A Short History of Canada

1) ''Close to half the population was female. Less than a third of women were married, and 6 per cent were widows (double the percentage of widowers). Two-thirds of women were classified as ''children or unmarried.'' The vast majority of them worked hard, but only 11,422 female servants and a handful of laundresses and seamstresses emerge from the occupational census. Women had no share in public life and, legally, no more status than their husbands or fathers permitted. Their official status was hardly higher than that of the 23,035 Indians (or sauvages, as the French translation of the census described them). The once-proud aboriginal people of North America now survived largely as wards of an indifferent state. A few generations earlier, Indians had helped save Canada during the war of 1812; now they were heading for extinction. Few Canadians even noticed.''

2) ''Canada could hardly ask for a nobler founder than Champlain. Navigator, soldier, visionary, a Protestant turned Catholic by conviction, a man of Renaissance curiosity and eternal fortitude, Champlain created New France. A few bleak winters in the Bay of Fundy persuaded him to try elsewhere. Fate then took him back to Cartier's great river, the ''Father of Waters.'' Where Cape Diamond rears up to narrow the St. Lawrence River, Champlain and a few men built their habitation in the autumn of 1608.
Champlain's business, financed by court favourites and Rouen merchants, was the fur trade. In its name, he made alliances with the Algonquins; fought their dreaded enemies, the Iroquois; journeyed to the Huron country that is now central Ontario; and sent young Frenchmen to learn Indian languages and lifestyles as the first coureurs de bois. Champlain has been condemned for provoking the Iroquois, but his intervention only speeded up the inevitable.''

3) ''However parochial they were, most British North Americans recognized the power of the United States. In 1847 the Americans had absorbed Texas and California with unnerving speed. In the 1850s the Fraser and Cariboo gold rushes might well have provided a pretext to add British Columbia to the American Union. South of the tiny Red River colony, Minnesota had become a state; its politicians made no secret of their annexationist intentions. From 1861 to 1865, Americans were preoccupied with their Civil War, but, as the Montreal-Irish orator D'arcy McGee warned, war was an appetite that grew with feeding.''

4) ''Il faut que ça change, proclaimed the Liberal slogans, to be echoed by younger, better-educated Quebec voters, shaped by the 1950s to demand more of life and government than the Church or Duplessis had allowed them. When Lesage won the 1960 election, most Canadians welcomed the message and saw a superbly talented new government take shape: Paul Gérin-Lajoie, René Lévesque, and George Lapalme attracted comparable talent to the task of modernizing Quebec. Canadians were slower to overhear the other slogan of the 1960 victory: maîtres chez nous. The state would replace the Church and the land as the fundamental instrument of Canadien survival. Unless something dramatic happened in Ottawa, the state would be Québécois; its logical direction would be independence.''

5) ''Tories agreed they could win, but not with Mulroney. After lavish patronage for his friends, a mawkish farewell tour of world capitals, and a delay to make sure Joe Clark quit first, Mulroney announced his retirement on February 24, 1993. 'This is a beautiful view,' he told reporters at his residence at Sussex Drive, 'but it ain't free.' With 3082 days in office, Brian Mulroney had outlasted all but four Canadian prime ministers. He had forced through free trade with the United States, slashed the civil service, employed his friends, won admiration in Africa by opposing apartheid, and doubled the national debt.''