History Episode 5- The Incompatible 51st State: Rails, Rebellion, and a Nation Forged in Frost

How the hell did Canada and the world end up where it is in 2025? What can we realistically do about it? 

This is the episode we've been building toward. We're finally arriving at the beginning of the 1900s... the sum of all the perspectives explored in Canadian Grit so far. 

Canada was never a sure thing. Just as we feel the existential quakes of American instability and isolationism in 2025, this episode brings to life our shared past and the fact that Canada has been through this and worse... it's the only reason "Canada" even exists. 

This episode's got Donald Trump talking about Canada as the 51st state. It has Queen Elizabeth from her 1957 Christmas Speech speaking prophetically about what the world needs in 2025. It has Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip's last tour laid out as a heroic journey of Canadian Grit... one that I liken to what Louis Riel tried to achieve for the Métis nation. 

This immersive episode has it all... hardship, compromise, and shared humanity.

The point of Canadian Grit is to jump around in time.. to show us the now and then.. and to explore perspectives on how we got to now from then.

Today, I pull together all the threads of past historical episodes of Canadian Grit, and show you exactly why Canada is North of Ordinary. 

Keywords

Tariffs, Economy, Donald Trump, Queen Elizabeth, Railway, Homeland, Progress, Tragically Hip, Gord Downie, Invasion,Canada-American Relations, USA, Historical Perspectives, Critical History, Fun, Engaging, Inclusive, Chinese Head Tax, Niagara, Ridgeway, Métis, Louis Riel, Manitoba, Quebec, Wars, Rebellions, Remembrance, Immersive, Narrative, History, Canadian History, Monarchy, WWI, WWII, Loyalists, Reformation, Revolution, Politics, Identity, Technology, Development

Transcript

unknown: 0:00

Are we ready?

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Let's go.

