Chapter 2. Confederation in Conflict
2.9 The Railway
Completing the Intercolonial Railway between the original four provinces was a condition of Confederation. That task could be accomplished without too much difficulty. After all, the colonies had laid some 3,200 km of track by 1865. Finding a company with the wherewithal to build a railway from Montreal to the Pacific was a whole different order of magnitude. The Grand Trunk Railway was the obvious candidate but its directors balked at the prospect of an all-Canadian route. The newly-established Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was a contender in 1873, but that plan ran off the proverbial rails when it was discovered that Macdonald’s Conservative Party had received significant funds from the CPR. The Pacific Scandal cost Macdonald his administration, brought the Mackenzie Liberals into office, and a substitute railway company could not be found. The Mackenzie administration was not without accomplishments in this regard: in one term of office it oversaw the construction of several north-south lines that would assist Canadian exports. Returned in 1878, and faced with an almost apoplectic British Columbian body politic that was calling for “The terms [of union], the whole terms, and nothing but the terms,” Macdonald resumed the search for a contractor. Again, the CPR stepped forward and the project, started in 1880, was completed in a remarkable six years. Built with heavy government subsidies and other incentives provided to the CPR Company, it represented a genuine engineering achievement. It was also a massive corporate accomplishment.
The CPR as Land Baron
The legal mechanism that made possible the distribution of western lands was the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, aspects of which were highly problematic. For one, it disregarded Aboriginal title in violation of treaty agreements. Indigenous peoples continue to protest this situation. The Act had implications, too, for the provinces of the West. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec (and, a little later, PEI) all had exclusive control over their natural resources (with a few exceptions like fisheries), but land and other natural resources across the whole of the Prairie West and the Peace District in northeastern British Columbia were Ottawa’s to control, tax, and dispense. Establishing settlers increased traffic on the railway. This increased the movement of supplies and farm equipment from east to west, it stimulated steel production in the original provinces, and as capital and sweat were invested in farms, it created a market for land and further revenues for the state. Ottawa became wealthy on western lands while western territories and provinces did not. Finally, the parceling out of western lands in sections determined a human geography on the plains that was brutally rigid. Roads were driven at one- or two-mile intervals that corresponded with the grid of sections. The effect was to separate neighbours by miles of landscape and