History of Canada

The lands encompassing present-day Canada have been inhabited for millennia by Indigenous peoples, with distinct trade networks, spiritual beliefs, and styles of social organization.

Over centuries, elements of Indigenous, French, British and more recent immigrant customs have combined to form a Canadian culture that has also been strongly influenced by its linguistic, geographic and economic neighbour, the United States.

[1] During the Wisconsin glaciation, 50,000–17,000 years ago, falling sea levels allowed people to move gradually across the Bering land bridge (Beringia), from Siberia into northwest North America.

[11] However, individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally; thus with the passage of time, there is a pattern of increasing regional generalization (i.e.: Paleo-Arctic, Plano and Maritime Archaic traditions).

The Algonquian language is believed to have originated in the western plateau of Idaho or the plains of Montana and moved with migrants eastward,[16] eventually extending in various manifestations all the way from Hudson Bay to what is today Nova Scotia in the east and as far south as the Tidewater region of Virginia.

[27] The inlets and valleys of the British Columbia Coast sheltered large, distinctive populations, such as the Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth, sustained by the region's abundant salmon and shellfish.

[27] These peoples developed complex cultures dependent on the western red cedar that included wooden houses, seagoing whaling and war canoes and elaborately carved potlatch items and totem poles.

[39] João Álvares Fagundes and Pero de Barcelos established fishing outposts in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia around 1521 CE; however, these were later abandoned, with the Portuguese colonizers focusing their efforts on South America.

[41][42] French interest in the New World began with Francis I of France, who in 1524 sponsored Giovanni da Verrazzano's navigation of the region between Florida and Newfoundland in hopes of finding a route to the Pacific Ocean.

[46] Permanent settlement attempts by Cartier at Charlesbourg-Royal in 1541, at Sable Island in 1598 by Marquis de La Roche-Mesgouez, and at Tadoussac, Quebec in 1600 by François Gravé Du Pont all eventually failed.

[75] However, new arrivals stopped coming from France in the proceeding decades,[76][77][78] meaning that the English and Scottish settlers in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the southern Thirteen Colonies outnumbered the French population approximately ten to one by the 1750s.

(Guadeloupe produced more sugar than all the British islands combined, and Voltaire had notoriously dismissed Canada as "Quelques arpents de neige", "A few acres of snow").

[105] Notably, the borders between Canada and the United States were officially demarcated;[105] all land south and west of the Great Lakes, which was formerly a part of the Province of Quebec and included modern-day Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, was ceded to the Americans.

American forces took control of Lake Erie in 1813, driving the British out of western Ontario, killing the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, and breaking the military power of his confederacy.

[111] The war was overseen by British army officers like Isaac Brock and Charles de Salaberry with the assistance of First Nations and loyalist informants, most notably Laura Secord.

[110] The troubling memory of the war and the American invasions etched itself into the consciousness of Canadians as a distrust of the intentions of the United States towards the British presence in North America.[113]pp.

In Upper Canada, a band of Reformers under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie took up arms in a disorganized and ultimately unsuccessful series of small-scale skirmishes around Toronto, London, and Hamilton.

")[130] Federation emerged from multiple impulses: the British wanted Canada to defend itself; the Maritimes needed railroad connections, which were promised in 1867; English-Canadian nationalism sought to unite the lands into one country, dominated by the English language and loyalist culture; many French-Canadians saw an opportunity to exert political control within a new largely French-speaking Quebec[113]pp.

[140] Under the Indian Act, the government started the Residential School System to convert the Indigenous peoples to "industrious Christian Canadians" and extinguish native language and culture.

They were growing rapidly thanks to abundant wheat crops that attracted immigration to the plains by Ukrainians and Northern and Central Europeans and by settlers from the United States, Britain and eastern Canada.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George eventually relented, and convinced the reluctant Americans to accept the presence of delegations from Canada, India, Australia, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Canada negotiated with the United States, Australia, and the Soviet Union to expand the pool, but the effort failed when the Great Depression caused distrust and low prices.

[175][176] In 1930, in the first stage of the long depression, Prime Minister Mackenzie King believed that the crisis was a temporary swing of the business cycle and that the economy would soon recover without government intervention.

With falling support and the depression getting only worse, Bennett attempted to introduce policies based on the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in the United States, but he got little passed.

Canada played a major role in supplying food, raw materials, munitions and money to the hard-pressed British economy, training airmen for the Commonwealth, guarding the western half of the North Atlantic Ocean against German U-boats, and providing combat troops for the invasions of Italy, France and Germany in 1943–45.

[197] After the start of the war with Japan in December 1941, the government, in cooperation with the U.S., began the Japanese-Canadian internment, which sent 22,000 British Columbia residents of Japanese descent to relocation camps far from the coast.

[202] In 1948, the British government gave voters three Newfoundland Referendum choices: remaining a crown colony, returning to Dominion status (that is, independence), or joining Canada.

[218] The west, particularly the petroleum-producing provinces like Alberta, opposed many of the policies emanating from central Canada, with the National Energy Program creating considerable antagonism and growing western alienation.

[228] The constitutional reform process under Prime Minister Mulroney culminated in the failure of the Charlottetown Accord which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" but was rejected in 1992 by a narrow margin.

[249] From January 2020 to May 2022, Canada was greatly impacted by COVID-19 pandemic,[250] which caused over 40,000 deaths in the country, the third highest mortality toll in North America (behind the United States and Mexico).