Not to be confused with the despicable sex act.
Reenactments of many of these moments and others can be viewed at History by the Minute.
For a more in depth look at particularly interesting periods for a casual reader, the books of the late Pierre Berton are a must considering that honored Canadian journalist made a second career proving the stereotype of Canadian history being boring is wrong.
Circa 214 000 000 BCE: A huge meteorite impacts the Earth, creating an impact crater that over time is filled by a pair of lakes in Northern Quebec—Lake Mushalagan and Lake Manicouagan. In 1968, a dam across the Manicouagan River is completed as part of the Manic hydroelectric project, combining the two lakes to form today's Manicouagan Lake. The annular lake and the René-Levasseur Island in it form a distinctive shape easily seen from space, known as the "Eye of Quebec".
Circa 20 000 – 10 000 BCE: Siberians cross the Bering Strait by either a land bridge (due to lower ocean levels as a result of the Ice Age) or a sheet of ice (due to the … uh, Ice Age). Hundreds of unique cultures grow and develop up and down the Americas from these progenitors.
Circa 4450 - 850 BCE: The first evidence of human settlement in the Canadian Arctic dates from this time. The arctic and marine environment makes radiocarbon dating a crapshoot, so the dates aren't entirely reliable. This culture is called the Pre-Dorset culture, which will be followed by the Dorset culture proper, named after Cape Dorset (now Kinngait) in modern-day Nunavut.
Circa 500: The Dorset culture of the Arctic develops.
Circa 1000: Leif Ericson founds Vinland in what is now L'anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. His men stay for a while until the natives (called "Skraelings" by the Vikings, believed to have been Beothuks, Dorset, or Algonquins) kick them out for partying too hard note .
Circa 1000-1300: The Thule culture, ancestors to modern-day Inuit, spread across the Canadian North, displacing the Dorset culture. The exact nature of the Dorset/Thule relationship is unclear, such as how violent it was or if the Dorset simply assimilated into the Thule.
Circa 1190, or perhaps somewhere between 1450 and 1660: Deganawidah, a powerful Iroquoian leader also known as the Great Peacemaker, unites five separate Iroquois nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk) as the Haudenosaunee or League of Iroquois. The League becomes one of the most powerful First Nations organizations on the continent. The Tuscarora, whose now-extinct language is closely related to those of the other five nations, would later join the confederacy after emigrating to the Haudenosaunee lands from their previous home in the Carolinas, giving it the popular name "Six Nations". The Six Nations confederacy still exists today as a strong voice for Native people. The Great Law of Peace, written by Deganawidah, still serves as its constitution.
1534: Jacques Cartier's expedition explores deeper into the mainland. In 1535, he spends the winter in what is now Québec, at a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) village named Stadacona, and nearly loses half his men to hypothermia, only to then nearly lose half his men to scurvy. They survive by drinking tea made from boiled spruce needles after learning this trick from the local natives. Yum. He names the land he found "Canada", after the Iroquoian language word Kanata meaning "village". Legend goes that the local natives were referring to the village of Stadacona, but Cartier thought they referred to the land as a whole.
October 2, 1535: Jacques Cartier lands on the island where modern-day Montreal is located. He visits a Iroquois village named Hochelaga, situated on the foothills of a mountain he names Mont-Royal (Mount Royal, Montreal, get it?).
1605: Samuel de Champlain establishes Port-Royal, later the heart of New France. He institutes Canada's first social club, L'Ordre de Bon Temps (English, The Order of Good Times), to avert death by winter depression and malnutrition. In 2005, Canadians celebrated the anniversary of this achievement the way they know best: with commemorative quarters.
July 3, 1608: Samuel de Champlain establishes the city of Québec on the now derelict site where Stadacona stood, at the place where the Saint Lawrence River is the most narrow. (Québec most likely comes from Kebec, an Algonquin word that means "the place where the river is narrow".)
Summer, 1609: Champlain realises that he will need to work with the First Nations to have any real chance at a successful colony. He allies with the nearby Wendat tribe (incorrectly called "Huron" by the French, and even Canadians to this day) who ask for his help in a war against the Haudenosaunee (incorrectly called "Iroquois", even to this day). This puts Champlain in a Morton's Fork where allying with one nation means pissing off another, but doing nothing leaves him with no allies. He decides to go with some of his men and a large Wendat war party to Lake Champlain to fight the Haudenosaunee and with his arquebus (gunpowder weapons would be virtually unknown to First Nations at the time) he kills off Haudenosaunee war leadership and scares the rest into a rout, at a battle near what is commonly believed to be modern day Fort Ticonderoga. This singular battle will sour relationships between the French and the Haudenosaunee forever, and for the rest of New France's history the Haudenosaunee will side with the British against the French and the Wendat nation.
1610: The British start to arrive on Newfoundland and establish a thriving cod fishing industry on the Grand Banks (one of the most fertile fishing grounds in the world until its collapse in the 1950s). According to legend, the head Brits planned this as a summer settlement only, assuming Newfoundland to be uninhabitable in the winter. The ordinary people brought over to harvest and process the aforementioned fishies decided they were having none of that travel back and forth, thank you very much, and established permanent settlements anyway. Tensions rose nearly to start the first (white) rebellion in North America. The head Brits finally decided that anyone crazy enough to live in Newfoundland in the winter was welcome to it, and let them be.
1611: Samuel de Champlain establishes a trading post on Montreal island somewhere near the old port, at Pointe-à-Callières. He names it Place Royal. This is the first European settlement on the island, but he is forced to abandon it as it cannot be defended from Mohawk warriors.
1617: The French apothecary and merchant Louis Hébert leaves Paris with his wife and two daughters to permanently settle down in Canada. He is the first French to do so, and to begin farming the land to make a living. He will die 10 years later and is considered the first Canadian note .
1629: The first known African slave comes to Canada under the ownership of British Commander David Kirk, who led a military expedition that briefly captured Québec City. Kirk sells the 7-year-old boy to a French clerk working for the English. He is given 3 years later to the care of the Jesuits and is rebaptized "Olivier Le Jeune".
July 4, 1634: Laviolette founds the city of Trois-Rivières (Three Rivers), where the Saint-Maurice river meets the Saint-Lawrence river. There isn't actually three rivers, but the Saint-Maurice makes a delta near its mouth so it looks like three rivers if you come from the Saint-Lawrence by boat.
May 17, 1642: Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, an officer and noble, and Jeanne Mance, a nurse and missionary, found the city of Ville-Marie, modern-day Montreal. The tiny town has a fort note , and one of their main goal is the conversion of local natives. The early years are rough, with brutal winters and hostile natives making agriculture difficult. There are not enough native converts to really kick up demographic growth, and Maisonneuve needs to go back to France twice to convince more settlers to move to Canada.
1650: A "little Ice Age" begins, which affects most of the Northern Hemisphere for the next two centuries. The change in climate breaks up Inuit communities and forces them into a more nomadic lifestyle.
September 12 1665: Jean Talon arrives in New France as its first Intendant on orders of the King of France. The colony was dying, weakened by wars with the Iroquois and neglected by the fur trading companies who put profit before colonization. Jean Talon made many reforms (administrative, judicial, etc...), diversified the economy, built infrastructure, encouraged settlers from France to come to North America, and overall whipped New France into shape.
Winter 1666-1667: The Intendant Jean Talon organizes a general census of New France to gather much needed information. It is the oldest known census in Canada and one of the most important documents of its period. It does not include the 1200-men garrison of royal troops.
1663–1673: One thousand Filles du Roy (the King's Daughters) were sent to New France to boost the population of the colonies and correct the huge gender imbalance there. The women were mostly orphans, and the government paid for their passage and dowries. note
May 2, 1670: Based on the proposal of trappers Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers (Messers Radishes and Gooseberry), Charles II founds the Hudson's Bay Company, granting it exclusive trade rights (and de facto control) of the Hudson's Bay watershed, one third of modern-day Canada. The venerable HBC would go on to supply Europe with beaver pelt hats and First Nations with European technology for the next two hundred years, and still exists as a department store chain. Prince Rupert of the Rhine serves as the corporation's first governor.
October 16, 1690: As part of the Nine Years War raging in Europe at the time, the city of Québec is attacked by Admiral William Phips, supported by American militias. He asks the French governor general Louis de Buade de Frontenac to surrender. Frontenac famously says to the envoys that his only reply "will come from the mouth of his cannons". The battle is a decisive win for the French, who decide to fortify the city in case the English try another attack.
August 4, 1701: Sieur de Callière, governor of New France, and 39 Native nations, sign the Great Peace of Montréal, which marks a turning point in French-Native relations. Since New France's economy (and France's interest in keeping the place running) is heavily dependent on fur trading with Natives, this is a smart move.
April 1713: As part of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, France cedes nearly all of its New World holdings to Great Britain, including Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. France retains control over Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton Island.
April 10, 1734: Marie-Joseph Angélique, a black slave girl and servant to a rich widow, sets fire to the city of Montréal. She learned that she might be sold and separated from her lover and lashed out in this way. The fire destroys 46 buildings, including most of the modern-day old town. She is captured two months later, subject to a Kangaroo Court, tortured into confessing, and finally hanged.
1755: The Great Upheaval (In French, Le Grand Dérangement). British authorities forcefully deport 12,000 Acadians from their newly-won colonies. Many die in the process. Some end up in what is now Louisiana; "Acadian" eventually becomes "Cajun".
1759: The Quebec campaign. A British force led by General James Wolfe makes its way towards Quebec city with the intention of capturing it. Many atrocities are committed by British troops on the way in the hopes of intimidating and weakening the French. In a letter to a colleague, Wolfe states "If, by accident in the river, by the enemy's resistance, by sickness, or slaughter in the army, or, from any other cause, we find that Quebec is not likely to fall into our hands (persevering however to the last moment), I propose to set the town on fire with shells, to destroy the harvest, houses and cattle, both above and below, to send off as many Canadians as possible to Europe and to leave famine and desolation behind me; belle résolution & très chrétienne; but we must teach these scoundrels to make war in a more gentleman like manner." To no one's surprise, these measures backfire, and many Canadians join the militia.
September 12, 1759: The British advance in Quebec culminates in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, outside of Quebec city, after an intense months long siege, Wolfe's force decisively defeats the French of Louis-Joseph Marquis de Montcalm and captures Québec City a few days later. This is a major defeat for the French, and the beginning of the end for New France. Surviving French forces abandon Québec and try to regroup. Wolfe is killed in the battle and Montcalm succumbs to his wounds the next day. The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West remains one of the most famous Canadian historical paintings.
April 17, 1760: British sailors scoop up a nearly dead French artilleryman from the icy Saint-Lawrence river after his ship had sunk. After being interrogated by the British commander James Murray, he reveals that a French force lead by the Chevalier François Gaston de Lévis and made up of 2600 professional soldiers, 2400 Canadian militiamen and 900 Native Americans are coming to retake the city. The British occupiers set up outposts at the nearby small towns of Sainte-Foy, Sillery and Cap-Rouge and dig in, waiting for the French.
April 18, 1760: The French and British fight at Sainte-Foy, leading in the British forces being routed and having to fall back to secure positions in Quebec City. The French force sets up a siege, determined to take back the town. The siege is complicated on both sides. The French have little cannons, and much of their powder is wet. The British walls are nearly crumbling, food is low, and Quebec's fortifications are not suited for long range defensive artillery fire, so the British need to make ad hoc new artillery positions.
Both sides dig in and wait for reinforcements and supplies from Europe. Unbeknownst to both, the British fleet has achieved major victories over the French fleet at the Battle of Quiberon Bay and the Battle of Lagos and France is in no position to send reinforcements even if they wanted to (they're not particularly keen on it).
