What is the Canadian Pacific Railway and its historic importance?

The Canadian Pacific Railway is a transcontinental railway completed on November 7, 1885, when Donald Smith drove the Last Spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia, linking eastern and western Canada by rail for the first time. The CPR fulfilled the promise that brought British Columbia into Confederation in 1871: a railway connecting the new province to the rest of the country within ten years.

Sir John A. Macdonald's National Policy of 1879 made the railway one of three federal priorities, alongside protective tariffs and western settlement. Construction began in 1881 under chief engineer Sandford Fleming and general manager William Cornelius Van Horne. About 15,000 Chinese labourers were brought to Canada to build the most dangerous section through the Rocky Mountains; an estimated 600 to 800 died on the job, and survivors faced the discriminatory head tax imposed by the federal government in 1885. Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologised for the head tax on June 22, 2006.

The line ran 4,800 kilometres from Montreal to Port Moody on the Pacific coast, and extended to Vancouver in 1887. It carried European settlers west to homesteads on the prairies under the Dominion Lands Act, hauled wheat back east, and provided the logistics for the federal government to suppress the 1885 North-West Resistance led by Louis Riel.

The railway transformed Canada from a string of regional economies into a single national one. CPR hotels including the Banff Springs (1888), the Château Frontenac in Quebec City (1893), and the Empress in Victoria (1908) shaped Canadian tourism, and the company's grain elevators, telegraph lines, and steamship services tied the country's industries together. CPR remains an active Class I railway today.