The four westernmost provinces of Canada cover 2.9 million square kilometers and makeup almost 29 percent of Canada’s land area. It is a region which has long been associated with new opportunities and fresh beginnings, upward mobility and potential wealth. Politically, it has been characterized as a region bound together by a series of common outlooks on a range of issues. However, there is reason to question the characterization of western Canada as a single region. The four provinces are as varied as their landscapes. British Columbia and Alberta are separated by the Continental Divide and the Rocky Mountains, one province is of the mountains and the sea while the other three are prairies. All four provinces lay claim to a distinct and varied history. Since the 1930s, each of the four provinces trajectories have rapidly diverged as a result of the combined effects of each province’s particular experiences not only economically but socially and politically.
This paper will explore the different trajectories taken by the Prairie provinces and British Columbia from the 1930s onwards. The first section of this paper will focus on the Great Depression and the second half on the post-Second World War era. It will examine the experiences of the western provinces and explore how variations in these experiences contributed to later political and economic developments. This paper will argue that, while there are certain common and uniting threads shared by the all four of the provinces, the western provinces have become more and more unlike each other economically, politically and socially.
Part I: The Great Depression
The Great Depression began in October 1929 and ended with the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. It was a decade marked by an overwhelming sense of desperation following on a previous decade of economic uncertainty and recession. The economic downturn hit the urban unemployed, the rural poor, and farmers particularly hard. Investment and consumption stalled. Unemployment soared and workers grew increasingly discouraged not just in the western provinces but across Canada. The 1930s were also marked by the efforts by politicians both at the federal and the provincial level attempting to cope with a situation for which they had no training and no precedent in either economic or social welfare policy.
For the Prairie provinces, the economic depression of the 1930s was combined with a drought brought on, in part, by unsustainable land use practices. Monoculture farming had turned much of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba into a dust bowl. Collectively remembered as an ecological and human disaster, the Great Depression of the 1930s saw steep declines in agricultural prices and the failure of foreign markets to readjust in the wake of the economic downturn. It was devastating for prairie farmers many of whom were locked into fixed interest payments on debts contracted in a more positive economic era and who had adopted farming practices which stripped the land of topsoil and its ability to withstand drought. In July 1931, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett described the situations as “the greatest national calamity that has ever overtaken this country.”
As gross national income fell by an estimated 7 percent, the Canadian government raised Canada’s tariffs – a futile effort to realize some gains from trade. The result was, however, the near decimation of the grain trade that had been the economic backbone of the prairies. Alberta which saw per capita income fall by 61% and Saskatchewan by 72% between 1929 and 1932. Federal government intervention, including large-scale transfers to the provinces and the creation of a regional land reclamation organizations, were instituted during the 1930s. Saskatchewan received the most relief funding with nearly one-third of the population receiving some form of relief between 1931 and 1932. At the provincial level, provinces such as Alberta forced banks and other financial institutions to negotiate settlements on farm debt and actively promoted changes in land use. The Alberta provincial government’s chief policy objective during the 1930s was to reduce the drought vulnerability of its farmland by reducing population and infrastructure. One legacy of this policy goal was the transformation of small and unsustainable wheat farms into larger, more sustainable ranches.
If the Great Depression revealed how closely tied the Prairie provinces were to the fortunes of the international wheat market and to favourable weather patterns, it also revealed how closely linked British Columbia was to the trade of staple goods. This reliance left the province vulnerable to the uncertainties of trade. The demand for British Columbia resources from the United States created the boom and bust cycles in the province’s economy and, as a result, limited the province’s ability to engage in long-term economic planning. Prior to the Great Depression, the province had seen increases in the exports of lumber and apples through the opening of the Panama Canel; the province’s lead and zinc were in demand in American auto plants and the prairie grain trade moved away from Winnipeg and towards Vancouver. During the Depression years, however, high American tariffs and unprecedented competition in international markets brought disaster to Canadian exports which, by 1933, were less than half of what they had been in 1929.
