (1896–1919)

In 1896 Wilfrid Laurier became the first French-Canadian prime minister. He governed for fifteen years, and he presided over the greatest boom in the young country's history. His term, from 1896 to 1911, is still the longest unbroken run of any Canadian prime minister.

Settling the Prairies

The government advertised free homesteads across Britain, the United States and continental Europe. Immigrants poured in: British and American farmers, and, unusually for the time, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Scandinavians, Doukhobors, Mennonites and Jews. They came on the CPR, in "colonist cars", and broke the prairie sod for wheat.

Between 1905 and 1913 alone, about 2.3 million people arrived, in a country of fewer than 8 million. Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905. Gold was found in the Klondike in August 1896, setting off the rush that brought tens of thousands north to the Yukon. Canada's GDP per person, by the Maddison Project's estimates, rose from $4,937 in 1901 to $7,088 in 1913 (in 2011 dollars), a remarkable jump for twelve years.

Prairie life was hard: sod or log houses, brutal winters, isolation, and dependence on a single crop and the railway's freight rates. It also built a distinctive political culture of farmers' co-operatives, grain pools and protest parties that later gave Canada its social-democratic movement.

The colour line

The welcome had limits. The Chinese head tax, $50 in 1885, was raised to $100 in 1900 and $500 in 1903, about two years' wages for a labourer. A 1908 "continuous journey" rule barred immigrants who did not sail directly from their country of birth, which in practice excluded people from India, since no such direct voyage existed. In May 1914 the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver carrying 376 passengers from British India, most of them Sikhs. Only about twenty were allowed to land. After two months in the harbour, the ship was forced to leave; when it reached India, British troops opened fire on the passengers, killing about twenty. Canada apologised in the House of Commons in 2016.

The First World War

When Britain declared war in August 1914, Canada, as a Dominion, was automatically at war. About 650,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders served, from a country of fewer than 8 million. More than 66,000 died, and more than 170,000 were wounded.

On 1 July 1916, the Newfoundland Regiment was almost wiped out at Beaumont-Hamel on the first day of the Somme; Newfoundlanders still mark 1 July as a day of mourning as well as Canada Day. On 9 April 1917 the four divisions of the Canadian Corps, attacking together for the first time, captured Vimy Ridge, a position that British and French attacks had failed to take. Vimy became the national legend of a colony that had become a nation in battle, though the reality was a hard-fought success in a war of horrifying losses, not a turning point of the war.

At home, the war divided the country along its old fault line. In 1917 Prime Minister Robert Borden introduced conscription. French Canadians, who felt little attachment to Britain or France and resented a military that operated almost entirely in English, overwhelmingly opposed it. The 1917 election, fought on the issue, gave Borden's pro-conscription Unionists 153 seats; Laurier's Liberals won 82, 62 of them in Quebec. In Easter 1918 anti-conscription riots in Quebec City ended with soldiers firing on the crowd and several civilians dead. About 125,000 men were conscripted; only about 24,000 reached the front.

On 6 December 1917 a French munitions ship, the Mont-Blanc, collided with another ship in Halifax harbour and exploded, in the largest human-made explosion before the atomic bomb. About 2,000 people were killed and some 9,000 injured.

Women won the federal vote at the end of the war: some women with relatives in uniform voted in 1917, and most women received the federal vote in May 1918. Manitoba had been the first province to grant it, in 1916; Quebec would be the last, in 1940. Indigenous people with status and Asian Canadians were still excluded.

The war ended in a wave of labour unrest. In the Winnipeg General Strike (15 May – 26 June 1919), some 30,000 workers walked off the job, and the strike ended after "Bloody Saturday", 21 June 1919, when the Royal North-West Mounted Police charged a silent parade and fired into the crowd, killing two men. It remains one of the most influential strikes in Canadian history.

