CANADA’S CLASS WAR

Part 1: 1492-1885 | From the onset of colonization to the total entrenchment of Canadian capitalism

Part 1 outlines how the Canadian State and its capitalist society have its roots in a brutal process of settler colonization. From 1492 to 1885, small outposts grew into a fully-fledged capitalist State; semi-feudal colonizers were superseded by big capitalist robber barons; petty settlers gave way to a rising, privileged middle class; and the masses of colonized and oppressed peoples were transformed into the core of a growing working class. Through repression and resistance, many folk heroes were forged, many lessons were learned, and a revolutionary legacy was born.

Contents

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Early Colonization

(1492-1763)

For more than 250 years, what would become Canada was primarily defined by the conflict between the invading European empires and colonized peoples. This colonial contradiction fueled secondary competition and conflicts between empires, between the ruling and toiling classes within each empire, and among colonized peoples.

From Africa to the Americas

In the 1400’s, some of the feudal powers and trading republics of western Europe began devising ways to “go around” the Islamic dynasties of the Mediterranean Sea, and trade more directly with the rest of Africa and Asia. The Kingdom of Portugal and maritime republics of medieval Italy paved the way in extending Europe’s Mediterranean-based commercial and military activity outward into the Atlantic Ocean and southward down the west coast of Africa.

Soon they set up outposts along the African coasts and among numerous Atlantic archipelagos. Through these militarized ports, the European elite began to control the means of trade between much of Africa and Europe. This allowed them to establish unfair and exploitive trading relations with many African city-states, kingdoms and tribes. The European feudal merchants widened this gap tenfold by increasingly making the buying and selling of African people a common part of their intercontinental commercial dealings. Pitting leaders against their people, and coastal and interior Africa against each other, the European merchants set up the framework for a oceanic system of kidnapping, trafficking and enslavement. With this, they initiated the brutal depopulation of many African peoples and classes. This was enmeshed with divisive political schemes and ideological indoctrination campaigns (namely religious, Eurocentric Christian proselytizing). The intentional disruption and underdevelopment of entire African societies in-turn fueled a rapid development of (western) European society.

Stolen African wealth and labour enriched Europe’s upper classes. Colonial loot funded innovations in ship-building techniques, navigational technology and printing methods while bringing about some of the first “modern” banks. It also accelerated the “Renaissance”, a largely ruling-class-funded cultural and ideological movement that overall helped to entrench Eurocentrism, white supremacy and the dominance of the European elite’s reactionary, Christianity-based social order.

This was the beginning of mercantilism, of dying feudalism and rising capitalism. Soon, Europe’s medieval traders and craftsmen grew into transatlantic merchants and commodity manufacturers. These early capitalists (merchants and manufacturers) sought more captive markets and exploitable land and labour. And the old feudal monarchies desperately sought more territorial possessions and royal subjects. The rising and falling ruling classes became aligned behind colonization; behind territorial expansion, resource extraction, exploitation and enslavement. Thus the feudal “great” powers, their clergymen (i.e. ideologues) in hand, closely colluded with their respective financiers, big shipbuilders, traffickers and enslavers in a crazed quest for world domination.

Beginning in 1492, the ruling classes sent Columbus, Cabot, Cartier and co. on scouting and enslaving missions to the Americas.¹ At first, they mainly sought trade routes around the world to Asia. Upon “discovering” the Americas, their focus increasingly shifted to scoping out the peoples and resources of the western hemisphere while proving the viability of transatlantic colonization and trade. To woo their financial backers, kings and clergymen, the colonial henchmen brought back info, dried goods, precious metals, and trafficked Indigenous people.

After seeing the spoils, hearing the stories, and speaking to the trafficked Indigenous captives, the depraved ruling classes of western Europe saw there was a whole “New World” to exploit. Jumping on this grand new “opportunity” to conquer and kill, steal and pillage, they dispatched increasingly-large fleets to the Americas, with the intention of forcefully setting up permanent forts and trading posts. Spanish and Portuguese forces dominated Central and South America and the Caribbean, while English and French forces focused more on Northern America, in particular the east coast and mouth of the Great River (“St. Lawrence”).

A colonial social order is imposed upon Northern America

In the process, the (French and English) mercantile elites became colonizers of what would become Canada. Within each empire an alliance of feudal and capitalist classes coordinated, commanded and benefitted from the colonial projects. In the beginning, the monarchies commanded large feudal trade monopolies (like the Company of One Hundred Associates, Hudson’s Bay Company, etc.) and administered the government proper. Their clergymen ran civil society (the Church, (mis)education, healthcare, charities, institutions). While the capitalists carved out control of larger and larger portions of the economy.

Together, the colonial ruling classes extracted profit and gained power primarily through their exploitation of the colonized. The dispossessed classes whose (stolen) land and (forced/coerced) labour provided the economic basis for colonialism. In the beginning this was primarily the masses of robbed, subjugated and enslaved Indigenous and African peoples. It secondarily consisted of the exploited and dehumanized women, indentured servants, convict labourers and war prisoners of Europe. All under the boot of the colonial regime.

To actually oversee and enforce their schemes, the colonizers relied on a carefully-cultivated mass base of settlers. A middle-class formation that carried out the colonial project by assisting in the violent displacement and suppression of colonized peoples, by physically occupying the land, and by capturing and expanding markets. They arose from Europe’s feudal peasants and petty gentry to become colonial sailors, soldiers, trappers, big fishermen, surveyors, craftsmen, homesteaders, shopkeepers and lower administrators. The settler classes were overall oppressed by the colonizers but shared in the exploitation of the colonized (usually through the allocation of: cheap stolen land; political privileges, special rights; and exploitable servants, apprentices and labourers).

