The folks who built Canada -- that amalgam of climatic regions within one parliamentary democracy, having the second largest landmass in the world and the longest coastline (on three oceans), inhabited by over 250 ancestral groups -- were not who many think they were.
They were not privileged and elitist "colonials" but often obscure, non-wealthy, and uncelebrated men and women of variegated cultural backgrounds. Even when they emerged from the obscurity they started with into positions of fame (and recently, of blame and denigration), they often remained non-wealthy.
Like who, you ask? Take David Thompson (1770-1857) who fled England as an impoverished street urchin and crossed the Atlantic to work in a freezing northern Manitoba Hudson Bay post, and turned out to be a cartographic genius. He surveyed and mapped, for the first time ever, an astounding 3.9 square km of the North American continent, travelling over mountain ranges and through bush by canoe and snowshoe with aboriginal assistants he met and befriended.
Thompson's maps are still in use, and his achievements, accomplished without modern transport or comforts, are astonishing, although that doesn't stop them being brushed off as "colonialist" by current history pundits ("pundit" being a Hindu world for "learned person"). The officially learned persons of BC (where the Thompson River was named after David Thompson by explorer Simon Fraser) have learned ideological correctness. Thompson, beginning as an impoverished orphan in London, ended his life as an impoverished senior in Montreal, in 1857. His material and reputational rewards were few; nevertheless his unique role in Canada's history is unalterable.
James Douglas too began life on the low rungs of Hudson Bay employment, without personal wealth behind him, and through sheer ability, strategy and energy became a government appointee, lawmaker, landowner, road-builder and Governor of Vancouver Island and then BC. He established Fort Victoria and later, the first elected assembly of Vancouver Island (which was elected as was customary at the time, from among landowners only).
Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had a similar life trajectory: going to work as a school-leaving teenager, becoming apprenticed to a law firm, becoming a lawyer and in time entering politics, blending warring political factions and regions into one nation through sheer force of character and allegiance-building, and steering a nation-spanning railroad through the thickets of party- and commercial politics.
And the pre-existing "privilege" of these self-impelled nation-builders was …?
They weren't the only type who built BC and Canada. Do many people know who Sister Mary Providence was? She travelled to Fort Victoria from Quebec in 1858 to become superintendent of the first school, set up by the order of the Sisters of St. Ann. She was 22 years old. (Many current citizens still haven't "aged-out" of youth-care housing at age 22.) Hardly a member of a rich elite, she was a youthful ascetic dropped into a rugged pioneer environment.
Mary Spencer was another teacher of humble background, who arrived in BC from Ontario in 1898 and then became a professional photographer (then a very new profession) in Kamloops and Vancouver, before becoming, with her sister, a fruit farmer in the Okanagan. Of the same ilk was hardworking boarding-house owner and sometime gold-miner Nellie Cashman, an Irish-American immigrant who famously in 1874 led a rescue team of men mid-winter to save miners snowed under by a blizzard in the wilds of northern BC.
These are but a few of the often-anonymous professionals, politicians, surveyors, engineers, educators, farmers, shopkeepers and ad-hoc social workers (anonymous women who adopted orphans and fed the poor) who built the two colonies that became the Province of BC. They didn't bring their energy and abilities to Canada thinking "let's go across the ocean in risky boats to find some people to oppress on the other side of the world". Today, over 150 years after the nation of Canada was formed, they are being quite mean-spiritedly denied the recognition conveyed through landmarks named after them. Signs bearing colonial names are being removed, but as George Orwell and others have pointed out, we can cloud the memory of history, but we can't erase history.
These figures were indeed an "elite", a word of French derivation which simply means "chosen". They were chosen by fate and the circumstances to which they so staunchly rose. It's interesting how our latest pundits wish to knock them down again, along with the signposts of streets named after them -- but to what end?
It will also be interesting to see how the next elite is chosen.
(Note: this article was rejected by a Canadian History conference "due to subject matter considerations". What do YOU think of the subject? )