Part 8 — Between the wars and the Second World War (1919–1945)

Canada came out of the war more independent. It signed the peace treaty in its own right, joined the League of Nations as a member, and in the 1920s began to run its own foreign policy. The Statute of Westminster (11 December 1931) confirmed that the Dominions were equal partners with Britain, free to make their own laws. Canada was now independent in almost everything except the power to amend its own constitution, which, oddly, stayed in London until 1982.

In 1929 a landmark ruling, the Persons Case, settled whether women could be appointed to the Senate. Five Alberta women, the "Famous Five" (Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Emily Murphy and Irene Parlby), had asked whether "persons" in the constitution included women. Canada's Supreme Court said no. On 18 October 1929 the British Privy Council, then Canada's highest court, said yes, and its judgment described the constitution as "a living tree capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits", a phrase that still guides how Canadian courts read it.

The Famous Five were also complicated heroes. Emily Murphy, the best known of them, campaigned for the compulsory sterilisation of people judged "mentally deficient", and supported Alberta's 1928 sterilisation law, under which thousands of people were sterilised before its repeal in 1972. Canadians now honour the achievement and reckon with the views at the same time.

The Depression

The Great Depression hit Canada harder than almost any other country, because it depended so heavily on exporting wheat, timber, minerals and newsprint, whose prices collapsed.

Output fell by about 29 percent and output per person by a third. By 1933 close to 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed, by contemporary estimates. On the Prairies, drought turned farms to dust and wheat prices hit record lows. Men "rode the rods" on freight trains looking for work; the federal government sent single unemployed men to remote relief camps. In 1935 camp workers organised the On-to-Ottawa Trek to protest; police stopped them in Regina, where a riot on 1 July 1935 left a police officer and a trekker dead.

The crisis spawned new parties that changed Canadian politics: the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), democratic socialists rooted in Prairie farmers and labour, and the ancestor of today's New Democratic Party; and Social Credit, a populist movement that took power in Alberta. Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, a Conservative, was defeated in 1935, and the Liberal William Lyon Mackenzie King returned. King, prime minister for a total of more than 21 years, the longest in Canadian history, was cautious, secretive and, in private, a spiritualist who used mediums to contact his dead mother; he was also a master of holding a divided country together.

In June 1939 Canada refused to take in the St. Louis, a ship carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, after Cuba and the United States had already turned it away. The ship returned to Europe, and about 250 of those passengers were later murdered in the Holocaust. The historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper told the story of Canada's closed door in None Is Too Many (1983), taking the title from an official's reported remark.

The Second World War

This time Canada decided for itself. Parliament declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, a week after Britain. More than one million Canadians and Newfoundlanders served in uniform, from a population of about 11 million, and more than 45,000 died.

Canada also ran the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which trained more than 130,000 aircrew for the Allies. Its navy, which began the war with 11 combat vessels, grew into a major force that escorted more than 25,000 merchant-ship crossings of the Atlantic. Its factories made ships, vehicles and munitions. The Dutch still send Canada tulips every year in thanks for the liberation.

Conscription again divided the country. In the plebiscite of 27 April 1942, King asked voters to release him from a promise not to conscript for overseas service. Almost two-thirds of Canadians said yes; about 73 percent of Quebec voters said no. His formula, "not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary," held until November 1944, when a manpower crisis forced him to send a one-time levy of about 16,000 conscripts overseas. Only about 2,500 of them reached front-line units before the war ended.

The war also brought the gravest injustice to a group of Canadians since Confederation. After Pearl Harbor, more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians, most of them born in Canada, were removed from the British Columbia coast, interned in camps or sent to work on farms, and had their homes, boats and businesses sold without their consent. After the war, nearly 4,000 were exiled to Japan. They were not free to return to the coast until 1 April 1949. In 1988 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney apologised and the government paid $21,000 to each survivor.

Canada went into the 1930s a depressed exporter of raw materials. It came out of 1945 with a large air force and navy, booming industry and a new sense of what a national government could do.

