Narrative non-fiction series
Canada’s Long Century
Canada did not simply happen.
Canada did not arrive fully formed on July 1, 1867. It was made, piece by piece, through conferences, statutes, maps, debts, land claims, railway promises, elections, treaties, wars, courtrooms, schools, factories, farms, reserves, streets, kitchens, and ballots. It was argued into being by people with competing visions of power, belonging, land, language, empire, class, faith, race, gender, and survival.
Canada’s Long Century is an eight-volume narrative non-fiction history of that making. Beginning in the Confederation decade and ending with the final years of Jean Chrétien’s government, the series follows Canada from a fragile Dominion on paper to a modern state shaped by constitutional rights, global trade, Indigenous resurgence, Quebec nationalism, immigration, war memory, welfare-state politics, austerity, and post-9/11 uncertainty.
The series begins with A Country Invented, where Confederation is not treated as a tidy birthday party but as a contested political construction. British North America becomes Canada through negotiation, ambition, fear, debt, imperial policy, resistance, and exclusion. The Red River Resistance, the transfer of Rupert’s Land, the first Numbered Treaties, British Columbia’s railway bargain, Prince Edward Island’s reluctant entry, and the Pacific Scandal all reveal a country possible on paper but still unsettled in fact.
The Iron Dominion carries the story through John A. Macdonald’s return, the National Policy, the Canadian Pacific Railway, industrial growth, Chinese labour and exclusion, the Indian Act state, the North-West Resistance, Louis Riel’s trial, urban smoke, reform movements, and the Manitoba Schools Crisis. Canada becomes more real, more ambitious, and more coercive. Iron means rails, machinery, discipline, and the hard edge of state-building.
Laurier’s Boom enters the age of wheat, immigration, cities, empire, labour unrest, racial exclusion, women’s reform movements, western settlement, and the road to war. Canada grows quickly, but the boom is never innocent. Homestead dreams, railway towns, and immigration posters sit beside reserve control, residential schooling, head taxes, anti-Asian violence, and the Komagata Maru.
Blood, Flu, and Bread follows Canada through the First World War, conscription, Vimy, Passchendaele, Halifax, internment, women’s wartime work, the influenza pandemic, veterans’ struggles, Winnipeg 1919, the restless 1920s, consumer modernity, closed immigration doors, and the crash waiting at the decade’s edge. It is a volume of sacrifice, grief, labour, illness, memory, and uneasy peace.
Hard Times, Total War moves from the Depression into the Second World War. Breadlines, Prairie dust, relief camps, Regina 1935, new political movements, refugee exclusion, and closed doors give way to mobilisation, factories, ration books, the Atlantic lifeline, Hong Kong, Dieppe, Italy, Normandy, the Netherlands, Japanese Canadian internment, conscription, victory, and mourning. Hunger and mobilisation become one long transformation of the Canadian state.
Peace, Prosperity, and Cold War follows the postwar years: soldiers coming home, Newfoundland joining Confederation, the baby boom, suburbs, immigration reform, the Cold War, NATO, Korea, Suez, peacekeeping, pensions, medicare, the flag, Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, Indigenous organizing, Expo 67, and the arrival of Pierre Trudeau. It is the story of a country becoming more comfortable, more confident, and more modern, while carrying older injustices inside the new prosperity.
The Charter Dominion enters the charged years of Trudeau, Quebec, oil, rights, feminism, multiculturalism, inflation, Indigenous political resistance, the October Crisis, the 1980 referendum, patriation, and the Charter. Canada rewrites itself in constitutional language, but the applause is uneven. Rights expand, but old arguments over land, language, region, power, and belonging do not disappear.
The Fractured Peace closes the arc from Brian Mulroney’s 1984 landslide to Chrétien’s exit in 2003. Free trade, the GST, Meech Lake, Oka, Charlottetown, the 1993 collapse, deficit reduction, austerity, NAFTA, Quebec’s 1995 near break, Delgamuukw, Nisga’a, Nunavut, globalization, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Canada’s final choice under Chrétien all bring the long century to a tense landing. Canada does not glide into the twenty-first century. It staggers, negotiates, cuts, rallies, survives, grieves, argues, and continues.
Across these eight volumes, Canada is not presented as a saint or a villain. It is treated as something harder and more interesting: a country made by people, power, paper, courage, cruelty, compromise, and consequence. Its history contains generosity and exclusion, reform and delay, public vision and private cost, battlefield courage and bureaucratic harm, constitutional promise and grocery-bill reality.
Canada’s Long Century is the story of a country still under construction. Not a monument. Not a myth. A living argument with snow on its boots and ink on its hands.
Volume IA Country InventedCanada’s Long Century
Volume I
A Country Invented
Confederation, Resistance, and the First Dominion, 1860s–1873
Before Canada was a country, it was an argument.
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.
Volume IIThe Iron DominionCanada’s Long Century
Volume II
The Iron Dominion
1873–1896
Railway iron built the country, but it also hardened it.
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.
eBook: 978-1-997004-04-2 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-05-9
Volume IIILaurier’s BoomCanada’s Long Century
Volume III
Laurier’s Boom
Immigration, Empire, Exclusion, and the Road to War, 1896–1914
A golden age with shadows under the wheat.
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.
eBook: 978-1-997004-06-6 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-07-3
Volume IVBlood, Flu, and BreadCanada’s Long Century
Volume IV
Blood, Flu, and Bread
War, Pandemic, Labour, and the Uneasy Peace, 1914–1929
War made Canada modern, then peace made it restless.
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.
eBook: 978-1-997004-08-0 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-09-7
Volume VHard Times, Total WarCanada’s Long Century
Volume V
Hard Times, Total War
Depression, Reform, Mobilisation, and Victory, 1929–1945
Hunger broke the old state. War built a new one.
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.
eBook: 978-1-997004-10-3 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-11-0
Volume VIPeace, Prosperity, and Cold WarCanada’s Long Century
Volume VI
Peace, Prosperity, and Cold War
Postwar Canada, Welfare State, Cold War, Quebec, Suburbia, Rights Language, and the Road to 1968, 1945–1968
The golden age had a television glow and a Cold War shadow.
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.
eBook: 978-1-997004-12-7 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-13-4
Volume VIIThe Charter DominionCanada’s Long Century
Volume VII
The Charter Dominion
Trudeau, Quebec, Oil, Rights, and the Rewriting of Canada, 1968–1984
Canada rewrote its rights, and reopened its arguments.
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.
eBook: 978-1-997004-14-1 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-15-8
Volume VIIIThe Fractured PeaceCanada’s Long Century
Volume VIII
The Fractured Peace
Free Trade, Referendums, Globalization, and the End of Chrétien’s Canada, 1984–2003
The Cold War ended, but Canada’s peace cracked open.
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.
eBook: 978-1-997004-16-5 • Paperback: 978-1-997004-17-2