Canada historical timeline

Canada is a young state on very old ground, assembled deliberately and late, and the assembly is still visible in how it works. It was built by negotiation rather than revolution -- provinces joining a federation on terms, one at a time -- and the terms stuck. That is why a traveller meets a country whose provinces set their own drinking age, sales tax and highway rules, whose signage switches language at a federal building, and whose newest territory is younger than most of the people reading this.

Chronology

1. 1867 The Province of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick unite as the Dominion of Canada on 1 July under the British North America Act. The federation was a bargain between jurisdictions rather than a merger, which is why provincial law still governs so much of what a visitor encounters day to day.
2. 1885 Banff is established as Canada's first national park, originally Rocky Mountains Park. It set the pattern of protecting the mountain landscape around a railway, and the town inside the park boundary is still the commercial centre visitors use.
3. 1885 The last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the country's first transcontinental line, is driven at Craigellachie in British Columbia on 7 November. The railway is why the mountain resort towns exist where they do, and why British Columbia was in the federation at all -- it joined in 1871 on the promise of a rail link.
4. 1896 Gold is found in the Klondike on 16 August, and when the news reaches Seattle and San Francisco the following year an estimated 100,000 prospectors set out for the Yukon. Dawson City went from 500 people in 1896 to about 17,000 by the summer of 1898, which is why a town of that size and architecture sits where it does, and why the Yukon has road and river infrastructure out of proportion to its population.
5. 1911 The Dominion Parks Branch is established on 19 May, becoming the world's first national park service. Everything a traveller now recognises as the Parks Canada system -- the boundaries, the wardens, the entry fees, the interpretive apparatus -- descends from that office.
6. 1914 The First World War runs from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918, and at Vimy Ridge from 9 to 12 April 1917 the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fight as one formation for the first time, capturing most of the ridge on the first day. The battle became the country's central military memory, and the memorial that marks it stands on land in France given to Canada.
7. 1931 The Statute of Westminster is passed on 11 December, increasing the sovereignty of the self-governing Dominions in relation to the United Kingdom. It is the legal step between colony and country, and the reason the constitutional patriation of 1982 was a completion rather than a beginning.
8. 1939 The Second World War runs from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945. Canada finished it with the world's third-largest navy and an industrial base it had not had in 1939, and the war is why so many mid-century Canadian cities have the airports, shipyards and suburbs they do.
9. 1949 Newfoundland officially joins Canada at midnight on 31 March, having been a separate dominion in the British Empire until then. It is the last province to join, which is why Newfoundland feels least like the rest of the country and why its accent, its clocks and its outport settlement pattern are all its own.
10. 1962 The Trans-Canada Highway is opened by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, though construction is not completed until 1971. It is the road a visitor drives, and the reason a coast-to-coast trip is possible on one route at all.
11. 1969 The Official Languages Act comes into force on 9 September, giving French and English equal status in the government of Canada. This is the institution a visitor sees most often: bilingual signage, packaging and federal service is a legal requirement, not a courtesy, and it stops at the line where provincial responsibility begins.
12. 1982 The Constitution Act is proclaimed on 17 April, patriating the constitution and enacting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, guaranteeing the rights of Aboriginal peoples and entrenching provincial jurisdiction over natural resources. That last clause is why resource and land-access rules differ so sharply from province to province.
13. 1993 The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement is signed on 25 May and, with the Nunavut Act, receives Royal Assent on 9 July -- the instrument that produced the territory six years later. For a traveller it is why access to much of the eastern Arctic runs through Inuit organisations rather than through a parks service.
14. 1999 Nunavut is completed as a territory on 1 April, separated from the Northwest Territories. The map most visitors carry acquired its current shape in living memory, and the Arctic a traveller can reach is administered by governments that are younger than the airports serving them.

What survived, and what did not

Canada keeps less old building than its age suggests, and for ordinary reasons: timber construction, fire, and a nineteenth-century habit of replacing rather than repairing. What survives is concentrated in the places that were rich early and then stopped growing fast enough to demolish themselves -- Quebec City's walled upper town, the stone streets of Old Montreal, the outport churches of Newfoundland, the Victorian commercial blocks of Ontario towns that the railway reached and then bypassed.

The other preservation story is not architectural. The parks system that began at Banff in 1885 and acquired a national office in 1911 is the reason large landscapes survived intact through a century of resource extraction, and it is the single largest thing standing between a visitor and an unbroken view. It is also why access is so structured: in Canada the boundary, the permit and the season decide where you can go, far more than the landowner does.