This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.
In The Globe’s earliest imaginings, the West was a land of rivers, plentiful game and fertile soil, a “magnificent empire” that lay between the Great Lakes and Rocky Mountains just waiting to be conquered.
“The wealth of 400,000 square miles of territory will flow through our waters, and be gathered by our merchants, manufacturers and agriculturalists,” stated a particularly grandiose 1863 Globe opinion.
“Our sons will occupy the chief places of this vast territory, we will form its institutions, supply its rulers, teach its schools, fill its stores, run its mills, and navigate its streams.”
Hard pragmatism lay behind that rhetoric. In the years before Confederation, the Province of Canada, which encompassed portions of what is today Southern Quebec and Ontario, found itself trapped between the western-reaching American colossus to the south – its Civil War ending and its ambitions endless – and the vast lands under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the north and west. If Canada could not expand, it might soon perish.
Globe founder George Brown’s powerful, if blinkered, advocacy influenced Canada’s successful fight to purchase and annex HBC-owned Rupert’s Land, a western territory five times the size of France, creating the fantastically large, peaceful and prosperous country of today. But it came at a price.
The rush to profit from what The Globe viewed as a wilderness uninhabited and unvisited, “except by the wandering savage or hunter,” ignored the long settlement and rights of Indigenous people. The paper’s claim in 1876 that Canada, in contrast to the United States, had “treated our Indians like human beings, and have scrupulously kept the faith in all our dealings with them,” was patently false – a wrong we are still reckoning with today.
As the West developed, The Globe’s early championing of the Canadianization of the region gave way to coverage that alternated between in-depth stories and editorials, and articles that sometimes took the tone of reporting on a foreign country.
One particularly embarrassing contemporary example: a 2011 front-page story about Alison Redford being elected Progressive Conservative Party leader, and therefore premier, that featured the infamous headline: “Alberta steps into the present.”
The headline was speaking about the province that is the historical home of the Famous Five, Canada’s most noteworthy suffragette reformers, in the Prairie region where women first got the vote, and at a time when Ontario – and most other provinces – had yet to elect a woman premier.
In reaction, Calgary Herald columnist Licia Corbella wrote that Ontario “is in the midst of a provincial election in which the current Premier, Dalton McGuinty, is that province’s 24th all-male, all-white Premier. His challenger is Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, another middle-aged white fella.”
If The Globe has had its bad days in Western coverage, it has had many good ones as well, stretching back to the years before Confederation. Brown, as both Globe proprietor and leader of the Reform, or Liberal, Party, pushed hard for incorporating the West into Canada, unlike others – including his archrival, Sir John A. Macdonald – who were more inclined to let it drift away as a separate colony. According to biographer J.M.S. Careless, Brown feared that letting the West pursue a separate destiny would see it occupied by “American miners and settlers, and its trade carried off by the Red River to St. Paul and the Mississippi.”
Preston Manning, the founder of the modern-day Reform Party, created as an offshoot of the country’s conservative movement, says Brown’s editorial and political positions had huge ramifications for the West we know today. “He advocated more strongly than Macdonald that the Rupert’s Land at that time – all of the West under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company – should be made part of Canada.”
Brown got his wish. In 1870, three years after Confederation, Canada purchased Rupert’s Land from HBC – ending the company’s 200-year monopoly over the lands whose rivers flow into Hudson Bay – along with the far less formally administered North-Western Territory, the massive region even further north and west of Rupert’s Land.
Researchers from the Geological Survey of Canada chart the newly acquired western territories in an 1873 expedition from Manitoba's Fort Garry to Rocky Mountain House, Alta.Library and Archives Canada
Brown was aligned with other Western interests from the earliest days of Canada being a country. He opposed the Macdonald-authored National Policy that levied high tariffs on foreign imported goods to shield Canadian manufacturers – at the expense of agricultural exporters, first in Southwestern Ontario, and then on the Prairies. “Brown was never successful in getting free trade,” Manning says. “But the fact that he advocated it was something that the Western guys always wanted.”
The Globe’s assertiveness in its ideas about the West also led the paper to write enthusiastically about a new industrial school in Battleford, in what is now Saskatchewan, in 1884. “The system will gradually and quietly transform tribes of otherwise uneducated and intractable savages,” it said in an editorial about the inauguration of a decades-long system of forced assimilation and familial separation for Indigenous people in poorly funded church-run schools, where preventable diseases ran rampant and many children were sexually or physically abused.
A century later, The Globe would write about the demands from Indigenous leaders for investigations into conditions at the same residential schools.
Children wear cricket uniforms at Battleford Indian Industrial School in 1895, just over a decade after it opened.Library and Archives Canada
The newspaper was also tested by the resistance of the Métis, in what would become Southern Manitoba, who weren’t enamoured with becoming a part of Canada. According to historian Gerald Friesen, the new English settlers arriving in the province were “determined to claim the new land as a child of Ontario,” and they displayed an intolerance to racial mingling that we now consider blatantly racist. Racial and anti-Catholic intolerance took hold despite the long history of intermarriage between French traders and Indigenous women in the area, Friesen wrote in his book River Road.
Early on, The Globe treated the growing restiveness that eventually led to rebellion with Pollyannaish optimism. “There is nothing which cannot be removed by the exhibition of a friendly and liberal spirit,” the paper declared as major troubles flared.
By the time Métis leader Louis Riel was set to be hanged after the North-West uprising, the paper had adopted a much grimmer tone. An October, 1885, Globe editorial – likely motivated in large part by a dislike of the Macdonald Conservatives – lambasted the prime minister for misgoverning while ignoring the reasonable land claims of the Métis.
Louis Riel in 1875, a decade before he was tried and executed for his involvement in the North-West Rebellion.Library and Archives Canada
In the decades that followed, The Globe’s coverage of the “Western situation” could be nuanced. In the 1920s, for instance, the paper argued the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta deserved control over their own natural resources, which Ottawa had denied them when they obtained provincehood, and which they finally achieved in 1930. The Globe also supported tariff reductions and lower railway rates for struggling farmers, noting the rise of a secession movement, “perhaps not formidable, but important as a symptom of discontent.”
But that did not prevent the paper from indulging in patronizing writing, such as framing Manitoba’s decision in 1928 to increase the salary of the premier to at least $10,000 a year as “another sign that the West is growing up.”
And in 1933, when Western farmers facing the Depression and drought complained about discriminatory banking policies crafted in Montreal and Toronto, The Globe found it baffling that they felt “head office location has something to do with influencing policy.”
Drought-stricken soil drifts along a fence between Cadillac and Kincaid, Sask, in 1931.National Archives of Canada
The paper astutely sent author and humorist Stephen Leacock to the West in 1937. “Sunny Alberta is a land of contrasts. In point of altitude it begins at the summit of the Rocky Mountains and ends at the bottom of Saskatchewan,” he wrote, a particularly adept description of the province, which at the time was leaning over a financial abyss after years of dust bowls and crops devoured by grasshoppers.
“In temperature it will freeze you at a few hours’ notice with forty below zero and then wipe it all out with a Chinook wind and beg your pardon for it,” Leacock wrote.
“In point of latent resources, in and under the soil – coal, gas, metals – there’s literally no end of it.”
Fire spews out of the Legendary Leduc #1 well in Devon, Alta., in 1947, one of the finds that propelled the oil boom of later decades.Canadian Petroleum Discovery Centre
The thousands of kilometres between those latent resources and political leaders in Central Canada have long been a point of tension. In 1971, celebrated Globe journalist Stanley McDowell wrote from Regina on growing Western alienation. He noted Parliament was squabbling over a bill that enabled a payment Western farmers saw as their due, while quickly passing other legislation for a similar sum that helped Central Canadian manufacturers.
“Quebec separatists began calling their province a ‘colony’ in the early 1960s. But Westerners can cite a solid body of historical evidence that their region was developed as a colony from the start,” McDowell wrote.
In the fractious days of the National Energy Program in the early 1980s – as the government of Pierre Trudeau pushed to Canadianize the country’s energy industry in response to two energy crises – many Globe editorials were on the side of Alberta, then-premier Peter Lougheed and the oil industry.
“The National Energy Program that emerged … led to the dismantling of a good many energy projects, and to bad relations with our closest industrial partner, the United States, over changing the rules in mid-game,” one Globe editorial declared. “More than anything, it extended alienation of the West, which had already wiped out the Liberal Party beyond the city of Winnipeg.”
The Globe opened an Edmonton bureau in 1979, just before those fractious days, citing the need to cover “this fast-growing and increasingly important centre of Canadian commerce and industry.” It opened a Winnipeg bureau two years later. Today there’s a small but vibrant crew in Calgary and Edmonton, but The Globe has been more fragmented in its coverage of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
In some ways, the Toronto-centred Canadian media still struggles to understand the West. For example, it tends to view populism on the Prairies as uniformly negative, and through the lens of modern American populism – a Canadian analogue to Donald Trump whipping up intolerance and anger with false claims. Western Canadian populism has unique historical attributes, which gave rise to political movements on both the right and the left.