May 17, 1760: French bombardment of Quebec City ends when the Chevalier de Lévis notices the British fleet approaching. He proclaims "France has abandoned us" and his army falls back to Montreal.
September 8, 1760: Realizing that their situation is untenable, the French garrison of Montreal capitulates without a fight. New France falls under British martial law. Most French elites (military officers, government officials and merchants) return to France. The French commander, de Vaudreuil, asks that the Canadians be treated well as subjects of the Crown, and the British commander, Amherst, accepts.
February 10, 1763: The French and Indian Wars/the Seven Years War end with the Treaty of Paris. France gives up almost all of her North American colonies to Britain save the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland. The British offer them the choice between keeping Canada and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. Since the later is making a lot of money from sugar; they choose to keep Guadeloupe.
- The British authorities in Canada implement the Test Oath like in the rest of the empire. To hold certain jobs (notaries, lawyers, bureaucrat, apothecary, etc...) the Canadians must renounce Catholicism and embrace Protestantism. Very few Canadians take it, and there is not enough British immigration to fill the vacant posts, so the Oath is half-halfheartedly enforced just for the sake of keeping the colony running smoothly.
October 7, 1763: The Royal Proclamation is issued, forbidding settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Though more immediately applicable at the time to land grants given to British colonists in what is now the United States, the Proclamation continues to have legal significance in 21st-century Canada's relationships with its First Nations.
August 1, 1764: The Treaty of Fort Niagara was agreed to by British and Indigenous representatives, trading a section of land along the Niagara River and establishing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and new colonists who would be settling in the area. The new relationship established would come into play forty-eight years later (see below).
1774: In a remarkable display of foresight, the British pass the Act of Québec, which guarantees the Catholic religion, and system of Civil Law derived from France for the Canadians and abolishes the Test Oath, which is more or less the first measure of tolerance towards Catholics passed by Parliament in nearly 150 years. In a typical Canadian compromise, the French system of civil law is blended with the English system of criminal law. With their rights guaranteed, the Canadians have no reason to rebel, and the British gain a smooth-running colony that won't be a source of headaches.
- Perhaps diluting the remarkableness of that foresight, the act would be cited as one of the "Intolerable Acts" that spawned the American Revolution. Opposition in the 13 colonies came for various reasons, partly that the Québecois were being allowed to remain Roman Catholic, and partly that the lands given to Québec by the act included regions that were being eyeballed for colonial expansion.
- Although since French and British explorers and settlers had been in the land given to Québec long before the 13 colonies started eyeballing it, this becomes again remarkable foresight against Manifest Destiny.
1775: With the American Revolution underway, Benedict Arnold (yes, that Benedict Arnold) leads an army into Quebec to take out the British forces there and hopefully gain the Canadians as allies, thinking they would welcome the Continental Army as liberators, while the British believe the Canadians are docile and will obey their feudal landlords and the Catholic Church and side with the crown. Canadians and First Nations side with the crown; though their loyalty is lukewarm, they see it as the lesser evil. The Continental Army captures Montréal on the 15th of November, but is stopped at the Battle of Québec on December the 31st 1775.
1783: End of the American Revolution: many United Empire Loyalists flee America, where for obvious reasons they are less than welcome, for a new life in Canada: this is the point when Canada starts to become a truly bilingual country.
1790s: A series of rulings over the decade by James Monk, Chief Justice of Lower Canada, make slavery virtually outlawed through jurisprudence.
1791: The province of Québec is divided into the sections of Upper Canada and Lower Canada. Many of the Loyalists who fled the American Revolution settled in Upper Canada, forming what will become the province of Ontario. The Franco-Canadians remain the majority in Lower Canada, which would eventually become the province of Québec.
- Note that the "upper" and "lower" refer to Upper Canada being farther up the St. Lawrence River than Lower Canada, confounding the usual convention that "up is north", and confusing many elementary school students being shown these areas on a map.
1792: Eleven hundred black Loyalists travel to Sierra Leone to found the Freetown colony led by the abolitionists John Clarkson and freeman Thomas Peters. All were former slaves from America who either escaped or were granted freedom and resettled in Nova Scotia for fighting for Britain in The American Revolution.
1793: The Act Against Slavery is passed by the Upper Canada legislature, banning the slave trade within the colony and guaranteeing freedom for children born to female slaves once they reached the age of 25. It was the first law against slavery enacted anywhere in the British Empire.
August 27, 1793: Governor John Graves Simcoe establishes the city of York, on what is now modern Toronto. The majority of settlers are displaced loyalists who had to leave the USA after the American Revolution made them feel not welcome there anymore. It will serve as the new capital of Upper Canada, as it is believed to be safer from American attacks than the old one at Newark, near the Niagara River.
1799: The first proposal for a canal that would allow boats to bypass Niagara Falls is made. The Upper Canada parliament rejects it.
- June 21–24, 1813: Laura Secord, taking care of her wounded husband in their home where American officers had billeted, learns of an impending American attack against James FitzGibbon's British forces and sets out to warn him. She travels on foot for almost two days through untamed wilderness to deliver her warning. FitzGibbon's British and Mohawk force defeats the Americans at the Battle of Beaver Dams.
- The Treaty of Ghent officially ended the war on December 24, 1814, but it took weeks to get that information to North America from Belgium. In the meantime, the British lost the Battle of New Orleans. Even though the war ends with an effective stalemate, the fact that the Colonies were able to repulse the American invaders multiple times was victory enough for them and a lasting boost to the notion of keeping their own identity as something different from America: a Canadian-ness is developing, neither "Americans on the wrong side of the war" or "British on the far side of the sea" but something separate.
1814: A famine in the Red River Colony (to be known as Manitoba) causes Governor Miles Macdonell to ban exports of food. This raises the ire of the Métis population note , who want the right to sell food if they want. In 1816, leader Cuthbert Grant leads a revolt and steals the government's food to see how they like it, which leads to the Battle of Seven Oaks that June 19, when the new governor, Robert Semple, finds out. He gets himself killed for it (might have something to do with sending 28 poorly trained men against 61 well-trained men) and the Métis define themselves as a nation, complete with their own flag. (The battle site is at what is now the corner of Main Street and Rupertsland Boulevard in Winnipeg, on the #18 North Main bus route.)
1818: A young businessman in the Niagara Peninsula area, William Hamilton Merritt, proposes a canal in the area. While his original plan was to provide water for a sawmill he owned, it changed to a canal between Twelve Mile Creek, on the shore of Lake Ontario, to the Welland River, which flows into the Niagara River above the falls—allowing boats to bypass the falls.
1820: Fearing a potential attack by the Americans, the British-led Canadian militia decides to bolster Quebec City's fortifications by building a cool fort called La Citadelle. Construction will take over 30 years, and the fort will be handed over to the Canadian Forces in 1871. Today it's the oldest military building in Canada, an actual military base, an official residence of His Majesty the King if he comes for a visit, a museum complete with a gift shop, and the headquarters of the Royal 22nd Regiment who do nice parades for tourists involving a goat mascot named Batisse and soldiers dressed exactly like British Royal Guards, complete with not being able to move or talk.
1824: The Upper Canada parliament establishes the Welland Canal Company to build Merritt's proposed canal, prompted by the impending completion of the Erie Canal across the border in New York State. Construction starts on November 30.
1827: As part of the Welland Canal project, a second canal, known as the Feeder Canal, is added, connecting the original canal directly to Lake Erie.
1829:
- With the death of Shanawdithit, the Beothuk people of Newfoundland become the first documented extinct people of the New Worlds.
- The town of Ottawa, named Bytown at the time, is founded while the Rideau Canal is being built.
November 30, 1829: Exactly five years after the first sod was turned, the Welland Canal opens to traffic.
March 1831: Due to the insufficiency of the Feeder Canal as a shipping route, a new Lake Erie terminus for the Welland Canal is chosen near modern-day Port Colborne.
March 31, 1831: Montreal is officially incorporated, and the name Montreal is made official. No more Ville-Marie.
June 1, 1833: The expanded Welland Canal opens to boat traffic.
March 6, 1834: York is formally incorporated, and its name changed to Toronto (either from "tkaronto" a Mohawk word meaning "where there are trees standing in the water" or "toronto" the French spelling of a Huron word meaning "plenty", both had been previously recorded as names for the settlement). The first mayor is William Lyon Mackenzie.
August 1, 1834: Slavery is officially abolished through the British Empire, effective from this date. This is mostly a formality, as a variety of pro-abolition court rulings had made slavery virtually nonexistent in Canada. Racism is still a big issue, this is the early 19th century after all.
1837: The Patriot rebellions against British rule occur in both Upper (Anglo-) and Lower (Franco-) Canada, in part for responsible government, i.e., essentially real democracy, at least by the standards of the time, and home rule. The Lower Canadian rebellion was far better organized, but both were crushed. However, the rebels still eventually won in part because the Crown sent John G. Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, to figure out why the people didn't like British rule, and his report concluded that the government was legitimately corrupt and recommended the same "responsible government." His report is nevertheless thought of as an insult by Lower Canada, as it pinned all the blame of the rebellions on Francophone, Catholic Canadians (despite the Anglophone Protestant Upper Canada having also been in revolt) and also recommended the prompt assimilation of the Francophone, Catholic Canadians into the Anglophone, Protestant rest of Canada, and even said that the Franco-Canadians had no culture.
February 10, 1841: The Act of Union, 1840 is ratified, united Upper and Lower Canada into a single province. For administrative purposes, they are designated Canada West and East respectively. They don't get the responsible government Lord Durham recommended until 1848.
1841: The Upper Canada government completes the buyout of the Welland Canal Company that it started in 1839, and starts work on an expansion of the canal, deepening it and reducing the number of locks from 40 to 27.
June 15, 1841: The Parliament of United Canada is set up in modern-day Kingston, Ontario.
November 28, 1844: The Parliament gets moved to Montreal.
1846: The expanded Welland Canal, known today as the Second Welland Canal, is completed.
June 15, 1846: The Oregon Treaty establishes the 49th parallel north as the political boundary between the United States of America and British North America west of the Rocky Mountains. Both sides agree because when you travel above 49 degrees north, the temperature abruptly drops forty degrees.note
April 25, 1849: Angry that the Franco-Canadians are gaining more political power (among other grievances) many anti-Unionist Anglo-Canadian rioters attack and set fire to the parliament building in Montreal (while the Parliament is in session, no less) after an article in the English newspaper The Gazette called for an uprising. Several priceless books and records are destroyed when the fire spreads to the national library, and rioting spreads throughout the city. After this event, the MPs decide to alternate parliament between Toronto and Quebec City.
1855: Bytown is renamed Ottawa.
December 31, 1857: Queen Victoria declares the backwater frontier town of Ottawa will now be the capital of Canada, to finally put an end to the bickering between Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Quebec City who all want that sweet capital title. The choice is baffling to many, but Victoria justifies it by saying the city is easily defendable from the Americans, it's right between the Franco and Anglo parts of Canada (good for unity!), and since it's relatively small there's less risk of angry rioters burning down Parliament like what happened in Montreal 8 years earlier.
December 12, 1859: Victoria Bridge in Montréal is completed this year after 5 years of construction, and the first train (freight) crosses it on this date. This is the first bridge on the St. Lawrence River, effectively uniting Canada's infrastructure. Before this, crossing the St. Lawrence was done by boat in the summer and ice roads in the winter, but it was dangerous to cross during the autumn and spring due to treacherous conditions from thawing and freezing. Apart from minor renovations and upgrades in 1897-1898, most of the bridge is still from the 1860's, a testament to the original workmanship quality.