In response to rising unemployment, provinces instituted work camps for unemployed, homeless men, providing them with food, shelter and a small wage. These camps operated in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. They were designed so that transient, unemployed workers were kept away from urban centers, but acted as breeding grounds for hopelessness and anger. The provinces and the federal government were reluctant to make concrete plans for unemployed workers, however, fearing that it would set a precedent and encourage workers to leave their employment and depend solely on provincial relief programs. Relief in the western provinces was granted as a last resort even as wages were cut and companies were forced to lay off workers in the face of the sustained economic depression of the 1930s. In British Columbia, the arrival of those lured by the warmer climate and the collapse in agriculture on the prairies, intensified the unemployment crisis faced by the province. While the province’s Conservative party did establish relief camps, failing government revenues in 1931 caused challenges for the provincial government. The provincial government turned its financial problems over to private enterprise and, through the 1932 Kidd Report, argued that – further taxation being impossible – the only alternative lay in reducing provincial expenditures. Social services were cut back. The Kidd Report had underlined the way social services “were a privilege to be withdrawn in times of economic difficulty if they threatened the capitalist edifice.”
A fallout of the Great Depression was an increasing sense that provincial governments should be more involved in the economy and more sensitive to the struggles of the unemployed. The issues of unemployment, dispossession, homelessness, and hunger became acute during the 1930s. Crime rates rose and the trade of alcohol from Ontario to the Crowsnest Pass of Alberta becoming a growth industry. Originally relief had been viewed as a religious and charitable duty that provided “the minimum basic necessities for a minimum period until normal family circumstances were restored.” Healy notes that “soul-destroying, physically and mentally debilitating, morally corrupt, the realities of relief during the Great Depression became a political catalyst for the increasing numbers who were subjected to its administration.” For working-class women, the struggles of providing for their families during the 1930s and avoiding relief became part of challenging the boundaries placed on them by the state and by society.
The turbulence experienced by workers during the Depression years led to an increase debate around the relations between labour and capital. During the Depression years, however, unemployed workers, transients, and their supporters took to the streets to give vent to their disappointment and to challenge authority. This frustration can be seen in the protests in the 1932 sit-down strike in Saskatoon and the 1935 ‘On-to-Ottawa Trek’ where men living in intolerable conditions for 20 cents a day in British Columbian work camps jumped trains on their way to Ottawa to protest conditions. In British Columbia efforts to curtail the growth of militant industrial unionism during the 1930s were encoded in the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. Analysts note that this piece of legislation was part of an effort to combine collective bargaining with the criminal and common law in a way which would stunt the growth of unionism. However, these efforts to contain labour through the legal and legislative systems would, ultimately, fail. The movements surrounding job security, higher wages and standard of living for workers continued to build momentum through the Second World War and in the post-war era, securing significant gains for workers who had struggled through the Depression years.
The unprecedented nature of the Great Depression affected the course of political parties and the party system in western Canada. Almond and Powell suggest that “certain events and experiences may leave their mark on a whole society…a depression can constitute a severe political trauma for millions of individuals…they may acquire new conception of the role of politics in their lives.” The Social Credit and Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF),] formed during the Great Depression. The Social Credit party, founded in 1935 in Alberta by radio evangelist, Aberhart, and capitalized off of the province’s changing socio-demographic make-up, won a significant victory in Alberta’s provincial assembly and advocated for policies such as employee participation in profits and shareholding. The party combined salvation and economics, basing the party off of Major C.H. Douglas – a British engineer – policy recommendation that capitalist governments should distribute money or ‘social credit’ to stimulate the economy. The ‘social credit’ policies, including a $25-per month social dividend payment to every adult Albertan, ultimately failed when the party tried to implement them. It went on to adopt more conservative financial and social policies. However, the Social Credit party did spread to British Columbia and, relying on the rapidly changing sociodemographic character of the province, built a political platform in the 1950s.
The CCF also arose out of the Depression and was a locus for debates around issues of social welfare and providing working-class families with income security. The CCF formed in 1932 and the leader, James Shaver Woodsworth, proposed the radical idea that unemployment was not the fault of the individual but the system: “A severe condemnation still rests upon indifference…We have tried to provide for the poor. Yet, have we tried to alter the social conditions that lead to poverty?” The CCF ‘Regina Manifesto’ was a radical departure from the free market system. For wheat farmers in Saskatchewan, the appeal of the CCF was in the support it showed for the wheat board monopoly over grain markets, and in its call for public ownership of farm machinery companies and other larger corporations. In British Columbia, the CCF party gained a foothold among industrial workers who saw potential in the social programs advocated for by the CCF. The CCF and the ‘Regina Manifesto’ was the origin for policies including unemployment insurance and universal old age pensions.