Part 9 — Building the modern state (1945–1968)

The quarter-century after the war turned Canada into a prosperous, urban, industrial country, and created much of what Canadians now think of as their identity.

Newfoundland joined on 31 March 1949, after two referendums in 1948 in which voters chose Confederation over a return to self-government. The second referendum, on 22 July 1948, was close: 52 percent for Confederation, 48 percent for a return to responsible government. Joey Smallwood, who led the campaign for joining, became the province's first premier and governed until the 1970s. Some Newfoundlanders still regard the vote as a mistake, others as the best decision they ever made.

Prosperity and the welfare state

The economy boomed on resources (oil in Alberta after the Leduc strike of February 1947, iron ore, uranium, pulp and paper) and on manufacturing, much of it American-owned. A baby boom pushed the fertility rate to about 3.8 children per woman in 1960. Suburbs, cars and television spread. Governments built a welfare state piece by piece.

The Diefenbaker years

In 1957 the Conservative John Diefenbaker, a Saskatchewan lawyer and a spellbinding speaker, ended 22 years of Liberal government. Diefenbaker championed "one Canada" and the North, appointed the first woman to a federal cabinet, and passed the Canadian Bill of Rights on 10 August 1960. It was an ordinary federal law that applied only to federal statutes, and the courts used it sparingly; its weakness was one reason the Charter of 1982 was entrenched in the constitution.

Two projects of his years still divide memory. On 26 June 1959 Queen Elizabeth II, Diefenbaker and President Eisenhower formally opened the St. Lawrence Seaway, which let ocean-going ships sail from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes; building it flooded six Ontario villages and three hamlets, now called the Lost Villages. And on 20 February 1959, Diefenbaker's government cancelled the Avro Arrow, an advanced supersonic interceptor jet. About 14,500 Avro employees were laid off that day, and nearly 15,000 more in its suppliers. Defenders of the decision point to the Arrow's soaring cost in an age of missiles; for many Canadians, it remains a symbol of a national technological future thrown away.

Culture and the American shadow

A Royal Commission chaired by Vincent Massey reported in 1951 that Canadian culture risked being overwhelmed by cheaper American popular culture, and that American literature's influence could be "almost overpowering." It led to federal funding for universities, a stronger CBC (which began television broadcasting in the 1950s), the National Library (1953) and the Canada Council for the arts (1957). French-speaking critics argued that its vision of culture was an English-Canadian elite's. Its fear, that a small population next to the United States had to deliberately protect its own voice, became a permanent theme of Canadian cultural policy, from Canadian-content rules on radio to support for film and publishing.

Medicare's father, in popular memory, is Tommy Douglas, the CCF premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, whose government introduced North America's first public hospital insurance for all citizens and planned the medicare program his successor launched; in 1961 he became the first leader of the federal NDP. In 2004 viewers of a CBC series voted him "the Greatest Canadian". It is the institution Canadians most often say defines them, and the subject of constant argument over waiting times and funding, between those who want more public money and those who want more private options within it.

A place in the world

Canada was a founding member of NATO and fought in the Korean War. Its diplomats, above all Lester B. Pearson, specialised in being useful: in the 1956 Suez crisis Pearson proposed a United Nations Emergency Force to separate the combatants, and won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. Peacekeeping became part of Canada's self-image for a generation, even as most of its defence effort went into NATO and the joint North American air defence command with the United States, NORAD.

Symbols of a new nationalism

As prime minister (1963–68), Pearson's minority governments produced an extraordinary run of nation-building: medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada–U.S. Auto Pact of January 1965 that built Ontario's car industry, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and, after a bitter debate in which many English Canadians wanted to keep the Red Ensign with its Union Jack, the maple leaf flag, raised for the first time on 15 February 1965. In 1967 Canada celebrated its centennial, and Montreal's Expo 67, opened on 27 April, drew the world.