1850–1860: The height of the Underground Railroad, which brought escaped slaves North to freedom. Slavery had been abolished in Canada in 1834 (although discrimination was still rampant) and individuals could not be extradited back to the U.S. At least 30,000 people, but possibly as many as 100,000, escaped slavery this way, many settling in what is now southern Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
June 29, 1864: The Saint-Hilaire train disaster occurs near the modern day town of Mont-Saint-Hilaire, in Québec: a train heading from Québec City to Montréal and carrying mostly German and Polish immigrants falls through an open swing bridge into the Richelieu river, after the crew failed to obey a stop sign. With 99 casualties, it is the worst railway disaster in Canadian history.
1864: The leaders of the British North American colonies discuss the possibility of uniting to deal with various political issues, including financial problems, political gridlocks, and mutual defense against any American invasion. Their discussions lead to the creation of what would become the British North America Act.
July 1, 1867: The British North America Act, 1867 comes into effect. The Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia become the Dominion of Canada, which still exists today, much modified. The Province of Canada's subdivisions are renamed Ontario and Québec. In a general trend that repeats itself throughout Canadian history, Confederation is a witch's brew of ideas and trends, mixed together in a large compromise. John A. Macdonald, the premier of Canada West, is inaugurated as prime minister and leads the "Liberal-Conservative Party", which is one of the ancestors of the Conservative Party of today, to victory in the first federal election, held from August 7 to September 20. He celebrates by getting drunk.
November 1869: The newly formed dominion buys the vast Northwest Territories from the Hudson's Bay Company. In response, Métis leader Louis Riel sets up a provisional government in the Red River Settlement. This eventually, after some bloodshed, leads to the inauguration of the postage stamp — I mean, province — of Manitoba, established in 1870. John A. Macdonald celebrates by getting drunk. Over the next century and a half, the Northwest is divided into new territories and provinces, and established provinces see their territories expanded.
1870: The then-23 years old, Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell moves from the USA to Paris, Ontario with his family. He will set up a workshop there and become a famous inventor.
July 20, 1871: The Colony of British Columbia is brought into Confederation. John A. Macdonald celebrates by getting drunk.
1871: Canada's first decennial census is conducted. The British North America Act mandated a national census every 10 years, in years ending in 1.
1871: With the departure of British troops from Canada, the citizens of Quebec City start to question the usefulness of nearly 200-years old fortifications and city gates that impede traffic. The gates are demolished, but...
1872: ... Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Lord Dufferin and governor general of Canada from 1872 to 1878 decides to preserve the fortifications for their historical value, and proposes the construction of newer, wider gates that both look historic and let traffic through. This decision pays off, as Quebec City is the only city north of Campeche, Mexico to still retains its old colonial fortifications, which makes for a nice tourist attraction.
- Construction begins on a replacement for the Welland Canal, following a shorter and straighter route between St. Catharines and Port Dalhousie, with 26 locks. The new canal will have 26 locks, one fewer than the Second Welland Canal, and is also deeper and wider than the Second Canal.
1873: John A. Macdonald celebrates the formation of the Northwest Mounted Police on May 23rd by getting drunk. The NWMP march west to enforce law and order in the Northwest Territories and the Native American nations were quite impressed, at least at first, at how helpful they were tamping down the whiskey traders ravaging their communities. On July 1st Prince Edward Island joins Confederation, and John A. Macdonald celebrates by getting drunk. Macdonald resigned as Prime Minister on November 5 after being accused of accepting re-election donations from capitalist Hugh Allan in exchange for the contract to build a railway between the Pacific to the eastern provinces. Alexander Mackenzie would lead the Liberal Party to its first electoral victory the following year, though Macdonald was re-elected back in 1878 with a proposed economic program called the National Policy which sought to increase tariffs on imported manufactured items (the intent was to protect Canada's own manufacturing industry), build the Canadian Pacific Railway and promote immigration to the west.
August 10, 1876: Alexander Graham Bell, considered the inventor of the telephone, makes a phone call through a telegraph line from his family homestead in Brantford, Ontario, to his assistant Thomas Watson in Paris, Ontario, roughly 13 kilometers away. While this is not the first phone call note , it demonstrates that the telephone can work across long distance.
February 8, 1879: With the world rapidly becoming smaller, railway surveyor (for both the Intercolonial and Canadian Pacific railways) Sandford Fleming first proposes a system of standard time zones at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute. The entire world eventually adopts a modified version (Universal Coordinated Time) by 1924.
June 24, 1880: At the Saint-Jean Baptiste banquet note in Quebec City, the "O Canada" hymn, originally in French only, is performed for the very first time. Commissioned by Lieutenant Governor of Quebec Théodore Robitaille, the music was written by Calixa Lavallée and the lyrics written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The new hymn quickly replaces the older "Vive la Canadienne" as an unofficial hymn of Quebec and Francophone Canada in general. The later will become a regimental marching song for the Royal 22nd Regiment.
1883: G.C. Hoffman of the Geological Survey of Canada demonstrates that separation of bitumen from oil sands using water is possible. Years down the line this process will lead to Alberta's oil industry and a massive political fustercluck.
1885: Louis Riel leads another and more violent resistance in the west in response to the Canadian Government's efforts to relocate the Métis people to make room for the trans-continental railway. Having lived for generations using a river lot system for farming and community building, the Métis weren't keen on leaving their communities to farm in sub-optimal patch farms ordained by the government. The Canadian militia uses the partially built (and all but broke) transcontinental railway to get there in a few days to crush the resistance. As a result, Riel is defeated, tried, and executed, which alienated the Franco-Canadian population even while the whole affair gave Macdonald's dream to unite the nation through a ribbon of steel the final political boost needed to complete it. John A. Macdonald celebrates by getting drunk. Note that Riel is to this day thought of as a traitor by some Canadians and a hero by others. There are high schools in Montreal and Ottawa named after him, a public monument of him the Manitoba Legislature building and a Manitoba provincial holiday in his honour (how many people executed for high treason can claim that?). Furthermore, there was a dramatized TV recreation of the trial with viewers invited to vote "Guilty" or "Not Guilty" online on the matter, the vote went firmly to "Not Guilty".
- To thank the fifteen thousand Chinese laborers who helped build the Canadian Pacific (completed November 7th), the government passes the Chinese Immigration Act, forcing all future Chinese immigrants to pay $50 to enter Canada if they fell outside narrow definitions (teachers, merchants, and missionaries were exempt). It's not the first slap in the face to the Chinese in North America and it won't be the last.
June 3, 1885: The Battle of Loon Lake. 150 remaining Cree forces in the Northwest Territory make a Last Stand against a militia of 75 men led by Major Sam Steele. The Crees are routed and surrender. This is the last land battle on Canadian soil.
1887: The Third Welland Canal opens to traffic. The Second Canal remains in operation.
1891:
- John A. Macdonald wins his final election, and celebrates by getting drunk.note He dies later that year, and the whole country offers a toast in his honour. The Canadian political scene gets really weird for the next 4 years, with replacement Prime Ministers suddenly dying in office with disturbing frequency: between 1891 and 1896, Canada goes through five different Prime Ministers,note until Wilfrid Laurier defeats Charles Tupper in 1896.
- The St. Clair Tunnel, the first sub-aqueous tunnel in North America capable of carrying rail traffic, is opened. Built by a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Railroad, it carries traffic under the St. Clair River from Port Huron, Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario for over a century.
December 1891: Dr. James Naismith (former physical education teacher and director of athletics at McGill University) invents basketball while an expatriate in the US, at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.
1893: The Château Frontenac note hotel in Quebec City is completed and opens to the public. Built by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, it's one of Canada's first "grand railway hotels" and a fine example of Châteauesque architecture. The Château Frontenac will be expanded in 1924, where it will gain its famous central tower note . It's easily Quebec City's most famous building (and arguably the second most famous Canadian landmark after the CN Tower) and makes the city's skyline easily recognizable.
May 5, 1893: The Montreal Hockey Club wins the first Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup, better known as The Stanley Cup. The Cup will go on to become the most prestigious North American professional hockey trophy.
1894: First Nation children are now forced to attend the infamous Residential School system. Native children are taken away from their culture and forced to assimilate into white Canadian cultures, with the explicit goal to "kill the Indian and save the person" and eventually commit a cultural genocide on Native populations. The residential school system is a disaster, schools are underfunded and abuse (mental, physical and even sexual) is rampant. Many children die and are unceremoniously disposed of. Permanent damage is inflicted to First Nation cultures as their youth are forbidden to practice their traditional customs or speak their languages. Attendance will be mandatory until 1947 (with the last school closing in 1996).
1896: The Klondike Gold Rush. Tons of American prospectors flood north into British Columbia. The presence of the NWMP makes this the most orderly gold rush in history, and the presence of the NWMP's machine guns finally define the Alaska-Canada border which had been bandied about by politicians for years. The legendary NWMP Colonel Sam Steele, the commanding officer of the Yukon territory, gains international acclaim for his professionalism and incorruptible integrity during this time: he remains a figure of national importance through to the modern day. In the national election on June 23, Wilfrid Laurier, leader of the Liberal Party, is elected to lead his party's first government since 1878 (and becomes the first Franco-Canadian PM, the post-Confederation PM with the longest consecutive tenure, ending in 1911,note and the Liberal leader credited with making them "Canada's natural governing party"), finally ending a weird period of Canadian politics which saw five prime ministers in five years.note
June 13, 1898: The Yukon Territory is established to get a better handle on the Gold Rush.
1899-1902: The Second Boer War. Canada is asked by the British to send troops to South Africa to help the war effort. The Conservatives want a force of 8000 to be sent. In traditional Canadian compromise fashion, Prime Minister Laurier of the Liberals initially sends 1000. The situation is a Morton's Fork for Laurier, since he relies on both Franco-Canadians and Anglo-Canadians for his voting base, and the former are mostly opposed to the war, seeing it as imperialist and unjust, while the later are mostly in favor of it, out of loyalty towards Great Britain. In total, 8600 Canadians will go to the war. 224 die, 252 are wounded. Canadian soldiers are involved in running the infamous British concentration camps for Boer civilians, where thousands of Boers die.
1901: Prime Minister Laurier declares the 20th century as the century of Canada. Nobody else notices.
September 1, 1905: Alberta and Saskatchewan, created from the Northwest Territories, join Confederation.
1906:
- The federal government starts conducting separate decennial censuses for the prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, held in years ending in 6, to monitor western growth. This means that censuses in those provinces are held every 5 years instead of every 10.
- Canada's first governing body for university sports, the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union Central (CIAU Central), is founded. However, it only covers universities in Ontario and Québec.
October 1906: Construction starts on the Michigan Central Railway Tunnel, the first fixed crossing of the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor.
August 29, 1907: The southern arm and parts of the central structure of the Québec bridge collapse due to calculation errors that were noticed too late. 75 workers are killed and 11 are injured. It is the worst bridge-related accident in history, and the engineers go back to the drawing board to draft up a new design. Most of the wreckage is salvaged, but some of it is still down there and can be seen at low tides.
September 26, 1907: The Dominion of Newfoundland is established.
1908: Robert Stanley Weir, a lawyer from Montreal, writes an English version (though not an exact translation) of "O Canada". He is not the first to do so, but his version is the most popular, and will be adopted later on as the official version, with a few minor modifications.
June 1908: Anne of Green Gables, written by Prince Edward Island native Lucy Maud Montgomery, is published. The book has sold over 50 million copies since its publication, making it the best-selling Canadian novel of all time, and Montgomery wrote seven additional books in the series through 1936.
