"Dominion" of Canada?

Recently I was asked whether Canada is still a dominion. Certainly on the old maps from my childhood the northern half of the North American continent had DOMINION OF CANADA emblazoned across it. But now one rarely if ever hears this term used. What happened in the meantime?

When the Fathers of Confederation were meeting to negotiate a union of the British North American colonies in the 1860s, they considered a number of possibilities as to its name. Canada at that time applied only to the united province of Canada, that is, southern Ontario and southern Québec. Here is the account of the London Conference of 1866-7 from the Library and Archives Canada website:

Choosing "Canada" as the new country's name was relatively easy, as was the choice of "Ontario" and "Quebec" for the two halves of the Province of Canada. However, difficulties arose in choosing a designation. The delegates wished it to be a kingdom; the British feared that such a title would anger the United States, and denied the request. An alternative, "Dominion," was suggested by Samuel Leonard Tilley, from a line in Psalm 72 of the Bible: "He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth."

By the early 20th century dominion had come to describe those countries within the British Empire which were effectively autonomous with respect to domestic affairs but were still dependent on the United Kingdom with respect to external affairs. At the time of the Statute of Westminster, 1931, when the dominions became effectively independent, there were six dominions, which now had legal equality with the UK itself: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Newfoundland and the Irish Free State. After this point, these six countries had the authority to alter their own constitutions and set their own foreign and external policies.

However, Canada remained anomalous for just over a half century thereafter. Our chief constitutional document was not an entrenched document but an act of the British Parliament known as the British North America Act. Whenever our political leaders wished to change this act, they had to appeal to the Parliament in London to do so. Of course, London would accede to this request as a matter of course. Yet, because these leaders could not agree on an amending formula for an entrenched document, they could not manage to change Canada's continued status of technical dependence on the United Kingdom. At some point during this period the word dominion came to be associated with this dependence and fell into disuse as a consequence.

At one time Canada Day, 1 July, was known as Dominion Day. Federal-provincial relations were called Dominion-provincial relations, as indicated in the earlier editions of Robert MacGregor Dawson's Government of Canada. Certainly by 1978, the year I moved to Toronto, dominion was gone, apparently for good. No one, as far as I know, had made a deliberate decision to dispense with the word. But gradually it had become obsolete.

Not everyone is happy with this. If John Diefenbaker were still around, he would be kicking up a fuss. Moreover, someone with obvious monarchist sympathies is maintaining a website devoted to the Dominion of Canada (note Diefenbaker's image on the left). However, for most other Canadians the disappearance of the word dominion does not loom large in their consciousness.