Non-Fiction by George R. Andrews.

Who Does What? Canada Explained

Full long synopsis forthcoming. This title is prepared as part of the non-fiction branch, with bibliographic details and release information preserved for future expansion.

eBook: 978-1-997004-00-4 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-01-1

A Country Invented

Before Canada became a nation, it was ink, debt, ambition, fear, law, and negotiation. A Country Invented begins in the tense colonial world of the 1860s, where British North America was divided by region, language, religion, class, trade, and local loyalty. Confederation emerges not as destiny, but as a political invention shaped by deadlock, American pressure, railway dreams, imperial calculation, and the ambitions of men who believed a new Dominion could hold the northern half of the continent together.

But this is not a fireworks-and-portraits version of 1867. The book follows the people who resisted, bargained, endured, or were ignored: Nova Scotians suspicious of union, Prince Edward Islanders protecting local interests, Métis leaders at Red River, Indigenous nations facing treaty pressure and hunger, workers living inside the new economy, and families trying to understand what Ottawa meant in daily life. From Confederation to the Pacific Scandal, A Country Invented tells the story of a country made on paper before it was settled in memory.

The Iron Dominion

After the scandal that shattered Macdonald’s first government, Canada had to decide whether its national project could survive its first great breach of trust. The Iron Dominion follows the young Dominion as it becomes more real, more ambitious, and more coercive. Railways cross the Shield, tariffs promise prosperity, cities fill with smoke and labour, and the West is surveyed into a national project. The country gains muscle, but the muscle is not innocent.

This volume moves from Ottawa’s party rooms to railway camps, reserve offices, factory floors, prairie settlements, courtrooms, and classrooms. It examines the CPR as both achievement and instrument, the National Policy as both economic vision and political bargain, and the North-West Resistance as a national turning point whose consequences cut through Métis, Indigenous, French-English, and federal politics. The Iron Dominion is the story of Canada learning to govern distance with steel, law, hunger, paperwork, and force.

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Laurier’s Boom

Wilfrid Laurier’s Canada liked to see itself in sunlight: wheat fields, railway towns, immigration posters, booming cities, and a prime minister whose “sunny ways” seemed to promise national maturity. Laurier’s Boom captures that energy without letting the romance swallow the record. The country grows rapidly between 1896 and 1914, drawing newcomers to the Prairies, expanding towns and railways, entering imperial debates, and imagining itself as a modern nation on the rise.

Yet the same period also tightened the machinery of Indigenous control, expanded residential schooling, enforced racial immigration barriers, taxed Chinese workers, excluded South Asian travellers, and left workers and women fighting for safety, wages, rights, and recognition. From Sifton’s immigration campaigns to the Komagata Maru, from prairie kitchens to Vancouver streets, from Boer War patriotism to the abyss of 1914, Laurier’s Boom tells the story of a country whose confidence was real, but never evenly shared.

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Blood, Flu, and Bread

In 1914, Canada entered war because Britain did. By 1929, it had become more autonomous, more wounded, more modern, and more divided. Blood, Flu, and Bread is a national history with battlefields in it, not a battlefield history with home-front chapters attached. It follows soldiers through Ypres, the Somme, Vimy, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days, but it also stays close to kitchens, factories, farms, internment camps, hospitals, union halls, polling stations, and families waiting for telegrams.

The First World War expanded Canada’s state power, deepened French-English tension, opened limited voting rights to some women, sharpened suspicion toward immigrants, and created a generation of veterans whose wounds did not end with the Armistice. Then came influenza, labour conflict, Winnipeg 1919, new political movements, consumer culture, radios, cars, and the fragile prosperity of the 1920s. Blood, Flu, and Bread is the story of sacrifice without amnesia, victory without neat healing, and a country moving toward catastrophe with one hand on the radio dial.

