Published by The Royal Bank of Canada

Canadians Then and Now

Do Canadians have any common roots?Not by ancestry, but history has placedus closer together than we might imagine.

At a time of celebration, let us lookback on those who preceded us. Amongthem we might perceive the roots of asociety. It all began 20,000 years ago...

[] Nineteen eighty-four marks the anniversary ofseveral key events in Canadian history. It has been450 years since Jacques Cartier planted a cross onthe Gaspé Peninsula and claimed for France akingdom of inconceivable vastness and wealth.Two hundred years ago, New Brunswick and CapeBreton Island (the latter temporarily) becameprovinces of the old British Empire. Ontario willalso mark its bicentennial. Toronto was incor-porated as a city 150 years ago, and Trois-Riviéreswas founded 350 years ago. A number of otherCanadian communities will be 100 years old.

Amid the celebrations to which these occasionsgive rise, Canadians might spare a little thought tothe question of who they are and how they arrivedtogether at this juncture. Our population is sovaried in its ethnic and religious origins that itmay seem impossible that we could have anycommon roots. But we do have some points ofcommonality in our national background. Ourhistory has given most of us similar outlooks andcharacteristics. And when we examine the lives ofthose who have gone before us, we find that theyshared these similarities too.

The basic common denominator among Canad-ians is that they all owe their presence here toimmigration. To stretch a point, even the firsthuman beings ever to set foot on this land movedhere from somewhere else. They were the descen-dants of Asians of Mongoloid stock who crossed the

Bering Strait roughly 20,000 years ago and madetheir way to a corner of the Yukon Territory whichhad escaped glaciation in the latest Ice Age. Somestayed in the north and spread eastward to becomethe Inuit people. Others, misnamed Indians, slowlymigrated into the newly-habitable country to thesouth as the ice cleared.

These southbound migrants went through anexperience which emigrants ever since have facedwith a mixture of hope and trepidation. Theyliterally built a new life in a new land. In itsponderous, grinding retreat to the north, the hugemass of ice which had covered much of the continentcompletely rearranged the terrain beneath it,gouging out lakes and rivers, flattening downplains, creating hills and valleys. This fresh environ-ment must have called for considerable changes inthe way the people who arrived in it acted. TheIndians adapted their methods and customs to theconditions they encountered, inventing new toolsand weapons, new forms of shelter and transporta-tion, even new gods.

No one will ever know what forces drove thesepeople onward. They may have been uprooted bynatural disasters or wars. Some of them undoubtedlywere obliged to move because they had exhaustedthe local food or fuel supply. Others, we mayassume, were responding to the fundamental urgethat makes human beings want to find out what isbeyond the next bend in the river.

The tribes into which the Indians coalescedbroke down into two broad classes. First there werethe nomadic fishers and hunters who were foreveron the move, pulling up stakes to probe unknownstretches of wilderness, continuing to seek what-ever was around the bend. Then there were thosewho were content to remain in one area as long asit would support them. In the temperate regions,they cleared patches of bush, planted crops onthem, and erected villages nearby.

The pattern was the same among the Europeanswho eventually came here. The roving adventurersled the way. Jacques Cartier was a professionalnavigator with many voyages behind him beforehe was commissioned by King Francis I of Franceto strike out in search of a short trade route fromEurope to Asia. Neither he nor his men had anypersonal desire to stay in the country they dis-covered. Having charted the course to it, theyconsidered their work finished; it was left to lessrestless men and women to colonize New France.

When the colony was finally established, thesame two types of character emerged among theNew French as among the Indians. There werethe adventurous coureurs de bois who led a rovinglife in the bush, and the stolid habitants who builthomes and cultivated the soil. The latter lived ina small enclave of civilization in boundless wilddomain, a situation which the British conquestof New France did little to alter. Apart from ascattering of tiny villages built by pastoral tribes,all the country west of the present western out-skirts of Montreal was the preserve of the nomad,whether Indian or white.

The explorer and the settlerin a symbiotic relationship

The nomadic tribesmen traded furs with menwho were very much like themselves -- men whonever stayed in one place for very long unless theywere forced to by the weather. Trading and mili-tary posts could be found here and there, but theywere manned by transients who intended to returnto their homes if they didn’t die first.

