By the time of Confederation Ontario's economic lead over Quebec had been well established. John McCallum shows that the origins of this lead had little to do with the conservatism of the habitants and the church in Quebec, little to do with any anti-industrial bias of the Montreal merchants, and nothing to do with Confederation. Rather the origins lay in the wealth provided by Ontario's superior agricultural land.

During much of the first part of the nineteenth century Ontario farmers were more specialized in wheat-growing than the twentieth-century farmers of Saskatchewan, and when...