May 1909: Toronto-born actress Mary Pickford appears in her first motion picture, Two Memories. By 1916, Pickford was one of the most famous entertainers in the world and the first real movie star — The term "America's Sweetheart" was coined to describe her popularity in the States, even though she remained a Canadian citizen until 1920. In 1930, she won Best Actress at the second-ever Academy Awards for her starring role in the film Coquette, making her the first Canadian to win an Oscar.
December 4, 1909:
- Le Club de Hockey Canadien, known in English as the Montreal Canadiens, form and play their first season of ice hockey. "The Habs", as they are nicknamed, join the National Hockey League for its inaugural season in 1917 and are still around today as the oldest surviving professional ice hockey club in the world.
- In Toronto, the first Grey Cup game is held for the national amateur Canadian football championship, with the University of Toronto Varsity Blues defeating Toronto Parkdale 26–6. The trophy, however, wouldn't actually be presented until March 1910. The trophy is still presented to this day, though now it's the Canadian Football League championship trophy.
July 26, 1910: The Michigan Central Railway Tunnel opens. Originally owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway and now owned by its successor CPKC, it carries rail traffic between Detroit and Windsor to this day.
July 1912: Ontario passes Regulation 17 (French: Règlement 17), a law prohibiting education in French beyond Grade 2. This law passes at a time of heavy immigration from Québec into Eastern Ontario. This is seen as an outrage by Franco-Canadians in Québec and outside, and sours relationships between both linguistic groups, which would complicate matters during World War I, and arguably start the movement for Québec nationalism and independence. The Regulation is repealed in 1927 by the conservative Ontario Premier Howard Ferguson. He personally opposes bilingualism, but wants to form a political alliance with Québec against the federal government, and this is the only way to get Québec on his side.
1913: Construction begins on a fourth Welland Canal. This canal will be even deeper, have only eight locks, and will follow a slightly longer but straighter route, entering Lake Ontario at Port Weller (now part of St. Catharines). However, World War I and its immediate aftermath would put work on ice for several years.
May 23, 1914: The steamship Komagata Maru arrives in Vancouver with over 300 Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim immigrants from India; they are refused permission to dock and enter the country, even though they are British subjects (like all Canadians were at the time); after two months in Vancouver harbour, the ship is turned around with all but twenty passengers forced to return to India. The Canadian government will make an official apology for the incident in 2016.
May 29, 1914: The steamship Empress of Ireland collides with the Norwegian coal ship Storstad in heavy fog in the Gulf of St Lawrence and sink in 14 minutes. The death toll is 1,012 of the 1,477 people on board, making it the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history.
August 4, 1914: Canada automatically enters World War I against Germany, since it is a dominion of the United Kingdom and Canadian foreign policy is controlled by London. Canada is however allowed to determine its level of involvement in the war. The war and the the Conscription Crisis will threaten the unity of Canada, as Franco-Canadians and Anglo-Canadians have very different views on the war. Prime Minister Borden both promises to send 500,000 troops to the Allied war effort, while not implementing conscription in Canada. He'll soon realize how holding both those promises will be difficult.
October 14, 1914: The Royal 22nd Regiment is established in Québec City, after Québec pharmaceutical tycoon Arthur Mignault offered the federal government CAD$50,000 to establish a Franco-Canadian unit. Borden is eager to create a French-speaking unit, hoping to drive up recruitment from Franco-Canadians and fulfill his 500,000 troops promise. Prior to this, Franco-Canadian volunteers were often mixed up into English-speaking units deliberately, as an attempt to push an English-supremacist agenda by the Defense Minister Sam Hughes. Despite discipline issues early on, the Royal 22nd, or "Van Doos" as they are nicknamed by Anglo-Canadians, have an excellent combat record and are seen as serving not only Canada, but also the honour of Franco-Canadians.
December 8, 1915: Field surgeon John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields is first published in Punch magazine. Allegedly, McCrae's fellow soldiers retrieved it after he had discarded it as unsatisfactory. McCrae himself died of pneumonia in 1918. His collected works, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, was first published in 1919.
July 1, 1916: The Newfoundland Regiment (later Royal Newfoundland Regiment) launches an assault on German forces at Beaumont-Hamel as part of the Battle of the Somme. The 30-minute battle is a bloodbath, with all but 110 of the 780 who went "over the top" dying; of those who survived, only 68 answered roll call the next morning.note
September 11, 1916: The Québec bridge collapses again. While hoisting the central structure of the cantilever bridge, some of the cables give up, and the central section plummets in the river, taking the lives of 13 workers. This structure is still at the bottom of the Saint-Lawrence. The bridge will open to foot and carriage traffic in 1917, but it will take until 1919 for trains to cross.
1917-1918: Conscription crisis affects Canada. Virtually all Franco-Canadians, and a non-negligible number of Anglo-Canadians, heavily resent being forced to go to war. Franco-Canadians cite various economic note , political note and cultural note reasons for why they do not fight. In addition to its political nature, the conscription crisis takes on ugly ethnic conflict tones, with prominent figures and newspapers on both sides of the issue and of both languages having very passionate opinions about the topic. Riots sometimes broke out in Montreal and Quebec City.
April 9, 1917: Canadian troops show their guts (sometimes literally) in the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Despite some 40% casualties (3,598 killed and 7,004 wounded), it was well-planned and well-executed, with victory achieved after three days of fighting. Four of the soldiers present earn Victoria Crosses. Following this, the Canadian troops develop a reputation for being pretty dangerous, prompting the Germans to invent the term Stormtrooper to describe them. This battle is extremely symbolic for Canada, as troops from all over the country fought together, and many historians credit Vimy Ridge as being the start of Canadian national identity.
June 8, 1917: Influential artist Tom Thomson dies in a canoeing accident at the Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, aged 39. Thomson had been one of the first Canadian painters to gain international prominence despite his lack of any formal training, and his oil paintings of nature scenes, particularly The Jack Pine and The West Wind, are considered to be iconic images of the country. His sudden death by drowning was the subject of much debate and conspiracy over the years due to his reputation as a master canoeist and an expert outdoorsman.
November 26, 1917: The National Hockey League is founded in Montreal following the demise of the National Hockey Association. Over the course of the 1920s, it competes and eventually absorbs regional competitors such as the Pacific Coast Hockey Association and Western Canada Hockey League to become the top professional ice hockey league in Canada. In 1924, it becomes an international league with its first (but certainly not last) American team, the Boston Bruins. In 1927, it becomes the sole league whose teams compete for the Stanley Cup.
December 6, 1917: The French munitions ship Mont Blanc collides with Belgian vessel Imo in Halifax Harbour. She burns for twenty-five minutes before she explodes, leveling two square kilometres and killing over two thousand people. Train dispatcher Vince Coleman desperately sends a message to stop an inbound train carrying three hundred people (inflated to 700 in the associated Heritage Minute), remaining at his post until he confirms the train's response. He does not survive, but not only did the train did stop safely out of the blast zone but also immediately passed on Coleman's message to begin emergency efforts for the stricken city.note Until the Trinity test, this was the largest manmade explosion at the time, and remains the largest non-nuclear manmade explosion to date.note Hundreds of Haligonians are blinded by debris from the explosion, contributing to the founding of the Candian National Institute for the Blind the following year. Significant damage is also inflicted on the black community of Africville, which receives only a minor share of the reconstruction funding.
March 28, 1918: The conscription crisis reaches its most violent moment in Quebec City. A young man who was exempted from conscription but had left his papers home is arrested by the Dominion Police. While he is later released, the outrage from the arrests leads to riots from anti-conscription Quebecers, who ransack the police station, conscription offices and two pro-conscription newspapers and destroy many conscription-related records. To quell the riot, federal troops are sent by train from other provinces, as the federal government feared Quebecer units would sympathize with the rioters. The army opens fire on rioters, killing 4 and wounding nearly 150. Order is restored on April the 1st.
May 24, 1918: Women, (with certain racial exceptions for Asian and First Nation women), are finally allowed to vote in federal elections, regardless of whether or not the province they live in recognizes that right.
November 11, 1918: World War I draws to a close at 11 AM. The last Canadian soldier (and second last overall) to be killed was one Private George Lawrence Price, 2 minutes before the armistice took effect. In total, out of an expeditionary force of 620 000 people, 67 000 have been killed, and 173 000 wounded, a casualty rate of nearly 39%.
1918-1919: As if WWI wasn't bad enough, The Spanish Flu now spreads across the world, and Canada is no exception. 50,000 Canadians will die from the disease.
June 28, 1919: The Treaty of Versailles is signed. Canada negotiated with the British to be able to send a delegation, and send a delegation it did, though Canada had to sign the treaty as a part of the British Empire and not on its own, to avoid upsetting the Americans by giving the Brits even more votes in the new League of Nations. Canada also got a small share of the indemnities from Germany, and gained some sweet credibility as a nation.
December 3, 1919: The first train crosses the Québec Bridge, after it was finally completed in August of the same year. So far it hasn't collapsed in its 100-plus years of service. With a central span of 549 metres, it is the longest cantilever bridge span in the world.
February 1, 1920: The (Royal) Northwest Mounted Police merges with the Dominion Police, creating the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
August 21, 1921: Maurice Richard is born. He will become a legend of hockey in Canada and a folk hero in his home province of Québec.
September, 1922: The Chanak crisis occurs between the United Kingdom and Turkey, with many fearing a full blown war would occur. William Lyon Mackenzie, prime minister of Canada at the time, had been traumatized by how WW1 (and most specifically the issue of conscription) had split Canada alongside French- and English-Canadian lines (and also fractured the Liberal party more or less along the same lines) and vowed that Canada would not automatically join the United Kingdom in war without the House of Commons voting on it. This incident is mostly forgotten today, but it was a critical development in Canadian independence, showing that the United Kingdom's powers over its dominions was not absolute, and would eventually lead to the Westminster Status of 1931.
October 23, 1922: New Brunswick-born Bonar Law becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the first individual born outside the UK to do so (and only one until the New York City-born Boris Johnson became PM in 2019); he will serve for eight months.
1923:
- Frederick Banting shares the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John Macleod for their discovery of insulin's role in regulating blood sugar, enabling diabetes sufferers the world over to lead normal lives. Banting shares his part of the award money with his assistant Charles Best and Macleod shares half of his money with James Collip, Banting's other collaborator.
- Two governing bodies for women's university sports are founded—the Women's Intercollegiate Athletic Union, governing most but not all Ontario Institutions, and Ontario-Quebec Women's Intercollegiate Athletics, mostly for Québec with some Ontario members.
July 1, 1923: After two revisions increased the head tax to $100 and then $500, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 outright bans Chinese immigrants from Canada. Again, merchants, diplomats, foreign students, and "special circumstances" granted by the Minister of Immigration exempt only a select few. This and other racist immigration policies would stand until the widespread immigration reform of the 1960s and '70s. (More info here.)
1926: Karl Clark of the University of Alberta patents a hot water separation method to separate bitumen from oil sands.
August 16, 1927: Construction starts on another fixed crossing between Detroit and Windsor, this one a road bridge.
March 31, 1928: Gordie Howe, who became a hockey legend with an incredibly long career and equally long list of records, is born in Floral, Saskatchewan, a rural community not far from Saskatoon.
Summer 1928: Construction starts on yet another fixed crossing between Detroit and Windsor, this one a road tunnel.
1929: The "Famous Five" (Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, and Henrietta Muir Edwards) take their case to the Privy Council in England and have womennote declared as "persons" under the law, able to vote and hold office.
November 15, 1929: The second fixed crossing between Detroit and Windsor opens as the Ambassador Bridge. Today, it's the busiest international border crossing in North America in terms of trade traffic, though this may change when the third road crossing (the Gordie Howe International Bridge) opens in 2025 or later.
