Mulroney defeated John Turner in the 1984 election and became Canada’s 18th Prime Minister. In his first term he had the first conservative majority government in 26 years. It seemed as if Mulroney was able to take Canada in any direction he wanted, but his support was made up of socially conservative populists from the…
Canada may have had a lot of great Prime Ministers considering they all offered something different and helped establish Canada, but Robert Borden was Canada’s best Prime Minister.…
Everyone in Canada knows the name of our current Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but he has done nothing compared to our very first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald. Macdonald did many things for our country, including making it a country, and it all started from his vision. He had a vision to unite all of Canada as one through a transcontinental railway, which went on to be known as the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The CPR cost a ton of money though, and the Canadian government just didn’t have enough money to keep pouring it into the CPR. Macdonald needed money, and he decided to get it from Hugh Allen, which led to the Pacific Scandal. Due to the Pacific Scandal, Macdonald was kicked out of office, and by the time the next election came around, he knew that he needed a political platform to win the election. In 1876 he created the National Policy, which became the basis of the Conservative election platform during the 1878 election. This National Policy had three initiatives to it; to create a system of protective tariffs against foreign goods; to encourage greater immigration to the west; the cornerstone of the national policy was to finish off the CPR. The National Policy got Macdonald back in power, more importantly though, Macdonald’s National Policy hugely impacted Canada economically, politically, and socially.…
The era of late 1700’s was a period of great change in North America. After the French and Indian war ended in 1963, Great Britain’s control of North America’s east coast caused more interaction between the American colonies and Canada, which was a French colony prior to the war. In 1774, the Continental Congress wrote to the inhabitants of Quebec in an appeal which was entitled, “Appeal to the Inhabitants of Quebec.” In this appeal, the American colonists expressed their great joy that Quebec was now a part of the English colonies, and the main thesis of this appeal was that the inhabitants of Quebec had earned the right to have the same rights as the colonies under a just form of government, and that the best way for them to achieve that was by joining the American colonies. These ideas that the colonists had were very persuasive, and they provided a…
When Pierre Trudeau was in office he passed large amounts of bills and acts, which greatly impacted Canada to develop as a nation. Trudeau officially made the country bilingual by in 1969 by passing the Official Languages Act. He kept the french culture so that they would not have the need for separation. when the Constitution Act passed in 1982, Canada gained complete control over their constitution, and therefore it made Canada independent from the British government. “The act ended the need for British approval of amendments to Canada’s constitution”. With his Charter of Rights and Freedoms included in the Constitution, Canadians were guaranteed freedom and would not suffer from discrimination. Everyone accepted this because if offered…
I believe that bilingualism is central to Canada’s identity, as well as other languages. Pierre Elliott Trudeau has said that, “Bilingualism unites people; dualism divides them. Bilingualism means you can speak to the other; duality means you live in one language and the rest of Canada will live in another language”.…
Tommy Douglas was one of the most influential politicians in Canadian history, whose contributions were monumental in shaping our nation. He began as a Baptist minister and then entered politics by becoming a House of Commons member, then premier of Saskatchewan, and finally leader of the NDP federal political party. He achieved many great goals in his lifetime as a politician, but his two main achievements were leading the first socialist government elected in Canada thereby establishing democratic socialism in Canadian politics as well as being the creator of Medicare, the most advanced health care system in the world.…
There has been a great deal of contention surrounding the revisionist perception of Quebec’s normalcy and the traditional understanding of Quebec as a distinct entity. The former attempts to substantiate the shift away from traditional…
Immigration plays a big role in Montreal’s political and urban geography. Montreal is the primate city of Quebec. The Quebecois work extremely hard on language preservation and maintaining their cultural identity. French is the primary language spoken in Quebec. The Quebecois have the lowest birthrate in all of France. Quebec faces a major problem. They need to bring in immigrants to keep their culture alive, but their culture is also changing by letting in all of these immigrants. Quebec is divided into two areas where there are the English on one side and the French on the other side. The English pose a major threat to the Quebecois. The Quebecois realize that guarding their language is the only way to preserve their culture. In attempts…
Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the 15th prime minister of Canada in 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984.…
We have all made amazing decisions and terrible. Justin Trudeau is no different. That is why I am here, to tell you about some of his amazing decisions and some of his terrible, and how he has made the biggest impact on Canadian society in 2017. Justin Trudeau does not just have a job he has a family life too. He has two sons and a girl, Xavier James Trudeau was born October 18, 2007, the day his Granddad would have turned 88. On the fifth of February, 2009, Ella-Grace Margaret Trudeau followed suit. Five years later their third child, Hadrien was born.…
Trudeau was interested in Marxist ideas in the 1940s and his Harvard dissertation was on the topic of Communism and Christianity.[9] At Harvard, Trudeau found himself profoundly challenged as he discovered that his "... legal training was deficient, [and] his knowledge of economics was pathetic."[10] Thanks to the great intellectual migration away from Europe's fascism, Harvard had become a major intellectual centre in which Trudeau profoundly changed.[11] Despite this, Trudeau found himself an outsider – a French Catholic living for the first time outside of Quebec in the predominantly Protestant American Harvard University.[12] This isolation deepened finally into despair,[13] and led to his decision to continue his Harvard studies abroad.[14]…
In the 1970s, the Federal Government undertook an official policy on multiculturalism that was based on the understanding that, “…there cannot be one cultural policy for Canadians of British and French origin, another for the original peoples and yet a third for all others. For although there are two official languages, there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other.” (Trudeau 1971) If Canada were to establish policies on official cultures, cultures that people must integrate into, the effect would be to increase feeling of alienation in minority communities by creating barriers to entrance. By actively promoting these different cultures, so long as there is a collective will for the…
Throughout Canadian history there have been many influential political leaders in the past, but none as powerful or significant as Brian Mulroney. Despite the many political criticisms, Brian Mulroney served as the longest conservative prime minister in Canada, he attained a struggle through his pre-political life, which lead him to cleaning up his act and leading the conservative party to the greatest majority in Canadian history, he goes on to serve the legacy of one of the greatest political leaders of all time.…
In this essay, I will demonstrate that the Prime Minister is powerful and can cause many potential dangers by analyzing different elements inside and outside of our government over the period of different Prime Ministers throughout the Canadian political history.…