Indigenous resistance to colonial genocide

Most Indigenous peoples put up staunch armed resistance to the forced imposition of these exploitive, colonial relations. Indigenous freedom fighters organized hit-and-run raids, ambushes and acts of sabotage in self-defense. Many battles were won and some campaigns were quite successful in disorienting or (temporarily) repelling the invading forces. But eventually, the colonizers overcame the persistent acts of armed resistance the only way they could; through overwhelming brutality. They deployed armed settler militias and launched scorched-earth genocidal attacks.

These brutal military incursions were even more deadly due to how they exasperated the spread of many diseases and viruses from the “Old World” (Europe, Asia and Africa). The colonizers’ ships introduced rats, pigs and sparrows to the Americas, which acted as carriers and super-spreaders of Euro-Afrasian plagues and illnesses. Previously-unexposed Indigenous peoples of the Americas, entire populations of people, were subjected to various types and waves of deadly epidemics.

By the mid 1700s, the colonizers’ forces had violently established large colonial footholds along the east coast and banks of the Great River (St. Lawrence), with populations in the thousands (Québec City, Montréal, Halifax, St. John’s, Trois-Rivières, etc.). From these footholds the colonizers were able to control the means of international trade, (namely the large ships and ports), giving them a hand in slowly establishing unequal (exploitive) economic relations with Indigenous peoples. And small colonial forts and outposts (often built directly on Indigenous trade routes and meeting places) dotted the shores of the Great Lakes, stretching the colonial incursion even further westward into the continent.

After two centuries of war, displacement and exploitation, Europe’s North American colonial projects were securely established. Hence, the struggle between the great powers and colonized peoples was (temporarily) overtaken by the clashes among the great powers for control of the now relatively-stable and provenly-profitable colonies.

The British elite’s War of Conquest

This struggle between the colonizing powers came to an inevitable point in 1756, with the breakout of the transatlantic Seven Years’ War. In what is now Canada, the war was mainly between the British colonies (allied with the Great-Lakes-based Haudenosaunee Confederacy), and the colonies of New France (allied with the more eastern Wabanaki Confederacy, Wendat Nation, and Anishinaabe peoples).²

In Acadia (parts of the modern-day Maritimes), the French-speaking settlers formed guerrilla units alongside the Mi’kmaq people of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Together they launched a protracted armed resistance movement against the British invasion.

British colonial forces countered the guerrillas by launching a war of extermination. Entire Mi’kmaw villages were burned down and Acadie settlers were targeted with a brutal, door-to-door mass deportation campaign. The genocidal campaign of destruction and displacement in effect nearly annihilated the social and physical bases in which the guerrillas could operate.

Within a decade, the Mi’kmaq were beat down and colonially subjugated, while 9-in-10 Acadien settlers were violently expelled (mostly to Europe or French Louisiana³). The few thousand Acadien settlers who managed to evade British troops were displaced, dispossessed and financially ruined; pushed into a class position somewhere between the lower settlers and colonized peoples.

In France’s Canada (modern-day southern Québec) the attacking British forces, backed by their massive colonial navy, were eventually able to overcome resistance efforts and force a surrender. The French aristocratic classes dipped, leaving their semi-feudal, colonial society behind. French Canada’s remaining Catholic Church officialdom, seigneurs (big feudal landlords), and early capitalists either capitulated or were subordinated to the British ruling classes. The remaining Franco-Canadien middle classes and habitants (colonial peasants) were suppressed and made to join the lower ranks of the settler classes.

Ultimately, the British Empire and its ruling classes came out on top. They quickly consolidated their colonial rule over New France, codifying it with the Treaty of Paris of 1763. With the French Empire out of the way, the ruling Brits ramped their colonial project and moved to subjugate the Wabanaki Confederacy, Wendat Nation and Anishinaabe before turning on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and their other Indigenous allies. The conquering colonizers and their settler forces stole more and more land from Indigenous peoples while trampling over their right to dignity and national self-determination. For a second there, much of Northern America was under hegemonic control of the British elite.

Falling Mercantilism, Rising Capitalism

(1763-1815)

But struggle and change are inevitable. So as soon as the war between the French and British empires ended, the contradictions within the now-dominant British North American colonizer classes rose to the foreground. The old British aristocratic class and rising bourgeoisie (capitalist class) began to really duke it out.

In Britain’s Thirteen Colonies a clique of rich, enslaving plantation and merchant capitalists struggled to cut the strings of the monarchy.⁴ These soon-to-be “Founding Fathers” stepped up their competition with the British elites over the support of the settler masses. In continuing down their path of capitalist development, the Thirteen Colonies’ plantation bourgeoisie struggled against the Crown over: trade (which was limited mainly to Britain under old mercantile restrictions), constraints on westward territorial expansion, oversight from overseas aristocrats, and taxes.

This political struggle within the ruling classes erupted into a military struggle in 1776, when the bourgeois clique launched a War of Independence. They proclaimed the formation of the United States of America, creating the political and legal framework for unrestricted, slavery-based, capitalist development.

Yet unlike the US (which was basically a plantation colony at that point), industrial-manufacturing Britain and its fur-trapping Canadian colony were not economically dependant the system of chattel slavery in the same way or to the same extent. So the British and pro-Crown elite, seeking to buy Loyalists and weaken support for the proclaimed American Republic, leveraged this basic economic difference to its advantage. Thus out of strategic necessity, not moral integrity, they promised (a form of) freedom to enslaved people who fought against US Independence and for the British Empire. Of course at the same time they hypocritically continued to promise Loyalist enslavers continued legal ownership of “their property”.⁵

In an attempt to convince Franco-Canadians not to ally with the (mostly English-speaking, mostly Protestant) Americans, the British elites promised to tolerate Catholicism, the French language, and French civil law. To draw additional support they promised cheap land to Loyalist settlers. In short, Canada became a northern counterpart to the US; a peculiar, still mostly-French-speaking, base of operations for the British Empire.