August 16, 1930: The first British Empire Games are held in Hamilton, Ontario. Now known as the Commonwealth Games, they are the creation of a local sports journalist, H.H. "Bobby" Robinson. They have been hosted in Canada three more times since: in 1954 in Vancouver, in 1978 in Edmonton, and in 1994 in Victoria.
November 3, 1930: The third fixed crossing and second road crossing between Detroit and Windsor, the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel, opens. It remains in use today.
November 12, 1931: Hockey Night In Canada debuts on CNR Radio. The broadcast of NHL hockey games moves to CRBC (a predecessor to the CBC) two years later, and the Hockey Night banner endures to this day as the longest-running sports broadcast in the world. Hockey Night began television simulcasts in 1952, stopped broadcasting on the radio in 1976, and adopted a Saturday night doubleheader format in 1988.
December 11, 1931: The Statute of Westminster makes Canada (and Newfoundland, still an independent dominion at this time) an equal member of the British Empire to the UK herself. Westminster can no longer legislate for Canada, British diplomats can no longer sign treaties for Canada, and Canada begins to establish separate embassies. The Constitution remains a British law, because the Canadians can't agree on what to do with it.
August 6, 1932: The fourth and current Welland Canal, officially the Welland Ship Canal, opens to traffic. The second and third Welland Canals, now redundant, are permanently closed.
February 16, 1934: The Dominion of Newfoundland ceases to exist when the United Kingdom resumes direct rule of the heavily indebted nation.
May 28, 1934: Oliva-Édouard and Elzire Dionne, a French-Canadian farm couple from just outside the small Ottawa Valley community of Corbeil, Ontario, become the parents of identical quintuplets—in birth order, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. The first multiple birth of that size in which all were known to have survived past infancy, the girls were made wards of the state shortly after their birth over the objections of their parents and became a major tourist attraction until the provincial government returned them to their parents in 1942.
September 21, 1934: Poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen is born in Westmount, Quebec. No word exists on whether his birth was met with a chorus of "Hallelujah".
September 27, 1934: Dr. Wilder Penfield of Spokane, Washington founds the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in the same year he becomes a Canadian (British) citizen. While there, Dr. Penfield pioneers the mapping of the human brain and the Montreal procedure to treat epileptic seizures. Countless people will no longer dread the smell of burnt toast so much.
August 17, 1936: Maurice Duplessis, of the conservative Union Nationale party, wins the Quebec General Elections. His politics are staunchly conservative, authoritarian, pro-Catholic, pro-clergy, pro-business and vehemently anti-union and anti-communist. Maurice Duplessis would go on to become a juggernaut of Quebec politics. His first mandate will have him focus on the Great Depression, to some success.
Duplessis' far-right ideology and pro-Catholicism would complicate things during the second World War, as it would generate support in Quebec for the pro-Catholic, fascist Vichy France regime alongside the classic anti-semitism. That being said, this is not necessarily unique to Quebec, as far-right or outright fascist movements existed in most of the Western world from the 1920s to the end of WW2.
November 2, 1936: The Canadian Broadcasting Act creates the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC's francophone counterpart, Radio Canada, is created the following year.
September 10, 1939: Canada makes its sovereignty official by voting to go to war against Nazi Germany nine days after Britain, their first international act as a sovereign nation.note Between the declaration of war and VE-Day, the Royal Canadian Navy grows a hundredfold as Canada takes up the bulk of the responsibility for protecting convoys from U-Boat attack, becoming experts in anti-submarine warfare.
October 25, 1939: Snap elections in Quebec called by Maurice Duplessis earlier happen on this day, to some degree of panic in Ottawa. This backfires heavily on him, as he ran on an anti-war platform that would see Quebec doing all it can to avoid participating in the war effort. This did not endear him to the electorate, who were pro-war, especially since the federal government had promised not to enact conscription, which had been deeply unpopular with French-Canadians during the last war (to be fair it's not like English-Canadians were super thrilled about conscription either, British-Columbia for instance had strong opposition to conscription, out of fear that if Japanese-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians were drafted, they would use it as (*gasp*) leverage to get the right to vote). William Lyon Mackenzie breathes a sigh of relief as he feared that Duplessis (whom he called "diabolic" and a "little Hitler" in his diary) would use the war to drive a wedge between English- and French-Canadians and have Quebec secede. This election is notable because it's arguably one of the biggest cases of federal encroachment in provincial elections, to the point King exercised censorship powers on Duplessis.
April 25, 1940: The province of Quebec grants voting rights to women. It is the last province to finally do so. The reason it held that long was because of the strong influence of the Catholic Church in Quebec.
June, 1940: Limited conscription occurs. In order to placate Quebec's reluctance to conscription, those who are conscripted stay in Canada or are put to work in critical industries. Drafted soldiers are known as "Zombies", due to neither being soldiers nor civilians, just like how zombies are neither living nor dead and are treated with derision by volunteer soldiers, and are bullied by NCOs into becoming "real" soldiers. William Lyon Mackenzie King, the prime minister, is still reluctant to enforce "full conscription", believing that Canadian unity is not worth the price of victory in a foreign war, while his opponents believe that victory needs to come at any cost and urge him to expend conscription.
December 8, 1941: Four hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor note , 1982 Canadian soldiers, part of the British-led garrison of Hong Kong, are engaged by the Japanese military in a surprise attack on Hong Kong. When the Japanese win the battle on the 25th of December, 1689 Canadian soldiers will be made prisoners, and 267 of them will perish in Japanese POW camps.
- That same evening note , Canada declares war on Japan, roughly one day before the USA does so as well.
- By the end of 1941 and early 1942, the USA, the UK, the USSR and many other allies are actively fighting across several theaters, while Canadian Forces are largely just sitting in Great Britain to defend against an unlikely German invasion.
February 25, 1942: Following a similar decision by the Roosevelt administration a few days earlier, citing "national security concerns", the federal government orders the internment of people of Japanese descent, including Canadian citizens, in the province of British-Columbia. In truth, this is the culmination of decades of racist sentiments towards Japanese people on the west coast. Japanese property such as farms, buildings and fishing boats are seized without compensation and sold to white people. In total, 27 000 people were arrested and imprisoned without trial, despite reports by government officials and RCMP and Canadian Forces officers saying this move is pointless from a national security standpoint.
April 27, 1942: A referendum occurs where the federal government asks Canadians to be exempted from their promise not to enforce conscription. To the surprise of no one but William Lyon Mackenzie, Quebec is the only one to vote no (an overwhelming 70% of Quebecers voted against it). King then expresses that henceforth the federal government's policy would be "not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary". King would still attempt to keep the Zombies home as much as possible. Conscription riots occur in Quebec, but nowhere near the intensity of those of WW1.
May 1942 - November 1944: Several low-intensity but still strategically important skirmishes occur in the Saint-Lawrence river and gulf between German U-boots and Canadian Navy surface boats, resulting in a Canadian strategical victory that secures the Saint-Lawrence waterway for Allied shipments. This will be the first naval attack on Canadian soil with casualties since the war of 1812.
August 19, 1942: The infamous raid on the German-held port of Dieppe in France starts and ends in a disastrous failure. Roughly half of the 6000 strong (mostly Canadian, part British) force that makes it on the beach is killed, wounded or captured. The Western Allies make the grim realization that they will not be able to make a landing in Western Europe anytime soon, and that launching an attack on a port town is suicidal. The lessons learned at Dieppe help make the Normandy landings of D-Day possible. As a small consolation, the Allies make some good German intelligence gains.
January 19, 1943: Princess Margriet of the Netherlands is born to Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands while the family is in exile in Canada. The maternity ward of the Ottawa Civic Hospital is temporarily declared to be international territory to ensure the princess inherits only her Dutch citizenship from her mother. As thanks, the Dutch royal family sends one hundred thousand tulip bulbs to Ottawa once the war is over. Ten thousand bulbs have been sent to Ottawa every year since, giving rise to the Canadian Tulip Festival.
August 17 - 24, 1943: First Quebec conference (codename "QUADRANT"). Winston Churchill and FDR gather for highly secret military talks at the Château Frontenac and the Citadel. Churchill wants the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King to attend, but FDR vetoes him. The Allies begin to plan Operation Overlord, and the British agree to merge their nuclear weapon program (codename "Tube Alloys") with the American's Manhattan project. Canada will provide uranium, heavy water and scientists. The Quebec Agreement signed there was the stepping stone of US-UK nuclear collaboration, and defined how each country would handle nuclear energy, both peaceful and military.
- Sgt. Maj. Émile Couture of the Canadian Forces, then 25 of age, is tasked with cleaning the rooms after the dignitaries are left, as the secrecy of the conference is too critical to leave it to the staff. He finds a leather portfolio with a gold inscription on it saying "Churchill-Roosevelt, Quebec Conference, 1943" that contains virtually complete plans for Operation Overlord. He takes it home as a souvenir and when he realizes just what he found, he hides it under his mattress until he can hand it back the next morning. For his prudence he's rewarded with a thorough investigation by Scotland Yard and the FBI, and a nice medal by the British.
Fall, 1943: With the war clearly going in the Allies' advantage, William Lyon Mackenzie King now faces the terrifying possibility that the war might end without any Canadian victories note . Buying wholesale into Churchill's declaration that Italy was the "soft underbelly of Europe", King had the 1st Division (operating as part of the British 8th Army) and the 5th Canadian Armoured Division and 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade merged into the I Canadian Corps of the 8th Army and deploy to Italy, where it turned out that the Germans and Italians made excellent use of Italy's mountainous terrain to form a solid defense, resulting in a difficult and casualty-heavy Allied advance.
April 14, 1944: The legislative assembly of Québec votes to establish Hydro-Québec, a state-owned power company. The next day they nationalize the Montreal Light, Heat and Power company, responsible for providing light, heat and power to Montreal. This decision came after nearly a decade of popular demand, as power companies were seen as greedy and price-gouged on essential services, and the decision had nationalistic undertones, as these companies were generally handled by Anglophones. Hydro-Québec also has a mandate to modernize existing power grids and provide electricity to the countryside of Québec, as power companies only focused on urban areas, neglecting the surrounding country due to lack of profit. To this day Hydro-Québec is still entirely owned by the province of Québec and generates virtually all its power from hydroelectric dams note Hydro-Québec offers some of the cheapest electricity costs in North America and contributes heavily to Québec's low greenhouse gas emissions, and generates extra money by selling power to other provinces or New England states. The company has attracted controversy, mostly from First Nation communities who have dams built on their traditional lands, which obviously disrupts rivers and the fish in it.
June 6, 1944: Canadian forces landing on Juno Beach on D-Day face heavy resistance (generally considered the worst after Omaha Beach), but penetrate deeper into German territory than either the British or the Americans.
Fall 1944 - Spring 1945: Canada played a major role in the liberation of the Netherlands from German occupation, also providing relief to Dutch civilians in the form of rations and blankets to survive the winter. The Dutch have sent thousands of tulips to Canada every year as a show of gratitude.
April 13 - April 14, 1945: Throughout the night, Corporal Léo Major, serving in the Franco-Canadian Régiment de la Chaudière, single-handedly liberates the city of Zwolle in the Netherlands from the Germans, sparing the city a major shelling. The locals are so grateful they name a street after him.
May 8, 1945: V-E Day. The European theater of WWII is over with the capitulation of Nazi Germany. Out of 1.1 million Canadians being mobilized, 42,000 have been killed and 55,000 wounded.
1946: Premier Tommy Douglas introduces the universal health care system in Saskatchewan, where he leads the first avowedly socialist government in North America. By 1961, all provinces will have adopted the health care plan.
