Canada never had its ‘Gilded Age’ in the American sense however I’d like to talk a bit about what might be considered our Gilded Age. When the gilded age was beginning Canada was three years young, still establishing itself with an immense focus on expansion making industry take a back seat for the time being. While America boomed in industry, economy and culture Canada was racing west to the pacific with a deep nationalist perspective of “ours by birthright” that was present in most Parliamentarians and Canadians. With the west secure by the 1890s the Government did move its focus onto industry and, after a boom in foreign investment and sharp increase in immigration the economy began to industrialise in 1896, in the preceding years it was completely dominated by resource exploitation, fur trading and agricultural.

Here in 1896 we get to what could loosely be considered a Gilded Age in Canada, the economy was growing and factories began popping up at an increasing rate; in 1891 the population of Toronto stood at 181,000 after thirty years it had passed 500,000, the same was true in Montréal which was at 217,000 in 1891 and 619,000 in 1921. Industrialisation really blasted off in the Great War and the successive years as many of those factories were used to produce cars in the rapidly booming auto industry of the 1920s. On the culture/political thought front, the classic ‘British Canada’ culture received a hefty hit after the disaster that was the Great War when ideas of self determination took hold of Canadian politics from 1918-1931.

It’s hard to identify a true ‘Gilded Age’ but the period from 1896-1918 fits the description of the American Gilded Age better than any other period in Canadian history as it was characterised largely by industrialisation, (with the exception of early 1910s recession) a generally upward trending economy and a changing culture/political thought.