Rights expanded too. Asian Canadians won the federal vote in the late 1940s; status First Nations people won it, without having to give up their status, in 1960. In the 1960s Canada removed explicit racial preferences from its immigration rules, opening the door to the far more diverse immigration of the decades that followed.

Part 10 — Quebec: the Quiet Revolution, the October Crisis and the referendums (1960–1995)

For most of the century after Confederation, French Canada had defended itself through the Catholic Church, large families, rural parishes and a cautious, conservative provincial politics. The Church ran most schools and hospitals. English-speaking Canadians and Americans owned most of the big businesses, and in Montreal the language of the boardroom and often of the shop floor was English. French Canadians were a majority in Quebec and, on average, earned less than its English-speaking minority.

The Quiet Revolution

In June 1960 the Liberals under Jean Lesage won the provincial election, and in a few years Quebec remade itself so thoroughly that the period is called the Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution. The provincial state took over education and health care from the Church, creating a Ministry of Education in 1964. Under the slogan Maîtres chez nous ("Masters in our own house"), on which Lesage fought the 1962 election, the government nationalised private power companies into an expanded Hydro-Québec, which became a symbol of what French-speaking engineers and managers could build. A new, confident nationalism replaced the old defensive one: Quebeckers began to call themselves Québécois rather than Canadiens français.

The social change was just as fast. Church attendance collapsed. Quebec's fertility rate, among the highest in the Western world, fell from about 3.8 children per woman in 1960 to about 1.9 by 1970. A people that had survived by having large families now had to think about survival in other ways: through language law, immigration and the power of the state.

On 24 July 1967, during the centennial year, the French president Charles de Gaulle visited Expo 67 and ended a speech from the balcony of Montreal's city hall with "Vive le Québec libre!", the slogan of the independence movement. Ottawa was furious; many Quebeckers were thrilled.

The October Crisis

A small minority chose violence. From 1963 to 1970, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) set off more than 200 bombs. On 5 October 1970 one FLQ cell kidnapped the British trade commissioner James Cross; on 10 October another kidnapped Quebec's labour minister, Pierre Laporte. On 16 October Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, the only time it was used in peacetime, suspending civil liberties. The next day Laporte's body was found. Police arrested 497 people, most without charge; only 62 were charged. Cross was released in December in exchange for his kidnappers' safe passage to Cuba.

At the time, opinion polls showed overwhelming public support for the crackdown. Many Quebeckers, then and since, remember it differently: as the moment Ottawa sent soldiers into the streets and jailed poets, union leaders and activists for their opinions. Both memories are real, and both are part of why the crisis still matters.

The Parti Québécois and the first referendum

The mainstream independence movement chose the ballot box. On 11 October 1968 René Lévesque, a former television journalist and Lesage minister, founded the Parti Québécois (PQ). On 15 November 1976 it won 71 of 110 seats in the National Assembly. The new government passed the Charter of the French Language, Bill 101, on 26 August 1977. It made French the language of work, commerce and government, required most immigrant children to attend French schools, and restricted English on commercial signs. English-speaking Quebeckers saw it as an attack on their rights, and many left the province in the years that followed. Most francophones saw it as the law that saved their language on a continent of English speakers, and still do.

On 20 May 1980 Quebec voted on a mandate to negotiate "sovereignty-association", political independence with an economic partnership with Canada. Trudeau, himself a Quebecker, promised "renewed federalism" if Quebec voted No.

Meech Lake, Charlottetown and 1995

Trudeau's renewal turned out to be the patriation of the constitution in 1982 (Part 11), which Quebec's government did not sign. Brian Mulroney, the Conservative prime minister elected in 1984, tried to bring Quebec in with the Meech Lake Accord (1987), which would have recognised Quebec as a "distinct society". It needed every province's approval. In Manitoba, the First Nations MLA Elijah Harper blocked a vote, objecting that Indigenous peoples had been left out; Newfoundland's premier cancelled his legislature's vote; and the accord died on 23 June 1990. Many Quebeckers took its failure as a rejection. Many English Canadians had seen it as special treatment. A second attempt, the broader Charlottetown Accord, was put to a national referendum in 1992 and lost, 54.3 percent No nationally, with majorities against it in six of the ten provinces, Quebec among them.

