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Reviewed by:
  • Roads to Confederation: The Making of Canada, 1867 ed. by Jacqueline D. Krikorian et al.
  • Bradley Miller
Roads to Confederation: The Making of Canada, 1867. Jacqueline D. Krikorian, David R. Cameron, Marcel Martel, Andrew W. McDougall, and Robert C. Vipond, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Volume 1: Pp. 400, $113.00 cloth, $46.95 paper; Volume 2: Pp. 512, $128.00 cloth, $51.00 paper

If you research, teach, or enjoy learning about Confederation and its place in Canadian political history, you should buy this hefty, helpful, two-volume collection. Published in English and in French (by Les Presses de l'Université Laval), the collection features thirty-eight carefully edited historical treatments of Confederation, ranging in publication date from John Hamilton Gray's 1872 Political and Parliamentary History of Canada to a 2016 piece by Kathryn McPherson on gender in the Confederation debates. Twenty-nine of the pieces have been translated into the other official language for the first time. The collection also includes an excellent introduction to the scholarship on Confederation that identifies its key themes and internal debates as well as some of the ways in which it has changed since Gray inaugurated Confederation historiography just a few years after 1867.

One of the many achievements of this collection is to distill complex and important differences of opinion among Confederation scholars and commentators. In "Ideas of Confederation," for example, writers tackle the debate over the Burkean versus Lockean origins of the British North American Act (bna Act). Likewise, in just over one hundred pages, readers get six different perspectives on the enduringly important question of whether Canada was designed to be a centralized or decentralized federation and whether Confederation ought to be understood as an act or a pact. There are some canonical English-language readings reprinted here, including essays by Donald Creighton and Norman Rogers that take very different approaches to the power dynamics of the bna Act. But I found the debate between French Canadian writers on the act/pact question especially stimulating, with Richard Arès espousing the two founding nations theory in a 1949 piece followed up by Stéphane Paquin's 1999 assertion that the theory is in fact a myth, though one that has mobilized Quebecers for decades.

As the editors document in the introduction, visions of Confederation have changed over time and across Canada, and so these scholarly works do more than just convey knowledge, they also reflect the varied identities, places, and periods of their authors. So too does this collection, published in the era of settler-colonial [End Page 681] studies and Indigenous reconciliation. The introduction argues forcefully that the very parameters of Confederation scholarship must be expanded beyond its dominant focus on the work of the white, male Founding Fathers who inked the formal constitutional deals. To this end, the first readings examine those who were affected by Confederation but who had no power to shape the bna Act. These include pieces by Olive Patricia Dickason and William Newbigging on settler-Indigenous relations and McPherson on gender. Especially important here, and likely new to many anglophone readers, is Gaétan Migneault's translated 2016 piece on the Acadians of New Brunswick, a group derided as too ignorant to play a role in the colony's political decision-making but who nonetheless likely used what power they had to protect their linguistic interests as francophones outside of Quebec.

Likewise, the final portion of the collection examines whether Confederation was a formative event or was simply "yet another technical shift in the governance of the colonies but meaning very little in terms of power relations on the continent" (vol. 2, 370), as the editors query in the introduction to that chapter. On this point, they include readings on political economy, the racial and gendered dimensions of colonialism, and a portion of Clearing the Plains (University of Regina Press, 2013), James Daschuk's influential book on federal Indian policy, starvation, and disease. Even the many readers who will not see these themes as obviating the significance of 1867 can use them to refine the ways in which they think about the ingredients of that importance.

Different readers...

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