The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Newspapers that Told the Story

Abstract

The railways have been an important topic within Canadian history and a large contributor of the founding of Canada. There has been in-depth research in the ways the railroads affected Canada. There was an earlier debate around the idea of why the railway was built exploring possible reasons of national identity, defense from the United States and profiteering from businessmen and politicians. There was another stream of research that takes the Annales school of history approach focusing on the peoples’ lived experiences and drawing many conclusions on how that impacted Canada. There was a post-modernist approach to the effects on Canadian culture from the railways. There is a segment of literature on the opinions of everyday citizens on the railways and those who were in favor of the railways and those opposed to the building of the railways. This research has built a strong narrative of the major events that occurred at the political, business, and working-class citizen level. There has been many different academic approaches and biography’s that tell the story of the individual and the country at large. There was an apparent gap in this research in understanding how the different newspapers covered the Canadian Pacific Railway and the scandal surrounding its building. I argued throughout this thesis that after the founding of Canada in 1867, both the Liberal and Conservative parties of Canada attempted to become the natural governing party of Canada and this fight occurred in the different partisan newspapers and spilled over into debates about the railways.