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Saskatchewan Alberta
Dominion Day by Blair Fraser
Professor Arthur Lower, in his fine history of Canada, ‘‘Colony to Nation”,
remarks that "Making one political body out of two is the most difficult of
human tasks. The difficulty increases as the square of the number to be
united, so to speak”. And after noting how few such achievements in other
countries had been peacefully established, he goes on to say that the confedera-
tion of Canada is almost as remarkable a political feat as the constitution of
the United States. “Two political miracles from one continent”, he says,
“Is a very good record”’.
I don’t think even Canadians in this generation, are more than half aware
of the dimensions of our own political miracle. We are quicker to deplore the
survival of “‘provincialism’’—and it does survive in Canada to a disconcerting
degree—than we are to remember how strong these provincial loyalties were
ou one lifetime ago, and how remarkable it is that we should have overcome
them.
It is indeed difficult to realize now. The great physical feat of Confedera-
tion was the building of railways, an achievement successful enough to blur
even the memory of the political feat that preceded it. We’re no longer con-
scious of a great divide between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Montreal or Ottawa
or Toronto. It’s just a rather long and boring train journey.
In the 1850’s, you went from Halifax to Montreal by boat, if you went at
all. It was a much slower, more difficult and more unusual journey than going
from Halifax to London. You couldn’t go at all in winter—you had to go first
to New York, and then up to Canada by train. To the Nova Scotians of that
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