Canada’s railway chapter receives an honest, inclusive retelling in a new book

Walk into just about any used bookstore, and you will likely find a copy of one or both of Pierre Berton’s classic histories of the Canadian Pacific Railway – 1970’s The National Dream, or The Last Spike, which arrived the following year. The story of how the railway linked Canada from sea to sea is one of our country’s founding chapters. Now it is being told once more by Stephen R. Bown in Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada.

He admits a lot has changed since then.

“Over the last half century, a lot has happened in terms of the evolution of ideas in society about what’s important or what stories we need to bring forward or the broader perspective of what was going on in the world at that time,” he said. “And, as well, new sources have come to light which also reveal different aspects of the story, which Berton couldn’t have included in his books because [they] didn’t exist.”

Given those new sources, Bown can’t help but take a more critical tone than Berton.

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John Ackermann sits down with Stephen Bown

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“The Canadian Pacific Railway was Canada’s first and greatest megaproject,” Bown writes. It was “a political and engineering feat of staggering dimension with over 4,000 km of track, much of it driven through terrain unsuitable for railways.” But it was also an “environmental and social tragedy” that was “good for some, disastrous for others.”

The last time we spoke with Bown, he was promoting his 2020 book The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire. Much like The Company, Dominion strives to include a greater diversity of voices and perspectives.

Bown wants the reader to realize just how complex the world was – even back then.

“It was much more diverse than we think it was,” he said. “I want them to have an understanding of the good, the bad, and the ugly of everything that happened so that we can have some kind of shared concept of how our nation was born.”

“It’s a huge story, and I just wanted to be a little more honest [about] understanding how the world was changing at that time and how people were contributing to that change, how they were being impacted by that change, and how they lived their lives within the context of this massive project that defined the country.”

Where traditional railway histories look at politicians, financiers, and engineers, Bown also includes those impacted by the railway, like Indigenous peoples and migrant workers, as well as the environment.

“We live in this land; we have to appreciate all of that world that existed around us at that time and with whom we share the world now,” he said.

Bown also offers a more even-handed view of figures like Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, whose image has taken a hit in recent years.

“Whether Macdonald was a good man or a bad man is open to debate,” he writes.  “But he certainly was an interesting one.” Elsewhere, Bown observes, “When [Macdonald] dreamed, he dreamed big.”

As a historical biographer, Bown says he tries to appreciate people’s lives within the context of their times.

“Canada is John A.’s creation. You can’t really dispute that,” he said. “It was his idea, his dream. The tool that he used to get that dream was the railway. Of course, in achieving that dream, he caused a lot of damage to a lot of people. There’s a dark side to the story, and that’s what has been missing [from] earlier treatments.”

But Bown says it’s also “simplistic and juvenile” to cast him as either a hero or a villain.

“John A. Macdonald doesn’t wear a devil hat, and he doesn’t wear an angel hat. He’s somewhere in between,” he said.

That about sums up Dominion as well. Bown doesn’t celebrate the railway, nor does he condemn it. 

“It did create the country. There wouldn’t be the country of Canada without [it]. So, absolutely. We exist because of that.”

Dominion:  The Railway and the Rise of Canada is published by Doubleday Canada.