March 17, 1946: Jackie Robinson breaks baseball's colour line when he debuts at shortstop for the Montreal Royals, the International League AAA affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Although the racist pressure on him almost drove him to a nervous breakdown, he survived in part because Montrealers made their city a welcome oasis for as they hailed him as their summer sports hero and he backed that adulation with spectacular play. Robinson will be called up for the 1947 season and eventually enter the MLB Hall of Fame.
June 27, 1946: The Canadian Citizenship Act gains Royal Assent, separating Canadian citizenship from British nationality; it will take effect on January 1, 1947.
October 16, 1946: Gordie Howe makes his NHL debut with the Detroit Red Wings. He would remain with the Wings for 25 seasons, retiring in 1971... only to return to the rival World Hockey Association in 1973, playing in that league until its demise and partial merger with the NHL in 1979. He played one final NHL season in 1979–80.
November 9, 1946: Viola Desmond is arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. At the time, black people were only allowed to sit in the balcony, but the nearsighted Viola had forgotten her glasses and wanted to sit closer to the screen. The ticket price for the balcony was 20 cents, with a two-cent tax; the ticket price for the main level was 40 cents, with a three-cent tax. Viola was charged and convicted of depriving the Canadian government of one cent; she had offered to pay the difference, but the theatre would only sell her a cheaper balcony ticket. Viola fought the charge and conviction in court; her appeal was ultimately dismissed, but she is remembered as an early fighter for civil rights in Canada. She would be posthumously pardoned in 2010 and her face appears on the $10 bill, replacing that of John A. Macdonald.
May 14, 1947: The Canadian government repeals the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. It will still take 20 years before Canadian immigration policy changes to allow Chinese immigration in any numbers.
October 1947: AT&T, which at the time operated the vast majority of phone systems in both Canada and the US, publishes a new standardized numbering scheme to cover both countries—what we now know as the North American Numbering Plan.
March 31, 1949: Newfoundland is brought (kicking and screaming) into Confederation, with a (still questioned) vote of 51% to 49% in favour of it. Former radio broadcaster Joey Smallwood, who was the major force in bringing Newfoundland into Canada, is named premier of the province, a role he would hold until 1972. On December 6, 2001, Newfoundland officially changed its name to Newfoundland and Labrador (the latter being the mainland portion of the province).
August 10, 1949: Avro Canada launches the Avro Jetliner, the world's second jet-powered passenger plane after the deHavilland Comet. The plane attracts widespread attention, notably from Howard Hughes, who even offered to buy thirty of them for TWA. Thanks to production delays and Korean War demand for the CF-100 Canuck, the project is cancelled — and we have been buying large American and European airliners ever since.
September 6, 1952: The CBC broadcasts on television for the first time.
1954:
- Seeking to modernize their arsenal, the Canadian Forces order a batch of 2000 FN FALs from Fabrique Nationale Herstal in Belgium. This is the first time a country's armed forces will adopt the legendary rifle as standard issue. Before Canada's order, the FAL had only been produced in small experimental batches. The CF adopts it under the designation of C1A1 and will later produce it under license, with typical Canadian modifications such as a larger trigger guard to allow for firing while wearing winter gloves.
- For the first time, the Grey Cup is contested solely by professional teams. This is considered to be the start of the modern era of Canadian football, though the formal establishment of the CFL wouldn't come until 1958.
August 6, 1954: Émilie Dionne becomes the first of the quintuplets to die, suffocating after suffering multiple seizures at the convent where she was preparing to become a nun.
1955: CIAU Central collapses due to differences in philosophy among its membership, which had expanded greatly in the postwar years.
March 17, 1955: The "Maurice Richard Hockey Riot" occurs in Montreal following the suspension of the famous Maurice Richard from the NHL, as a result a particularly brutal fight on the ice rink a few days earlier during a match with the Boston Bruins. The suspension is perceived as unfair by Franco-Canadians, and justified by most Anglo-Canadians. This riot highlights the divide between Franco- and Anglo-Canadians in Quebec, with many Quebecers seeing themselves as second-class citizens finally lashing back against "les Anglais". The riot will cause $100,000 in property damage, thirty-seven injuries, and 100 arrests, and Richard himself has to publicly accept his punishment in the hopes of calming the rioters.
1956: The 5-year census interval that had been used in the prairie provinces goes national, and remains in use to this day.
1957: Ottawa native Paul Anka becomes a teen idol in the United States, scoring a series of hit singles through 1963, many of which he wrote himself. He had another run of hits in the 1970s, and continues to tour to this day.
January 18, 1958: The Canadian Football League is officially formed when the Canadian Football Council, made up of the country's two professional circuits, leaves the Canadian Rugby Union (now known as Football Canada, which today governs amateur Canadian football) and formally assumes control of the Grey Cup.
1958–1959: Avro Canada designs, produces, and then (on order of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker) cancels the Avro Arrow supersonic interceptor program. Dan Aykroyd is not amused. While a marvel of engineering, ICBMs had rendered interceptors obsolete before the Arrow could be built, but the dismantling of the project was so complete and thorough note that it essentially returned Canadian aviation back to square one, — and we have been buying American fighter planes ever since.
1959: Winnipeg becomes the first North American city to implement a single three-digit emergency number. In a case of Early-Installment Weirdness, it initially used the British emergency number of 9-9-9, but changed to the current 9-1-1 in 1968 when the US agreed on the use of that number for emergency calls.
September 7, 1959: Maurice Duplessis, who had dominated Québec politics from 1936-1939 and from 1944 to 1959, along with his party, Union Nationale, dies during his second term as premier of the province. His staunchly conservative, pro-Catholic, pro-business, and anti-unionist stance drew him ardent praise and equally strident criticism; opponents would term his final 15-year tenure as premier La Grande Noirceur (The Great Darkness). Though the idea that his administration was a "Great Darkness" has been criticized (or at least nuanced) by historians, Duplessis' legacy in Quebec is still controversial.
June 22, 1960: Québec holds elections for its National Assembly. Jean Lesage leads the Québec Liberal Party to a majority, ending 16 years of uninterrupted Union Nationale control and setting the stage for the Quiet Revolution, during which the provincial government and general society are extensively secularized, the province's welfare state is established, and provincial politics realign along the federalist–sovereigntist divide.
August 10, 1960: Diefenbaker passes the "Canadian Bill of Rights", one of the earliest Federal expressions of human rights in the country to attempt to finally begin to address Canada's spotty record in that field. Unfortunately, the fact that it was a simple law that had little impact on provincial affairs and could be arbitrarily changed by succeeding government made it unacceptably weak in practice. It would be decades later when Pierre Trudeau managed to create something much stronger with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
1961: The Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union is founded as the country's first truly national governing body for university sports. However, it only covers men's sports.
January 26, 1961: Wayne Gretzky, who would grow up to break many of Gordie Howe's records and set many of his own, is born in Brantford, Ontario.
June 1961: The Canadian Football League starts the eighth season of its modern era, and for the first time teams in the Eastern and Western Football Conferences (now the East and West Divisions) play regular-season games against one another. Previously, eastern and western teams only met in the Grey Cup.
July 13, 1961: CBC debuts a new children's show, Misterogers, starring — you guessed it — Fred Rogers. The show lasts for a few years, after which Rogers returns to the US to launch his now-famous show on WQED Pittsburgh. His co-star, fellow American Ernie Coombs, stays behind, finding fame as his boss' Canadian counterpart as a beloved TV icon, "Mr. Dressup".
September 29, 1962: The research satellite Alouette 1 is launched at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It is the first satellite to be built by a country other than the US or Soviet Union; Canada is the fourth country to operate a satellite, the British Ariel 1 having been launched five months earlier.
April 1964: Buffy Sainte-Marie, an Indigenous (Cree) folk singer-songwriter born on the Piapot reservation in Saskatchewan but raised by adoptive parents in Massachusetts, releases her debut album It's My Way!, featuring two of her most famous songs: "Universal Soldier" and ""Now That the Buffalo's Gone". The album proved to be influential on the folk music scene, in the process making Sainte-Marie one of the first Canadian musicians to become internationally famous.
December 1964: Country/folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot releases his self-titled debut album.
1964: Demolition of the historic black community of Africville in Halifax begins, in order to construct the approach to a new cross-harbour bridge. Residents are relocated to newer housing, but (as with other "urban renewal" projects in North America in the 1960s) the move is controversial in light of the racial dynamics of the region and the past relationship between Africville and the rest of the city. Decades of protests follow, culminating in the site's declaration as a National Historic Site in 1996 and an official apology with compensation in 2010.
February 15, 1965: Canada officially adopts its current maple leaf flag in a ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, replacing the British Union Jack and the Red Ensign, both of which had previously served as Canada’s vexillological icon. The design was chosen from over 3,500 submitted ideas from the public, with the winner being that of prominent historian George Stanley. Stanley’s design consciously eschewed any symbol or imagery that could be seen as specific to any racial group, culture or nation, especially a Union Jack or a fleur-de-lis (symbolic of French/Québecois culture).
Spring 1965: A Winnipeg-based rock band called Chad Allan and The Expressions releases a new single (a cover of “Shakin’ All Over” by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates) with the band’s name replaced with the words “GUESS WHO?” on the label as a publicity stunt to keep people guessing as to who the band was. The single becomes a number one hit in Canada, but disc jockeys continue to refer to the band as “Guess Who?” even after the band’s real identity is revealed. After lead singer Chad Allan leaves the group and is replaced by Burton Cummings the following year, the band makes it official and changes their name to The Guess Who.
July 1, 1965: Canadian diplomat Arnold Smith is appointed the first Secretary-General of The Commonwealth of Nations.
1967: Canada's centennial year. Every small town builds a Centennial hospital, high school, community centre, theatre, museum, or park to celebrate 100 years of Confederation.
April 28–October 27, 1967: Expo 67 is held in Montreal, a watershed moment for the city. On July 24, during an official visit to Canada for the fair, French president Charles de Gaulle shouts "Vive le Québec libre" to a volatile separatist-leaning crowd and is (politely, albeit through clenched teeth) told to go home. His speech was an enormous morale boost to the Quebec separatist movement, and a major headache to most other people. As for consequences, de Gaulle was criticized by the French media for his insult, and he got huffy and exposed his own hypocrisy when the Canadian Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau publicly mused how the French President would have liked it if the Canadian Prime Minister went to France and said "Brittany for the Bretons!"
May 1967: The Canadian Forces issue CFAO (Canadian Forces Administrative Order) 19-20, Sexual Deviation - Investigation, Medical Investigation and Disposal which empowers the military to investigate members of the military suspected of being homosexual, and then discharge them.
July 23–August 6, 1967: Winnipeg is host to the Fifth Pan Am Games. Canada will host the games two more times, in Winnipeg again in 1999, and Toronto (and surrounding area) in 2015.
September 1967: The Great Canadian Oil Sands mine near Fort McMurray, owned by the Sun Oil company of Ohio, opens up commercial production after 3 years of small scale production. While it is not particularly profitable early on, it eventually becomes a proof of concept that profit can be made extracting oil from Canadian oil sands. It pioneers several technology that revolutionize oil sand extraction.
December 27, 1967: Leonard Cohen, having previously made a name for himself as a poet and novelist, releases his first album of music, simply titled Songs of Leonard Cohen.
March 23, 1968: Alberta-born and Saskatoon-raised folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell releases her debut album Song to a Seagull after making an impression on David Crosby while playing in New York City coffeehouses. She would go on to be one of the most influential musicians to come out of the 1960s folk music scene.
March 30, 1968: Future singing superstar Céline Dion is born in Charlemagne, Québec. Canada is, characteristically, sorry.
