FIRST READING: The triumph of Canada's 'artificial line'

National Post

12-05-2025

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'They (the Americans) just assumed it was going to flop into their lap,' said Bown.
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What happened instead was the sudden amalgamation of North America's various British colonies, many of whom were debt-ridden and plagued by stagnant, oligarchic economies.
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Still, the country that resulted, Canada, was able to raise its hand as the only viable non-American purchaser of the HBC's former domain — a deal that it struck in 1870.
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But a mere contract was not enough. If the U.S. couldn't purchase new territory, the other option was for motivated U.S. citizens to simply take it.
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Multiple times throughout the 19th century, a community of Americans would become established in a foreign country or territory, decide that they wanted to live under the stars and stripes, and then agitate for annexation.
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That's what happened to Hawaii: U.S. citizens overthrew the kingdom's monarchy and then successfully petitioned for U.S. intervention.
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It roughly describes the lead-up to the Mexican-American War, which saw California, Utah, Nevada and pieces of five other states added to the U.S. fold.
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It also describes any number of wars with Native Americans: Settlers would move into territory that had been legally set aside for Indigenous use, triggering armed conflict and a U.S. military response.
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Early Canadian history is filled with instances of what, in different circumstances, could easily have become a prelude to U.S. takeover.
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At multiple points, communities of Americans established themselves in Canadian territory, setting up whole economic networks that employed U.S. currency and served U.S. markets.
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In the immediate aftermath of Confederation, some of the only non-Indigenous people in the Canadian prairies were American traders and hunters operating with impunity. 'The whole area was entirely integrated into the American economic sphere,' said Bown.
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The 1898 Klondike Gold Rush and the 1858 Fraser Canyon Gold Rush were primarily American endeavours. At its height, the Klondike gold rush centre of Dawson City was predominantly U.S. citizens using U.S. dollars and exporting gold primarily to U.S. buyers. One of those Americans was Friedrich Trump, grandfather to U.S. President Donald Trump.
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Even the 1870 Red River Rebellion, a conflict over land in modern-day Manitoba, comprised Métis participants who hailed from the U.S. and whose sympathies lay closer to Washington than to Ottawa. In the early stages of the rebellion, leading U.S. figures openly saw it as an opportunity for the U.S. to calve off a piece of Canada filled with American sympathizers.
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'Is there no other alternative for the people of northwest British America than to be cajoled or dragooned into this unnatural union with distant Canada?' said then U.S. senator Alexander Ramsey, the leading booster for the effort.
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And yet, every time, the Canadian government was able to assert just enough influence and authority that the lands remained under Queen Victoria.
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Canada's first decades are defined by efforts to slap together the semblance of a country north of the 49th parallel before the Americans could do it first.
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The Canadian Pacific Railroad was the most conspicuous element of the plan, with its builders conscious that if they didn't drive a route to the Pacific as quickly as possible, the Americans would do it for them.
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In the words of one 2023 review of Dominion, the CPR was 'built to protect British North America from an economically ravenous United States' and was the spine for a 'paper nation.'
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The Northwest Mounted Police, a precursor to the RCMP, was founded specifically as a means to evict U.S. whiskey traders operating in the Canadian prairies.
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One of the inciting incidents for the force's creation was the 1873 Cypress Hills massacre, the murder of an entire Nakoda camp by American wolf hunters in what is now Saskatchewan.
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In the 1880s, the Canadian federal government approved a series of large, corporate-owned cattle ranches across the West. One of them, Bar U Ranch, remains a national historic site.
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Ranches were effectively the easiest and fastest way to make it look like large swaths of the prairies were under Canadian control.
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The operations employed predominantly American cowboys to produce cattle for American buyers, but under Canadian ownership and with a British flag flying over the proceedings.
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The federal leases for these ranches were scandalously cheap, 'but like other elements of national policy, these leases were designed to make the northwest profitable and assert Canadian sovereignty against American interests,' wrote historian Claire Elizabeth Campbell in a 2017 book chapter on the Bar U Ranch.
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And then, starting in earnest in 1901, Ottawa consolidated its hold on the West with one of the most feverish immigration schemes in human history.
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From just 1901 to 1913, millions of newcomers from Europe and the United States were settled onto prairie homesteads. At a time when all of Canada only had seven million inhabitants (roughly the population of the modern-day Greater Toronto Area), annual immigration briefly peaked at more than 400,000.
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As Bown notes, many of these newcomers would have had very little allegiance to the new nation of Canada. Large portions of them didn't even speak English. But it ensured that anyone crossing the 49th parallel would immediately encounter settlements filled with Canadian nationals ostensibly loyal to the Crown and flying the Union Jack.
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Luck underwrote all of this, of course. The aforementioned Mexican-American War and the U.S. Civil War ensured that the United States had to shelve their early 19th century conception of an entire continent under the U.S. flag — a concept often known as 'manifest destiny.'
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But it's been described as the Canadian ' flank thrust.' While the United States was busy with its other borders, the Canadians were able to tape together just enough of a functioning state that the top half of the continent has remained in their hands ever since.
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'It wasn't valuable enough for the Americans to expend any blood or treasure to take it,' Bown said. And by the time it was, 'it was too late.'
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When King Charles III opens Canada's Parliament at the end of this month, the Bloc Québécois has announced that they will not be showing up to work in protest. This is pretty standard Bloc practice; they usually skip anything with even a slight tinge of royal ceremony, including throne speeches. But the atmosphere will still be far less troublesome than what Charles is used to. In the U.K., speeches from the throne are laden with weird rules, including Buckingham Palace's practice of taking an MP hostage in order to ensure the King's safety.
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The U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Peter Hoekstra, just declared that we should all stop worrying about U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threats to annex us. 'From my standpoint, from the president's standpoint, 51st state's not coming back,' he told National Post, adding, 'he may bring it up every once in a while.' This is all somewhat awkward given that voters may have just decided an entire federal election on the basis of Trump ostensibly posing an existential threat to Canada. Watch the full interview here with the National Post's Stephanie Taylor.
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