The USA secured its independence in 1783. Its leading capitalists got their bourgeois slave republic, while the British aristocrats and Loyalists were able to retain control of their northern colonies. With this sort of unstable ceasefire, the British colonies and newly-minted USA ramped up their competing colonial, profit-making schemes.

Capitalist competition and expansion . . .

at the expense of the colonized!

The inter-capitalist competition mainly took the form of settler-colonial, expansionist rivalry. The British and US ruling classes fought to replace the neighbouring Indigenous societies with their expanding, developing capitalist societies.

One by one, the massive Wabanaki, Haudenosaunee, and Northwestern Confederacies were torn apart and subjugated, despite their resistive efforts. The colonizers’ drive to make profit and expand the reach of capitalism subjected other nearby Indigenous countries and communities to a similar fate; invasion, annexation, occupation, settlement and the establishment of exploitive capitalist relations.

The intense colonial rivalry culminated in the War of 1812, when the US attempted an adventurous invasion of the Great White North. Yet, even with much of the British navy busy in Europe, the French and English-speaking Canadians managed to successfully repel the short-lived Yankee invasion (even finding the time to burn down the White House!).

In the meantime the British redirected the bulk of American attacks towards the last remaining Indigenous stronghold in the region; Tecumseh’s Confederacy (a British ally on paper but sacrificial lamb in practice). By the war’s end in 1815, Chief Tecumseh himself lay murdered, his peoples’ Confederacy in ruins and overrun by US settlers. Meanwhile, the border between the US and Canada remained essentially unchanged.

So in the end, colonized people continued to suffer the worst from what was ostensibly inter-capitalist competition.

Industrial Capitalism Takes Root

(1815-1885)

Meanwhile, the British elite continued to accumulate massive hoards of wealth through their colonial projects. The theft of land, labour and resources alongside the rigging of unequal international trade made those at the very top, the head honcho exploiters, filthy rich. To increase their ability to control and exploit the people, a portion of the rich’s stolen hoard was put to use educating the upper classes, conducting scientific research, and raising the Empire’s technical capabilities. Advancements built up step by step until there was a jump in the means of production! Later called the First Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), the period saw a surge in major developments in mechanized equipment, mining processes, watermills, coal-powered steam engines, precision machine tooling, labour specialization and the factory system.

Basically, years of colonial looting culminated in the eruption of large-scale industry in Britain, which turned the country into the “workshop of the world”. A workshop in which dispossessed peasants laboured in massive, soot-filled factories owned by a small elite. Capital and manufactured goods flew out of Britain while raw materials (from Canada and other colonies) flooded in at an ever-increasing rate.

By the mid-1820s the impacts and innovations of the First Industrial Revolution reached the shores of North America. The resource extraction and export industries in Canada exploded. Machinery and equipment was imported from Britain, greatly assisting in the build-up of the basic infrastructure for further industrial development. Ports were enlarged and the first big regional banks were set up. Lumber mills, fisheries and mines were expanded and mechanized. New regional railroads, canals, and telegraph lines crisscrossed through old agricultural areas. And the colonial fur trade relocated out west to the recently-colonized, still-beaver-rich Pacific Coast.

In general, factory-style machine-assisted manufacturing (increasingly dependent on fossil fuels) was made more prominent by the owning classes; industrial capitalism began to take root. With these changes, the big bourgeoisie gathered strength, concentrating more and more capital and productive property in its hands. From the merchant-creditors and big manufacturers emerged Canada’s first bankers and industrialists. Many, if not most, aristocrats clung onto power by becoming some type of landholding rentier capitalists themselves.

The modern working class is forged

To actually build the infrastructure and facilitate these economic changes required an industrial workforce entirely beholden to the whims of capital. So the strengthening of the bourgeoisie and industrialization of the country was interrelated to, and dependant on, the growth of the modern working class, the proletariat. The labouring class that, unlike feudal peasants and colonial settlers, became characterized by dispossession; by not owning or controlling any productive property (land, materials, tools, a shop, etc.). Under the system of capitalism and private ownership imposed by the colonizers, people made into propertyless workers were put in a position where they could only make a living by collectively labouring for owners of various types and sizes; owners who profited off of (exploited) them by paying them a wage far below the value they created.

So initially Canada’s growing proletariat emerged primarily from the colonized; people already dispossessed, politically disenfranchised and controlled by the ruling owner classes. But centuries of genocidal campaigns had put the colonized in a position of resistance, dissent, dispersion and depopulation. And the settlers were still needed by the ruling class to prop-up and expand the frontiers of the emerging capitalist State; to semi-autonomously organize militias and keep the colonized “in their place”. So Canada’s capitalists needed millions of new people to comprise the country’s quickly-growing proletariat. Thus, the industrialization of Canada went hand-in-hand with the mass migration of soon-to-be wage workers and middle-class settler reinforcements.

Canada’s capitalists’ thirst for exploitable workers, settlers and administrators was answered in-part by their British counterparts. The English ruling classes had been busy privatizing rural land, dispossessing peasants and colonizing and starving the Irish. Their campaigns created conditions of poverty, unemployment and urban overcrowding, providing the impetus for a huge wave of migration from the British Isles to Canada. On top of that, US Independence and the annexationist War of 1812 brought tens of thousands of British Loyalists northward out of the US to Canada. At the time most of these English-speaking migrants settled in southern Ontario.

At the same time, enslaved Black Americans and abolitionists on both sides of the border had taken advantage of the contradictions between the US and Canada by organizing the Underground Railroad. The secret network of covert routes, safe houses, guides, code words, supporters and radical newspapers was continental in size and scope. All-in-all, the Railroad’s brave organizers and steadfast supporters helped bring tens of thousands of freedom-seeking Black Americans northward out of the US to the “Promised Land”, (mainly southern Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia).