April 20, 1968: Pierre Elliott Trudeau is sworn in as Prime Minister after unexpectedly winning the leadership of the incumbent Liberal Party two weeks before. He had entered public life in the 1950s as a hotshot lawyer, political commentator and public intellectual from Montréal, where he started a magazine that harshly criticized the provincial Duplessis government. He became a Member of Parliament in 1965 under Lester B. Pearson and was appointed federal justice minister in 1967, raising his profile enough to run for Liberal Party leadership the following year amid a wave of popularity dubbed “Trudeaumania”. Trudeau was seen as something of a maverick; a hip, handsome and charismatic alternative to the characteristic stuffiness of the Canadian political scene at the time, who said what he meant and did what he wanted in spite of what others may have thought. Over the course of his 16-year tenure as Prime Minister (including a 9-month interruption after narrowly losing the 1979 election to the Joe Clark-led Progressive Conservatives), Trudeau would prove to be a highly polarizing figure but is widely credited with liberalizing and modernizing Canadian politics and society; within just a year and change of him taking office, Canada decriminalized homosexuality, contraceptives, (therapeutic) abortions and some kinds of gambling, became officially bilingual, and strengthened gun control and laws against drunk driving, false advertising and animal abuse.
August 1968: Legendary progressive rock power trio Rush is formed in Toronto by guitarist Alex Lifeson (real name Živojinović, Serbian for “son of life”). A month later, original bassist and lead singer Jeff Jones is replaced by Gary Weinrib, better known as Geddy Lee.
November 12, 1968: After breaking up his band Buffalo Springfield and doing some session work for The Monkees, Winnipeg-raised Neil Young releases his debut self-titled album on his 23rd birthday. Along with the aforementioned Lightfoot, Sainte-Marie, Cohen and Mitchell, Young goes on to become one of the most popular Canadian singer-songwriters in history.
April 8, 1969: The Montreal Expos play their first game against the New York Mets. They are the first MLB team located outside the United States, and play in the city until relocation to Washington, DC after the 2004 season.
September 9, 1969: The first Official Languages Act declares Canada as a bilingual country with English and French receiving equal standing as official languages. The second Official Languages act, passed in 1988, strengthens the obligations presented herein. The amount of text on cereal boxes doubles overnight.
1970:
- Canadian Music has a paired breakthrough, with two songs hitting the top of the American Billboard charts by artists who prided themselves as being Canadian without the need to migrate to the States or disguising their nationality. The songs in question are "American Woman" by The Guess Who and "Snowbird" by Anne Murray. Their success helped solidify the movement to allow Canadian artists a fair shot of being heard in their own country over the seemingly overwhelming cacophony of American and British imports and show that Canada had its own music scene that deserves a level playing field. By 1971, the movement succeeded with the Canadian Content broadcasting rules dictating a certain minimum percentage of Canadian media product must be aired. While broadcasters spent years complaining and passively resisting these rules, they eventually paid off with a vibrant music scene at least that could make its own waves internationally with a secure home market.
- The Canadian Women's Interuniversity Athletic Union is formed as the first national governing body for women's university sports.
March 27, 1970: A "night of poetry" is held at the Église du Gésu in Montreal, attracting thousands. The poetry revolves around Quebec independence and French-Canadian identity. This invigorates the nationalist movement even further and indirectly leads to the events of October 1970.
May 27, 1970: Marie Dionne died of a stroke in her Montréal apartment, becoming the second of the Dionne Quintuplets to pass away.
October 1970: The October Crisis. The Québécois Marxist-Leninist separatist and nationalist group Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ) graduates from blowing up mailboxes and kidnaps the Labor Minister of Québec Pierre Laporte, and a British trade commissioner named James Cross. On the 13th, CBC reporter Tim Ralfe asks Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau how far he's willing to go to solve the crisis. "Just watch me," Trudeau replies, and he invokes the War Measures Act (i.e. martial law) to enable police to arrest and detain suspected FLQ members and sympathizers. Pierre Laporte is murdered and his body is found in the trunk of a car on October 17, 7 days after he was abducted. James Cross was released unharmed on December 3. However, the War Measures Act is predictably abused, and hundreds are detained with no reason given (and then released without being charged for anything). By the end of the year, the FLQ cell that did the kidnapping and murdering (their actions ended up killing five people and wounding a lot more, mainly with bombs) has been rounded up. While Trudeau was criticized for this move by principled politicians like Tommy Douglas, it was still immensely popular with the general Canadian public, including some Québécois (the provincial government of Quebec and the administration of the city of Montreal urged the federal government to enact the War Measures Act), and supporters argued it took violence off the table for Quebec separatism permanently, while shifting Quebec separatism closer to the more moderate center-left. The opinion of Quebecers at the time in regards to the FLQ is mixed. While many agreed or were sympathetic to their grievances, it was generally believed that they went too far and were too extreme.
1971: The first theater operated by the Montreal company IMAX is opened in Toronto, after building industry interest with early prototypes of their movie format showcased at both the Montreal Expo '67 (as "Multiscreen") and Osaka Expo '70 (the first time the name "IMAX" was used).
1972:
- Canada plays the Summit Series, an eight-game hockey tournament pitting their best players (banned from the Olympic Games because they were overwhelmingly professional) against the Soviet Red Army team. After losing game four 5–3 in Vancouver, Canadian captain Phil Esposito delivers an emotional outburst delivered toward the Canadian public, whom he perceives as not fully supporting their team. In the last game, series tied 3–3 with one tie, Paul Henderson scores the game-winner off a rebound, his third in the last three games. Canadians across the country celebrate; any Canadian who grew up in that period can tell you where he or she was when Henderson scored.
- Canada officially adopts 9-1-1 as its central emergency phone number, although it took more than a decade for it to become ubiquitous.
September 28, 1972: The Citytv network goes on the air as a single station in Toronto (originally on channel 79). Led by televisionary Moses Znaimer (formerly of the CBC), it aimed to revolutionize local television. After a rocky start (where the station relied on late-night softcore porn to survive), it eventually grew into a dynamic force, renowned for their local focus and impressive shows; their CityPulse newscast popularized standing up and walking around for anchors and gained note for having non-white and disabled on-air staff, while the 1990 spin-off series Speaker’s Corner foreshadowed the YouTube era by allowing anyone with $1 to record themselves for 2 minutes in a video booth on the street for a chance to be aired on TV. Citytv became the heart of the CHUM Limited media empire, encompassing both over-the-air stations and specialty cable networks like MuchMusic (which helped to nurture Canadian musicians via the CanCon requirements). Notably, their relatively transgressive content combined with Znaimer’s personal philosophy was a key inspiration for David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome. Sadly, after Moses "left" in 2003, City (which had begun expanding to other Canadian cities, acquiring many local stations), Much and most of the other CHUM assets quickly began to fall into Network Decay, with CHUM's buyout by CTV sealing their fate (though City had to be sold to Rogers, which promptly gutted the stations of their souls and turned them into import-reliant stations like CTV).
February 7, 1974: Steve Nash, who would grow up to become the first Canadian to be NBA MVP, is born in South Africa's largest city of Johannesburg. His family would move to Canada about 18 months later, settling briefly in Saskatchewan's capital of Regina before permanently moving to BC's capital of Victoria.
June 1974: The Canadian Football League season starts with another milestone—for the first time, all teams play the same number of regular-season games (16). Previously, Eastern Conference teams played 14 games and Western Conference teams 16.
June 29, 1974: Soviet ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov defects after a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at Toronto's O'Keefe Centre. He performs briefly with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and National Ballet of Canada before moving to the United States.
July 31, 1974: Québec's Official Language Act receives royal assent, making French the sole official language of the province.
November 15, 1974: Chad Kroeger of Nickelback is born. Again, Canada is sorry.
November 10, 1975: The US ore freighter Edmund Fitzgerald breaks up and sinks in Canadian waters in Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members on board. Gordon Lightfoot will write and record a chart-topping song about the disaster the following year, making it the most famous of sinkings on the Great Lakes.
June 26, 1976: The CN Tower in Toronto is opened to the public. The 553.3-meter-high tower will be the tallest free-standing structure in the world until 2007, when it is passed by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
July 17–August 1, 1976: Montreal hosts the Games of the XXI Olympiad. No Canadian athlete wins a gold medal. Mayor Jean Drapeau famously stated, after his city was awarded the games back in 1970, "The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby." Montreal didn't pay off the Olympic debt until 2006, and most Olympics since have run deficits. (The main exceptions have been the Games held in the States, all of which have been profitable. Both Winter Games hosted by Canada, 1988 in Calgary and 2010 in Vancouver, made small profits.) The Olympic Stadium, a white elephant among white elephants, stands with no permanent tenant; despite its reputation for structural issues, it is too strongly built to be demolished by any means but implosion... which can't be done without destroying the subway tunnel directly beneath.
September 21, 1976: The sketch show SCTV, starring members of the Toronto branch of the Second City comedy troupe, airs for the first time on the Global network. It would move to the CBC in 1980, and NBC began transmitting it in the United States the next year. The show would become a launching ground for the careers of many of Canada's most famous and beloved entertainers, including John Candy, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara and Rick Moranis. Ironically, the most famous running sketch was created as pure filler to satisfy the CBC's idea for satisfying Canadian Content requirements: "The Great White North", starring Bob (Moranis)& Doug McKenzie (Dave Thomas).
November 15, 1976: René Lévesque leads the sovereigntist Parti Québécois to a resounding victory in the Québec general election, with PQ rocketing from 6 seats in the National Assembly to a solid majority of 71, while the scandal-plagued Québec Liberals plunge from 102 to 26, with their leader Robert Bourassa defeated in his own riding. The election of a sovereigntist government causes great consternation in Anglophone Canada, leading to extensive discussions about reforming Confederation to accommodate Québec.
1977: Ontario folk singer-songwriter Stan Rogers releases his debut album Fogarty's Cove, which features his best known composition, the a cappella sea shanty "Barrett's Privateers". Rogers would become highly influential on Canadian folk music with his compositions about the working lives of everyday people, particularly fishermen and other nautical occupations. Sadly, his career would be short, as he would die in the fire of Air Canada Flight 797 in 1983. Legend has it that Rogers made it out of the plane safe, but went back in to help others and died from smoke inhalation in the process.
April 7, 1977: The Toronto Blue Jays, which were announced the previous year as Canada's second MLB team, play their first game at Exhibition Stadium on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds on Toronto's lakefront. While they beat the Chicago White Sox 9–5, the game is equally remembered for the brief snowstorm that hit shortly before the first pitch.
August 26, 1977: The Charter of the French Language (aka "Bill 101"), passed by the Québec National Assembly earlier that year, receives royal assent. It expands on the 1974 Official Language Act, making French the sole language of the workplace, advertising space, and education (with many exceptions).
1978: In university sports, the CIAU and WCIAU merge, with the merged body renaming itself the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union. (Notably, this was three years before the NCAA in the States started holding championships in women's sports.) The body operates to this day, having changed its name to Canadian Interuniversity Sport in 2001 and the current U Sports in 2016.
June 12, 1978: Wayne Gretzky, then a 17-year-old hockey phenom, scores his first professional goal while playing for the Indianapolis Racers of the short-lived World Hockey Association. He won't be in Indianapolis or the WHA for long, as he was traded to the Edmonton Oilers in October, and the Oilers were one of the WHA teams picked to join the NHL when the two leagues merged in 1979. Thus begins the career of one of the greatest (and certainly the most famous) hockey player of all time.
February 3, 1979: You Can't Do That on Television, a sketch comedy series aimed at and starring children and pre-teens, premieres on CJOH-TV in Ottawa. The show moves to the fledgling American kids' network Nickelodeon the next year, and become one of the channel's first hits and a cult favorite on both sides of the border. The show originated the “green slime” motif that would later become a trademark of Nickelodeon as a whole, and the 1986 season featured a young actress named Alanis Morissette.