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

Welcome back to Canadian Grit. I'm your host, Jamie Jackson. This is episode 5, The Long Road to Confederation. Rails, rebellions, and a nation forged and frosted. Last time we watched empires collide above the St. Lawrence. Maps were redrawn in musket smoke. Rebellions flared and failed. And the stubborn idea, Canada, went to ground, waiting out the frost. Ashes are fertile. From the ghost-strewn ramparts of Quebec to the ruined taverns of 1837, new seeds were quickening. Steel rails snaking west. Political alliances whispered by candlelight. And there was a question. It refused to die. Could a scattering of colonies stitched together by snow and distance become one country? Our country without tearing itself apart? Well, today we pick up that thread. We'll ride the Grand Trunk, east to west, eavesdrop on whiskey-soaked debates in Charlottetown, and feel the ground tremble as the last spike of the intercolonial railway is driven home. We'll meet the dreamers and deal makers. McDonald, Keltier, Brown, men divided by language, faith, and old wounds. Yet they were united by a single and audacious wager that frost and fire could be forged into a federation. Along the way today, we will ask, how do you bind peoples who have already fought each other and the empire into a single document called Dominion? What price is paid by indigenous nations, by Metis traders, by maritimer shipwrights, when progress, there's that word again, comes roaring on iron wheels. In 2025, when that old Dominion perhaps feels frayed again, what can these founding quarrels teach us about survival and grace? Episode four left us with the French Empire in Canada in ruins and rebellions smoldering, but also with the idea of self-rule taking root. Episode five begins today where those embers ignited. There was steel, speeches, and a continent-wide gamble called Confederation. Keep your ears open, our future is about to arrive on rails. For now, we chase that whisper from Quebec's blasted ramparts to hammers clanging in the Rockies. We ask how a scatter of colonies became one dominion, and who paid the fare. So pack your lantern, a thick coat, friend. The track ahead is long, the nights will be cold, and the only maps we have are the ones we draw together. What is a house versus a home? It's the same problem as differentiating a country from a nation. What is a nation? Is it a line drawn on a map? Is it a piece of parchment signed in ink? Is it a shared tongue? Language? A faith? A dream? Or is it something harder to see? Something stitched together by memory and myth. By hardship and hope. By fire and frost. When the mortally wounded Louis-Joseph de Montcalm learned Quebec would fall, he sighed, so much the better. I shall not live to seize the surrender of Quebec. British rule arrived on musket smoke, but conquest solved little. Seventy-six winters later, Lord Durham warned Westminster of quote, two nations warring with the bosom of a single state, quote. A Montreal diarist wrote that Durham's carriage drew more snowballs than Shears. Proof the diagnosis was accurate before the ink even dried. The fuse finally snapped in 1837. In our previous episode, I discussed how in Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie decried, quote, tyranny and waistcoats, and marched on Young Street. In Lower Canada, Louis-Joseph Papineau's Patriote fired the first volley at Saint-Denis. Both revolts were crushed. However, they did light a debate that smoldered all the way to Confederation. Eyewitnesses at Montgomery's Tavern swore Mackenzie's rebels fired with powder still in their pockets. So fast were they routed. At Saint-Denis, Patriot fighters hauled a lone brass cannon up a muddy lane using a church bell rope for a drag line. By the 1860s, the colonies of British North America had survived rebellions, harsh winters, border wars, and wave after wave of immigration. They remained more a collection of outposts than a true country. They spoke in different languages, practiced different religions, lived by different laws, and dreamt, often, of very different futures. Yet the idea of something larger, something called Canada, was gathering like mist rising from a river at dawn. It would not, however, come easily, and it would not come quickly. It would take vision, stubbornness, and compromise. It would take faith to believe that a nation could be built across rivers, mountains, and frozen fields. The first cautious steps toward that dream were taken on the quiet docks of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in the fall of 1864. Originally, the gathering at Charlottetown wasn't even meant to discuss Confederation. The maritime colonies, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island had organized a small meeting to discuss forming their own regional union. A sensible, manageable affair. Nothing grand. But then came a letter from politicians in the province of Canada, what we now call Ontario and Quebec, asking if they might join the talks. The Maritimers, after some hesitation, agreed. And so, across the restless Atlantic waters, delegates boarded ships and steamboats and set out toward a future they could scarcely imagine. When they arrived, the