Canada’s Century: Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Bold Prediction

“Let me tell you, my fellow countrymen, that all the signs point this way, that the 20th century shall be the century of Canada and Canadian development.… For the next 100 years, Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.” — Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier speaking at Toronto’s Massey Hall on 14 October 1904.

There is something distinctly Canadian about the fact that the author of a famously bold prediction about his country’s future was originally opposed to its creation. “All the signs point this way,” Sir Wilfrid Laurier told an adoring crowd at Toronto’s Massey Hall on 14 October 1904: “the 20th century shall be the century of Canada and Canadian development.” It was a claim he made more than once that year, and when he said those words, Laurier was in his 60s, frail in health but sure in his views, a political icon who had eight years of experience as prime minister, and a life filled with achievements, frustrations, turnabouts, and more than a few triumphs. He was a long way in every way from the young man who, almost four decades earlier, had been a political radical who once called Confederation “the tomb of the French race and the ruin of Lower Canada [Québec].” [MORE]