Prince Edward Island enters Confederation on July…
July 1873 CE
Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, anxious to thwart American expansionism and facing the distraction of the Pacific Scandal, had negotiates for the colony of Prince Edward Island to join Canada.
Prince Edward Island had begun construction of a railway on 1871 but their efforts to finance it have been frustrated by Great Britain's Colonial Office.
The Dominion Government of Canada assumes the colony's extensive railway debts and agrees to finance a buy-out of the last of the colony's absentee landlords to free the island of leasehold tenure and from any new immigrants entering the island (which will be accomplished through the passage of the Land Purchase Act, 1875).