Charlottetown waterfront was alive with curiosity, bustling. Horses clattered down muddy streets. Sailors hauled crates and barrels onto the wharves. Townsfolk gossiped in taverns about this strange influx of politicians in black coats and polished boots. A circus, an actual traveling circus, had rolled into town the same week, and for many islanders, it was still the bigger draw. Legend says Sir John A. MacDonald offered free champagne to the circus band so they'd play outside Province House, drowning out anti-union hecklers. Yet, behind the closed doors of Province House, in modest rooms heavy with pipe smoke and candlelight, a different kind of spectacle was unfolding. Not clowns or acrobats on tight ropes, but politicians attempting a high wire act of their own. Yet the divisions were stark. French and English, Catholic and Protestant, rich merchants of Halifax, hard-bitten farmers of Upper Canada, rugged fishermen from the outports of Newfoundland, and for those who don't know, Newfoundland wouldn't join Canadian Confederation until 1949. Ambitious politicians from Montreal were there too. Mistrust simmered beneath every polite greeting. Yet, amid the arguments and the whiskey-soaked dinners, a vision began to take shape. Not a perfect union, not a brotherhood of equals, but a fragile, necessary compromise, a survival pact for a harsh and uncertain world. Beneath that cross current of suspicion lay a shared alarm. In the South, the American Civil War was staggering to its close. In 1866, Fenian Raiders, Irish American veterans with leftover rifles, had already slipped across the Niagara and skirmished at Ridgway. Proof that the thin red line of British garrisons could no longer guarantee safety. Add to that collapsing trade after the U.S. canceled the reciprocity treaty, and the colonies felt like ice flows drifting toward an American thaw. Into this atmosphere stepped the province of Canada's great coalition delegates. Johnny MacDonald, the shrewd conservative from Kingston, saw Union as the best way to balance French and English populations while keeping the Americans at bay. Georges Étienne Cartier, Montréal's fiery lawyer soldier, wanted provincial autonomy for Quebec's culture, but knew it needed the shield of a larger federation. Alexander Galt had been preaching intercolonial union since 1858, calculating that pooled customs revenues could pay old debts. And George Brown, reform publisher of the Globe, arrived determined to end legislative deadlock. He declared that without structural change, our country will drift like a ship without a helm. So where did the idea for a pan or trans-Canadian railway come from? The Grand Trunks iron ribbon had already stretched from Portland, Maine, to Sarnia in Ontario. Proof that steel could chew through Muskeg, but it bled money and stopped at the Shield. South of the border, Lincoln's Pacific Railroad Act promised to knit the Union coast to coast. McDonald and Caltier feared without a rival line, the prairies would tilt towards Chicago, not Montreal. Galtz sketched a westward extension on a napkin, and Brown calculated grain rates if wheat could roll to an ice-free Pacific port. Over midnight whiskey, McDonald famously tapped the table and said, The road must bind us as tight as a priest's knot. The phrase became a rallying tagline in the makeshift press gallery. Amid the arguments and the whiskey-soaked dinners, a vision began to take shape. Not a brotherhood of equals, but a fragile, necessary compromise, a survival pact for a harsh and uncertain world. Behind it all, threading through every debate, every whispered calculation, was the railway. Without a railway, confederation would only remain fantasy. The distances were just too brutal. The wilderness too vast. The colonies isolated by rivers and mountains and endless snowfields would drift apart. Not together. A railway could bind them. A railway could turn loneliness into connection. Trade into lifeblood. Soldiers into a defense line. The Grand Trunk Railway, already clawing its way across the Rocky Shield from Montreal to Sarnia, had proven that steel rails could conquer geography. But it would take far more. A transcontinental railway, an iron road pushing westward through forest, rock, and prairie to make Confederation real. Without it, there would be no Canada. Through the long nights in Charlottetown, the delegates talked. They danced. They argued. They shared brandy and visions of what could be and what could be lost if they failed. Prince Edward Island host George Coles quipped that McDonald talked more sense at 2 a.m. than most men do at noon. Check on my flesh, check on my chest, big down is bouncing. A backhanded compliment to the whiskey-fueled marathon sessions, and somehow, by the time they ordered their ships to leave, the impossible had begun to seem inevitable. Within three years, the papers would be signed. On July 1st, 1867, three British colonies, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the province of Canada, then split into Ontario and Quebec, would unite to form a new Dominion. The Dominion of Canada. It was not a full break from Britain, though. Not yet. We'll get there. The Queen's face would still smile down from coins and on portraits.