Out of Meech's failure came the Bloc Québécois, a federal party founded in 1990 by Lucien Bouchard, a former Mulroney cabinet minister, to work for sovereignty in Ottawa. In 1994 the PQ returned to power under Jacques Parizeau, and on 30 October 1995 Quebec voted again. The No side won by 54,288 votes out of more than 4.6 million, with 93.5 percent of voters turning out. That night Parizeau blamed the defeat on "money and ethnic votes," a remark that was widely condemned, and resigned the next day.

In 1995 a country of 29 million people came within about one percentage point of beginning to break apart, on a question that had been argued over, in one form or another, since 1763.

The Supreme Court, asked by the federal government, ruled on 20 August 1998 that Quebec has no right to secede unilaterally, under Canadian or international law, but that a clear majority on a clear question would oblige the rest of Canada to negotiate. Parliament followed with the Clarity Act (2000), which lets the House of Commons judge whether a referendum question and majority are clear. Sovereigntists regard the law as an illegitimate federal veto on Quebec's choice; federalists regard it as a basic safeguard.

Part 11 — Patriation, the Charter and multiculturalism (1968–2000)

Two languages, many cultures

Pierre Trudeau, prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, had an answer to Quebec nationalism: make all of Canada a home for French speakers, so that they would not need a separate state. The Official Languages Act (1969) made English and French equal in federal institutions and services across the country. In practice, bilingualism took hold mostly in Quebec, in New Brunswick (Canada's only officially bilingual province) and in the federal government.

The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, set up in 1963, had described Canada as a partnership of "two founding peoples". Ukrainian, German, Italian, Jewish and other Canadians objected that the phrase left them out, and Indigenous peoples pointed out that they had been there first. On 8 October 1971, Trudeau announced a policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: Canada would have two official languages but no official culture. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act followed on 21 July 1988.

Multiculturalism became, for many Canadians, a core part of national identity. It also has critics. The Trinidad-born novelist Neil Bissoondath argued in the 1990s that the policy kept newcomers in ethnic compartments instead of helping them belong. Many Quebeckers have seen it as a way of reducing their nation to one "culture" among many, and Quebec prefers the term interculturalism: integration into a French-speaking society that respects diversity. A Quebec commission led by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor examined these "reasonable accommodation" debates in 2008.

Bringing the constitution home

Canada's constitution was still a British law, and amending it required a vote of the British Parliament. Trudeau decided to "patriate" it, with a charter of rights attached. Most provinces objected. In September 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that patriation without provincial consent was legal but broke constitutional convention. Trudeau then negotiated. On the night of 4–5 November 1981, federal and provincial ministers agreed on a deal, later called the "Kitchen Accord", that nine provinces accepted. Quebec, whose premier René Lévesque was not present when it was struck, did not. In Quebec it is still remembered as the "night of the long knives".

Queen Elizabeth II proclaimed the Constitution Act, 1982 on Parliament Hill on 17 April 1982. It included an amending formula and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Charter changed Canadian public life profoundly. Courts struck down laws on abortion, recognised same-sex rights, and expanded the rights of the accused. Admirers call it the country's greatest modern achievement; critics argue it has shifted power from elected legislatures to unelected judges. Section 33 was the compromise between those views. Quebec has used it repeatedly: in 1988, after the Supreme Court struck down part of Bill 101's sign rules, Quebec passed Bill 178 under the notwithstanding clause, and in 2022 it pre-emptively used the clause to shield Bill 96, a broad strengthening of French-language rules. Other provinces, including Ontario and Saskatchewan, have used or threatened it more often in recent years, and its use is a live national debate.