Strengthening the middle classes by oppressing most and privileging some

Throughout the 1830s, Canada’s population more than doubled. To sort out and divide this massive surge of migrants (who to exploit? who to buy-off?) the elites further institutionalized the ruling classes’ interconnected systems of social control. Including, patriarchy (oppression of women and enforcement of gender norms, created by the earliest propertied men); white supremacy (oppression of “non-white races” and enforcement of an racial hierarchy, codified by the European medieval monarchies and their Churches); and national oppression (oppression of entire nations and nationalities, introduced by colonial Empires and the bourgeoisie). These interrelated, inseparable, oppressive and counter-revolutionary subsystems function(ed) together to uphold and reinforce the overriding system of capitalism. They’re encouraged and manipulated by the elites in order to impact how classes form(ed) and how labour’s organized; to maximize profits while creating and intensifying conflicts and division among the working people.

So Franco-Canadiens, Irish and other oppressed nationalities were disproportionately made working class. Indigenous, Black and other colonized and racialized peoples were almost entirely forced into the lowest rungs of the proletariat. LGBTQ people were completely repressed. And all non-royal women continued to be relegated to being servants and domestic proletarians in man-ruled households.

On the other hand, white English, Welsh, Scottish and US migrant men largely joined the petty-bourgeoisie. The growing middle class of small capitalists that were arising from the settler classes, who work(ed) and live(d) below the ruling bourgeoisie but above the proletariat. The petty-bourgeoisie came about with the growth of capitalist relations and the accompanying surge of imported oxen, refined materials and tools, mechanized equipment and improved methods. Settler-peasants grew into small and medium farmers; trappers and craftsmen grew into small entrepreneurs and skilled tradesmen; clerks grew into working professionals; shopkeepers grew into small businessmen; and lower administrators grew into managers and State bureaucrats. Importantly, these early small capitalists kept one foot in the settler lifestyle, often retaining a parcel of (stolen) land and keeping their operations local in size and scope.

In 1833, the British elite abolished chattel slavery altogether (at least on paper) via the Slavery Abolition Act. They made this move only after the Empire’s global systems of wage-labour, indentured servitude and colonial subjugation became more profitable and sustainable than plantation slave labour. The British Empire’s “abolishment” (limiting, in practice) of racial slavery was largely an opportunistic attempt to politically and economically isolate their US rivals’ still-dominant plantation bourgeoisie, while gaining (critical) support from oppressed peoples and their allies.

In general, capitalist industrialization was beginning to render the old forms of social and economic organization obsolete, opening the door for major adjustments within the colony’s political system.

The Franco-Canadien masses and Anglo-Canadian middle classes . . . revolt!

In the recently-settled and built-up region along the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, internal conflict and class struggle bubbled to the surface. There was a heightening of contradictions between the ruling classes (the Crown and big bourgeoisie) and emerging petty-bourgeoisie (in particular the small-medium farmers). Between the Anglophone elite and Franco-Canadien masses. Between the new urbanizing (mostly-capitalist) towns and old (semi-feudal, settler-colonial) rural areas. In spite of this, Canada’s ruling classes just exploited and profited off of the general disarray and uneven development, actually exasperating the societal conflicts in the process.

Throughout the 1830s the internal class struggle manifested itself as organized political forces. At the top, the English-speaking big capitalists, British aristocracy and colonial parliamentarians coalesced into two semi-secret, partnered syndicates: the Family Compact, which ruled Ontario, and the Château Clique, which ruled Québec. Both were Anglo-supremacist, loyal to the British Crown, and as corrupt and shadowy as their names implied.

Meanwhile, some urban professionals (doctors, journalists, clerks, lawyers), small businessmen and bourgeois-democratic colonial politicians linked up with the large rural petty-bourgeoisie (small farmers, property-owning skilled tradesmen, etc.) to create two side-by-side democratic movements. The Reform movement in English-speaking Canada (centred in Ontario), and the Patriote movement in French Canada (centred in Québec). Both movements strived for the diminishing of British aristocratic privileges; for liberal “democratic” rights (comparable to the ones in America at the time, i.e. nearly-entirely for white men); and for a type of home rule, with partial or full independence from the British elite.

In addition to such liberal-democratic reforms, the struggle in French Canada was for national self-determination. It was against Anglo domination and forced national (economic, linguistic, cultural) assimilation. So while the Catholic Church higher-ups and reactionary seigneurs sided with the anti-French Château Clique, the Patriotes were still able to win popular, active support from local parishes and the Franco-Canadien masses. Ultimately, the national-democratic character of the Patriote movement made it 4 to 5 times larger than the Reform movement in Ontario, while also giving it a more radical orientation and militant character. Initially, the dual struggles were conducted through peaceful means: demonstrations, assemblies, petitions, and parliamentary actions. Of course these actions were all ignored and suppressed by the ruling Compact and Clique.

But soon, capitalism’s “boom and bust cycle” dragged the country into a major economic depression, bringing the already-heightened contradictions in society to a peak. The democratic movements surged in popularity and the struggle was intensified. Funds and rifles were acquired from supporters on both sides of the border and armed actions were quickly organized.

Throughout 1837 and ‘38 the peoples’ movements grew into full-scale Rebellions. The Reformers and Patriotes engaged in street clashes with government forces, even attempting a few (somewhat hastily organized) armed insurrections in Toronto and Montréal. They also set up decentralized bases of operations in the US (covert, paramilitary “Hunters’ Lodges”) from which they made proclamations and launched cross-border raids.