SPEAKER_03: 15:12

But now, at least for a few minutes, I welcome you the peace of my own hope. But it's possible for some of you to see me today. It's just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes, I'm not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard, how to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old. But it's not the new invention which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless. Honesty counted as foolishness, and self-interest set up in place so constraint. At this critical moment in our history, we will certainly lose the trust and respect for the world if we just abandon those fundamental principles which guided the men and women who built the greatness of this country and commonwealth. Today, we need a special kind of courage. Not a kind needed in battle, but a kind which makes us stand up to everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need a kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the city so that we can hear the world, but who are not afraid of the future. It has always been easier to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult. That's why we can take a pride in the new commonwealth we are building.

SPEAKER_01: 17:02

British soldiers would still man the garrisons, but it was the first cautious step toward sovereignty, toward something entirely new. A country made not by revolution, but by negotiation, not by conquering others, but by stitching together the reluctant and the wary. It's a country that was laid down not only with pens, but with iron rails. Canada is a country built with hard winters, tougher boots, and a belief that survival, stubbornness, and imagination could create something that had never before existed. The long road to Confederation was no smooth parade. It was a trail cut through frozen rivers and bogs, through old rivalries and wounded pride. It crossed ancient indigenous lands where agreements were made, broken, and purposefully misunderstood. A legacy that would shape Canada's future every bit as much as its past. But still it moved forward. One treaty, one mile of track, one cautious handshake at a time. Canada was no longer a name borrowed from an old Iroquoian word or a patch of snow on some foreign monarch's map. It was beginning just barely to become its own. This past scene left us on Charlottetown's wharf in 1864. But a great deal happened in the 20-odd years between Durham's diagnosis and that champagne-soaked conference. In 1841, the act of union fused Upper and Lower Canada into the single province of Canada. An uneasy marriage designed to break the French-English deadlock. By 1848, Baldwin and La Fontaine finally won responsible government. Yet the new legislature was still gridlocked among language lines. George Brown railed that double majority is double folly. And Johnny MacDonald joked that the assembly felt more like two cats tied together by the tails over a clothesline. Representation favored property. Women, indigenous peoples, and the Metis remained spectators to a pageant builder's democracy. Throughout the 1850s, the Grand Trunk Railway hammered towards Sarnia. Settlement roads sliced into the shield. And the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty opened farm gates to U.S. markets until Washington tore it up in 1866, spurring the colonies to seek new prairies, new tariffs, new revenues, hmm, terraforce.

unknown: 19:58

We don't need energy.

SPEAKER_02: 20:00

We have more energy than anybody else in the world. So we spend$200 billion subsidizing Canada. We don't have to do that. And frankly, the way that gets solved is that Canada should honestly become our 51st day. We wouldn't have a northern border problem. We wouldn't have a terror problem. We don't need the Inc.