The CCF experienced steady growth in British Columbia in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1933 election, the CCF promised “A radical transformation of society including the socialization of the financial machinery of the country…the socialization of health services, free education from public school through university, the rapid expansion of social series…” It built on the support of organized labour and distanced itself from the narratives built around Liberal and Conservative parties which were identified as tools of large corporations in the province. When the two old-line parties were joined to form the government during the war, British Columbia voters were drawn in by their claims that the purpose of unions was to ensure that the war effort continued. The CCF had one the majority of votes in the 1941 provincial election and the alliance of the old-line parties reflected the pressure they faced from the business community to reconcile and prevent socialists from gaining a foothold in the province. The alliance between the two continued after the second world war and would have remained cohesive if not for partisan disputes over contracts.
In contrast to Alberta and Saskatchewan, Manitoba moved towards a moderate administration by forming a coalition government whose focus was primarily on local conditions. While the province struggled to provide relief for the unemployed and nearly went bankrupt during the Depression, the province was not subject to the same economic and social pressures as the other two western prairie provinces were during the Depression years which contributed to the formation of the Social Credit and the CCF. As noted by Jones et al, “Unlike its western neighbours, whose economies were tied to the highs and lows of global commodity markets, Manitoba’s economy was given to neither boom nor bust, thus sheltering its political culture from the extremes of political ideology.” The province was primarily governed by the United Farmers Manitoba (UFM) which fused with the provincial Grits in 1932. The party was renamed the “Liberal Progressive” and, under Premier Bracken, assembled a series of coalition governments throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Manitoba was the only province whose governing party remained in power through both the Great Depression and World War II.
Immigration almost stopped during the 1930s and early 1940s. Prior to the Great Depression, immigration policy had emphasized the importance of white, British immigrants to underlining the “permanence of settlement and the conscious effort to define Canada as a British society…” During the Great Depression and until after the Second World War, the Canadian government invested little in the way of financial or human resources into helping newcomers to manage the migration and settlement process, however. Migrants that did arrive faced deportation if they demonstrated a need for relief and those that did arrive in Canada had to confront a system of laws and policies that reflected substantial fear about newcomers and minority groups as well as resentment. For Japanese Canadians, these underlying fears and the distinctions drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ laid the foundation for the enactment policies which were targeted to further entrench those fears during the Second World War. Japanese Canadians were forcibly removed from the Pacific coast following the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack and relocated to internment camps in the interior of British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. They were stripped of their homes, businesses and any possessions they could not carry with them.
The First Nations communities of the western provinces also experienced significant hardship during the Great Depression. Chief Barker, “there is nobody now living in the present generation who has tasted such hardship.” While there were ‘make-work’ opportunities which provided some income for First Nations peoples, First Nations peoples were viewed as “an encumbrance” on already stretched government finances. The only source of relief came from the Department of Indian Affairs and was provided at a rate below that received by non-Aboriginal people. Despite the hardship experience during the Depression years, the 1930s were also a time of increased First Nations political organization in the west and groups began to pursue land claims in the western provinces. In Alberta, for example, this result in the formation of the ‘Indian Association of Alberta’(IAA) in 1939 and Saskatchewan saw the formation of a similar group form in 1945. The IAA was significant because it allowed First Nations peoples access to politics at the provincial level and “served as an important precedent and forum for articulating Aboriginal needs.”
Part II: The Post-war Era
The end of the Great Depression era came with the beginning of World War II. At the beginning of the 1930s, war seemed far off and distant. War was not only expensive but the memories of the First World War were fresh in the minds of Canadians. However, like in 1914, Canada went to war in 1939 because Great Britain went to war. On the surface, the Canada of 1939 was very different from the Canada of 1914. In 1914 Canada had gone to war easily and reflexively; in 1939 the economy was still caught in rippling effects of the Depression. The westernmost provinces entered the Second World War poorer than any time since 1900. However, the war and, most importantly, the post-war period signaled a shift in the fortunes of western Canada and the future of the region began to look more optimistic. The economic boost provided by the war saw wealth begin to flow into the region as oil and potash, as well as uranium and other minerals, diversified economies which had once relied almost exclusively on agricultural exports. In Alberta, for example, the growth of cities such as Edmonton and Calgary due to the oil and gas industry illustrated larger shifts within Canada of power as companies such as Sun Life moved their offices from eastern cities in order to better access these new markets.
