This Summer, I made my second trip to the Province of Alberta. Now, to be honest, I am a bicoastal creature. I was born in New York City, and spent my earliest years there and its immediate environs, although my family’s background necessitated trips to New England. At an early age my family relocated me to Los Angeles, California. There, save for two Junior College years in Roswell, New Mexico, I lived until moving to Austria. So my knowledge of these United States was pretty much restricted to the two coasts until I began to travel extensively inland in my mid-20s. Belatedly, I discovered the immense charm of the Old South, the Great Basin, and the Midwest.
My knowledge of our northern neighbour, the Dominion of Canada, has been similarly limited. Although I have never yet been to their version of New England — the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and — in sense, although it is a world unto itself — Newfoundland, nor most of Quebec (an omission I hope to end), my direct knowledge of the country has been restricted to East and West — Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal on the one hand, and Vancouver and Victoria on the other. The Prairie Provinces were as much terra incognita to me as our own Midwest had once been — and as easily disregarded in my own mind. But just as I have learned better since about that region, so my visits last year and this have revolutionised my thoughts about central Canada — and specifically Alberta.
Unlike Eastern or Western Canada, where the American traveller is immediately aware that he is in a foreign country, Prairie Canada feels deceptively like the United States. For one thing, there are Chinese restaurants everywhere — and perhaps nothing says “America” to an expatriate returning from home like a Chinese restaurant. But as one begins to adjust, he begins to feel as though he fell into a parallel universe where the American Revolution never happened — and which does not seem the worse off for it.
There are the little Crowns everywhere, and institutions labelled “Royal” this and that. The Maple Leaf flag is of course everywhere — but here and there are Red Ensigns and Union Jacks in greater profusion than one would think after decades of Liberal attempts to cut the conscious connection with Britain. It was a supreme irony that in response to President Trump’s sabre rattling, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney felt forced to reverse a very long party policy and summon His Majesty the King to open Parliament in Ottawa. At the time I was reminded of Hilaire Belloc’s line: “always hold the hand of nurse, for fear of finding something worse.”
But for all that Carney’s action might have been politically hypocritical, his instincts were quite sound. While French Canada has language and customs and once had religion to distinguish itself from Anglo-America, Anglo-Canada has only its allegiance to the Crown to define itself against the colossus to the South. Reinforcing that allegiance is the King’s representative in Ottawa, the Governor-General. Despite being constrained — thanks to the debacle of 1688 — to obey the Canadian Prime Minister as much as the King must (as well as in Charles’ case “his” others in London and the other Commonwealth Realm capitals), like the King, that ultimately loyalty is owed by the subject to a higher authority than a politician. The G-G and his viceregal court function much the same way as the King would if His Majesty lived in Ottawa — but he is appointed “on the advice” of the sitting Prime Minister. Before 1931’s Statute of Westminster, he was appointed on the advice of the British Prime Minister, and practically speaking represented the British government. But with the Statute, the PMs of the Irish Free State, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa advised the King who to appoint, and so each became functionally independent. In addition, each Australian State has a Governor, and each Canadian Province a Lieutenant Governor — all of whom represent the King on the State or Provincial level. As with Governors-General, the residence/office is usually called “Government House,” and features a small court all its own — with the tenant and his staff acting toward government as the sovereign would if living there.
Each of the Prairie Provinces has such an establishment, from which the Lieutenant Governor emerges at the beginning of each legislative session to deliver the speech from the Throne amid great pomp. Every New Year’s Day His Honour hosts visitors to Government House at a “levee,” a practise borrowed from the Royal Courts.
Indeed, despite all the American resemblances, it is the Crown and Parliament that made the Canadian West so different from the American. To begin with, just as Slavery was ended peacefully in the British Empire in 1833 (and so made Canada the terminus of the Underground Railroad), the Crown’s Indian policy was very different from that of the United States. The Proclamation of 1764 which forbade settlers to take over Indian lands which had not previously been ceded by treaty between the Crown and the interested tribes was — alongside the Quebec Act, which protected the Catholic Faith of the French Canadians — one of the major causes of the American Revolution. But its application to the remaining parts of British North America spared the Canadian West almost all — though, as we shall see, not quite all — of the horrors that the Indian Wars bathed the American West in. Indeed, a number of tribes fled to Canada for refuge — others died trying. Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) in his youth joined a Wild West Show that performed in front of Queen Victoria, or “Grandmother England” as Black called her. Recaling the experience, he said: “We liked Grandmother England because we could see that she was a fine woman, and she was good to us. Maybe if she had been our Grandmother, it would have been better for our people.” He went on to speculate as to whether the Lakota would have faced such brutal treatment, broken treaties, and the loss of their sacred lands if they had been under her care rather than the authority of the United States.
In any case, Indian policy being established, the Canadian West would first be opened up not by settlers, but by the fur traders of the North West and Hudson’s Bay Companies (HBC). Initially keen rivals, they merged in 1821, and day-to-day control of Canadian West — or “Rupert’s Land” — was given to the unified Company. Their French Canadian and Scots employees often married Indian women; the result was the birth of a new people — the Metis — who were equally at home among Europeans and Indians, and who spread lightly through what are now Western Canada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas — which is why this author has distant “Colombe” cousins among the Lakota in South Dakota.
The Metis and Catholic Indians proved a fertile field for the Catholic Church under the HBC. Among many other missionaries, François Norbert Blanchet (1795–1883) and Augustin-Magloire Alexandre Blanchet (1797–1887), two French Canadian brothers, were the first two Bishops in what became in 1847 the American half of the Oregon Country — thus ending their dream of a sort of Northwest Paraguay under the protection of Hudson’s Bay.
The population in Eastern Canada, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe looking for new lands to settle in the Canadian West, the authorities in Ottawa (after the Dominion of Canada was founded in 1867) and London looked at the haphazard way in which the American West was being settled with its boot hills and helldorados, and resolved that the Crown would offer its subjects something better. In 1870, political rule over Rupert’s Land and the North West Territories was transferred from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the nascent Dominion. Three years later, Ottawa founded the North West Mounted Police (NWMP). The following year, the “March West” saw the Mounties take control of the newly acquired lands. They brought strict and impartial justice into areas into which lawlessness had begun to creep.
Under their aegis, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate established flourishing missions through Western Canada — most notable of whom was the great and saintly bishop, Vital-Justin Grandin (1829-1902). Farmers from a great many countries safely settled these wild regions — among these were a great many Ukrainian Byzantine Catholics — thanks to whom, pierogis are an unexpected staple among a great many “normal” restaurants in Alberta to-day. The steeples of Latin Catholic Churches of several different nationalities, Byzantine Catholic and Eastern Orthodox onion domes, and Anglican steeples mushroomed across the land, under the watchful eye of the NWMP.
But even as across the southern border, similar diverse populations all sent their children to schools where the stars and stripes were displayed, whilst pictures of Washington and Lincoln gazed down serenely upon their charges, so it was in Canada. But instead of being taught that they were common children of the freest nation on earth, these young Canadians were informed that they were fortunate subjects of the Greatest Empire the World had ever seen. The Union Jack was displayed in these classrooms, while pictures of The King and Queen looked down. So it was until after World War II. This history has shaped the Alberta of to-day, as we shall see in our next outing.
