Chapter two in the origin of the Sovereignty Act played out between the period after the Hudson’s Bay Company lands were acquired by Canada and the start of World War Two. For their part, Laurentian Canada showed the same condescension and contempt for the prairie west as it did before 1870. And on the other hand, Westerners gradually came to realize that they were not so much Canadian citizens as subjects of an imperial Canada..Manitoba was admitted to Canada in 1870. It consisted of around 100 square miles of the Red River Valley, about 1/18th of its present size, its boundaries having been determined by Canada. In no respect was it a province like the others. The rest of what is now Manitoba was governed directly from Ottawa as part of the Northwest, and even that was insecure. In 1874, for example, Ontario claimed its western boundary was the eastern boundary of British Columbia, namely the peaks of the Rockies. Ontario also claimed it northern boundary was the Arctic Ocean..Wrangling between Manitoba and Ontario began a few years later with the Canadian decision to expand the boundaries of Manitoba north and west to reflect the population increase in response to Dominion homesteading policies. But where was the Manitoba-Ontario border? Contentions centred on Rat Portage (now Kenora) because this unruly town was a centre of CPR construction. Each province claimed the right to enforce its laws, which led to some acrimonious but also comical consequences: Manitoba constables who made arrests were in turn arrested by officers of Ontario. After the Manitoba jail was incinerated, the premier of Manitoba, John Norquay, commandeered a train, filled it with an armed militia from Red River, and left for Rat Portage to arrest those responsible for the arson. In 1884, Canada ruled that the disputed territory belonged to Ontario. No surprise there..Looking back on the previous twenty years, Manitoba premier Rodmond P. Roblin said in 1905 that Manitoba “has been shorn of territory which belonged to her, crippled for all time, treated as an outcast, cribbed, cabined and confined, left to remain a small postage stamp on the very large envelope of the Dominion.” To add insult to injury, it was seven years after Saskatchewan and Alberta had been carved out of the Territories that Manitoba assumed its current shape.. Captain John PalliserCapt. John Palliser .The creation of the two new provinces to the west of Manitoba also served the interests of Laurentians. Within a few years of the turn of the century, most politicians thought the time was ripe to create new prairie provincial governments. Premier Roblin argued that the western boundary of Manitoba be extended into what is now southern Saskatchewan..Frederick Haultain, by then premier of the Northwest Territories, had a different vision: a single province, named Buffalo, located between BC and Manitoba. Such a possibility had been discussed ever since Captain John Palliser undertook his British North America Exploring Expedition during the 1860s to determine the suitability of the area for agricultural settlement. At the time the Hudson’s Bay Company, which sought to keep homesteaders away from their fur preserve, dismissed the expedition as nothing but a buffalo hunt at taxpayers’ expense. A few years later, Canadian bureaucrats conceived of a multi-province subdivision of the prairies. Showing the same amazing imaginative capacities that endure to the present, they called the new divisions provinces one, two, three, and four..In the event, Laurentian politics determined the outcome. Liberal Prime Minister Laurier objected to the existing options on two counts: neither Haultain nor Roblin was a Liberal. Worse, either proposal would have resulted in what Haultain sought, “real power in Ottawa.” Not a chance..Geography and history favoured a division between the short grass plains in the south and the parkland in the north. Conservative strength in the Northwest, however, was concentrated along the CPR main line in the south. Laurier responded by dividing the new provinces with an entirely arbitrary north south line that had the happy result of diluting Conservative support into two provinces and sustaining Liberal provincial governments until 1921 in Alberta and 1929 in Saskatchewan..If this sort of partisan gerrymandering in favour of the Ottawa government were not insulting enough, neither of the new provinces gained control over the chief source of revenue. As with the initial “postage stamp” province of Manitoba, public lands and subsurface mineral resources were reserved “for the purposes of the Dominion.” The words of Sir John A. Macdonald in 1870 still defined Canada’s policy in the prairie west. It would be “injudicious,” Macdonald said, to (1) “have a large province” that (2) “would have control over its lands” because (3) it “might interfere with the general policy of the government.” And so things stood for the next four decades..When at long last, in 1930, the Natural Resources Transfer Acts gave the prairie provinces control over resource revenue, it was just in time for a decade of severe deflation and drought. Having been excluded for two generations from the practice of responsible government, prairie politicians had developed their own kind of self-government. It was conventionally despised and deplored by Laurentian academics and politicians as populism. For those with a taste for Marxist jargon, prairie politics was an expression of “alienation.” From the Progressives and farmers’ parties of the 1920s to Social Credit in the 1930s and 40s, western and especially Alberta politics were considered by Laurentians as laughable..Not so much laughable as threatening, however, was the attempt by the Alberta Social Credit government at the height of the Great Depression, and in the face of inaction by the Dominion government, to take matters into its own hands. The Alberta legislature passed a series of measures designed to implement a controversial economic theory, also called social credit. Chief among their proposals were bills that would tax and control banks, all of which were Laurentian and by law regulated only by the Dominion government. A total of eleven enactments were disallowed by the Dominion government (and three were reserved) prior to the death of Premier Aberhart in 1943. So far as Albertans were concerned, and despite whatever reservations they may have had regarding social credit, Ottawa’s action conformed to a familiar pattern. Eugene Forsey was neither a strong defender of provincial rights nor an enthusiastic admirer of social credit or of the Social Credit Party but was an honest scholar. As he wrote close to these events, “the revival of Dominion control over the provinces is really the revival of Dominion control over such provinces as try to do things which the dominant economic interests of Canada dislike.”.Looking back from the 1950s, another honest scholar, James Mallory, summarized Canada’s involvement in the prairie west leading to the creation of the three provinces: they were provinces, he said, not in the same sense as Ontario and Quebec, but “in the Roman sense.” Whatever did he mean? A Roman province was distinguished by two major attributes. First it was a locale where administrative rule was exercised by Rome or an agent of Rome (or by extension, by an agent of the New Rome on the Rideau). Second, unlike the inhabitants of Italy (or of Laurentian Canada) those new “provinces” paid tribute to the imperial capital. Moreover, the etymology, pro-vincere, suggested the new provinces were conquered territories. To this day, the embarrassment of the 1885 rebellion was never forgotten by Laurentian administrators..Dr. Cooper teaches political science at the University of Calgary. Second in a series of four, part three tomorrow.
