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With the Red River Rebellion resolved,
the Canadian government set itself
to the more difficult task of putting
a "Canadian" identity on
the western landscape. From the moment
the region entered Confederation with
the transfer of Rupert's Land, Ottawa
envisioned an orderly settlement of
the West under the direct control
of a federal
administration. Aboriginal
claims needed to be dealt with,
homesteads
surveyed, a transportation
system built, and a system of law
enforcement firmly entrenched before
mass immigration
from Europe and the United States
could proceed. The entire settlement
process was to be administered by
a new government agency, the Department
of the Interior, which initially had
Prime Minister John A. Macdonald as
its minister.
Interestingly, at no time throughout
the settlement process was there a
mechanism put in place by the federal
government - Conservative or Liberal
- that would enable the West to evolve
gradually from a territorial administration
controlled by Ottawa to a provincial
administration controlled at the local
level. "The federal government
wanted no inconvenient local interference
with its project of making the prairie
west Canadian," notes historian
John Thompson.
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