Page "History of Canada" Paragraph 1

Beginning in the late 15th century, French and British expeditions explored, and later settled, along the Atlantic coast.

France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America to Britain in 1763 after the Seven Years ' War.

In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces.

This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the British Empire, which became official with the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and completed in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament.