Welcome to the Canadian Cultural Centre Network,
ORIGIN OF THE NAME
The name Canada likely comes from the Huron-Iroquois word “kanata,” meaning village or settlement. In 1535, two Aboriginal youths told French explorer Jacques Cartier about the route to “kanata” (the site of present-day Québec City). Cartier used the word “Canada” to describe not only the village but the entire area controlled by its chief. The name was soon applied to a much larger area: maps in 1547 designated everything north of the St. Lawrence River as “Canada.”
Cartier also called the St. Lawrence River the “rivière du Canada,” a name used until the early 1600s. By 1616,although the entire region was known as New France, the area along the great river of Canada and the Gulf of St. Lawrence was still called Canada.
Soon explorers and fur traders opened up territory to the west and to the south, and the area known as “Canada” grew. In the early 1700s, the name referred to all French lands in what is now the American mid-west and as far south as present-day Louisiana.
The first use of “Canada” as an official name came in 1791 when the Province of Quebec was divided into the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. In 1841, the two Canadas were united under one name, the Province of Canada. At Confederation, in 1867, the new country assumed the name “Canada” under Section 3 of the British North America Act (now known as the Constitution Act, 1867).
History
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Sir John A. Macdonald, our first Prime Minister, used this four-province flag to represent Canada, but the Royal Union Flag (also known as the Union Jack) remained the most widely used flag in the British Empire. |
Today, Canada is made up of ten provinces and three territories.
However, in 1867, when the British North America Act, 1867 created the new Dominion of Canada, there were only four provinces — Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Three years after Confederation, Canada purchased Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had been granted a charter to the area by the British government exactly two centuries earlier. Rupert’s Land spanned all land drained by rivers flowing into Hudson Bay — roughly 40 percent of present-day Canada. The selling price was 300,000 pounds sterling.
Also in 1870, Britain transferred the North-Western Territory to Canada. Previously, the Hudson’s Bay Company had an exclusive licence to trade in this area, which stretched west to the colony of British Columbia and north to the Arctic Circle. When it was discovered in the mid-1800s that the prairies had enormous farming potential, the British government refused to renew the company’s licence. With the Hudson’s Bay Company out of the area, Britain was free to turn it over to Canada.
Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory were combined to form the Northwest Territories. The Manitoba Act of 1870 created the province of Manitoba from a small part of this area.
In 1871, British Columbia joined the union with the promise of a railway to link it to the rest of the country.
In 1873, Prince Edward Island, which had previously declined an offer to join Confederation, became Canada’s seventh province.
Yukon, which had been a district of the Northwest Territories since 1895, became a separate territory in 1898.
Meanwhile, Canada was opening up its west, just as its neighbour to the south had done before. Migrants from eastern Canada and immigrants from Europe and the United States began to fill the prairies, which were still part of the Northwest Territories. Then, in 1905, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were created, completing the map of Western Canada.
After great debate and two referenda, the people of Newfoundland voted to join Confederation in 1949,creating Canada’s tenth province.
On April 1, 1999, Nunavut, covering 1.9 million square kilometres of Canada’s eastern Arctic, was created from the eastern part of the Northwest Territories