The history of Canada

For more than fourteen thousand years the land that is now Canada belonged to its first peoples, from the salmon-fishing towns of the Pacific coast and the bison hunters of the plains to the farming villages of the Great Lakes and the Inuit of the Arctic. France planted a colony on the St Lawrence in the early seventeenth century, and Britain took it in 1763 after a century of imperial wars. The British North American colonies united as the Dominion of Canada in 1867, pushed west to the Pacific, and over the following century turned self-government into full independence while remaining a monarchy within the Commonwealth. That expansion was built on treaties, dispossession and an assimilation policy, the residential schools, that the country has only recently begun to face openly. Today Canada is a bilingual, federal and largely immigrant society, the second-largest country on earth by area.

People reached North America from northeast Asia across Beringia, the land bridge that joined Siberia and Alaska during the last Ice Age. For thousands of years the great Laurentide ice sheet covering most of Canada kept them in the unglaciated north-west, around Alaska and the Yukon, where sites such as the Bluefish Caves preserve some of the oldest traces of human life on the continent. As the ice melted, from roughly 16,000 years ago, hunters spread south and east, following mammoths, mastodons and caribou with finely made fluted spear points. The exact timing and routes of the first migrations are still argued over by archaeologists, and many Indigenous nations hold their own accounts of having always lived on their lands.

As the climate settled after about 8000 BCE, peoples adapted to very different regions. Archaic hunters and fishers worked the Atlantic coast, the boreal forest and the plains. In the east, the Woodland period from about 2000 BCE brought pottery, burial mounds and trade networks that tied the north shore of Lake Ontario to the Hopewell world of the Ohio valley, the predecessor of the Mississippian culture further south. In the Arctic, the Dorset culture, traced back to about 500 BCE, was replaced by the ancestors of the Inuit, the Thule people, who spread east from Alaska after about 1000 CE with dog sleds, kayaks and skin boats for hunting whales. By 1500 they occupied the whole Arctic coast from the Mackenzie delta to Labrador.

By the time Europeans arrived, the peoples of Canada spoke more than fifty languages belonging to a dozen families. In the east, speakers of Algonquian languages, among them the Mi'kmaq of the Maritimes, the Innu, the Algonquin, the Ojibwe and the Cree, lived mainly by hunting, fishing and gathering, travelling by birchbark canoe along river systems that would later become the routes of the fur trade. The Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi kept an alliance known as the Council of Three Fires. The Beothuk of Newfoundland, who would vanish by 1829 under the pressure of settlement, violence and disease, were probably also Algonquian speakers.

South of them, around the lower Great Lakes and the St Lawrence, lived Iroquoian-speaking farmers who grew maize, beans and squash and lived in palisaded towns of bark longhouses. The Wendat, or Huron, confederacy between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay numbered perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 people. Across the lake, the five nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, were bound by a Great Law of Peace that oral tradition dates to the twelfth century or later, and their power reached into what is now southern Ontario and the Montreal region.

On the plains, the Blackfoot confederacy, the Plains Cree and others built their lives around the bison herds. In the western subarctic lived Dene peoples speaking Athapaskan languages. The Pacific coast, rich in salmon, shellfish and the giant red cedar, supported some of the densest non-farming populations anywhere: the Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Coast Salish built plank houses, ocean-going canoes and carved poles, and held potlatches at which rank was confirmed through the giving of wealth. These were complex societies with their own laws, diplomacy and long-distance trade, not empty wilderness.

The first Europeans known to have reached Canada were Norse sailors from the colonies founded in Greenland during the Viking Age. Sagas tell of Leif Erikson sailing to a land he called Vinland, and excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland revealed a Norse camp of turf buildings occupied around 1000 CE, the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas outside Greenland. It was abandoned after a few years.

Five centuries later, in 1497, the Venetian navigator John Cabot sailed under licence from Henry VII of England and made landfall somewhere on the Atlantic coast, probably Newfoundland or Cape Breton. His reports of waters crowded with cod drew Basque, Portuguese, French and English fishing fleets, which crossed every summer to fish the Grand Banks and dry their catch on shore. Basque whalers built stations at Red Bay in Labrador in the sixteenth century. The French sailor Jacques Cartier made three voyages from 1534, planting a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula, sailing up the St Lawrence to the Iroquoian towns of Stadacona and Hochelaga, on the sites of later Quebec and Montreal, and recording the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning village, which gave the country its name. His attempt to found a colony in 1541 failed.