The fur traders were the last ones to want peopleto settle down and develop the country. When, inthe early 1800s, the Earl of Selkirk tried to founda colony of Scottish immigrants on the Red River,

the traders of the North West Company did theirbest to kill it in the bud. Ironically, the company’sexplorers, ever searching for new sources of pelts,drew the maps of western and northern Canadawhich pioneer settlers would later follow. The200th anniversary of the founding of that grandorganization will be commemorated at its formerwestern headquarters, Old Fort William, Ont.,this July.

It is fitting that this and the other special eventstaking place this year should honour both theexplorers and the settlers. Without both types ofpeople, this country would never have grown intowhat it is. A symbiotic relationship prevailedbetween the two. The work of the explorers madelater settlement possible, but they could not havefunctioned without the work of the existing settlers.The fur traders depended upon their base inQuebec for the provisions they needed for theirexpeditions. In the eastern colonies, the seamenwho sailed away to trade with the West Indieswere sustained by the men and women who caughtfish, raised gardens and built ships "down home."

The celebrations this year will also throw lighton a special kind of immigrant who has contributedmuch over the years to our common heritage. Thisis the refugee who did not choose voluntarily tocome here, but who made the best of it when he did.

The bicentennials of New Brunswick and On-tario will concentrate on the leading examples ofthis type, the United Empire Loyalists. These werepeople who had the courage of their convictions tothe extent of risking their lives. They brought thatsame iron determination to the task of building anew homeland for themselves.

The story of the Loyalists has been widelymisunderstood, partly because their own Canad-ian descendants retroactively endowed them witha social prominence and political beliefs whichmost of them did not possess in the first place. TheCanadian habit of subscribing to the popularAmerican version of history in imported books,movies and television programs has done nothingto clarify the picture of what these people werereally like.

The myth of the Loyalists as seen through Canad-ian eyes is that they were a lot of upper-class

snobs who thought they owned the country andlorded it over later immigrants, as some of theiroffspring indeed attempted to do. Through Ame-rican eyes, they are generally perceived as a smallfaction of pseudo-aristocratic "Tories" who refusedto grasp the torch of liberty because they were toobusy trying to hold on to the privileges and powerthey enjoyed.

Tar and feathers forthe loyal point of view

Neither perception accords with the facts. Firstof all, the Loyalists could hardly be described asa small faction. One of the fathers of the Americanrevolution, John Adams, wrote that as much asone-third of the population of the 13 Colonies wasopposed to independence when it was declared in1776. The Loyalists were certainly not all priv-ileged land-owners or officers of the Crown; therewere probably as many of these on the revolu-tionary side, including George Washington.

The usual impression of the American War ofIndependence is that it was fought out betweenthe English redcoats and Hessian mercenaries ofKing George III on one side and tough Americanfrontiersmen wielding squirrel rifles on the other.In fact, it was largely a civil war between Ame-ricans who wanted to break away from the BritishEmpire and Americans who did not.

Like all civil wars, it was an especially bitterconflict. Loyalist soldiers captured by their ex-compatriots were hanged as traitors to the revolu-tionary cause, and civilians in Revolutionist terri-tory who expressed loyal sentiments were cruellyabused. At best, their property was confiscated andthey were prohibited from practising their tradesor professions. At worst, they were hounded bymobs who burned their houses, threw them in jail,tarred and feathered them and subjected them toother painful indignities.

After the decisive defeat of the British forcesat Yorktown in 1781, scores of thousands ofLoyalists clustered in British-held areas to awaitthe results of the peace negotiations that woulddetermine their future. When the terms of theTreaty of Paris became known two years later,they were shocked and hurt. It seemed to them

that the Mother Country had sold out their in-terests. Although the U.S. government promisedto facilitate their return to their homes, many whotried to reclaim confiscated property were asroughly handled as ever by vindictive formerneighbours. So, with the Crown’s assurance thatthey would be assisted in resettling on new land,at least 60,000 of them (estimates range to100,000) left their homes behind for good.

Loyalists with the means to do so went toEngland, Bermuda and the settled parts of theWest Indies. The poorer ones -- some 45,000 ofthem- took up offers of land grants in the Britishcolonies to the North. They either sailed in convoysfrom Britain’s last outpost, the port of New York,or trekked overland to the rivers and lakes thatformed the new international boundary. The shipsfrom New York landed in Halifax and Montreal.The land-bound refugees crossed into what wasthen Western Quebec, later to be joined by severalthousand who moved up the St. Lawrence Riverfrom Montreal.