SPEAKER_01: 20:23

of Confederation in 1867 promised, quote, peace, order, and good government, quote. Canada's original motto. Yet universal representation, universal suffrage, was still but a mirage hovering over the wheat horizon, one that Louis Riel was about to chase. To build a nation is one thing, but to hold it together is another. A stitched together string of provinces, paper promises, and uncertain loyalties. The ink of Confederation was barely dry and already the country strained at the seams. In the East, storms brood over language and power. In the west, the horizon was unclaimed, unmapped, the last frontier, and as far as Ottawa was concerned, unwired. We are a loose bundle of sticks, quote. John A. MacDonald wore in Parliament in 1869. And loose sticks burn quickly. His remedy was steel. If this new country was to survive, if it was to stretch from sea to sea to sea, or at least to sea to sea at the beginning, it would need more than a shared anthem or a crown overseas. It would need steel. The Canadian Pacific Railway was not just a railway. It was a promise, a monument, a weapon. It was a nation-binding gamble made of wood, stone, sweat, and smoke. It was, in every way, Canada's spine and its scar. The promise had been made in 1871 when British Columbia, a rugged and remote colony on the Pacific, agreed to join Confederation. In return, Prime Minister John A. McDonald pledged that a railway would be built to connect it to the rest of Canada within 10 years. It was a staggering promise. Audacious and unlikely. There were no detailed maps of the high Rockies, no clear route through the Muskagger Shield. There was, however, a sense of urgency. The Americans had already driven rails all the way to Omaha, and they were talking about annexing the prairies. Fenian raiders had slipped across the Niagara. U.S. newspapers openly spoke of, quote, Canada for the taking, quote. Canada had to move fast or risk vanishing altogether. They built through forests that swallowed sunlight where pines rose like spears and axes cracked the frozen air. They built across endless prairie grasslands, straight as a whisper. Over lands long stewarded by Cree, Nakota, Soto, and Blackfoot peoples. They blasted through the badlands and tunneled into mountains so unforgiving, they collapsed again and again. They buried men where they stood. Surveyor Walter Moberly wrote from Eagle Pass, quote, the peaks rear like frozen waves, every mile is a wager with death. The labor was relentless, the pace inhumane. Tens of thousands of workers were brought in to fuel the project. Irish navies, French Canadian loggers, Kanaka canoe paddlers, and Metis ox cart drivers. But none bore the brunt like the Chinese laborers. They arrived from Guandong, southern China, desperate for work, and were paid little more than a bowl of rice and ten cents a day. They were given the most dangerous jobs, setting explosives, scaling canyon walls, carrying iron rails across ravines, laying track in swamp and snowfields. And when they died, which they did in the thousands, their names were often never recorded. Some estimates say that one Chinese laborer died for every mile of track laid through British Columbia. Some drowned in rushing rivers. Others were killed by dynamite or rock slides. Some starved, froze, or simply vanished. One of the few whose letters survive wrote, quote, We sleep in canvas like paper. When the snow comes, it cuts your face as a knife. I send home money and blood together. They were never in the photographs. When the golden spike was driven at Craigalaki, British Columbia, in November of 1885, the iconic photo showed a tight circle of suited men. White men, posing solemnly over the last rail. The moment was staged. The real last spike, the one that actually completed the line, had already been hammered into place without ceremony. Missing from the frame were the hundreds of Chinese workers who had blasted and fled and buried the track through the Rockies. Their exclusion wasn't an oversight. It was a message. Their reward? The Chinese head tax. A deliberately punitive immigration fee introduced the very year the railway was completed. It began at$50. And remember, they got paid 10 cents a day and a bowl of rice. Then it rose to$100. Then,$500. More than two years' wages. It was designed to keep their families out, to make sure they remained cheap labor, not neighbors. The Chinese head tax remained in place for decades, long after the tracks had cooled. Long after the trains had crossed the country a thousand times. Still, the rails kept moving. They pressed eastward through Treaty 6 and Treaty 7 territory, through lands that had been signed away under the threat of famine and disease. Where bison once roamed in herds so thick they shook the ground. The railway carried settlers by the thousands into indigenous homelands. It delivered troops to suppress the Northwest resistance. It brought goods, letters, priests, laws, and fences. It brought the state. But it also brought something else. Something strange and unseen before. A shape. A line. It's the spine I mentioned earlier. A feeling that the country was no longer just a scattered collection of ports and hamlets. It was connected. Suddenly, a girl in Halifax could step onto a train and arrive days later in Vancouver. A farmer in Manitoba could ship grain to a port in Victoria. Soldiers could be moved. Cattle shipped. Letters sent. Canada had mass. It had motion. Rails Superintendent William Van Horn boasted, quote, if we can't export the scenery, we'll import the tourists, quote. He was half joking, but the slogan would one day power a tourism boom. The railway did not heal the country's wounds, but it did make them visible. It did not end the division, but it linked the divided. It was a thread pulled tight between peoples, provinces, and stories that didn't yet know how to speak to each other. And over time, through that long iron thread, something like identity began to hum. We can't talk about the railway without talking about the cost. The ghosts of the CPR linger in tunnels and trestles, in the buried bones of workers, in the sacred lands carved up without consent. In the treaties signed under starvation, in the towns that flourished on land that had been promised to others, in the policies that punished the very hands that built this nation's spine. Blackfoot chief Crowfoot watched the first locomotive steam across the prairie and said, The planes are now gone. It is the end of the buffalo. It is the beginning of the wheels. And yet, despite the blood and the betrayal, the railway remains a symbol, a monument, a reminder that ambition and injustice often ride on the same rails. Today, most Canadians know the story of the last spike. However, fewer still know the stories of the people whose homes and tracks were passed through without asking. But the earth remembers. And sometimes on cold mornings, when the wind whistles down the tracks and the rails hum like a tuning fork, feels like those stories are still traveling, still arriving. The CPR made Canada possible. It also made Canada reckon with itself. Steel and smoke. Blood and progress. There's that word again. Pride and erasure. The railway gave the country a spine, a direction, but it also left it scarred. The Iron Road was finished, but its first great cargo was not wheat or tourists. It was soldiers. In the spring of 1885, flat cars loaded with Dominion rifles rattled westward, using the brand new transcontinental line to reach the tiny mission of Batosh in record time. The same steel that promised unity now delivered an army to crush a people who said the Confederation bargain had left them out. Telegraph polls flickered with reports, quote, Riel taken, Métis lines broken, rail proved decisive, quote, to Ottawa, it was branded efficiency. To the Red River and the Capelle, it felt like invasion at telegraphic speed. The country had its spine, sure, but one of the oldest vertebrae, the Metis homeland, was being dislocated. And in the middle of that fracture stood Louis Riel, a man who believed Canada could be more than competing rail charters and tariff schedules, as a place where riverlot farmers, Cree hunters, Francophone priests, and Anglophone merchants might share a map. A home. When the survey stakes ignored that vision, he took up pen and prayer. And finally, arms. The train thundered past his barricades. The gallows followed close behind. Yet, as we'll hear next, Riel's last words echo today as sharply as any steam whistle. Like another future poet prophet named Gord Downey, Riel turned his exit into a mirror for the nation. Wheat fields, wheat kings, iron rails, unfinished treaties. They were all part of one long song about who gets to belong. Twenty years for nothing, well that's nothing new.

