Why was the Canadian Pacific Railway important to Canadian/Canada History?

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JuanB

British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871 on the promise the railway would be built. The transportation link was important to settle the west.

Randy R

it was built to get goods across the country and passengers also??"? if it wasn't build tghere was another railway build under canadian national railway.

AuntCarolyn

I agree with MatthewH. The railroad connected the east with the west, and everything in between, and made Canada a country.

Willster

A frequently raised theory is that if the railway not been built -- and it went across the Canadian prairies in 1882 and 1883 -- then British Columbia might have become an American state, right up there with Oregon and Washington, and the Canadian prairie provinces might well have been settled by people from Montana and the Dakotas.

I do recall reading somewhere that there was a serious movement afoot in Minnesota in the 1880s to send settlers and possibly even soldiers into the Canadian Northwest -- what is now Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta -- if no other white folks showed up there.

Even more important than the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway was the "March West" of the North-West Mounted police in 1874. As the curator of the RCMP Museum in Regina once told me, if the March West had failed, then the Canadian Pacific Railway either would not have been built at all, would have been built much later or would have been built much more to the north -- through Prince Albert and Edmonton -- than it was actually built.

In a nutshell, no mounted police, no railway. And if there's no railway, then there are no Canadian prairie provinces and there was a chance the remainder of Canada would have slipped into American hands early in the 20th century

Andrew

The others forgot one thing. It also was a promise to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick so that they would join confederation.

PuckDat

Juan has it pretty well covered. Without that railway, we never would have settled the west and BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan may have joined the US.

Mathew H

Very imperative to Western Canada. British Columbia would only join if the railroad was built, and other provinces desired it.. mostly for commercial interests to expand markets.

As for Alberta, and Saskatchewan, they would have been absorbed into the United STates. At this point in history "Manifest Destiny" was first priority, and we had Presidential candidates saying "54 40 or fight". The US probbaly would have succeeded in taking all of Western Canada. Remember that farms existed on both sides of the tracks, and the railroad was essential to prairie life in those times.

The railroad did a few things commercially, but it also offered defense. By having a transport line so close the American border, it offered a chance of troop transport just in case the Americans did invade Western Canada.

With no railroad the whole country would be vastly different.

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