The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) will enable an innovative and internationally significant program of research focused on a central question: What characteristics, processes and circumstances explain the making of modern Canada? The proposed program of research represents the culmination of more than twenty five years of systematic socio-historical study by researchers across Canada. This previous work has set the stage both for the creation of  the CCRI and for the research projects that will be enabled by this new infrastructure.

The point of departure for the planned research is the overarching theme that has emerged during the recent decades of systematic research both on historic and contemporary Canadian society. In stylized terms, this theme can be captured in the words 'complexity' and 'diversity'. In contrast to the previous simple images of Canada as a country of, for example, "hewers of wood and drawers of water" or "two solitudes" or a "metropolis and hinterland", scholars have been developing new images of Canada that attempt to do justice both to the collective experience of large scale social change and to the diversity and distinctiveness of those in different times and places.

The new images of complexity and diversity have reflected the reinterpreting of Canadian history in terms of not only the "famous and infamous" but also, and perhaps most importantly,  the "anonymous." In this view, an  understanding of the thoughts and actions of those in positions of official and unofficial power are considered to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for historical explanation. Rather than being characterized as the passive beneficiaries or victims of those in leadership positions, every person is considered to have contributed in diverse and uneven ways to the making of history. In recent decades, scholars have been revealing the "hidden history" of Canada in which large-scale social change occurs as a result of individual decisions and actions multiplied over and over across a population. It is in this sense that scholars now analyse change in Canada from both the "top down" and "bottom up" as well as the many interactions among individuals within families, communities and larger jurisdictions.

How can scholars pursue a research agenda focused on the making of modern Canada that is formulated within this daunting conceptualization of the complexity of change? There is, of course, no complete answer to this question but many scholars now agree that systematic analysis of microdata is essential for probing the ways in which large-scale historical change is articulated at the level of individual experience. Moreover, it is only by using individual level data from different decades that we can control for variables which are extraneous to our theoretical model, and can partial out the relative effects of different independent variables.