It was Saskatchewan’s governing Co-operative Commonwealth Federation that famously introduced the publicly funded medicare system, Manning notes.
New Democratic parties on the Prairies argue with justification that they are different – more pragmatic – than some of their national brethren. Writing in The Globe about the 2023 election of Wab Kinew as Canada’s first First Nations provincial premier, NDP adviser Mike McKinnon said that “his leadership is sure to follow a proud Prairie tradition passed down from Roy Romanow to Gary Doer, Rachel Notley and now Mr. Kinew. Manitobans can expect their premier-designate to join a long line of pragmatic and (mostly) popular NDP governments on the Prairies.” Kinew makes the distinction himself, referring to his party by the full name, “Manitoba NDP,” with the province’s name in the lead.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew.Zachary Prong/The Globe and Mail
With the rise of sovereignty and autonomy movements in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the relationship between east and west has become more strained. In November, 2019, for example, Alberta premier Jason Kenney spoke dismissively of the “Toronto Globe and Mail” criticizing Western politicians and their “preaching” on job losses and economic hardship.
In a speech that he spent all night writing, Kenney referenced historical complaints – including those of Frederick Haultain, the first premier of the North-West Territories – that Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905 without the same powers afforded others; and alluded to the “Laurentian elite” author of a Globe editorial who failed to understand how economic powerhouse Alberta had bolstered the Canadian economy in the past, even as other regions struggled.
After Kenney was pushed from office in 2022, Danielle Smith took over as United Conservative Party Leader and Premier. She won the provincial election in May, 2023. Smith has become the most strident proponent of provincial autonomy measures – or Alberta First policies, as she has called them – to occupy the office of premier. She introduced “sovereignty” legislation to enable Alberta MLAs to vote on motions against federal rules they believe intrude into the provincial sphere. And she has had little qualm in launching advertising campaigns cheerleading for Alberta to consider leaving the Canada Pension Plan and create its own fund.
Historian and former Saskatchewan cabinet minister Janice MacKinnon says coverage of the Saskatchewan First Act and Alberta’s Sovereignty Act in 2022 revealed a lot about how the West gets treated by Canadian media. “Would anybody from Alberta presume to fly into Ontario to write about a piece of legislation that they haven’t read, but they just know it’s going to be bad?” she says.
“There’s the centre of Canada, and they feel free to tell us that we don’t meet whatever their standard is. But they sometimes don’t understand the place where we live.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith sits for a portrait during the 2023 election that brought her United Conservatives back into government.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Even before Smith became Premier, Globe readers have been fascinated by the churn and combativeness of Alberta politics and its leaders. In that vein, stories that reinforce stereotypes about the West are often popular. But columnists from outside the province at times gloss over the scale and complexity of energy and climate questions – and the effect of federal policies on provincial economies.
The Prairie provinces are different from the rest of the country because of the vagaries of the global commodity markets on which they depend. That makes the region subject to sudden ups and downs, where the economy can be cratering at one moment and flying high the next. It makes for fascinating and complex stories.
On that Prairie resource wealth, there is no monolith of political views, even in Alberta. Former Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft and others have argued the gusher of oil and natural gas money has resulted in democratic institutions being captured by private interests. Economists say the reliance on resource revenues leads to financial swings that play havoc with public budgets and make planning difficult. And environmental liabilities to clean up the oil patch loom large, an issue that has been covered in depth by Globe reporters and columnists in recent years.
The Globe, as a national newspaper, has to recognize not only regional economic differences, but the interests and conflicts of environmental protection, resource development and Indigenous rights. The world’s climate is changing in terrifying ways, and the looming global disaster is difficult to square with Canada’s role in producing still-in-demand fossil fuels, in an era where there’s a renewed aversion to relying on Russia or the Middle East for energy security.
Most of the country’s city dwellers see the economy as focused on the auto sector, real estate or technology. But in the Prairie provinces, the connection to the seemingly old-fashioned yet still absolutely necessary work of resource extraction and farming remains stronger, and plays a greater role in politics. What the world needs from Canada is plentiful in the West: natural gas, wheat, lentils, potash – but also the space and sun for solar power, the underground for carbon capture and the potential for an array of critical-mineral mines.
The old resource-based economy Brown wrote about is still the West’s foundation, and, in many regards, the country’s. To neglect it, or to write it off as yesterday’s news, is to ignore the present reality.
Kelly Cryderman is a columnist at The Globe and Mail, based in Calgary.
Bruce West/The Globe and Mail
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