Canada

Even its major cities, Regina and Saskatoon, have not grown so large as to be unmanageable, though they have to struggle hard to find work for their citizens and for the young people from farms and native reserves who seek more opportunity

prime minister the province has contributed to Canada, John Diefenbaker, have usually been people of vision and eloquence, with a concern for Canada as a whole as well as for their own community. Of the three prairie provinces, so linked in geography and history, Saskatchewan has been the reformer and the innovator.

For all its man-made boundaries, Saskatchewan is a territory where humans are guests, not rulers. It is a land where people, knowing their insignificance in the great stretch of terrain,

The horse, brought by the Spanish, transformed life for the nomadic natives of the southern plains. Hudson’s Bay Company traders reached the future site of Edmonton in 1753.

The bitter rivalry between the Company and Montreal-based Nor’westers soon invaded the region, with competing posts and expeditions. The North West Company’s Peter Pond and Alexander Mackenzie were matched by the Bay’s Peter Fidler and David Thompson.

1880s saw completion of Toronto’s second City Hall and, in a similar romanesque style, the Provincial Parliament Ontarians known as Queen’s Park. The premier of the day, Oliver Mowat, wondered whether Ontario’s government would ever be big enough to fill the entire building.

Wilderness became the icon for a new generation of artists that took shape before the 1914-19 war and which would be known, in the 1920s, as the Group of Seven. Many of their stark, spare landscapes were painted in Algonquin Park
Ontario cities doubled and tripled in size during this period. Southern Ontario evolved into settled farmland, with a scattering of prosperous cities and towns. Life in Ontario’s small towns was satirised by Stephen Leacock, a professor of economics but also a humorist and popular writer. His “Mariposa” was Orillia on the shores of Lake Simcoe, a crude frontier railway and logging town which, by the end of the century, had acquired gentility and a sense of its own permanence which Leacock gently satirised for millions of readers around the world.

Fur trade rivalries could be violent, with ambushes on the lonely portages and raids on wilderness posts. The situation was complicated after 1811 when Lord Selkirk, a philanthropist and Hudson’s Bay director, sent a colony of dispossessed Scottish crofters to settle at the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, blocking the main North West Company route to Montreal. Matters came to a head in 1816, when Nor’westers killed Governor Semple and 21 Red River colonists at Seven Oaks, within the limits of present-day Winnipeg. Selkirk responded with Swiss mercenaries. The courts swallowed both sides’ money and

Manitoba, more than any other province, tried to be a cultural melting pot; it was there, in the 1920s, that an author coined our more common Canadian description: a cultural mosaic, each piece unique but forming a pleasing whole. No Canadian province is more diverse in the origins of its people.

Wartime demands brought prosperity to business through generous munitions contracts, but most workers felt excluded from the bonanza, and, by the spring of 1919, that feeling produced a six-week general strike in Winnipeg. Businessmen denounced the workers as Bolshevik conspirators, nervous politicians agreed, and key leaders were arrested for sedition. On Bloody Saturday, June 12, 1919, mounted police and militia crushed and dissolved a pro-strike demonstration on Winnipeg’s Main Street