Acknowledgments

This book’s genesis can be traced to the origins of The Confederation Debates, which sought to familiarize Canadians with the debates that shaped their country’s founding during the past one and a half centuries. The project digitized roughly nine thousand pages of text from local and federal legislatures debating the admission of each province or territory into Confederation, between 1865 and 1949, as well as the Numbered Treaties and records of their negotiation, and posted these records to our legacy website hosted by the University of Victoria (http://hcmc.uvic.ca/confederation/).

From the outset, contributors from across the country diligently worked to package portions of these records into educational mini-units, social media posts, and other deliverables, and the project’s leadership recognized that the records would be much more meaningful if they were accompanied by primers concerning each province, territory, and Treaty area’s entry into Confederation.

Towards this end, a group of Canada’s leading historians congregated at St. Jerome’s University in February 2017 to share and discuss papers detailing each province, territory, and Treaty areas’ journeys into Confederation. Everyone was impressed by the collective strength of the research as well as the thoughtful analysis emphasizing a common (though diverse) pursuit of local autonomy, and the decision was quickly made to submit the papers for scholarly publication. The result is Reconsidering Confederation.

This book would not have been possible without the continuous support and guidance provided by Raymond B. Blake, Penny Bryden, Colin M. Coates, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, and Marcel Martel. I am also deeply grateful to all of the chapter contributors for their carefully considered work and fast turnaround times. Support from the Crabtree Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, St. Jerome’s University, the University of Waterloo, and the Canada150@York fund helped to make this book a reality. Several research assistants, including Yuqian (Gloria) Fan, Sumedha Jain, and Phil Thompson also helped to prepare the manuscript for publication.

The book is also indebted to the University of British Columbia Press for granting us permission to reproduce J.R. Miller’s chapter from New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada’s Native Pasts. The authors of this volume are also appreciative for the constructive feedback offered by the anonymous peer reviewers.