21h 16min, jul 1, 1867 y - British North America Act
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In the early 1860's, Canada was known as British North America. It was made of 2 territories and 7 colonies. Each colony had it's own government. Economies were struggling as exports to the United Kingdom and United states had gone down. Among the people in the colonies, trade was wanted to increase.
The people of the Province of Canada were divided because of religion, politics and language. When the United States began to become rich, British North America became afraid of being invaded. So, the Maritime colonies came up with an idea. They decided to unite to form a new country. They planned a conference, and when the Province of Canada heard, they asked to join as well. After just a week of conferencing and discussing, they decided that a bigger nation would make the colonies more stronger and prosperous. A difficult task was to decide on the rules of how the new nation would be governed and who would have more power. During the next conference in Quebec City, representatives from Newfoundland joined this time. After 15 days of negotiating and debating, the group came up with a list of resolutions. Each colony would have to get the approval of it's legislature. Confederation wasn't very popular and this caused disagreement in the Maritimes. In the end, Confederation was rejected by Newfoundland PEI, but it had been approved by all the other colonies. The representatives form the Province of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia met one final time in December of 1866. The Quebec Resolutions were turned into a bill and had been approved by the British Parliament. This law was called the British North America Act and was the act that created Canada. The British North America Act outlined things such as the new Parliamentary System, including the Governor General, the Monarch, the Senate and the House of Commons. It was also the act that divided power between federal and provincial goverments.
The act finally came into effect on July 1st, 1867. In modern Canada, July 1st is celebrated as Canada Day.
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