Yet, caught up in their middle-class concerns, the rebels largely dismissed the massive revolutionary potential of workers, in particular women and the colonized. Their movements’ reformist, petty-bourgeois and capitalistic aspirations meant little effort was put towards allying with Indigenous peoples or really mobilizing the support, (let alone adapting the class interests), of the still-small yet important proletariat proper. With little active support of the revolutionary lower classes, and only limited assistance from a small section of the upper classes, the rebels didn’t really have the organized forces needed to win. On top of that, they lacked a cohesive or workable long-term military strategy, with many bungled or ill-prepared battles and campaigns failing quite quickly.

So ultimately, the rebellions were crushed by British forces, petty-bourgeois Loyalist militias, and the US government (which sought to remain neutral, uphold their Rule of Law, and maintain stable economic relations). The ruling classes of British North America invoked martial law and initiated a brutal crackdown. Thousands of rebels were arrested or killed fighting, over a dozen were executed, hundreds were deported to British penal colonies in occupied Australia, and many others fled to the US.

Confederation . . . or the political consolidation of the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie

The peoples’ liberal-democratic uprisings were crushed, but the British aristocracy saw where the winds were blowing. And it scared them. Desperately seeking to avoid a full-blown, American-style, capitalist revolution in the North they came up with a sort of compromise.

The British elite began a process of slowly relinquishing control of their overseas “possessions”, of gradually loosening their grip just as much as they needed. The colonies’ ruling classes (the colonial bourgeoisie and their subordinated allies) were cautiously granted more legislative and administrative autonomy. At the same time careful efforts were made to secure the support of the growing rural petty-bourgeoisie (which largely took on the role of the old settlers in relation to the State and colonized peoples).

1. the Martimes & St. Lawrence-Great Lakes Regions

In the late-1850s, US-based Irish migrant workers formed the Fenian Brotherhood, a revolutionary organization made to defend and further the Irish struggle for national self-determination. Developing parallel to the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland, the Fenians sought to fight for an independent Irish Republic by actually fighting the British Empire, even in it’s colonies. So, in the late-1860s, the Fenians began carrying out armed, cross-border attacks on British North America, in militant solidarity with their compatriots back in Ireland.

To better coordinate economic activity and more-effectively combat the “Fenian raids”, the British Crown sought to bring together some of its colonies. So in 1867 the colonies of Canada (southern Québec and Ontario), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (formerly Acadie), and later the big-landlord-run Prince Edward Island (PEI), were confederated into the Dominion of Canada.

Ontario’s Family Compact, Québec’s Château Clique and the Maritime bourgeoisie were politically, militarily and economically merged into a larger Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie.⁶ Essentially functioning as colonial agents of the British elite, they set about cementing the Canadian State, privileging and buying-off the petty-bourgeoisie, exploiting the ever-growing proletariat, and upholding the socially-divisive dominance of men, white people, and the developing Anglo-Canadian nation. They set about manufacturing, promoting and ingraining a distinct, totalizing colonial culture and ideology; Canadian Orangeism or Anglo-Protestant supremacy. The defining aspects of this dominant bourgeois, Anglo-Canadian mentality were: Loyalty to the British Crown; a reactionary, Eurocentric Christian ethos (Protestantism in particular); and Anglo-supremacy.

At the same time, as part of their wider strategy, they encouraged the solidification of a Franco-Canadien comprador class; a traitorous, opportunistic elite of Francophone clergymen, big landlords and capitalists. They were tasked by the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie (and the Imperial British elite) to assist in the exploitation, suppression and (attempted) assimilation of French-speaking Canada. A task they happily took up, with Catholic Church officialdom serving a most reactionary role. Comprador bishops propagated obedience to (British) authority and settled on a meek form of “cultural autonomy” for Franco-Canadiens (instead of proper national self-determination).

2. The Northern Great Plains

Immediately after it’s creation, the Canadian State set its sights on crushing and co-opting the Métis, Cree and other (semi-)colonized Indigenous peoples of the northern Great Plains (modern-day Prairies). This was inline with their goals of settling westward, halting US northward expansion, and consolidating Loyalist Anglo-Canadian rule over the northern half of the continent. In the face of this imminent threat, pan-Indigenous solidarity and anti-colonial nationalism (re)surged among Indigenous peoples.

Within the Red River Métis Nation (based in and around modern-day Winnipeg), another movement for national self-determination was born. The Métis were a relatively new nation, emerging through the interplay between (mostly-French) settlers and different Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. The development of a distinct national identity was notably accelerated by the existential threat of Canadian westward expansion. With the arrival of Government surveyors in 1869, the Métis people quickly formed the Métis National Committee, functionally led by Louis Riel.

The Committee organized Métis hunters, farmers, workers and professionals who simply sought national recognition and an equal place within Confederation. But the brutal, stop-at-nothing attitude and methods of the encroaching capitalist Government quickly made it clear to the Métis that even their basic democratic rights would have to  be fought for. They could only assert their right to national self-determination through armed struggle.

So the rallied Métis people, led by the National Committee, raided storehouses and barracks, took up arms, and launched a resistance movement that was anti-colonial and national-democratic in character. Métis fighters and the defiant people pushed back surveyors, blocked trade routes, and surrounded the main colonial fort in the region. The threat of the people, organized and armed, was enough to force the enemy to surrender and abandon the fort, all without firing a shot! From there, the Métis National Committee effectively created for itself a position of leverage from which it could properly negotiate with the colonizers’ Government.

The feds responded by recognizing the Red River Colony and then incorporating it into confederation as the province of Manitoba. Yet this apparent compromise on the part of the Government was actually a ruse (!) as it brought the region under federal jurisdiction.

