While the French were well established in large parts of Eastern Canada, Britain had control over the Thirteen Colonies to the south; and laid claim (from 1670, via the Hudson's Bay Company) to Hudson Bay, and its drainage basin (known as Rupert's Land), as well as settlements in Newfoundland. The British colonies were rapidly expanding, while the French fur traders and explorers were extended long by thinly. La Salle's exploration of the Mississippi to its mouth in 1682
gave France a claim to a vast area bordering the American Colonies from the Great Lakes and the Ohio River valley southward to the Gulf of Mexico. England had feared the fact that France threatened to control almost half the continent which would give them indisputable control of the fur trade, an industry that England was just realizing could be more profitable than gold. Thus, England was quick to follow up on its claim to the back-door route towards fur country by establishing the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. French expansion soon began to threaten its claim though, and, in 1686, Pierre Troyes led an overland expedition from Montreal to the shore of the bay where they managed to capture many of the company's forts by surprise. New France would wage several naval raids into the bay the following years and almost succeeded in driving the English from this part of the continent altogether.
Britain and France repeatedly went to war in the 17th and 18th centuries and made their colonial empires into battlefields. Numerous naval battles were fought in the West Indies; the main land battles were fought in and around Canada. The first areas won by the British were the Maritime provinces. After Queen Anne's War, Nova Scotia, other than Cape Breton, was ceded to the British by the Treaty of Utrecht as well as the Hudson Bay territory conquered by France in the late 17th century. As an immediate result of this setback, France founded the powerful Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, which was then the French colony of Ile Royale. Louisbourg was intended to serve as a year-round military and naval base for France's remaining North American empire and also to protect the entrance to the St. Lawrence River. The fortress developed into the most heavily fortified bastion in North America during the next 25 years. During King George's War, an army of New Englanders led by Sir William Pepperell mounted an expedition of 90 vessels and 4,000 men against Louisbourg in 1745. The fortress had become a hornet's nest of raiders who preyed on the merchant ships of the American Colonies. Within three months the New Englanders succeeded in forcing Louisbourg to surrender. The fortress was returned to France, however, by the Treaty of Aix-la Chapelle signed in 1748. The alarm and anger of the New Englanders at the return of Louisbourg to French control prompted the founding of Halifax in 1749 by the British under Edward Cornwallis as a bulwark against the great French outpost.
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 gave Britain authority over as many as 5000 French-speaking Acadians. Not trusting these new subjects, who repeatedly proclaimed their neutrality, the British first tried to dilute their numbers by bringing in Protestant settlers from Europe. Finally the British ordered the Acadians deported from their lands in 1755, an event called the Great Upheaval or le Grand Dérangement, causing some 12,000 Acadians to be shipped to destinations throughout Britain's North American holdings and later even to France, Quebec and the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue. Many of the Acadians settled in southern Louisiana, creating the Cajun culture there. Some Acadians managed to hide and others eventually returned to Nova Scotia, but they were far outnumbered by a new migration of planters from New England who were settled on the former lands of the Acadians and transformed Nova Scotia from a colony of occupation to a settled colony with strong ties to New England.
During this time the French colony along the shores of the St. Lawrence continued to flourish, although French explorations and territorial claims to the Ohio Valley brought increasing conflict with the interests of Britain's American colonies. Inevitably the interests of the British and French in North America ran towards conflict resulting in the outbreak of war in both in Europe and North America. Canada was also an important battlefield in the Seven Years' War, during which Great Britain gained control of Quebec City after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and Montreal in 1760.
Source: Wikipedia.org