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Hard Times, Total War

The Great Depression did not strike Canada evenly, but it exposed weaknesses everywhere. Hard Times, Total War begins with falling markets and moves into a country of relief lines, municipal desperation, prairie dust, freight-riding men, closed doors to refugees, angry roads, and new political movements born from economic collapse. The older Canada of local charity, thin relief, and cautious federal responsibility proves too small for the emergency.

Then war changes the scale of everything. Ottawa mobilises money, labour, factories, farms, food, ships, soldiers, news, and households. Canadians fight in the Atlantic, Hong Kong, Dieppe, Italy, Normandy, and the Netherlands, while women enter wartime work, ration books enter kitchens, and Japanese Canadians are dispossessed and interned. Hard Times, Total War binds Depression and war into one transformation: the story of a country broken open by hunger, reorganised by mobilisation, and left in 1945 with a stronger state and an unfinished moral ledger.

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Peace, Prosperity, and Cold War

After 1945, Canada wanted peace to mean home. Veterans returned with kit bags and silence, families crowded into houses, babies arrived, suburbs spread, appliances hummed, and the federal state became more visible in ordinary life through pensions, family allowances, housing, unemployment insurance, and eventually medicare. Peace, Prosperity, and Cold War tells the story of the postwar bargain: more comfort, more security, more public programs, and a wider sense of Canadian possibility.

But this is not nostalgia in a maple-syrup jar. The same decades carried Cold War fear, American pressure, NATO, Korea, nuclear debates, racial discrimination, gender limits, underfunded Indigenous communities, residential schools, and the rising force of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Newfoundland joins Confederation, the flag changes, immigration begins to shift, peacekeeping becomes part of national mythology, Expo 67 dazzles the country, and Pierre Trudeau arrives at the edge of a new era. This is the story of modern Canada taking shape, bright in the living room, uneasy in the walls.

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The Charter Dominion

In 1968, politics stepped under television lights. Pierre Trudeau arrived as celebrity, intellectual, federalist, reformer, and combatant, but The Charter Dominion is not simply his biography. It is the story of the country arguing around him: Quebec nationalists and federalists, Indigenous leaders, feminist activists, immigrants, oil workers, western premiers, judges, students, households squeezed by inflation, and citizens learning that rights language could enter daily life as law, protest, hope, and conflict.

From the October Crisis to the White Paper, from multiculturalism to the politics of the body, from the kitchen-table economy to the National Energy Program, the book traces a Canada remaking its identity under pressure. The 1980 Quebec referendum, constitutional patriation, the notwithstanding clause, Indigenous constitutional advocacy, Quebec’s exclusion from the final agreement, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms form the volume’s climax. The Charter Dominion is the story of a country that entrenched rights while discovering that rights do not end argument. They make the argument constitutional.

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The Fractured Peace

After 1984, Canada entered an age that looked peaceful compared with the wars, Depression, and constitutional births of earlier volumes. But the peace was cracked from the beginning. The Fractured Peace follows the country through free trade battles, constitutional failure, Indigenous land defence, regional anger, public-sector cuts, globalization, Quebec’s near departure, post-Cold War uncertainty, September 11, Afghanistan, and the refusal to join the Iraq War.

Brian Mulroney’s Canada begins with a vast political coalition and the promise of renewal, then moves into the storms of free trade, the GST, Meech Lake, Oka, Charlottetown, environmental crisis, and party collapse. Jean Chrétien’s Canada inherits deficit panic, austerity, NAFTA, western populism, Quebec separatism, urban diversity, global markets, and a transformed political landscape. The 1995 referendum brings the country within a breath of rupture. Nunavut’s creation, Delgamuukw, Nisga’a, and the long shadow of Oka reshape arguments over land, law, and sovereignty.

This final volume is not a quiet epilogue. It is the story of a country that balanced budgets while cutting deeply, embraced globalization while communities absorbed the cost, celebrated diversity while suspicion sharpened after 9/11, and reached the end of the twentieth century still arguing over land, belonging, sovereignty, memory, and power. The Fractured Peace brings Canada’s Long Century to its landing: not with a finished monument, but with a country still alive, still divided, still stubbornly unfinished.

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