A shock force of 1,200 troops was dispatched from Ottawa to “police” the newly-created province. That is, to repress the Métis’ struggle for self-determination and forcefully assert the rule of big Anglo-Canadian capital! It took the feds and militiamen over four months to march, paddle and portage all the way to the Red River. But once there, the armed resistance (still bunkered in the seized fort) was encircled, blockaded, and quickly overwhelmed militarily. Luckily, Riel himself managed to escape and find refuge in the American Midwest! Yet overall, the rebels had failed to recognize the need for mobility and dispersion when confronting a more powerful enemy.  

As the armed resistance movement was crushed so were any hopes of national equality or genuine democracy within the framework of the Dominion.

With the Red River Colony subdued, the British Crown transferred its massive northwestern territories (about 75% of modern-day Canada) to the newly-formed and now-militarily-proven Canadian State. The transfer provided the (claimed/stolen) land for the burgeoning capitalist State to violently expand into. It also supplied the colonial outposts, trade networks, and access to natural resources for the strengthening Anglo-Canadian capitalists to take over and wield against the people!

3. The Pacific Coast

Shortly after, to counter competing American influence and continue expanding westward, Britain and Canada’s ruling classes moved to secure their grip on their west-coast, fur-trading Colony of British Columbia (BC). They were met with resistance from the Salishan, Wakashan, Haida, Dene, Lingít, Tsimshianic and other Indigenous peoples of the northwest coast and plateau. Despite being on the whole relatively advanced militarily, the Indigenous societies of the region (widely varying in size, social stratification, political organization, language and culture) were enmeshed in competition and warfare while importantly, lacking a larger alliance or Confederation.

Meanwhile, the colonizers had many entrenched forts and a unified army with modern firearms by this point. So the ruling classes were able to systematically encircle and isolate each Indigenous population centre and then use lies and coercion, backed by untold brutality, to divide and conquer the many Pacific Northwest Indigenous tribes, nations and city-states one by one.

Soon, colonial surveyors found that BC’s Fraser Canyon was full of gold (and coal)!. A wave of small entrepreneurs and working-class migrants quickly swelled the colony’s population, most of them from America. Gold quickly started flying out of BC, leading both the Canadian and US ruling classes to begin vying for control of the territory. Yet around the same time, America became enveloped in internal strife . . .

The US Civil War was mainly between its Northern industrial capitalists and Southern plantation capitalists over whether it was more profitable (and sustainable) to keep Black people enslaved or transform them into “free” wage-workers, renters, sharecroppers and paying consumers. As the two bourgeois factions competed, they dragged the entire population into the fight. Throughout the conflict, the British and Canadian elite semi-openly supported the enslaving South (materially and militarily) in an attempt to sabotage the increasingly-powerful North. Yet ultimately, the North won out and the old system of race-based chattel slavery was (formally) abolished on the continent. Yet far from achieving racial and political equality across society, nearly all Black Americans quickly became a massive, super-exploited section of the US proletariat.

With the American elite bogged down in recovering from the civil war and “Reconstructing” their State, the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie were able to politically outmaneuver their US counterparts and confederate British Columbia as a province of the Dominion in 1871. Of course, US capital was largely allowed to continue exploiting the region and its working and oppressed peoples.

Extending Westward . . . or the legal, economic & military expansion of the Canadian capitalist State

The acquisition of the new and profitable Westcoast province, the steadfast resistance of many Indigenous peoples, and continued competing US expansionism, drove Canada’s capitalists to prioritize linking the country across the continent. To capture new markets and further develop their exploitive capitalist system, they (1) wrote up new laws, (2) orchestrated new industrial-capitalist projects, and (3) launched new military campaigns.

1. New Laws: The “Indian” Act

Less than a decade after Confederation, the British Crown and growing Canadian State enacted the “Indian” Act. It essentially codified the subjugation of Indigenous peoples, further facilitating their forced transformation into an oppressed subclass of the wider proletariat. (This of course excluded Indigenous compradors; the small percentage of traitorous middlemen and negotiators, wealthy landowners, and capitulating chiefs who personally benefitted from, and/or went along with, the oppression of Indigenous peoples and theft and privatization of Indigenous land).  

The Act split most Indigenous peoples into “Status Indians” and “Non-Status Indians”, while leaving the Arctic Inuit and “mixed-race” Métis completely unrecognized and in legal limbo for many decades. Most Indigenous peoples were forced into smaller and smaller “reserves” (tiny rural ghettos). Tribes, nations and Confederacies were broken up, sub-divided into small “bands”, and pitted against each other. Inter-tribal solidarity was systemically eroded as the “bands” were encouraged to fight over Government-sanctioned crumbs.

The Act empowered the old, white-supremacist Christian Churches to ramp up their genocidal residential school system. Kidnapped from their communities and forced to attend these “schools” (centres of forced assimilation), Indigenous children were subjected to white-supremacist propaganda, self-hate-inducing psychological torture, and daily abuse from the State and its clergymen-creeps. Residential schools served to weaken Indigenous peoples as a whole by torturing their children, erasing collective knowledge, and attacking minds, bodies, families and communities.

Additionally, the patriarchal State imposed a legal system in which the recognized nationality of women and children (including settlers) revolved around the legal status of the “man of the house”. This served to oppress women in general, and  further dislocate  Indigenous family structures in particular, drastically reducing the number of recognized “Indians”. By the 1880s, the ruling classes’ Indian Act agenda and it’s divide–conquer–assimilate policies were in full swing.

2. New Industrial-capitalist Economic Projects: The Canadian Pacific Railway & Killing of the Bison

The Canadian ruling classes next phase of capitalist expansion was to fully secure the vast, semi-colonized North-Western Territory and physically link their center-east base with the west coast. To do so, they launched their biggest, industrial-capitalist project yet: the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The privately-owned project was heavily subsidized by the corrupt Government. State bureaucrat capitalists allocated a massive amount of government assistance to their partners in the CPR financier syndicate (many of whom were American). The CPR robber barons received tons of cash, huge sections of Government-built tracks, over 25 million acres of (stolen/claimed) federal land, a legally-enshrined 20-year monopoly on transcontinental transportation, and importantly, specialized military support.

To squeeze out as much profit (surplus labour power) as possible, the big industrialists enforced conditions of barefaced exploitation: grueling hours (70-100 hrs/week), poverty wages, child labour, and deadly work practices. To distract from the horrific conditions and divide the working masses, the owner class kept up their strategy of rigidly stratifying working people according to their constructed, chauvinistic national and racial hierarchy.

Thus, the CPR’s petty-bourgeois-type positions (well-paid militiamen, managers, engineers and armed paramilitary forces) were reserved for white Anglo-Canadians, Americans, and Brits.

Meanwhile the actual manual labour was carried out by tens of thousands low-paid, politically-oppressed Irish, Italian and Chinese migrants, alongside some Franco-Canadien and Indigenous peoples. Chinese workers made up more than half of the workforce. They were segregated from white European workers, paid half as much or less, and made to do the deadliest jobs (hundreds were killed due to explosions, rockslides, falls, etc.). The Chinese labourers had left their homeland en masse as parts of China were forced into conditions of desperation and displacement after being semicolonized by the British Empire and others.

In the mid-1800s, the British, French, Russian and US ruling classes actually teamed up to attack, invade and subordinate China. The so-called “Opium Wars” (1839-1842, 1856-1860) broke the Qing Dynasty, led to the British annexation of Hong Kong, and initiated the century of humiliation, where the peoples of China were subjected to colonial exploitation, foreign capital and continuing feudalism.

Around the same time, Britain’s ruling classes seized colonial control of much of south Asia (modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka) establishing the British Raj; direct Crown rule over the entire Indian subcontinent.

These projects in Asia cemented the British Empire as the world’s superpower of the day while transforming the colonized peoples of these regions into a massive, exploitable labour reserve for the world’s Anglophone capitalists.

After building much of the CPR, most Chinese proletarians were too poor to travel back to China, with many forming communities in and around Victoria and Vancouver BC. Like other oppressed migrant nationalities, Chinese-Canadians were denied political rights. But they were also targeted by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, a racist law passed right after the CPR was completed. The law continued and ramped up the exploitation of Chinese workers in Canada by imposing a “head tax” (mandatory annual fee) on every Chinese person in the country.

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As it cut across the Great Plains, the CPR project brought one of the continent’s first capitalism-caused ecological disasters to a point: the near-extinction of the Plains bison. For Indigenous peoples, the bison had long been a vital source of food and resources, with the buffalo hunt often functioning as a central political and cultural organization. But once the capitalists got a taste of this precious animal, bison were commodified and large-scale extraction, processing and export enterprises were set up.

Big land speculators, railroad tycoons, animal-processing moguls and bankers amassed a fortune by rallying an Anglophone petty-bourgeoisie (guns-for-hire, clerks, traders, priests) to eagerly assist them in the exploitation of an army of mostly-Indigenous workers (hunters, labourers, etc.). These operations were super-accelerated with use of the expanding (at that time still-partially-built) railroad. As the entire region was geared towards overhunting the bison, the animal’s total population collapsed from around 30 million in 1800 to literally a few hundred by the mid-1880s.

The big robber barons were well-aware the bison were being driven to extinction. In fact, they saw this as desirable; as an integral part of their crazed, short-term-profit-making scheme. The industrial slaughtering of the bison created the conditions for genocidal mass starvation, which aided the ruling classes in subjugating entire Indigenous societies to their imposed capitalist economy. Within a generation (1870 to 1900), half of all Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains were starved to death. Survivors were coerced and forced “out of the way”; onto the reserves and into the hands of the capitalists and their State.

Ultimately, the construction of the CPR and killing of the bison went hand-in-hand with the ruling-classes’ subjugation, dispossession and proletarianization of the colonized.

3. New Military Campaigns: The North-West Resistance Movement of 1885

Throughout the 1880s, the Queen’s rapidly-expanding Government ignored the many appeals, petitions and attempted negotiations put forward by Indigenous tribes, confederacies and people’s councils. The contradiction between the genocidal Canadian State and colonized peoples reached a peak as the bison dwindled and the CPR neared its completion. Soon enough, most Indigenous peoples of the northern Great Plains united in taking a determined stand against Anglo-Canadian capitalist domination.

Louis Riel was asked to return from exile and politically guide the renewed resistance movement. At the same time, Indigenous diplomats brought together the Métis, the Iron (Cree-Assiniboine) Confederacy and the Blackfoot Confederacy, forging somewhat of a loose united front against the Canadian State. Most militant and steadfast Indigenous peoples enthusiastically stood for armed resistance while many others offered political and moral support. The resistance leaders and their negotiators were successful in ensuring that Indigenous people who chose not to participate, did not interfere militarily. Although some did make appeals to the steadfast resistance fighters to lay down their arms and give in, largely with no success.

The feds attempted to hinder the growing Indigenous resistance movement by quickly enacting the country’s first strict gun laws. The restrictions, which applied only to the semi-colonized North-West, required a letter of permission from the Government in order to legally posses a gun. The resistance adapted accordingly: existing firearms were hidden from authorities, old guns were reconfigured and repaired, and new guns were smuggled up from the US.

In March of 1885 the western Métis people’s committees formed the Provisional Government of Saskatchewan. Emerging 16 years after the Red River Resistance, it was a second attempt to assert genuine democracy and national sovereignty. This time the Métis were more militarily prepared, had strong working allies, and enjoyed broad support from the masses oppressed by Anglo-Canadian capital.