Since the Second World War the differences between the western provinces have become more evident not only economically but politically and socially. The definition of the ‘west’ has become increasingly fluid and varied. Resnick notes that “For certain purposes, BC’s inhabitants feel themselves part of western Canada or the West, yet for others they feel themselves apart from the other western provinces, including Alberta.” There is no single political culture which unites the four provinces nor can the region be represented by stereotypes around oil or agriculture. Resnick argues that British Columbia can be characterized by a “bibrant, if somewhat chaotic democracy.” In contrast, Wesley maintains that Alberta is defined by “populism, individualism and provincial autonomy,” that Saskatchewan places greater emphasis on security and collectivism, and that Manitoba is defined by “modesty and temperance.” There are significant ties not just to Canada but also the United States – a major focus of external trade in the energy, agriculture and softwood lumber economic sectors.
The growth in industrialization and mechanization in the western provinces was accompanied by increasing rates of urbanization. Since the end of the Second World War, urbanization has transformed the west. During the Great Depression, the prairie provinces were predominately rural, but by 1971 they were considerably more urban. There was a change in the pattern of development of the west which had seen waves of new immigrants expand the western frontier to an increasing move toward cities such as Vancouver. Furthermore, while the immigrants who had settled the western provinces had always been culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse, this diversity was often suppressed by pressure to conform. After the 1970s, however, this diversity was given a chance to emerge more fully as multiculturalism became a Canadian government policy. Between 1941 and 1961 the urban population in the four most western provinces increased by 42 to 63 percent. This brought significant changes to the social make-up of the western provinces and reflects, to some extent, the fundamental economic changes experienced by all four provinces in the post-war years. In some western Canadian communities these changes brought tensions. Harris suggests that the increased urbanization seen in western Canada contributed to a sense of increasing anonymity as well as to an erosion of community identity. The growth of resource towns like Uranium City in Saskatchewan, for example, which grew and then disappeared disrupted old ways of living in the west.
The emergence of parties such as the Social Credit in the post-war years was viewed as something of an electoral curve-ball. However, the Social Credit did offer alternatives for voters. In British Columbia under the guidance of W.A.C Bennett, the British Columbian Social Credit party built on the conservative but interventionist approach of the government in Alberta. Bennett argued that the money generated in taxes should and could be used to develop the province’s resources and generate new employment opportunities. Under Bennett, the ‘free enterprise versus socialism’ slogan became part of the political narrative and was used as a way to discredit the CCF and discourage support for the Liberal and Conservative Parties. Bennett set the stage for British Columbia’s rather polarized and combative political environment which pits left against right. Between 1991 and 2001, the province had seven premiers in contrast to Alberta which had only six between 1935 and 2005.
Under the leadership of Bennett, who presided over major transformations in the economy and labour force, British Columbia saw developments in the service, finance, and real estate sectors. One result of these developments was an increased labour. Bennett, who believed that the capital needed to generate jobs and wealth in the province, promoted integration in the forest industry and permitted mining companies to strip mine. The long-term consequences of extractive based economic policies were often ignored in favour of the short-term gains they generated. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Robin finds that the environmental degradation caused by the forestry industry in British Columbia went unremarked on by the provincial government because of the revenue it generated. The reliance on natural resources has tilted the province’s economy “in the direction of capital intensive primary resource sector which employed few people and a diminishing portion of the labour force.” Similar to Alberta’s focus on fossil fuel production, British Columbia’s economy remained centered around its resources. The rise of Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies in the last quarter of the century brought new opportunities to British Columbia’s resource economy and contributed to the provinces economic growth.
Alberta has developed a political and economic model based on the support of local capitalists. Since the end of WWII, Alberta has developed a reputation for having a conservative political culture with a long history of shared political understanding – a resource rich, single party province with a conservative political agenda. Evans and Smith argue that “Alberta stands out in a class by itself as a genuinely one-party dominant system.” The importance of natural resource extraction in the fossil fuel industry to the province’s growth has shaped not only the internal politics of the province but Alberta’s interactions with the rest of Canada. The Social Credit Party did govern without significant opposition from 1935 to 1971, and the PCs formed majority governments from 1971 until 2015 with the election of the left-leaning New Democratic Party. Generally, analysts suggest that Alberta’s political and social culture emphasizes “the importance of keeping Alberta strong and free…this notion of ‘freedom’ constitutes the code – the persistent, core narrative – of Alberta politics, favoring right-wing parties like Social Credit and the Progressive Conservatives.”
