2.1 Introduction
There are, today, approximately 35 million Canadians. Coincidentally, that is almost exactly the number of people who were living in the United States in 1867. At the time of Confederation, there were 3.4 million people in all of Canada (that is, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia), and today there are more people than that in metro Montreal. In other words, in 1867, Canada contained fewer people than exist today in the country’s second largest city and yet the Dominion’s original government had the temerity to think they could capture the whole northern half of a continent and thus foil the expansionist interests of an incredibly well-armed country to the south, whose population outnumbered the Canadians 10-to-1. It seems improbable.
It is perhaps even more improbable that the original 1867 version of Canada would eventually claim enough territory to become the second largest country — in terms of area — on Earth. At the time of Confederation, Canada was hardly more than the core elements of New France. Its boundaries did not include much beyond Acadia and the St. Lawrence Valley, along with what had once been Wendake (or Huronia), and the lands of a clutch of other Iroquoian confederacies, most of which were allied to New France in the 17th century.
Exponential Expansion
In 1869-70, Canada’s tumultuous annexation of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory gave the new Dominion access to the whole of the West and the North. What lay beyond the Rockies joined the federation in 1871. Two years later, Prince Edward Island assented as well. In 1880, the British Arctic Territories were transferred to Canada. New administrative territories were carved out of the North: Keewatin in 1876; Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Athabasca, and Alberta in 1882; Franklin, Mackenzie, and Ungava in 1895; and the Yukon Territory in 1898.
Although Manitoba negotiated its way into the Dominion, both Alberta and Saskatchewan were created (in 1905) by bureaucrats in Ottawa wielding straight-edged rulers with willful disregard for historic and topographic boundaries. In 1912, Manitoba would benefit from this exercise as well, when Ottawa transferred much of the District of Keewatin to the original western province. At the same time, Ontario and Quebec would each engorge enough of the lands of the Lowland/Swampy Cree and Innu as to double in size. The Sverdrup Islands in the Arctic were ceded to Canada by Norway in 1930. In 1949, 82 years after the Charlottetown Conference that first introduced the idea of a colonial union, the Dominion of Newfoundland (with Labrador, the mainland annex assigned to it by Britain in 1927) joined the federation. Since then, the only significant additional adjustment of the map has been to establish the District of Nunavut in 1999 out of portions of the Districts of Franklin, Mackenzie, and all of what remained of Keewatin.
What this litany of administrative and boundary changes indicates is that the question of