Métis hunters led armed mobile detachments that focused on sabotaging the State’s military and transportation infrastructure (mainly the railway). Many Cree warriors led the way in utilizing guerrilla tactics to capture a few towns, forts and villages. These methods and tactics were mostly successful, with the resistance movement quickly establishing pan-Indigenous authority over the centre of the northern Great Plains.

Yet within a few months, the State deployed a large force from the Great Lakes region to squash the Resistance. 5000 petty-bourgeois militiamen and 500 Mounted Police made use of the partially-completed CPR to quickly transit across the continent and descend upon the Indigenous freedom fighters. Distances that took over four months to traverse during the Red River Resistance Movement now took the feds only a few weeks.

Militarily, the resistance movement put a greater emphasis on guerrilla tactics than it did during the Red River Resistance. This time around the resistance focused more on active defense (sabotage, surprise attacks, seizing the initiative) than passive defense (waiting for the enemy to attack). Yet, while learning from their previous mistakes, the resistance front didn’t go all out in adapting fast-acting, quick-withdrawing mobile guerrilla forces as a general strategy.

Thus, the Resistance’s main force of regularized troops literally dug-in and barricaded in Batoche (capital of the Provisional Government), while successful in eliminating many feds, was eventually overrun and defeated after a fierce standoff. Hundreds of Indigenous people were killed or wounded. Louis Riel was captured, prosecuted in a show trial where his sanity was questioned,⁷ and then executed by the State. Eight more leading resistance fighters were hanged and many more imprisoned. The Provisional Government was disbanded, the railroad was completed, and the entire region was forced into a position of colonial capitalist subordination.

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By the end of 1885 the Anglo-Canadian ruling classes had annexed territory and enforced its political rule across the continent, subjecting entire societies, nations and peoples to their all-consuming capitalist State. Throughout this process, a multinational proletariat was born and a revolutionary tradition was forged in resistance.

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Footnotes

1. Between 1492 and 1504, Genoese maritime-mercenary Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) commanded four transatlantic recon and enslaving missions to the Americas. Acting on behalf of the Spanish Catholic Monarchs, he landed in the Caribbean (but died still stubbornly maintaining that it was India).
   In 1497, the Portuguese navigator John Cabot (1450-1499) landed in what’s now Newfoundland on behalf of England’s King Henry VII. He spent about a month or so just offshore, but only actually stepped foot on the coast briefly.
   From 1534-1542 Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) led three transatlantic missions on behalf of the French King, making it inland all the way to modern-day Montréal. ↩︎
2. At the time, “British North America” included: the Thirteen Colonies (soon-to-be America), Newfoundland, territory around Hudson’s Bay, and island colonies in the Caribbean.
   “La Nouvelle-France” included: the colonies of Canada (modern-day southern Québec), Acadie (parts of the modern-day Maritimes and Maine), and Louisiana. ↩︎
3. The Acadiens who survived being deported to French Louisiana eventually developed a unique culture and dialect, becoming today’s Cajuns of the American South. ↩︎
4. The figurehead of this clique, George Washington himself (1732-1799), enslaved hundreds of people, owned over 50,000 acres of stolen land, and hoarded a net worth of over half a billion in today’s dollars by the time he died. Thomas Jefferson enslaved even more people throughout his life and owned over 5000 acres. The rest of the clique were almost all millionaires, enslavers, semi-aristocratic landholders and/or big businessmen. ↩︎
5. The British elite’s practice of engaging in opportunistic, two-faced double standards has since been refined and seemingly perfected by today’s liberal bourgeoisie. ↩︎
6. The main political leader of this colonial bourgeoisie was John A. Macdonald (1815-1891). As Premier of the “Province of Canada” (modern-day southern Ontario) from 1857-1867, he played a dominant role in maintaining the colonial regime, facilitating capitalist development, and confederating the colonies. He then became the first Prime Minister of Canada, going on command the country for nearly 20 years. His openly corrupt regime (1867-1873, 1873-1891) systematized policies of oppression, exploitation, division and social control. All while carrying out some of the most heinous crimes, devastating annexations, genocidal attacks, and repressive measures in the history of Northern America. He quite openly attempted to forcefully assimilate every Indigenous person his government didn’t kill or starve to death. Truly ugly, both inside and out. ↩︎
7. To this day the bourgeoisie continues to brand many revolutionaries and freedom fighters as “crazy”, “insane”, “unhinged” or whatever. They try telling us that not only is it “impossible” for us to win, it’s “insane” to even try! Accusations of insanity coming from a bunch of destructive, psychopathic freaks . . . ↩︎

Some References

Bergeron, Léandre. The History of Quebec: A Patriote’s Handbook, New Canada Publications, Toronto, 1971.

Brown, Chester. Louis Riel, Drawn & Quarterly, Montréal, 2003.

Dumont, Gabriel. Gabriel Dumont Speaks, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 2009.

Easterbrook, W.T. Approaches to Canadian Economic History, Carleton University Press, Ottawa, 1984, (1997 edition).

Lenin. The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899. From “Essential Works of Lenin”, Dover Publications, New York, 1987.

Palmer, Bryan D. A New History for the Twenty-First Century, James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Vol. 1 & 2, Toronto, 2024 –‘25.

Ryerson, Stanley B. 1837: The Birth of Canadian Democracy, 1937. The November 8^th Publishing House, Ottawa, 2022.

Wiebe, Ruby. The Temptations of Big Bear, McClelland and Stewart Ltd., Toronto, 1973, (1976 edition).

Suggested Further Reading

Kenny Lake. With a few exceptions, colonialism is over, Part 1: Capitalism in global conquest (1492–1945), Going Against the Tide, Issue #1, 2024. [goingagainstthetide.org].