SPEAKER_02: 32:09

No one's interested in something you didn't do.

SPEAKER_01: 32:15

Weakings and pretty things. Wait and see what tomorrow brings. Some of the last words written by Louis Riel. I am more convinced than ever that I was right. Hours before his execution on November 16, 1885. Canada was still an infant when it faced its first true reckoning. The Incon Confederation was barely dry. The new dominion was fragile, stitched together by ambition, treaty, and steel. And yet it was already pushing outward, stretching itself across the western plains. The West was vast, rich, and remained untamed. A land of myth, of promise, of sweeping rivers and fertile soil. But it wasn't empty. It had never been. In the center of it all lay the Red River Settlement, a diverse, thriving community that would become the heart of modern-day Manitoba. This wasn't some raw frontier. It was a place with history, families, farms, and culture. A place where the Métis, the children of French voyageurs and Cree, Anish Nabe and Solto mothers, had carved out a life that was uniquely their own. They spoke Mishif and French, lived along river lots and narrow strips of land, hunted bison, ran caravans, built churches, and defended what they had built with grit and pride. They weren't French and they weren't English. They were something new, yet something unmistakably Canadian. And then in 1869, Ottawa came barging in. That year, the Dominion of Canada bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company. It was a landmass so vast it stretched from northern Quebec to the Rocky Mountains. It was a backroom deal sealed in London and inked in Ottawa, but it made no room for the people who actually lived there. No Metis consultation, no indigenous negotiation, just imperial transaction. Surveyors were dispatched, carrying chains and tripods, drawing straight lines across a land that flowed in curves. One diary from Hudson's Bay Company survivor John Snow records Metis families pulling up his stakes at night and planting them upside down. A silent protest shaped like punctuation marks in the snow. They dismissed the existing river lot system. They ignored the kinship networks and land claims of the Metis. They acted as though they were the first to arrive, as if this place had no story before the Dominion had laid claim to it. Obviously, they hadn't or had chosen not to have heard of Turtle Island. To the people of Red River, it was an invasion. So they turned to a young, educated Metis leader named Louis Riel, just 25 years old. He was fluent in French, English, Latin, and law. He had studied in Moreal, and he had a poet's fire and a lawyer's discipline. He believed that Red River had the right, not just to defend itself, but to shape its own future within Confederation. Riel formed a provisional government. It wasn't a call to arms, not yet. It was an act of political clarity and courage. He sought negotiations with Ottawa. He wanted the Metis to be represented. He wanted to be heard. But tensions rose quickly. A group of armed orangemen, led by a man named Thomas Scott, tried to undermine the movement. They were arrested. Scott was tried, and then, against Riel's own better judgment, executed by firing squad. The reaction in English Canada was instant and furious. In Ontario, Riel was painted as a murderer, a traitor, a devil. In Quebec, he was called a patriot, a patriote, a prophet, a hero. The divide was not just political, it was cultural, spiritual, national. The Red River resistance forced Canada to confront a question it had not yet answered. What kind of country was this going to be? Would it be bilingual? Bicultural? Would it be inclusive of indigenous peoples and the Metis? Or would it be ruled by the dominant voices from Upper Canada? Under pressure, Prime Minister Johnny MacDonald negotiated. In 1870, the Manitoba Act was passed, creating the new province, Canada's fifth, with formal protections for Metis lands, language, and Catholic education. It was, on paper, a victory. But almost immediately those promises began to unravel. A military force was sent under Colonel Garnet Wolseley. Though billed as a peacekeeping mission, the soldiers carried vengeance in their packs. Harassment and intimidation followed. Fearing for his life, Riel fled into exile to the United States. There he would live as an outsider while speculators gobbled up Métis land and settlers flooded in from Ontario. In the years that followed, the Métis were pushed farther west into what is now Saskatchewan. Once again, promises were broken. The bison vanished, hunted nearly to extinction. The economic lifeblood of the plains was gone. Survey lines had cut through sacred ground. Government agents ignored petitions. Letters went unanswered. Tensions festered like an old wound. And then, in 1885, Louis Riel returned. The spark that lit the second Metis resistance wasn't greed or ambition. It was desperation. Riel's people were starving. Their voices ignored, and their land had been stolen. This time, the fight would not end in compromise. The Northwest resistance was fierce but brief. At Batoche, the Metis made their stand. Outnumbered, outgunned, yet determined. For days they held their ground, fighting with borrowed rifles and homemade bullets. But the firepower of the Dominion forces, with a railway to deliver men and munitions, eventually was enough to break their defenses. Riel surrendered. He was captured in chains and put on trial for high treason. The trial was a kangaroo court, a farce. He was denied full legal counsel. He was mocked for his visions, his religiosity, and his sense of mission. He stood in court not just as a man, but as a symbol of everything Canada was still struggling to understand about itself. And perhaps maybe still is. Sound bites are quotes: I die for the truth, I die for the people I love. Yet, today Riel is no longer remembered as a criminal. He is honored by the nation of the Metis, by the province of Manitoba, and by the Parliament of Canada as a founder, a visionary. Riel was a man who stood in the middle of two worlds and tried to build a bridge before anyone else believed it could even stand. His voice was the voice of a nation in the making. A Canada not yet fully realized. A Canada where indigenous and settler nations might live together in dignity, with peace and prosperity. Where French and English would not be enemies, where cultures would not be erased, but embraced. Where justice could run deeper than law. Riel believed in a future Canada. That reformation we're still trying to build. The Red River to this day still runs wide. Sometimes it spills its banks. And sometimes in the wind, the voice of Louis Riel can still be heard, whispering, I have nothing but my heart, and I have given it long ago to my country. The last rails at Cregalaki had barely cooled when telegraph wires buzzed with another truth. Steel alone could not weld hearts. The Canadian Pacific Railway, the CPR, had stitched the Dominion together, but it also ran like a scar through older sovereignties. To understand the depth of this wound, we have to take a step back. Far beyond Confederation, back to the very first map makers of this place that we've discussed in the first four episodes of our journey together. Before Canada was even thought of as a country, before the Steel, the treaties, the parliaments, and provinces, this land had names. Names that were spoken in languages that have echoed for thousands of years, yet a number of which have gone extinct, as I mentioned in my episode on Turtle Island. These languages were the grandchildren of Skywoman and shaped Turtle Island. Each of these names speaks to roots far deeper than any colonial flag could plant. What we now call Canada was and remains home to hundreds of indigenous nations. Not one people, many peoples, with their own governance