The Opposition revealed that a business group had been granted the Canadian Pacific Railway contract in exchange for political donations of $360,000 (about $9 million in today’s dollars)
Railways have figured large within Canadian and B.C. history, economies and politics.
They have shaped Canada geographically, politically, economically and socially by stitching B.C. and the prairies to the eastern provinces via one long steel and creosote-soaked wooden seam and a generous corridor of land grants along the route.
Anniversaries of two significant railway-related events occur this fall.
One is of the resolution of a scandal that rocked Canada’s Parliament 150 years ago. The Pacific Scandal prompted the resignation of then-prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald — he of residential school infamy and statue controversy — and an abrupt change in federal government.
The…