Permanent French settlement began with the fur trade. In 1605 Pierre Dugua de Mons and Samuel de Champlain founded Port-Royal in Acadia, and in 1608 Champlain founded Quebec on the St Lawrence. To secure furs, the French allied with the Wendat, Algonquin and Innu, which drew them into those peoples' wars with the Haudenosaunee. Jesuit missionaries lived among the Wendat, but epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases killed perhaps half of them in the 1630s, and in 1649 Haudenosaunee attacks destroyed Huronia and scattered its survivors. Missionary settlers founded Ville-Marie, later Montreal, in 1642.

In 1663 Louis XIV made New France a royal province of the Kingdom of France, governed by a governor, a bishop and an intendant, of whom Jean Talon was the most energetic. The crown paid the passage of about 800 young women, the filles du roi, to balance a colony of single men, and the settler population grew quickly through very high birth rates rather than immigration. Farms along the river were laid out in long narrow strips under the seigneurial system, while coureurs des bois and voyageurs carried the trade deep into the interior. French explorers reached the Mississippi, and La Salle claimed its whole basin for France in 1682. The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701, signed by the French and some forty Indigenous nations, brought an end to the long wars with the Haudenosaunee.

England, meanwhile, had claimed Newfoundland in 1583 in the reign of Elizabeth I, and from 1670 the Hudson's Bay Company traded through forts on Hudson Bay, claiming its vast drainage basin as Rupert's Land. The two empires fought four wars in North America between 1689 and 1763. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 France gave up mainland Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, and built the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton to guard the approaches to the St Lawrence. In 1755, distrusting the neutrality of the French-speaking Acadians, the British authorities in Nova Scotia began deporting them; in the Grand Dérangement some 10,000 to 12,000 people were shipped to the other colonies, Britain and France, and many later made their way to Louisiana. In the Seven Years' War, British forces took Louisbourg in 1758 and, under James Wolfe, defeated the French under Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec in September 1759. Montreal surrendered in 1760.

By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 France ceded Canada to Britain, keeping only the small fishing islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. The Royal Proclamation of the same year reserved the interior for Indigenous peoples and laid down that their land could be acquired only by the Crown through treaty, a principle that still underlies Indigenous rights in Canadian law. The Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteed the French-speaking Canadiens their Catholic religion and French civil law, which helped keep them loyal when the American Revolution broke out: an American invasion was defeated before Quebec on the last day of 1775.

After the war, tens of thousands of Loyalists who had sided with Britain, including Black Loyalists promised freedom and Haudenosaunee allies led by Joseph Brant, resettled in Nova Scotia, the new colony of New Brunswick and the upper St Lawrence. In 1791 the province was divided into a mainly French Lower Canada and an English-speaking Upper Canada, whose capital was later fixed at York, today Toronto. When the United States declared war on Britain in 1812, its armies invaded Upper Canada repeatedly. They were beaten back by British regulars, Canadian militia and First Nations warriors, among them the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who was killed in 1813. The Americans burned York in 1813 and British troops burned Washington the following year; the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 restored the old border.

Huge immigration followed the Napoleonic Wars, from England, Scotland and above all Ireland, whose famine refugees arrived in tens of thousands in 1847. Discontent with the narrow oligarchies that governed both Canadas led to armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838, under Louis-Joseph Papineau's Patriotes in Lower Canada and William Lyon Mackenzie in Upper Canada. Both were defeated. Lord Durham, sent to investigate, recommended uniting the two colonies, partly to assimilate the French, and granting responsible government, under which ministers answer to the elected assembly. The Province of Canada was created in 1841, and responsible government arrived in Nova Scotia and Canada in 1848. On the Pacific, which James Cook had charted in 1778 and Spanish ships had visited before him, the Hudson's Bay Company post at Victoria became the capital of the colony of Vancouver Island in 1849, and the Fraser River gold rush led to the colony of British Columbia in 1858.

