Showering Money upon Impecunious Partners: British Columbia Joins Confederation

But eastern payoffs were dwarfed by the massive redistribution project that was the transcontinental railway built as British Columbia's price of admission into Confederation. For Ontario, the Canadian Pacific Railway put the province back where it had been in the 1850s: showering money upon impecunious partners.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 93.