The land before the country
The land was home to First Nations, Inuit and, later, Métis peoples for thousands of years before Europeans arrived — the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Cree, the Anishinaabe, the Mi'kmaq, and dozens more, with their own laws, trade routes and treaties.
The French established New France from the early seventeenth century; Britain took it in 1763. What became Canada was assembled by treaty and by conquest, and confederation in 1867 united the first provinces under the British crown. The Indigenous nations who had made treaties with the crown were not partners in the new state so much as obstacles to be managed by it. The numbered treaties that opened the west were signed under duress and hunger, and honoured selectively; the Indian Act of 1876 made status Indians wards of the state, a legal category that in much of its logic survives to this day.
The northern terminus
Slavery existed in British North America, but the Atlantic story here is mostly one of escape to it. After the American Revolution, some 3,000 Black Loyalists — people who had taken British promises of freedom — were resettled in Nova Scotia, where the land was poor and the promises largely broken; many later left for Sierra Leone. Britain abolished slavery across the empire in 1834, and for the next thirty years the Underground Railroad carried thousands of freedom-seekers north to Ontario and Nova Scotia.
Africville, a Black community on the edge of Halifax, was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, denied services for a century, and then demolished by the city in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal, its residents moved out in municipal trucks. Halifax apologised in 2010. It is the sharpest single case of how Canada treated a Black community it had let exist but never served.
The schools, and the reckoning
From the 1880s until the last one closed in 1996, the residential-school system removed some 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and placed them in church-run institutions designed to erase their languages and cultures. Thousands died; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reporting in 2015, called it cultural genocide. In 2021 ground-penetrating radar located hundreds of unmarked graves at former school sites, and a story many Canadians had preferred not to know became national and unavoidable.
A country made by migration
Post-war Canada rebuilt itself on immigration, and after reforms in the 1960s that migration came increasingly from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Toronto and Montreal now have large communities of Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian, Ghanaian, Nigerian and Somali origin. Toronto's Caribana, running since 1967, is one of the largest Caribbean carnivals in North America.
Canada made multiculturalism official policy in 1971 — the first country to do so. The policy has always been easier to state than to live, but for a diaspora reader it is the reason the country reads, in its cities, like a piece of the Caribbean and West Africa relocated north. The points-based immigration system, which selects heavily for skills and education, has drawn doctors, nurses and engineers from Accra, Lagos and Nairobi in numbers that Africa itself can ill afford to lose — the brain-drain question that sits underneath every Canadian success story about immigration.