How a federation learned to govern modern life—war and boom, drought and riot, welfare and rights—by building sturdy procedures and arguing under rules.
Growth with a Canadian accent: tariff bargains, rail charters, two new provinces (1905), immigration offices from Liverpool to Galician villages, and cities laying pipes and bylaws. Abroad, a hyphenated dominion learns cables that count; at home, factories hum and the Naval Service Act (1910) turns identity into debate—until August 1914 turns it all into mobilisation.
Total war rearranges every desk: War Measures Act, boards and rationing, shell committees, and internments. Overseas, the CEF learns industrial combat—Ypres, Vimy, Passchendaele. Halifax Explodes; conscription splits politics; influenza follows the armistice; demobilisation hands the narrative to strikes and boardroom government.
From Winnipeg’s general strike outward to a decade ruled by statutes, boards, and files—Section 98, deportations by order-in-council, RCMP, CNR consolidation, pensions and the Persons Case—ending at the 1929 break.
Depression as a federal test: drought boards and relief, Pools under strain, Bank of Canada, Bennett’s experiments, and constitutional bargaining that sets up wartime centralisation.
A more competent second total war: industrial mobilisation, convoy struggle, plebiscite-managed conscription, internment scars, and a planning state that leaves factories, benefits, and habits of federal leadership.
Family Allowances to hospital insurance, CBC and Canada Council, Arrow’s end, Quiet Revolution’s opening act, and the Bomarc crisis teeing up Pearson.
Pearson’s flags and medicare, Expo optimism, FLQ violence and the October Crisis; a francophone state finds its voice as a federation learns bilingualism with teeth.
From Lévesque and the 1980 referendum to patriation, Charter politics, Meech and Charlottetown’s failures, the 1995 razor-edge, and the Clarity Act—rights language becomes everyday speech.