The discovery of oil at Leduc in 1947 placed Alberta’s economy on a trajectory that was distinctly different from other western provinces. One of the consequences of the petroleum boom was an increase in population due to the revenue being generated by the oil industry. Opportunities for workers in Alberta’s oil and gas has attracted workers from other parts of Canada with the proportion of interprovincial rising to 31% in 2011 – the highest of all Canadian provinces. While Alberta, like Saskatchewan, established a Heritage Fund into which was placed 30 percent of the annual revenue from non-renewable resources, Alberta’s approach to its resource wealth emphasizes the role of privately owned entrepreneurs in securing the revenue generated by the extraction of natural resources.
Saskatchewan’s differing heritage produced important variations in comparison to Alberta and Manitoba. The population ceased to grow in the 1930s and the province saw an increase in the number of people living in urban centers. In the post-war years, the province saw its economy grow but more slowly than British Columbia and Alberta. By the 1970s, it was significantly more diversified then it had been in the 1930s. Annual mining and natural resource revenue led by potash, petroleum, and uranium rose and the agriculture share declined. Crown corporations and co-operative institutions dominated some of the most important sectors. The Crown Investments Corporation, the holdings of which included provincial telephone and power utilities, the bus company, the potash enterprise, oil and mining companies were some of Canada’s largest business corporations at the close of 1981. A prairie socialist outlook shaped by the Great Depression led to a planned economic development and social ownership of natural resource plan in the 1940s. Saskatchewan’s emphasis on communal values, social solidarity and a more collectivist approach can be seen in the province’s establishment of a Heritage Fund. The province’s publically owned Heritage Fund was characterized by Saskatchewan premier Blakney in 1982 as a way of “getting a piece of the action for Saskatchewan people…citizens – not just the developers should share in our resource revenue.”
Agriculture remained important for the Saskatchewan economy in the post war years. The wheat pools had failed miserably in the Great Depression – falling deeply into debt – and the failure of pools, such as the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, meant that grain marketing was turned over to the Canadian Wheat Board in 1935. The Canadian Wheat Board had the exclusive authority to sell wheat and barley, providing farmers with a guaranteed minimum price. The wheat pools did, however, remerge following the Second World War. The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool morphed into the Saskatchewan Co-operative Wheat Producers Ltd in 1953. The design and intention of the co-operative and compulsory grain pools provides insight into policy variations between Saskatchewan and Alberta. Wiseman notes that Saskatchewan supported the grain pools more relative to neighbouring Alberta where farmers insisted on voluntary non-compulsory.
Manitoba’s trajectory since the 1930s has been one of relative stability not only politically but economically and socially relative to the other western provinces. It has generally been seen to adopt policies which keep it on the periphery rather than at the centre of new developments. Manitoba was not as dependent on wheat relative to Alberta and Saskatchewan. In 1921, Friesen notes that “more than half the seeded acreage was devoted to other crops.” Less reliance on the wheat market helped to shield the province from some of the effects of the Great Depression. In the post-war years, the province went on to develop a manufacturing sector including an aerospace in industry, garment making, agricultural implements and other light industries. The growth of mining and resource industries along with paper mills, hydro developments and the production of nickel and other minerals further diversified Manitoba’s economic development. However, the province has struggled with population stagnation and relied heavily on equalization grants given to poorer provinces by the federal government – payments that Alberta and British Columbia have protested.
The importance of natural resource extraction to the economies of the west, particularly British Columbia and Alberta, is an important component of the region’s history since the 1930s. However, markets centered around natural resources such as oil and, as a result, Alberta’s economy, are subject to booms and busts. For example, when oil prices crashed in the 1980s, however, the pain of economic depression was exacerbated by an ill-conceived federal energy policy introduced by Pierre Trudeau which forced Alberta to sell oil to Canadians at a below market price. The oil-producing West blamed Trudeau and the Liberals for the fallout and the narrative which formed was one in which the federal government would not protect the economic interests of the West.
Western, particularly Albertan, anger over the perceived seizure of resource revenues through federal taxation and energy development controls has contributed to a growing sense of resentment and mistrust between the Western provinces and the federal government. The seeds of western alienation in the political sphere had been planted during the Depression and World War II years and took on new life as population shifts and economic growth brought other political and social changes to the west. The sense that western Canadian provinces lacked the ability to influence federal policy and see its aspirations fulfilled became the center of a number political debates and regional protests. In 1986, for example, when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government awarded a contract to service the CF-18 fighter jets to the Quebec based Bombardier despite a bid from Winnipeg-based Bristol Aerospace. Gunther notes that “Westerners were confident the government they had worked so long to elect would give the work to the Winnipeg company.” Looking back at the political history of the western provinces it is possible to see the rise of the Social Credit and the CCF during the Great Depression, the Canada West Foundation established in the 1970s, the politics of Ralph Klein’s Alberta Conservative Party and the formation of the Reform Party of Canada in 1987 as part of the western provinces goal of seeing its aspirations fulfilled within the federal framework.
