Riel to Reform: A History of Protest in Western Canada

Louis A. Knafla is a history professor at the University of Calgary.

Exploitation, economic injustice, underrepresen-tation in the nation,
and lack of control in the provinces have shaped the ways in which the
people of Western Canada have defined their regional identity since the
development of the fur trade across the Prairies in the early 19th
century. In this collection, 20 Canadian historians, political
scientists, and journalists write about the forces that have combined to
create protest in the region, and about the various forms that protest
has taken. These short essays were written between 1957 and 1991 (most
in the late 1970s), and the volume includes brief section-area
introductions.

Several themes emerge from the essays. First, Western Canada’s
regional identity is equated with a tradition of political protest,
which is represented by such events as the Riel rebellions of
1869–70/1885 and the General Strike of 1919. Second, the Natives,
Métis, and European settlers spawned by the fur trade were subject to
the rule of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Third, following the repression
of the 1885 Rebellion a new regionalism was born, one based on the
agricultural exploitation of the West as the hinterland of central
Canada.

Fourth and last, following World War II, the regionalism of an agrarian
society was displaced by the regionalism of an increasingly urbanized
and natural-resource-based society with a growing urban working class.
The exploitation of Western Canada’s natural resources by the federal
government is viewed here as not dissimilar to the Hudson’s Bay
Company’s exploitation of animal furs.

What makes the West a region is the fact that its structural identity
as an exporter of natural resources gives it a mainstream ideology. The
problem is that the rest of the country needs its exports, and the
society of the West is too culturally dispersed to enable it to force
the protection of its interests by any national political party.
Therefore, Prairie radicalism, alienation, and regional political
parties have contributed to both the distinctiveness and the longevity
of protest in the region.