Deadlock in the Province of Canada, fear of the United States after its Civil War, and the need for railways brought the colonies together. Conferences at Charlottetown and Quebec in 1864 drafted a federal plan, and the British North America Act united Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as the Dominion of Canada on 1 July 1867, with Ottawa as capital and John A. Macdonald as first prime minister, under Queen Victoria. Manitoba followed in 1870, British Columbia in 1871 on the promise of a railway to the Pacific, and Prince Edward Island in 1873.

In 1869 Canada bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company without consulting the people who lived there. At Red River the Métis, a nation of mixed First Nations and European descent, formed a provisional government under Louis Riel and negotiated Manitoba's entry into Confederation. As settlers and surveyors moved onto the prairies and the bison herds collapsed, the Crown concluded the numbered treaties with First Nations from 1871 onward, in which land was ceded in exchange for reserves, annuities and promises of support that were often broken; many Indigenous signatories understood the treaties as agreements to share the land, not to surrender it. Starvation on the plains in the early 1880s was used to force bands onto reserves. In 1885 the Métis and some Cree rose in the North-West Resistance; troops sent west on the nearly finished Canadian Pacific Railway crushed it, Riel was hanged for treason, and eight Cree and Assiniboine men were hanged at Battleford. Riel's execution deeply embittered French Canadians. The railway's last spike was driven that November.

The Indian Act of 1876 brought First Nations under the control of federal agents, defined who counted as an Indian, and later banned ceremonies such as the potlatch and the sun dance. Chinese labourers who built the western stretch of the railway were then subjected to a head tax from 1885 and almost total exclusion from 1923. Under Wilfrid Laurier, the first French-Canadian prime minister, an aggressive campaign brought hundreds of thousands of settlers to the prairies, among them many from Ukraine and central Europe, and Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905. The Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s brought tens of thousands north to the Yukon.

From the 1880s the federal government, working through the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, built a network of residential schools for First Nations, Métis and Inuit children. Their stated purpose was to separate children from their families and cultures and turn them into Christian, English- or French-speaking Canadians. Attendance became compulsory for many First Nations children in 1894 and for all status children of school age in 1920; children were often taken by police. Around 150,000 children passed through the system, which the 2006 settlement with survivors eventually recognised as 139 schools; the last closed in 1996.

Children were punished for speaking their own languages, and many suffered hunger, overcrowding, forced labour and physical and sexual abuse. Tuberculosis and other diseases spread through poorly built schools; in 1909 the government medical officer Peter Bryce reported that, between 1894 and 1908, 30 to 60 percent of pupils at some western schools had died within five years of entering, and his warnings were ignored. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented more than 4,000 deaths and believed the true number far higher, many of the children buried in unmarked graves without their families being told. From the 1960s, the residential schools were followed by the Sixties Scoop, in which thousands of Indigenous children were taken by child welfare agencies and adopted into non-Indigenous families.

Survivors' lawsuits led to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2006 and a formal apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard testimony from thousands of survivors, concluded in 2015 that the system amounted to cultural genocide and issued 94 calls to action. In 2021 the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected probable unmarked graves at the former Kamloops school, and searches followed across the country. Pope Francis apologised in Canada in July 2022 for the role of members of the Catholic Church, and in October 2022 the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion recognising the system as genocide. A National Day for Truth and Reconciliation has been held on 30 September since 2021.

When Britain declared war in 1914, Canada was automatically at war. Some 620,000 Canadians served in the First World War, and about 60,000 were killed. The Canadian Corps fought at Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele, and its capture of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, with all four Canadian divisions attacking together, became a founding story of national identity. In December 1917 a munitions ship exploded in Halifax harbour, killing about 2,000 people. Prime Minister Robert Borden's introduction of conscription in 1917 was bitterly opposed in Quebec, and riots in Quebec City in 1918 left four people dead. The war won Canada its own signature on the peace treaty and a seat in the League of Nations. Women gained the federal vote in 1918, although Quebec women could not vote provincially until 1940, and most First Nations people could not vote federally until 1960.

The Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 recognised Canada and the other dominions as equal in status to Britain. The Great Depression hit Canada harder than almost any other country: output fell by about 40 percent, unemployment approached 30 percent in 1933, and drought turned the prairie wheat lands to dust. The crisis produced new parties, the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and Social Credit, and eventually a central bank and a national broadcaster. Canada also turned away Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, notoriously the passengers of the liner St Louis in 1939.

Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, a week after Britain, to make the point that the decision was its own. More than a million Canadians served in the Second World War out of a population of about 11.5 million, and more than 45,000 died. Canadian troops were lost at Hong Kong in 1941 and in the disastrous raid on Dieppe in 1942, fought through Sicily and Italy, landed at Juno Beach on D-Day and liberated much of the Netherlands. The Royal Canadian Navy grew into one of the largest in the world escorting Atlantic convoys, and the country trained some 130,000 Commonwealth aircrew. In 1942 about 22,000 Japanese Canadians were removed from the Pacific coast, interned and had their property sold; the government apologised and paid redress in 1988.

The postwar decades brought prosperity, a large welfare state and a new national confidence. Newfoundland, which had given up self-government in the depression, voted narrowly in 1948 to join Canada and became the tenth province in 1949. Canada was a founder of the United Nations and of NATO, sent troops to the Korean War, and in 1958 joined the United States in NORAD for continental air defence during the Cold War. Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for proposing the UN force that ended the Suez crisis, and peacekeeping became part of the national self-image. In the north, the government relocated Inuit families from northern Quebec to the High Arctic in 1953, partly to assert sovereignty, in conditions for which it later apologised. Public health insurance, pioneered in Saskatchewan under Tommy Douglas, covered every province by 1972. The maple leaf flag replaced the Red Ensign in 1965, and Expo 67 in Montreal celebrated the centenary of Confederation.

In Quebec, the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s swept aside the dominance of the Catholic Church, nationalised the hydroelectric companies and created a modern, secular French-speaking state. A small group, the Front de libération du Québec, turned to bombings, and in the October Crisis of 1970 it kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered the Quebec minister Pierre Laporte, after which Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act. Trudeau's governments made Canada officially bilingual in 1969 and adopted multiculturalism in 1971, as reforms of the 1960s ended immigration rules that had favoured Europeans and brought newcomers from Asia, the Caribbean, including Jamaica and Haiti, and later Africa and the Middle East. Canada stayed out of the Vietnam War and took in tens of thousands of American draft resisters. The separatist Parti Québécois won power in 1976, made French the sole official language of Quebec, and lost a referendum on sovereignty-association in 1980 by 60 percent to 40.

Until 1982 the Canadian constitution could formally be amended only by the British Parliament. Trudeau secured the agreement of every province except Quebec, and Elizabeth II proclaimed the Constitution Act in Ottawa on 17 April 1982, adding a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and recognising existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. Brian Mulroney's attempts to win Quebec's consent, the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 and the Charlottetown Accord of 1992, both failed. In 1985 a bomb planted by Sikh extremists destroyed Air India Flight 182 off Ireland, killing 329 people, most of them Canadians, the worst mass murder in the country's history.

Mulroney signed a free trade agreement with the United States in 1988, which was widened to include Mexico as NAFTA in 1994. The Oka crisis of 1990, a 78-day armed standoff between Mohawk protesters and Quebec police and the army over a planned golf course on disputed land, forced Indigenous land claims onto the national agenda. A second Quebec referendum in 1995 failed by the narrowest of margins, 50.6 percent to 49.4. In 1999 the eastern Arctic became Nunavut, a territory with an Inuit majority, following the largest land claim settlement in Canadian history.

Canada declined to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but sent troops to Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014, where 158 Canadian soldiers died. It became the first country in the Americas to legalise same-sex marriage nationwide in 2005. Stephen Harper's Conservatives governed from 2006 to 2015, followed by the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, Pierre Trudeau's son, who legalised recreational cannabis in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic killed more than 40,000 Canadians by mid-2022, and in 2022 protests by truckers against vaccine mandates that blockaded Ottawa and border crossings led the government to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time.

Trudeau announced his resignation in January 2025 amid falling support, and the former central banker Mark Carney became Liberal leader and prime minister in March. In February, United States President Donald Trump had imposed tariffs on Canadian goods and repeatedly spoken of making Canada the 51st state. The federal election of 28 April 2025 was fought largely on that issue; the Liberals, who had trailed badly in the polls, won a fourth term as a minority government with their highest share of the vote since 1980, while the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat. Over the following year a series of opposition MPs crossed the floor, bringing the Liberals to the edge of a parliamentary majority by the spring of 2026. In the summer of 2026 Canada co-hosted the football World Cup with the United States and Mexico.