systems, economies, languages, and deep spiritual relationships to the land. They traded, they built, they fought, they endured, and they told stories that sustained and shaped entire ecosystems. But when European settlers arrived, they called it Terra Nullius, nobody's land, and they began to draw borders. What followed wasn't a peaceful handover. It was a long, ongoing project of displacement. Maps were redrawn. Treaties were signed, often misunderstood or manipulated. And then came the rest. Residential schools, land seizures, starvation policies, and identity erasure, to name a few. Between 1871 and 1921, the Canadian government signed the numbered treaties from Treaty 1 in the Red River Valley to Treaty 11 in the Far North. On the surface, these were agreements meant to allow peaceful coexistence between settlers and indigenous peoples. But underneath, they were legal tools designed to clear the land, for farming, for railroads, for resource extraction. To indigenous nations, treaties were sacred. The words, quote, as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the river flows were not poetic flourishes. They were binding, relational, spiritual. What happened to we are only as good as our word? Yet Canada treated them as real estate deals. Once the contracts or the treaties dried, the promises were broken. Oral agreements disappeared. Terms were purposefully mistranslated, misunderstood, or ignored. The written record in French or English did not capture what was said, what was felt, what was sacred or what got destroyed. Extinct. The Crown acted quickly. Settlers flooded in. The Indian Act of 1876 stripped indigenous peoples of autonomy and legal status, designating them as, quote, wards of the state, quote. Traditional indigenous ceremonies were banned. Traditional indigenous governance was outlawed. Indigenous children were scooped into residential schools. Some as young as four were ripped from their homes, forced to speak English or French, forbidden from practicing their cultures. Thousands never returned home. They died from illness, abuse, starvation, neglect, intergenerational trauma and suicide like Glenn threatened in We Were Children. Many of these indigenous peoples were buried in unmarked graves, far from families. And for decades this was ignored, hidden, erased. But the land remembers, and so do the people. He signed under duress. Not in consent, but out of survival. Kito Kaha Nahiyin, better known as Poundmaker, another great Cree leader, tried to make peace during Riel's second resistance. He offered protection for retreating Canadian troops. He sought dialogue, not bloodshed. But Ottawa branded him a traitor. He got imprisoned. He never recovered. These weren't uprisings. These were calls to honor promises. But Canada didn't listen. Instead, it doubled down. The government criminalized the potlatch and the sundance. It regulated movement with past systems, forbidding indigenous people from leaving reserves without written permission. It constructed more residential schools, Indian hospitals and Indian agents, bureaucracies of erasure. Generations of indigenous people grew up without any access to their language, culture, or national stories. Yet, almost from the Inc's first glint, survey crews had already pegged township grids over buffalo ranges. Wheat and rail needed room. Promises got bent. Meanwhile, children were herded into church-run boarding schools. The secret is uniform haircuts, strict English, and firm discipline. The price was disease, graves without names, lullabies left unsung. Big Bear, when he refused to sign Treaty Six until starvation made that refusal impossible, told his band, quote, We stand on the backbone of the world, but they will move the bones if we are not careful, quote. Poundmaker had also said to his troops at Cut Knife Hill, we will all suffer if blood flows. He died on parole on the plains he'd sworn to protect. Across the continent, traditional indigenous ceremonies shifted underground. Elders cached or hid sacred bundles in root cellars. Women whispered language lessons at night. In Yukon's peel basin, Han children hid songs in berry baskets so priests could not confiscate them. If we fast forward a century to 1990, we might, or some of us, might remember the Oka crisis. It was in response to Mohawk land offenders who erected barricades against a golf course expansion over their burial ground. The standoff lasted 78 days, and the red surge line looked eerily similar to those of 19th-century rifle columns in Manitoba. But the drum kept beating and the trains kept rolling. Canada could no longer pretend treaties were folklore. As the drum rolled on through the idle no more teachins, wet sweat and rail blockades, meat mock lobster boats on autumn seas, and every landback prayer flag snapped into prairie wind, we remember this history. The truth. Canada is built on treaties, yet has not lived up to them. A land acknowledgement before a hockey game is not restitution, it is not reconciliation. Flying an orange flag on September 30th is not enough. Real reconciliation means land returned, promises kept, relationships rebuilt. In Canada 2.0, the work that we have to do is not history. It is now. As I was penning this story of history, I'm heading into a short interlude here. I was thinking of more ways that I could incorporate some musical history. And I was thinking, you know, with Louis Riel, um and so many of the heroes of history that we've met along the way, I think most of us can agree that none of us is getting out of here alive. That's the one certainty every map maker must pencil in. Some vanish in a heartbeat. Some, like Tom Thompson, disappear mysteriously. Or like Gordon Downey. They receive a verdict and a clock. Maybe years, months, days, and seconds. Did I live a life worth living? And for a guy who said he was tired as a fucking road for three decades that had scored songs about Canadian road trips and road apples and cottage dawns over the lake. In 2016, our own national mortality stepped up to the mic. Gord, well, he could have easily left quietly in privacy. Yet instead he hauled the nearly 40 million Canadians, around 36 million at the time, into one last arena-sized hug. A chunk of every ticket went to Sonny Brooks brain cancer research. Life handed forward by Gord and his family. And on that final stage in Kingston, he used the nation's loudest amplifier to plead, quote, do better. For First Nations. He turned his farewell show, his last show ever, into a landback anthem. And as I did some reminiscing about the Hips Farewell tour, I happened upon uh a blog by Candace Sampson called Life in Pleasantville.com, where in 2016 her recounting of watching the last hip concert in Kingston went viral with over 73,000 likes on Facebook. She originally published her article out YMC the day after the Tragically Hip's final concert aired on the CBC in August of 2016. Sampson said she, quote, wrote it from the heart, and it remains one of the things she's written that she's most proud of. On the anniversary of that concert, she decided to bring it home and quote, have it live on her site where it belongs, quote. Samson's own description of the final concert of the tragically hip in Kingston really and sort of eerily echoed my own. In August of 2016, on the night of the final concert, we boated to a friend's cottage near Gravenhurst where their family projected the entire event on the side of an old barn with over a hundred people partying under the moonlight, where we saw the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time. Many of the lyrical breakdowns that we've done together so far on Canadian grit were echoed by Samson, who included four of my favorite lyrics that she included as Gord's guideposts. Lines that I'm saying we are meant to carry past the exit doors. It's been a pleasure doing business with you.