First peoples, again

Section 35 opened a new era of Indigenous rights litigation. A series of Supreme Court decisions since then has recognised Aboriginal title and a government duty to consult Indigenous peoples on projects that affect their rights. Modern treaties, called comprehensive land claims, were signed in the North. The largest, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement of 1993, led to the creation on 1 April 1999 of Nunavut, a territory of about 2 million square kilometres in the eastern Arctic where 84 percent of the people are Inuit.

The decade also brought confrontation. In the summer of 1990, the town of Oka, Quebec, planned to expand a golf course onto a pine forest that included a Mohawk burial ground claimed by the Kanesatake community. Mohawks set up barricades. On 11 July 1990 Quebec provincial police stormed them, and Corporal Marcel Lemay was killed in the exchange of gunfire. The standoff lasted 78 days, until 26 September, and the federal government sent in the army. For many Mohawks the Oka Crisis was the defence of land taken from them over centuries; for many of their neighbours it was an armed blockade that paralysed the region for a summer. It helped prompt the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which reported in 1996.

Free trade

The other great debate of the period was about the United States. Mulroney negotiated the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement, in force on 1 January 1989, after an election fought almost entirely on the question in 1988. Opponents warned it would make Canada an economic colony; supporters argued it would secure access to the market that mattered most. NAFTA, adding Mexico, followed on 1 January 1994. The United States became by far the largest buyer of Canadian exports, which is why every later turn in Washington's trade policy hit Canada so hard.

Part 12 — Canada in the 21st century, and in 2026 (2000–2026)

The early 21st century brought rising oil wealth in Alberta and a conservative revival. Stephen Harper, prime minister from 2006 to 2015, led a newly united Conservative Party and governed as a cautious conservative: he emphasised the military, the North and resource development, and apologised for the Chinese head tax (2006) and the residential schools (2008). Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide on 20 July 2005, under his predecessor Paul Martin; Canada was among the first countries in the world to make it so.

Justin Trudeau, Pierre's son, won in 2015 and governed until 2025. His governments legalised recreational cannabis, introduced a carbon price and a child benefit, renegotiated NAFTA into the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA, in force 1 July 2020), and invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time, on 14 February 2022, to end the trucker "Freedom Convoy" occupation of downtown Ottawa against pandemic mandates. Supporters saw a firm response to an illegal blockade; critics, including civil-liberties groups, saw government overreach. In January 2024 the Federal Court ruled the invocation unreasonable and in breach of the Charter, and in January 2026 the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that ruling; on 22 October 2026 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the government's appeal. The inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls reported on 3 June 2019, with 231 Calls for Justice, and called the violence a "genocide", a conclusion some politicians and commentators disputed.

The population boom and the backlash

Canada's population grew by 2.8 percent in a single year, 2023–24, mostly because of temporary residents: international students, temporary workers and asylum seekers. The number of non-permanent residents peaked at nearly 3 million on 1 October 2024. Housing costs became the country's central political issue, and the long national consensus in favour of high immigration came under strain. The government cut its targets for both temporary and permanent residents. Growth slowed to 1.1 percent and then to 0.5 percent in the year to 1 July 2026, the slowest since the First World War.

Climate struck too: in 2023, wildfires burned about 18.5 million hectares, the largest area in Canada's recorded history, and forced more than 185,000 people from their homes by one estimate, among them almost the whole population of Yellowknife.

Trump, tariffs and Carney

On 6 January 2025, Trudeau announced his resignation. Two months later the new U.S. administration of Donald Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on most Canadian goods (10 percent on energy), from 4 March 2025, before exempting goods that comply with CUSMA from 6 March. Trump repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the "51st state". The reaction in Canada was a wave of patriotism. Provincial liquor boards pulled American alcohol from their shelves, an Angus Reid poll in February 2025 found 85 percent of respondents replacing at least some American products, and Canadian-resident return trips from the United States fell by about a quarter in 2025, according to Statistics Canada.

