Long Synopsis
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.