They formed a microcosmof Canadian society today

The people caught up in this exodus formed amicrocosm of the present "English" Canadianpopulation. Besides English-Americans, they weremainly of Scottish, Irish, French, German andDutch descent. Among them were several hundredblack ex-soldiers who had been released fromslavery by the war, and about 1,000 IroquoisIndians who had fought as allies of the British.This last group, headed by Chief Joseph Brant,took up land in and around Brantford (named afterthe Chief) and Cornwall, Ont., which also becamethe home of many white refugees. Both these citiesare observing their bicentennials this year.

In terms of social class, the majority was notmuch different from the majority of Canadianstoday: tradesmen, farmers, labourers, shop-keepers and discharged soldiers, with a sprinklingof doctors, lawyers, teachers and clergymen. Theirranks encompassed Anglicans, Roman Catholics,Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Congregation-alists, Mennonites, Quakers and pagans. Theyspoke a variety of languages, not the least French,since a community of Canadien farmers crossedthe Detroit River to resettle near Windsor, Ont.

The Loyalists were what modern social scientistswould call a heterogeneous and pluralistic group.As such, they represented the foundation of"English" Canada’s diverse cultural structure. Toadd to their variety, they came from many differentparts of the former 13 Colonies. There were easternfishermen and western grain-farmers then as now,only the grain-farmers did not live as far west.

Along with their babies and belongings, theLoyalists brought with them the traditionalgradualist Canadian approach to public affairs.They abhorred revolutionary extremes. Someindeed were the elitist hide-bound Tories of theLoyalist myth, but most were "Whiggish by per-suasion," according to the historian W.L. Morton.This means that they were not averse to politicalreform, but they believed that it could be accom-plished without violence or the severing of histori-cal connections.

This does not mean that they were at all back-ward in asserting their rights. The 14,000 wholanded in the Saint John River Valley, then partof Nova Scotia, had no sooner finished pitchingtheir tents than they began demanding to runtheir own local affairs. The result was the creationin 1784 of the Province of New Brunswick. CapeBreton was made a separate province as well,retaining this status until 1810.

Meanwhile, the Loyalists in Western Quebecbegan agitating for a change from Quebec’s Frenchsystem of land tenure and civil law to the Britishsystem they had known in their last places ofresidence. This led to the Constitutional Act of1791, which established Upper Canada (laterOntario) as a province with its own elected assem-bly and land and civil laws. The same Act con-firmed that the traditional French legal usageswould prevail in Lower Canada (Quebec), whichgained its own assembly as well.

So great was the part the Loyalists played inthe founding of Ontario that the province hasdecided to base its official bicentennial on theirarrival in 1784, despite the fact that it did notbecome a separate jurisdiction until seven yearslater. The rationale for this is that the Loyalistsreally founded the Ontario society.

Like every group of immigrants before and since,they had their share of adventurers among them.

Many lit out immediately to explore the timberand mineral resources of the great forests at theirbacks. From their bases in the Maritime provinces,Loyalist sailors pursued the shipping trade aroundthe world. A few generations later, men of Loyaliststock were in the vanguard of the opening of theCanadian West.

In the meantime, they went in for further pio-neering closer to home. Among" the places theysettled was the new Upper Canadian capital ofYork, the former and future Toronto, which hasnow officially been a city for 150 years.

The timeless themes of lifein this country still go on

As Canada’s most populous single place, Torontomakes an interesting study in the timeless themesof Canadian life -- exploration, settlement, immi-gration, its present eminence as a financial andindustrial hub is largely owed to its role in thepast as the leading settlement on a vast frontier.It was from Toronto that the explorers looking formineral resources over much of Canada werefinanced and supplied.

On drilling rigs and in mining camps in theCanadian North, the symbiosis between theexplorer and the settler still exists, even thoughthe explorer now may be a university-trainedgeologist and the settler a pin-striped banker. Theexplorer, in fact, may be on another frontierentirely, working with a microscope in a labora-tory, seeking discoveries of a scientific nature.But, in modern dress, the basic rhythms of Canad-ian life still go on today.

And the immigrants still come, some of themvoluntarily and some not, to add to Canada’scultural and material riches in their determina-tion to build a new life in a new country. For allwe know, they come with the same hopes anddreams and fears as those first people who stoodon the edge of Asia and then started striding overthe ice towards the outline of an unknown conti-nent countless eons ago. Now as then, there willbe adventurers and pioneers among them. And asthey come, our roots will be nourished andrenewed.