Canada became a country, the Dominion of Canada, in 1867.
Before that, British North America was made up of a few British colonies and possessions. This included the colonies of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and PEI. There was also the vast area of Rupert’s Land, which had been mandated to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670), and BC and the North-Western Territory, where the HBC did not have official title but was the main business concern and monopolized the fur trade, the major business at the time, and assumed responsibility for the colonial administration
Earlier, British North America had been larger.
From 1607 to about 1776 or 1783, much of eastern North America had been part of the British Empire. with colonies stretching from Florida to PEI and Newfoundland.
Some of today's Canada were relatively recent additions to the British North America.
PEI was acquired by the British in 1758.
The British colonies of BC and Victoria were HBC bailiwicks as of 1821, and later crown colonies, then united as one colony in 1866.
New France (Quebec) was transferred to Britain in 1763 and brought into the Empire. (Quebec's accession was peaceful aside from the initial Conquest - in part because British authorities accepted that French language, the Napoleonic legal code and the power of the Roman Catholic church would be maintained. (A hundred years later, Quebec's so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s would see the Church's power finally overturned, with today's anti-religious-symbols laws being the extension of this long-suppressed anti-Church sentiment.)
Thirteen colonies to the south sought independence in the 1770s. British colonies in Florida and in the Canadas (Ontario, Quebec, PEI, Nova Scotia and on the west coast) stayed in the British Empire.
Many loyal to the British way of life (including the British trait of fair play) fled the new "Excited States of America." Many settled in Ontario, at the time the pioneer fringe of European-style civilization.
Off and on friction between the two countries was a thing, and continues to this day.
As Canadian colonies were later to develop, faced a tougher geography, and had a smaller population - a phenomena not helped by the constant export of people from Canada to its more prosperous, noisier neighbour to the south - Canada's westward expansion was slower than the U.S.'s. At the end of the U.S. Civil War, yearnings of U.S. politicians for more conquests and the availability of a massive trained army of soldiers made British authorities aware of the vulnerability of the great mostly-empty Prairies and the Great Northland.
The Prince of Wales fort, the HBC's stone fortress on the frozen shores of the Hudsons Bay, was not going to do much to defend western Canada from U.S. invasion.
Macdonald and others saw that only through unification of the scattered BNA colonies would U.S aggression be staved off. Not necessarily through actual military defence but through moral force and proven legitimacy.
Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia effected Confederation. BC came in soon, on promise of a trans-continental railway. The much-larger U.S. had just finished its first transcontinental only a few year earlier. Canada thus was heroic - or foolish - to take on that epic task when it did. A more careful progressive development of the west, from east to west, might have created a more-sensitive human-based settlement history. Instead, farmers were helicoptered into the bald prairie along the route of the railway while the fertile Saskatchewan river valley was slow to develop. And as Frank Oliver, editor of the Edmonton Bulletin, complained, the CPR and other corporations came before the settlers, grabbing land for speculation while farm families were forced to take less useful land.
The NWT, a HBC-dominated area, was granted to Canada in 1870, when the HBC gave up its royal charter. That was when the present-day provinces of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan and the present NWT became part of Canada.
As a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, Canada left its foreign affairs in the hands of imperial authorities.
Oddly, a feather in its hat - as people used to say when they wore big hats - was the young Dominion's ability to suppress the 1885 Rebellion just with its own resources, using its permanent army forces and militia forces. The brains though could be said to be contributed by Britain - General Middleton, who led the main section of the government fores, was a British general who had had previous experience in colonial wars in New Zealand and India.
The suppression of the 1885 Rebellion went something like all such British wars - the British lost every fight but the last.
Defeats at Duck Lake and Fish Creek did not stop the push. The Metis did not hold their ground even if they had won each fight. And even if they had tried to do so, the soldiers would have just gone around them - the Metis could not hope to hold a solid line across the whole Prairies against the slow but steady advance by the Red Coats.
The fights each in turn grew closer to Batoche, which was really just a symbolic capital of the Resistance. The taking of Batoche saw the killing of fewer than 20 Metis fighters, a small portion of the fighters, and secured the capture of neither Riel nor his military commander, Dumont. But it signalled the end of organized resistance. If the Metis fighters could not even hold Batoche, it showed they had no strength.
There was no bitter-end guerrilla fighting as seen in the Boer War a decade later.
But also the government did not rely on military might to effect a peace. A commission of investigation was formed, and land scrip was issued to assuage the discontent.
And complaints of lack of representation was at least partially addressed. The NWT was given four federal seats. Alberta's seat at first was filled by former whiskey peddler D.W. Davis, running for the Conservative party, elected mostly by Calgary. Former Metis rebels and other unsettled old-timers in the Saskatchewan valley probably found little satisfaction with Davis's brand of representation - the fate of many groups under our geographical-district election scheme.
With elections up to five years apart, it would not be until 1896 that Edmonton and north-central Alberta sent its first local representative to the House of Commons - and a Liberal at that - Frank Oliver.
The addition of Newfoundland, in 1949, was the last expansion Canada has had. NFLD one of Britain's first overseas colonies back in 1500s, had held Labrador, on the mainland, since 1809.
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