Another unit completed, another year almost finished. This unit was the “Greatest Moments In History (but mostly the Canadian parts)”. Title copied from the Muppet show that we saw on our Florida trip, “Greatest Moments In History (but mostly the AMERICAN parts)”, yeah our teachers are super original. As always when we finish a unit and reflect on it in a post, I’ll be showing some of my work I’ve done this term to show my learning and understanding, but this time we were thrown a curveball and told to also pick only ONE moment in Canadian history that we learned about from this unit and were told to argue why we think it was the most significant and the greatest moment of our country.Ff
The Constitution Act of 1867
In just 150 years, Canada has made its mark in the the history books as a country that has struggled to emerge from its British-colonial roots, yet has made huge strides to become a beacon of human rights.
“[Canada] has seen the kind of changes from very much a dependence on Britain to a country that stands alone on the world,” said author and historian Christopher Moore.
Since the constitution act our country has had so many defining moments, universal health care, The Indian Act and residential schools, the second world war and many others that we learned in this unit. One that stood out to me and what I think truly defines Canada, literally and figuratively is the Constitution Act of 1867.
But what does a constitution do?
In order to understand how Canada’s constitution reflects our development as a nation, it is first necessary to understand the role that a constitution plays in modern society. Over the course of world history, many societies have been ruled by people who took power by force or by birthright. In these societies, laws governing the conduct of the general population were created more or less at the whim of the ruler. With the rise of democracy, however, came the idea that laws should reflect the public interest rather than the particular interests or idiosyncrasies of the lawmakers. In other words, in order to be legitimate in a democracy, laws must be: predictable; enforceable against everyone (including the people making the laws); and created in accordance with defined systems which appropriately limit the power of law-makers. The notion that laws should fulfill these 
requirements is known as the rule of law or constitutionalism.
A constitution, then, is a set of rules, written or unwritten, by which a society agrees to govern itself. Unlike most ordinary laws, however, the purpose of a constitution is not to set out detailed rules for controlling or regulating the conduct of individuals. Instead, a constitution sets up the mechanisms for making laws: these mechanisms both authorize and limit the power of the state, or government, to create ordinary laws. Because it creates the systems of government, which are in turn used to create and enforce ordinary laws, a constitution is often called the “supreme law” of a country.
On March 29, 1867, the British North America Act (BNA Act) was passed by British Parliament, creating the Dominion of Canada.
“The basic structure of how this country operates from one side of the country to the other, and the provinces and how we govern ourselves is still based on that document that was put together in the 1860s,” Moore said. “That is a remarkable thing.”
The idea for a union of provinces was first created three years earlier, in 1864, by some of Canada’s founding fathers, including John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier and George Brown, among some other fathers of confederation.
“We’ve grown from three million to 35 million, and yet somehow we’ve remained basically with that federal structure and that government structure that we’ve had since 1867,” said Moore.
The BNA Act created a federal state between three colonies — the Province of Canada (Ontario and Québec), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The act also gave a blueprint for the distribution of powers between the central Parliament and the provincial legislatures.
Manitoba was added in 1870, followed by British Columbia (1871), Prince Edward Island (1873), Alberta and Saskatchewan (1905). Squabbling between the provinces meant Newfoundland wouldn’t join until 1949. The Northwest Territories joined in 1870, then Yukon (1898), and Nunavut in 1999.
Although some provinces joined later than others we are still together today, still behaving and governing ourselves according to that document. This document brought our nation together through negotiations and order. Even though Prince Edward Island wanted nothing to do with the act at first they eventually realized joining Canada would be the best thing to do for the long run.
There will be many differing opinions on what could be the greatest moment in Canadian history, but for me history is defined as something that majorly effected the future, for you and me, the present. This Act of Constitution ultimately did just that, it’s how we govern ourselves, it’s what literally makes Canada, Canada. There were many other important moments in our nations history, such as the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).
It brought our nation together that one step further. Bringing military troops from the east to the west, allowing trade to improve as well as our economy since more people could visit those small towns that didn’t get much business.
Finally, the last part of this assignment was to create a visual that could also argue our opinion on the greatest moment in Canadian history. And since I didn’t have time to recreate the Act of Constitution and meet the founding fathers I thought I could just make a photo collage of all of these things.
I included three photos of the actual constitution in action, the one on the bottom being a painting of the event depicting the negotiations that would lead to the Act. Then I also included a photo of the actual document and beneath it a map showing what Canada looked like when it first came together in 1867. Then in the top right having a map showing what Canada looks like today just to compare so we can get an idea of how far our country has come in the past 150 years. Now the bottom two corners are two Canadian landscape photos. The one on the left being Deep Cove.
Where I’ve been lucky enough to grow up and then bottom right a photo in the Rocky Mountains from when my family drove through them on the way to Saskatchewan for a baseball tournament. I included these photos mainly to remind myself of how lucky I am and how without the Constitution Act of 1867 our country would not be what it is today and I would most likely not have the opportunities to live where and how I do today.
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