Canada's Unfinished Century

At the turn of the century, Canada learned to govern with letters, ledgers, and persuasion rather than edict. Laurier's Long Afternoon follows the country from the humid election night of 1896 to the rupture of 1914, tracing how sunny ways became an operating system: Orders-in-Council as instruments, clerks and inspectors as quiet protagonists, and compromise as both civic virtue and hidden cost. Manitoba's school crisis is the opening test-settled not by fiat but by regulation, petitions, and a carefully timed half hour at day's end-teaching a federation to lower the temperature without extinguishing the fire. Habits formed in classrooms spill into the grain trade and the cabinet room, as Ottawa bargains with railways, calibrates grants, and turns quarrels into contracts.From there, the canvas widens: the grid is driven across the prairie; ports at Québec and Halifax become sorting machines for people and ideas; and a new board culture takes hold-railway rates here, deportation hearings there-where procedure promises fairness even as statutes sharpen their edges. Immigration policy modernizes with the sweep of a pen, expanding categories of exclusion while nurses, inspectors, and station agents turn law into a daily ritual. In Parliament, the same administrative voice argues for a modest Canadian navy, while outside the chamber, numbers-tariffs, rates, car allocations-remake power. Persuasion proves elastic, sometimes humane, sometimes coercive in a softer key.Imperial weather rolls in: South Africa stamps parades onto calendars; the Alaska boundary sours illusions; the Naval Service Act splits friends; and the 1911 reciprocity election forces a reckoning between sentiment and arithmetic, factories and wheat. Laurier's method, so deft in fair weather, hits its limits as loyalty, markets, and nationhood collide. Yet even in defeat, the machinery he built keeps humming-boards hearing complaints, ships drilling, mail moving-proof that a young state had learned to act like one.Told in scene-driven prose, this volume braids kitchens to cabinet tables, schoolrooms to ports, and prairie section lines to parliamentary clauses. It is a ledger-honest account of a country trying to be decent by design, showing how every achievement carried a price and how compromise, once institutionalized, could protect or erode in the same measured hand. When the light finally changed in 1914, Canada had the tools of a modern state-and a set of unresolved arguments it would carry into the fire.

Canada's war is told in files and flesh. It opens in Ottawa, where a short statute with a long reach-the War Measures Act-teaches a country to govern by Order-in-Council while censors slit envelopes and permits become passwords to ordinary life. The tone is legal; the effects are warm to the touch: doors lock, presses fall silent, and "enemy aliens" learn how a list becomes a fence.From Valcartier's dust to Salisbury Plain's mud, an army climbs off paper and learns by error. The Ross rifle, loved in parliament and loathed in trenches, gives way to the Lee-Enfield without romance. At Second Ypres, men discover chemistry by terror and hold a line with rags and nerve.Industry stumbles, then runs. The Imperial Munitions Board imposes specifications, cracks scandals, and proves that a ledger can move mountains of steel. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board polices margins and preaches "honour rationing," writing thrift into shop windows and kitchens.Ports and pilots take their chapters: convoys gather in fog; the Royal Canadian Navy learns the slow heroism of moving grain and men under threat; in the air, maps get sharper and secrecy thinner. Halifax explodes and then rebuilds under a relief commission that turns urgency into administration.Vimy is presented as orchestration-a model, not a miracle-and the Hundred Days as tempo: deception, clocks, bridges, orders. Victory Loans and new taxes pay the bills; influenza collects its own.Armistice opens another file. Demobilization breeds riots at Kinmel Park and quiet homecomings on cold platforms. A new bureaucracy learns pensions, hospitals, and training; the Soldier Settlement Act tries to turn policy into soil with uneven mercy.The book keeps its ledger honest. Black Canadians of No. 2 Construction Battalion earn dignity and return to limits; Indigenous veterans meet pass systems and narrow benefits; women who kept benches and accounts demand wages and rights beyond the shift whistle.Winnipeg strikes; warrants replace bayonets. In Paris, Canada signs for itself and sits, softly separate, at the League. The Imperial War Graves Commission writes equality in stone; memory becomes administration. What began as an emergency becomes a habit, and a nation steps into the 1920s with new muscles, new debts, and arguments about what "after" means.