Debates around economic policy formation has also been deeply entwined with issues surrounding race and ethnicity. At the end of the Second World War, regulations against the admission of Asian immigrants and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe remained in place. Immigration, which opened again following the Second World War, has been increasingly important for shaping the direction taken by the western provinces. The countries from which immigrants are coming have diverged from Britain and Europe significantly. Measures aimed at doing away with discriminatory policies can be seen in the removal of barriers to the enfranchisement of Chinese and South Asians in 1947 in British Colombia. The remove of these barriers allowed them to vote in federal elections and to enter professions including “accountancy, law, and pharmacy.”
Minority groups who had previously been marginalized were also able to make themselves heard more easily in the political sphere in the decades following the war. The greater emphasis on multiculturalism at the federal level meant that minority groups were no longer forced to conform to the values and social beliefs of the dominant British group. The election of Ed Schreyer as Premier in 1969, for example, in Manitoba was significant because he was seen to embody the “little people – Roman Catholics, non-British ethnic groups and the working class.” By 1990, none of the four Western premiers was of exclusively British origin and the makeup of the western provinces had become increasingly socially and ideologically varied.
Efforts to address racially biased and exclusionary policies regarding immigration in the decades following the Second World War were part of a larger shift in attitudes. As noted by Barman, there was shift in the way longstanding prejudices were understood and addressed by policy makers whose previous attempts had been both partial and piecemeal. Equality of treatment, of opportunity, of access, of experience, of acceptance became subjects of debate in the westernmost provinces. Concern for the elderly and for children became more mainstream as did beliefs about the importance of equal access to education. There was a sense that the government should work towards a more ‘just’ society and capitalism was viewed with increasing skepticism resulting in expanding redistributive social programs and progressive taxation. Saskatchewan, for example, provided provincial medical programs as did British Columbia although Alberta and Manitoba opposed it in the 1960s. Women, in particular, saw significant employment and education gains following the Second World War – carving out new roles in western Canadian society. The 1930s had still been a time of patriarchy and a division of labour which privileged male workers, but the post-war era was marked by significant strides towards equal pay and equal opportunity for women. The struggle was a long one, however, and it has remained an important, enduring subject in western provinces.
Growing awareness of and efforts to address past wrongs and racially biased policies can also be seen in the changing relations between First Nations peoples not just in the western provinces but in the rest of Canada. The paternalistic, assimilative approach of the pre-war period became increasingly unacceptable. During the 1950s and 1960s the right to vote in federal elections was granted and the compulsory enfranchisement provisions in the Indian Act were removed. The laws which had banned the practice of traditional ceremonies such as the potlatch were removed and, by 1980, Aboriginal women had successfully challenge and changed discriminatory legislation regarding their status. The Indian Act remained in place, but First Nations rights were recognized in the 1982 Constitution and the 2008 Federal Government formally apologized for the residential school system which the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation commission described as ‘cultural genocide.’ Yet, efforts to press forward and place First Nations stories at the forefront of policy debates must address the high rates of poverty, unemployment, suicide, violence, incarceration and addiction which impact First Nations peoples. The scars of aboriginal discrimination and assimilation efforts are etched deeply.
Conclusion:
In the whirlwind of change which has shaped and reshaped western Canada since the 1930s, the western provinces have followed increasingly separate paths. The post-war economies of the west were defined by rapidly expanding resource frontiers, particularly in Alberta and British Columbia. These changes fundamentally altered the western provinces and influenced Canada as they did so. The politics of each province have drawn on shared experiences during the Depression years but they have increasingly diverged, influenced by the unique social, historical and economic contexts of each of the four provinces. These unique contexts have given rise to new political parties, emphasized the development of certain economic sectors and supported different political and social values.
As the four westernmost provinces – for all their differences – look toward the future they must address similar problems. Climate change and the debate around resource extraction have placed the economies of the western provinces at the heart of global debates about pollution mitigation and economic development. The natural resources which have fueled the growth in the west are finite. The western provinces must also face the challenge of how to include First Nations people when they have been marginalized by a narrative dominated by one perspective for so long.