SPEAKER_00: 54:40

This is our life.

SPEAKER_01: 55:30

A new beginning. For three decades, I've listened to the head write the soundtrack of Canadian road trips, and my own road trips are framed by many of these songs, including many people I know's breakups, hockey nights in Canada, and cottage parties. As Gordon's tumor grew and he passed his last days, he turned his spotlight outward. He gave this country a lesson in the art of a goodbye. He could have slipped away in private and no one would have faulted him. He invited all of us to his farewell. Faced with death, he had two doors. He chose the latter. He pushed his own physical pain aside and poured every riff, every howl, every fragment of poetry into us until the final chord. He truly was a man, machine, poet. He left us a template for courage and grace, too. The same virtues Riel invoked on the gallows, staring death in the face, both he and Downey flipped the script from how they would die to how they had lived. They showed this country how to leave with courage. And that it's a good life if you don't weaken. Through it all, the resistance has never stopped. Ceremonies have continued in secret, languages have been whispered at night. Stories passed from drummers to dancers, grandmother to granddaughter, from land defenders to blockaders and invaders, indigenous nations held the line, even as the country tried to write them out of its history. So once again, whose country is this? The truth is, Canada is a country built on treaties, but we've still yet to live up to them. We've yet to do our fair share. Canada still has a lot of work to do. That's why we're here. We're looking at assets, and together we're building Canada 2.0. And in this version of Canada, in our Reformation, we can make more space, we can be more kind, and we can include more voices. Perhaps we often will tell others to be more like us or to adapt the quote progress of the so-called West. Yet, as physicians Dr. Gabor Mate and uh his son Daniel Mate write in The Myth of Normal, our culture too easily normalizes disconnection fragmentation from the body mind, our innate holistic state of being. We look to war as spectacle and work as worth, stuff and materials as salvation. In the rush of the day-to-day and in the grind, we lose the vertical wisdom of elders, mentors, ceremony. Indigenous youth, and we here at Canadian Grit, however, are refusing that amnesia. We are staying together and we are helping these indigenous populations again to raise their languages, to map rivers with drones and legends, to remix powwow beats with hip-hop bars, and suing governments in courtrooms built on their own unceded land. The cedar smoke still rises. The drum still measures time. This country still has choices to make. They're the same choices that hovered as stingy smoke in Charlottetown's candlelight and on Batasha's rifle pits. Will we honor the treaties and our heritage? Our word? The systems that continue to govern us, who represent the promises of the past? Will we honor treaties and the stories that predate Confederation going back to Turtle Island? Or will we decide to keep patch up the past with new coats of paint? The big question that we want to ask today is what kind of nation is Canada going to be? We use the past to look at how we can move forward. And the truth is, as we look through history, documents, and the stories that I've brought to you, this land was never empty. It wasn't and was never freely given, and this Is not forgotten. This is Turtle Island, yet it is also Canada. These stories always were, and these stories always will be. From Turtle Island footpaths to Champlain's birch bark charts, from musket smoke over Quebec to steel rails threading Avalanche country, we have walked Canada's long road to confederation. That road was hewn by indigenous trailblazers who mapped rivers and memory, by empires that clashed and collapsed, by rebels and reformers who bartered ink for bullets, and by rail hands erased from photographs, by Metis visionaries who died insisting the map include their people. Canada is not a finished painting. It is simply the campfire we continue to stoke against a long frost and an enduring winter. Every reclaimed language, every treaty honored, every forgotten name restored is another log on that fire. Wherever you stand, Halifax Harbor, Red River Prairie, or Vancouver's rain-slick streets, listen.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:16

The rails still hum, the drum still beats, and the whisper still asks, What kind of nation are we choosing to become?

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:29

Confederation was only a prologue. In the decades that followed, Wilfred Laurier's famous quote, sunny ways tried to shepherd a land riven and divided by tariff wars, religious strife and a widening gulf between rich and poor. Prairie wheat rolled east while Toronto and Montreal sprouted smokestacks and Vancouver's harbor filled with cedar and coal. Residential school bells tolled even as homesteads welcomed Ukrainians, Icelanders, and black farmers from Oklahoma. People who arrived with hopeful seed grain yet found separate coaches and color bars waiting. Women organized petitions for the vote. And miners working in the Crow's Nest Pass fought for a living wage. In 1914, the steamship Komagata Maru was turned away from Burard Island. Its Sikh passengers denied even a foothold on the shore they hoped to call home. Gold fever seized the Klondike while on the Labrador coast, Moravian violins floated over in Nuctetut hymns. By the summer of nineteen fourteen, Cree sharpshooters, Quebec farm boys, and the railway sons of Chinese navies all boarded troop ships, convinced the Great War would be over by Christmas. They never imagined that another, darker conflict would follow within a generation. The Second World War. These are the stories of Canada's quote, long nineteenth century, the years when a fledgling country sprinted from colony to nation and then strayed into two global storms. They, and the questions they raise about land, loyalty, and identity await us in the next episodes. Thank you for traveling this far with Canadian Grit North of Ordinary. If this journey moved you or has been moving you, why not follow the show on your favorite app? I'd love to hear your stories, questions, or even your old field recordings. Send them to Jamie at CanadianGritMedia.ca or follow me on Instagram at Canadian Grit Media, YouTube, Facebook, or you could even leave me a quick rating which would be greatly appreciated. And if you feel so inclined, why not share this episode with someone who still hums wheat kings under their breath? Until next time, keep the fires for the engines lit, keep your stories genuine and true. Check the expiry date of that hummus before you dive in. Check your tire pressure, and most of all, stay north of ordinary. Not like that's hard for you to do, you clever Minx. Until next time, take care and enjoy the sunshine.