- published: 25 Mar 2016
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The Province of Upper Canada (French: province du Haut-Canada) was a political division in British Canada established in 1791 by the British Empire to govern the central third of the lands in British North America and to accommodate Loyalist refugees from the United States of America after the American Revolution. The new province remained the government of the colonial territory for the next fifty years of growth and settlement.
Upper Canada existed from December 26, 1791 to February 10, 1841 and generally comprised present-day Southern Ontario. The prefix "upper" in its name reflects its geographic position higher up the river basin or closer to the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River than that of Lower Canada or present-day Quebec to the northeast.
Upper Canada included all of modern-day southern Ontario and all those areas of northern Ontario in the pays d'en haut which had formed part of New France, essentially the watersheds of the Ottawa River, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior. It did not include any lands within the watershed of Hudson Bay.
Canada ( /ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km2 (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.
The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.
Justin Pierre James Trudeau, MP (born December 25, 1971) is a Canadian politician. He has represented the Montreal electoral division of Papineau in the Canadian House of Commons since 2008 as a member of the Liberal Party and currently serves as the party's critic for youth, post-secondary education, and amateur sport.
Trudeau is the eldest son of the late former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair Trudeau Kemper. His maternal grandfather, James Sinclair, was also a federal cabinet minister.
Trudeau was born on December 25, 1971, in Ottawa, Ontario. He was only the second child in Canadian history to be born when one of his parents was prime minister; the first was John A. Macdonald's youngest daughter Margaret Mary Macdonald, and Trudeau's younger brothers Alexandre (Sacha) (born December 25, 1973) and Michel (1975–98) were the third and fourth, respectively. Pierre and Margaret Trudeau separated in 1977, when Justin was six years old, and Pierre retired as prime minister in 1984. Of his mother and father's marriage, Trudeau said in 2009, "They loved each other incredibly, passionately, completely. But there was 30 years between them and my mom never was an equal partner in what encompassed my father's life, his duty, his country."