Since last fall, the Sovereignty Act has caused a lot of political scientists and lawyers, some of them my colleagues, to hoist a pen and direct their criticism towards this piece of legislation. We will get to their ill-founded remarks in due course. This article is the first of a short series of opinion pieces on where the Act came from. The short answer is that, unlike Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, it did not emerge, context-free from the brow of Zeus or of Danielle Smith. It is simply the most recent product of Western and Alberta history..The story began with the initial and prolonged contact between the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now the prairie west and European traders, organized in the form of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Under a plantation charter in 1670, the Company was granted a monopoly over trade into the territory that drained into Hudson’s Bay. Later the Northwest and Northeast Territories, land that drained directly into the Arctic Ocean, came under their “sway,” as the language of the eighteenth century put it. The land was owned by the Imperial Crown but was, from the European perspective, effectively controlled by the Company, especially after 1821 when interlopers from Canada were absorbed into a consolidated enterprise. By and large aboriginal claims to the land were ignored, though the place of native inhabitants in the actual trade was central..That relations between the Company traders and the indigenous inhabitants were mostly cordial is attested by the large number of inhabitants whose mother was indigenous and whose father was a Company employee. These “many tender ties,” resulting from marriages “according to the custom of the country,” were strained with the arrival of British women in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as was true in India around the same time. Nevertheless, most historians of the fur-trade era have argued that the society that developed from the trade centred at the Red River Settlement (now Winnipeg) was both independent from Canada and considered itself unique..Unlike the Americans, who provided a legal way for the territories claimed by that country to become states, there was no similar mechanism in British North America, neither in Canada nor in the Company lands. More importantly, there was no consultation with the inhabitants of Rupert’s Land — indigenous, Métis, mixed-race “country-born,” American, or British — by the Imperial government or by the Canadian one when in 1870, the Company lands were transferred from the Imperial to the Canadian Crown..At the time, Johnny Bruce and Louis Riel argued that they had been abandoned by the British. They also said that they “did not recognize the authority of Canada,” which sought to impose upon them a “despotic government.” They then declared “to the world” and to Canada that they had established a provisional government..However dubious in law the notion of 'abandonment' might have been, its political significance was clear, not least of all by the flourishing rhetoric that closely resembled the Declaration of Independence of 1776 by the British colonists to the south. One thing was clear: the Red River Settlement did not understand itself as an outpost of Canada. The Canadians saw things differently. Indeed, they thought they had purchased the Company lands the way the Americans purchased Alaska from Russia a few years later..In fact, however, the transfer of jurisdiction was by an Imperial political order, not a real estate deal. All Canada did was pay the Company for its “improvements,” such as Fort Edmonton. Fifteen years after the transfer, Canada had to mobilize Imperial military assets to impose its laws on the resistant and rebellious inhabitants of the former Company lands..The rebellion of 1885 had enduring consequences. First among them was the attitude of Canadians, whom we now call Laurentian Canadians, towards their erstwhile fellow citizens on the prairies. Sir John A. Macdonald summarized the new attitude when he called the “postage stamp” province of Manitoba and the various territories to the west of Red River “our” (meaning Imperial Canada’s) Crown Colony. Under British law, crown colonies were governed by Imperial agents in the interests of the Imperial Crown. There may or may not be legislative assemblies, but always the Crown had the right of veto and the option of imposing direct legislation by order-in-council..That was true when rule was from London. It remained true when rule was from Ottawa. The legislation that imposed rule from Ottawa included the Dominion Lands Policy, which reserved public lands “for the purposes of the Dominion,” the grossly misnamed National Policy, which provided tariff protection to growing Laurentian manufacturers at the cost of stifling the economic vitality of the prairies, and the “monopoly clause” of the CPR, which tied western homesteaders and pioneers to the financial tentacles of Montreal..From the start, therefore, the inhabitants of the prairie west thought they had been annexed by Canada without their consent. Like all frontier communities, they had expected self-government, but their governments had been prohibited from tapping the chief source of revenue, namely land and resources, by which to pay for public services. The territorial and then the new provincial governments, to be discussed in the next article, were reduced to supplicants, which was what the denizens of Ottawa thought proper then..Arguably, they still do..First in a series of four. Dr. Cooper teaches political science at the University of Calgary.