Mark Carney, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, won the Liberal leadership on 9 March 2025 with 85.9 percent of the vote and became prime minister on 14 March. He called an election for 28 April 2025 and won it.

The Liberals fell just short of a majority on election night. A series of opposition MPs crossed the floor to join them, giving the government a majority from 8 April 2026. On 31 October 2026, the House of Commons website showed 173 Liberals, 137 Conservatives, 21 Bloc Québécois, 5 New Democrats and 1 Green, with 6 seats vacant.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

All figures below are as of the dates given; check the sources for later updates.

• Trade with the United States. CUSMA's 2026 joint review did not produce the renewal Canada sought: on 1 July 2026 the United States declined to extend the agreement, which moves it into annual reviews. In October 2026 the U.S. Trade Representative opened public consultations for what it called the "2027 joint review".
• Quebec. On 5 October 2026 the Parti Québécois under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon won 60 of the National Assembly's 127 seats with 28.0 percent of the vote, four short of a majority, on a turnout of about 67 percent. It had promised a referendum on sovereignty. Whether and when one is held, and on what question, will shape the next chapter of the story told in Part 10.
• People. Statistics Canada estimated the population at 41,798,407 on 1 July 2026, up 0.5 percent in a year, with a median age of 40.9. About 23.0 percent of the population were immigrants at the 2021 census, the highest share since Confederation and the highest in the G7. About 1.8 million people (5.0 percent) identified as Indigenous: 1,048,405 First Nations, 624,220 Métis and 70,545 Inuit.
• Economy. The World Bank put Canada's GDP at $2.32 trillion in 2025, or $55,698 per person. Life expectancy was 82.1 years in 2024. The fertility rate had fallen to 1.25 children per woman, among the lowest in the world, from 3.81 in 1960.
• Space. In April 2026 the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen flew around the Moon aboard NASA's Artemis II, the first Canadian to travel around the Moon.

Part 13 — How to understand Canada today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. Canada was made by negotiation, not revolution. It has no founding war of independence. It got its self-government by petition, compromise and act of Parliament: responsible government in 1848, Confederation in 1867, the Statute of Westminster in 1931, patriation in 1982. That history explains a political culture that prizes accommodation, distrusts grand gestures, and treats federal–provincial bargaining as the normal business of the state. It also explains why the hardest moments (1837, 1885, 1917, 1970, 1990) are remembered so vividly: they are the times compromise broke down.

2. There are at least three founding peoples, and they tell the story differently. English-speaking Canadians have often told it as a steady growth of freedom and independence from Britain. French-speaking Quebeckers tell it as the survival of a nation conquered in 1759, which has had to defend its language and institutions ever since. First Nations, Inuit and Métis tell it as the story of peoples who were here first, who made treaties as nations, and whose lands, children and governments were taken. Each account is true to its own experience. Understanding Canada means holding them at the same time.

3. The treaties are not history; they are law. Section 35 of the Constitution affirms Aboriginal and treaty rights, and the courts have given that sentence real force. Pipelines, mines, dams and forestry across much of the country now depend on negotiations with Indigenous nations. Reconciliation, after the residential schools and the TRC, is both a moral project and a constitutional one, and Canadians argue about how far and how fast it should go.

4. Immigration is the national project. Canada has always needed people: from the filles du roi to the Loyalists, the Prairie homesteaders, postwar Europeans and, since the 1960s, newcomers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2021 almost one in four people living in Canada was an immigrant, a higher share than in any other G7 country. The country also has a long record of exclusion, from the head tax to the Komagata Maru to the St. Louis. The surge of 2023–24 and the backlash that followed are the latest test of a consensus that has always depended on public confidence that growth is managed well.

