Montreal’s main railway station, Gare Centrale, is a sunken, disorientating space somewhere below the downtown skyscrapers and is accessed through Bonaventure metro. To take this as a metaphor for the moves towards the confederation of Canada in the late 1850s, culminating in the British North America Act of 1867, would be something of a stretch. […]
Tag: British Empire
From Laurier, A Gilded Age, and Its Unravelling
With the news that in preparation for the G8 summit later this month, the small town of Fermanagh in Northern Ireland has been decked out in the image of a sadly lacking prosperity, it is worth recalling a similar event from the nineteenth century, albeit at a different stage of the economic cycle. The 1897 […]
At Laurier, Between the Klondike, London and Washington
In 1896, the year Wilfred Laurier became Prime Minister, Canada didn’t have a foreign policy. There was no need; most English speakers rejoiced in being imperial subjects and thought of themselves as British and while French Canadians felt no love for the empire, they were content for their imperial masters to respond to the threat […]
