The Rowell-Sirois Commission and the Remaking of Canadian Federalism investigates the groundbreaking inquiry launched to reconstruct the federal system and reveals its legacy for Canadian federalism today.In 1937, the Canadian confederation was broken. As the Depression ground on, the provinces faced increasing obligations but limited funds, while the dominion had fewer responsibilities but lucrative revenue sources. The commission was struck to review the system. Overcomi...

Plusieurs croient que le 1er juillet 1867 représente la date de la Confédération canadienne, le jour de la création du nouveau pays. Mais le processus ne faisait que s'amorcer en 1867. Du petit dominion aux frontières restreintes, le pays est devenu une fédération beaucoup plus grande, avec dix provinces, trois territoires, et des centaines de communautés autochtones. Les politiciens ont longtemps débattu le concept de pays; ils ont bien pesé les avantages et les inconvénients d'une adhési...

July 1st 1867 is celebrated as Canada's Confederation - the date that Canada became a country. But 1867 was only the beginning. As the country grew from a small dominion to a vast federation encompassing ten provinces, three territories, and hundreds of First Nations, its leaders repeatedly debated Canada's purpose, and the benefits and drawbacks of the choice to be Canadian. Reconsidering Confederation brings together Canada's leading historians to explore how the provinces, territories, ...

William Clifford Clark, federal deputy minister of finance from 1932 to 1952, had a profound impact on Canadian history. An important intellectual figure during the first half of the twentieth century, he was leader of 'The Ottawa Men,' a group of federal civil servants who shaped a new liberal vision of the nation. Robert A. Wardhaugh chronicles Clark's contributions to Canada's modern state in Behind the Scenes, which reconstructs the public life and ideas of one of Canada's mos...

The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. In a collection of ten essays, History, Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures “the prairie” as a construct that is non-linear and di...

New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even “define” a region like the Prairie West. In fact, the very concept of “defining” has come into question by new theoretical approaches and it may now seem a hopeless endeavour. But the process of defining can be just as important as the actual production of a definition.Toward Defining the Prairies highlights recent approaches to thinking about the Prairie West. Bounded by pi...

In 1910, young Pierre Maturié bid farewell to his comfortable bourgeois existence in rural France and travelled to northern Alberta in search of independence, adventure, and newfound prosperity. Some sixty years later, he wrote of the four years he spent in Canada before he returned to France in 1914 to fight in the First World War. Like that of so many youthful pioneers, his story is one of adventure and hardship—perilous journeys, railroad construction in the Rockies, panning for gold in...