5. Living next to the United States is the permanent condition. Canada was founded partly to avoid being absorbed by the United States, and every generation has had its version of the question: reciprocity in the 1850s, free trade in 1988, tariffs and the "51st state" in 2025. Canadians share a continent, a language (for most), and a deeply integrated economy with their neighbour, and define themselves in large part by what makes them different: medicare, gun laws, multiculturalism, the monarchy, and a more communitarian idea of government.

Canada has never had a single founding story. It has had treaties, conquests, compromises and referendums, and an unusual habit of turning its arguments into institutions rather than wars.

The takeaway

Canada began as the homelands of hundreds of Indigenous nations, became a French colony built on the fur trade and Indigenous alliances, and was conquered by Britain in 1759–60. Loyalists made it English-speaking, Confederation in 1867 made it a country, and the railway, the Numbered Treaties and the defeat of the Métis made it continental, at a heavy cost to its first peoples, including more than a century of residential schools that the TRC called cultural genocide. Two world wars made it a nation in its own eyes; the postwar boom built its welfare state; the Quiet Revolution and two referendums came within a percentage point of breaking it apart; and the 1982 Charter and multiculturalism gave it a new self-image. In autumn 2026, with a sovereigntist government in Quebec, a trade relationship with the United States in question, and population growth at its slowest in a century, Canadians are again doing what their history has taught them: negotiating.

Try this: look up the treaty or land agreement that covers the place where you live, or a Canadian city you know, on the Government of Canada's treaties map or a First Nation's own website. Find out which nation signed it, when, and what each side understood it to mean. Then read one of the TRC's 94 Calls to Action and check whether it has been completed. You will see that the history in this piece is still being written.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Statistics Canada, The Daily and analytical publications: population estimates (23 September 2026); "150 years of immigration in Canada" (Canadian Megatrends, 2016); 2021 Census releases on immigration (26 October 2022), Indigenous peoples (21 September 2022) and languages (17 August 2022).
- National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report (2015) and NCTR residential school history pages. Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada: the Numbered Treaties, the 2008 apology and the government's progress report on the Calls to Action. CBC News, Beyond 94.
- Veterans Affairs Canada: the First and Second World Wars. Justice Laws Website: Constitution Act, 1982 and Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Clarity Act.
- Élections Québec: official results of the 1980, 1992 and 1995 referendums and the 5 October 2026 general election. House of Commons, party standings (31 October 2026). Elections Canada, 45th general election.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026): population, GDP, GDP per person, life expectancy, fertility. Maddison Project Database (University of Groningen), via Our World in Data: long-run GDP and GDP per person.
- Office of the U.S. Trade Representative: request for public comment on the 2027 USMCA joint review (October 2026). NASA: Artemis II mission page.
- Many dates and figures for New France, the Loyalists, the Riel resistances, the head tax, the Komagata Maru, the conscription crises, the Halifax explosion, the Persons Case, Japanese Canadian internment, the Quiet Revolution, the October Crisis, Oka, Meech Lake, the Emergencies Act litigation and the events of 2025–26 were taken from Wikipedia summaries of cited scholarship and reporting, and cross-checked against the official sources above where possible. Where historians disagree, the text says so.

Go deeper
- 📘 A Concise History of Canada — Margaret Conrad (a clear, modern one-volume history that gives Indigenous peoples, women and the regions their place)
- 📘 A Short History of Canada — Desmond Morton (brisk and readable; the classic short version)
- 📘 The Inconvenient Indian — Thomas King (a funny, angry and personal account of Indigenous peoples and North American governments)
- 📘 I Have Lived Here Since the World Began — Arthur J. Ray (the history of Canada's Indigenous peoples from the earliest times to the present)
- 📘 None Is Too Many — Irving Abella and Harold Troper (how Canada closed its doors to Jewish refugees, 1933–1948)
- 🌐 National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: Reports (the TRC's final report and related documents, free to read)
- 🌐 Élections Québec: Results and statistics (official results of every Quebec election and referendum)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: If I Was Born in Canada; A Brief History of the United States (this series); The Columbian Exchange