Jerald Sabin (Carleton University)
.Between 1873 and 1936, federal public servants in the Canadian Department of the Interior directed the settlement of Western Canada from Ottawa. The Department’s administrative life was bookended by the creation of Canada in 1867 at one end and by the constitutional devolution of control over public lands and natural resources to the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta at the other. While the political dimensions of Western Canadian state formation are well understood, the administrative systems that both drove and supported this formation are not. This paper brings into conversation literatures on settler colonialism, North American administrative history, and Canadian constitutionalism to develop an account of Canadian colonial administration, its institutions, and practices. This paper draws upon the growing American literature on imperial/colonial administration, law, and politics. The paper argues that while the Canadian system of colonial administration was deeply influenced by the American experience of imperial expansion, its British colonial antecedents and the idiosyncrasies of a ‘pioneer public service’ placed Canadian colonial expansion on a distinct administrative path. To make this argument, the paper explores three elements of Canadian colonial policy: the political economy of eighteenth and nineteenth century British North America; the pre- and post-Confederation constitutional framework in which Western Canada was acquired and incorporated into the Canadian state; and the development of a Ministry of the Interior, whose portfolio at its height included Indian affairs, federal policing, immigration, land surveying, and natural resources.