July 31, 1979: Detroit businessman Manuel "Matty" Moroun acquires a controlling interest in the Ambassador Bridge. This will be significant in later decades, as Moroun would become a staunch opponent of a third Detroit–Windsor road crossing.
September 12, 1979: The short film Ida Makes a Movie airs on the CBC. A few more shorts featuring the same characters would air over the next few years using the overarching name The Kids of Degrassi Street. Over the next decade, the ensuing Degrassi ensemble teen-drama franchise would become one of Canada's most popular children's television series, even earning a sizable fanbase in the United States. Its 2001–2015 reboot, Degrassi: The Next Generation expanded that international fanbase and gave a kid from Toronto named Aubrey Graham his start in show business.
November 10, 1979: A freight train carrying a wide variety of hazardous chemicals derails in Mississauga, Ontario. More than 200,000 people are evacuated from the city in what was the largest peacetime evacuation in North America until Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The city's response earns Mayor Hazel McCallion the undying respect of residents, and she remains mayor until her retirement in 2014.
April 10, 1980: Gordie Howe's top-level hockey career ends when the Canadiens complete a 3–0 sweep of the Hartford Whalers in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Howe remains the oldest player in NHL history, at 52 years, 10 days.Postscript
April 12, 1980: Long-distance runner Terry Fox, who had lost a leg above the knee to bone cancer three years previously, begins his “Marathon of Hope” to raise money for cancer research by collecting donations while jogging from one end of the country to the other, running the equivalent of a marathon each day on a prosthetic leg. He starts at the country’s easternmost point in St. John’s, Newfoundland and heads west. By the time he arrives in Montréal in late June, he has become a nationally-known figure and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tragically, he is forced to stop on September 1st outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario when he became too winded to keep running and discovered his cancer had returned and spread to his lungs. Fox eventually dies 10 months later in late June of 1981 at the age of 22. He did not run in vain, however, as subsequent Terry Fox Runs held in his honor have raised millions of dollars for cancer research. He has become one of the most admired and inspirational individuals in modern Canadian history, with statues and monuments and namesakes aplenty, and he was voted the second-greatest Canadian ever in a nationwide poll in 2004, only beat out by Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian Medicare.
May 20, 1980: Québec has its first referendum to see if the province would bargain about leaving Canada. The “No/Non” side wins by 60%.
1981:
- The “Canadarm”, a giant robotic arm, is first tested in orbit aboard a space shuttle. It's one of Canada's biggest contributions to space exploration, used for deploying or retrieving payloads. A Canadarm will be installed on all 5 space shuttles and they will serve in over 90 missions.
- The Canadian Football League becomes a single entity for the first time, with the Eastern and Western Conferences agreeing to a full merger and becoming the league's East and West Divisions. Previously, the conferences had been separate entities, much like the National and American Leagues of Major League Baseball would technically remain until 2000.
November 13, 1981: Porky's, a bawdy sex comedy filmed entirely in Canada, is released and becomes a global box office smash. It becomes the highest-grossing Canadian film in history, both domestically and internationally. This achievement has an asterisk next to it, however, because the film was directed and written by an American, starred American actors, had no discernible Canadian content, was set in Florida, and was only filmed in Canada for the tax credit.
December 30, 1981: Wayne Gretzky, playing for the Edmonton Oilers, breaks the record of 50 goals in 50 games in one season previously set by hockey legend Maurice Richard by scoring 50 goals in 39 games in one season.
April 17, 1982: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II signs the Canada Act, 1982, officially severing all legislative dependence on the United Kingdom. The significance of this act is that Canada is now able to amend her own Constitution, having agreed, more or less, what do with it. The actual content of the act is, typically for Canada, a mishmash of agreements and compromises, hailed by some and deplored by others. Québec doesn't sign; despite two later attempts are reconciliation, Québec still hasn't ratified the 1982 constitution. In typically Canadian fashion, this fact has no legal significance whatsoever, and consumes the country in constitutional infighting for the next decade. In addition, the constitution's Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms enshrined a specific bill of rights into Canada's politics and gave its courts considerable power to interpret and enforce it. For instance, while the Equal Rights Amendment was failing in its ratification fight in the United States, feminist activists in Canada managed to get the equivalent language in the Charter included, which among other rights victories later, led to the blanket decriminalisation of abortion in 1988 in a Charter challenge. Alas, Trudeau had to compromise with the provincial premieres who wanted to preserve the supremacy of parliament with the "Notwithstanding Clause," in which many of the rights enshrined can be arbitrarily overruled for up to five years by the Federal or any of the provincial parliaments. Thankfully, this has at least become nigh-unthinkable on the Federal level to use even if various provinces have not felt that inhibited.
August 8, 1982: Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, a low-budget B-movie and the directorial debut of Ontario native James Cameron, opens in theaters ... in Italy. The movie barely made back its budget, but it's only the start of Cameron's career. Over the next three decades, he would go on to make some of the most popular and highest-grossing films of all time, including The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar.
1983: The rock band The Tragically Hip is founded in Kingston, Ontario. From humble beginnings playing Monkees covers in bars with a shower curtain as a backdrop, they become one of the most popular rock bands in Canada despite not being much of a deal in the US or elsewhere. To this day, any given commercial rock radio station in Canada can be expected to play at least one song by the Hip within the next hour.
July 23, 1983: Air Canada Flight 143 runs out of fuel halfway through a flight from Montreal to Edmonton. Fortunately, the captain was an experienced glider pilot, enabling him to control the Boeing 767 enough to land at a former RCAF base in Gimli, Manitoba... though unknown to the crew, parts of the base had been converted to an auto racing facility, and a race was going on at that very moment. Thankfully, no one on the plane or the ground was injured. Investigation found that the incident was caused by a series of mechanical and human errors surrounding the refueling system. The flight entered aviation history as the Gimli Glider.
1984: The sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall form in Toronto. The five-member troupe performs around Canada for the next few years before being noticed by Saturday Night Live creator and producer Lorne Michaels in 1988. The troupe's Michaels-produced sketch series The Kids in the Hall debuts on the CBC in October 1988, and becomes a cult favorite in the United States when HBO picks it up in 1989. After a few hiatuses along the way, the Kids continue to perform on stage and television to this day and each member has a respectable career of their own, most notably Dave Foley as one of the stars of the American sitcom NewsRadio.
October 5, 1984: Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian in space aboard the Challenger spacecraft. He is followed over the next 30 years by eight more scientists, two robotic arms, and a clown.
June 16, 1984: Cirque du Soleil is founded in Quebec by Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix and stages their first performance piece, Le Grand Tour, later that summer. Over the next several decades, the troupe becomes world renowned for their quirky, acrobatic, character-driven, and very Franco-Canadian stage and circus performances.
March 20, 1985: Inspired by Terry Fox, Rick Hansen—paralyzed from the waist down since an auto accident in 1973—begins the Man in Motion tour at the Oakridge Mall in Vancouver. Over the next twenty-six months, he pushes his wheelchair over forty thousand kilometres around the world to raise money for research into spinal cord injuries. David Foster and John Parr write the song "St. Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion)" in his honour.
1985: Having been an emerging figure on the Canadian literary scene for several years, feminist author Margaret Atwood publishes the dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, in which the United States government has been overthrown by a patriarchal Christian theocracy that enslaves women for the purpose of breeding. The book will later be adapted into a television series by the same name.
May 2-October 13, 1986: Another World’s Fair, Expo ‘86, is held in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was a cultural and infrastructural boon for the area; Vancouver went from being regarded as an unremarkable port city to a world-class metropolis, and the monorail/subway system known as SkyTrain was built for it (as was BC Place Stadium, the Canada Place convention centre, and the giant orb later to be known as Science World). It wasn’t without controversy, however:
- In the run-up to the fair, in preparation for the hundreds of thousands of tourists that would soon pour in, over a thousand residents of the Downtown Eastside—essentially a ghetto—were evicted from their homes in single-room occupancy hotels, sometimes with only a day’s notice. One of them, an elderly Norwegian immigrant named Olaf Solheim, is so traumatized by his eviction that he becomes depressed and starves himself to death. In response, a few Vancouver punk bands (led by D.O.A., known for their left-wing activism and advocacy) release a EP for the evictees titled Expo Hurts Everyone, hold a benefit concert at Stanley Park featuring Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and personally boycott the fair itself.
- At the opening ceremonies, Diana, Princess of Wales, attending with her then-husband the future King Charles III, faints in the presence of onlookers at the California Pavillion. At the time it is attributed to simple exhaustion and overheating, but several years later Di reveals that it was actually caused by the eating disorder she was suffering from at the time. Charles is said to have chastised her for not fainting in a more private setting.
- On May 9, a nine-year-old girl from Nanaimo named Karen Ford is crushed to death between two giant revolving turntables at the Canadian Pavillion. After a while, the pavillion reopens with new safety measures in place.
- On August 4, Slow—a local punk band that hadn’t boycotted the fair—plays opening night of the Festival of Independent Recording Artists. Lead singer Thomas Anselmi’s stage antics that night include throwing wooden two-by-fours into the audience and stripping down to his underwear, through which he would occasionally expose his penis. The show ends with the organizers cutting the power to the stage, Anselmi mooning the audience and bassist Stephen Hamm getting completely naked below the waist. Later in the night, angry fans storm BCTV‘s studios and force them to end their nightly newscast and play their late night movie early; appropriately enough, it just so happens to be Rock 'n' Roll High School.
February 13–28, 1988: Calgary hosts the XV Olympic Winter Games. The Soviet Union and East Germany dominate the podium, with no Canadian athlete winning a gold medal (their gold in curling doesn't officially count because it was a demonstration sport at the time). Britain's Michael "Eddie the Eagle" Edwards and Jamaica's bobsled team compete despite having no hope of success. The Jamaican bobsled team's performance will be dramatized in Disney's 1993 Cool Runnings, and Edwards will become the subject of a 2016 film. The finances are a notable improvement over the Games in Montreal, generating a surplus.
September 2, 1988: Following a similar move by the Reagan administration a month earlier, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney officially apologizes for the internment of Japanese-Canadians in WWII and pledges financial redress to the survivors.
May 4, 1989: The Canadian Pacific Railway inaugurates the 14.7 km-long Mount Macdonald Tunnel, the longest railway tunnel in North America.note
December 6, 1989: Fourteen women note are killed and 14 others (10 women, 4 men) are wounded at Montreal's École Polytechnique in Canada's largest mass shooting until 2020. The perpetrator specifically targeted women as part of an anti-feminist agenda, before taking his own life. The misogynistic nature of the atrocities gave the gun control debate, especially in Québec, a strong correlation with women issues that persists to this day.
July 1990: The Oka Crisis. A golf course in the town of Oka, Québec—just west of Montréal—releases plans to expand onto what the local Mohawk community of Kanehsatà:ke claim is their traditional land. The resulting protests lead to weeks of confusion and tense standoffs between Indigenous protesters, local police, and the Canadian Army. The only known casualty is SQ Corporal Marcel Lemay. In 1993, Indigenous filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin and the National Film Board of Canada release a documentary about the crisis, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. In 2010, Lemay’s sister publishes a book detailing her own journey for understanding and forgiveness.
August 1990: A previously unknown artist named François Pérusse launches Les 2 Minutes du Peuple (The People's 2 Minutes) on Montreal's CKOI-FM radio station. His 2 minutes humoristic sketches and songs are an instant hit with the Québécois public, and his career (still going strong in 2023) will make him a giant of comedy not only in Quebec but in French-speaking Europe as well, and he will receive many prestigious awards, like 7 Rubans d'Or (Golden Ribbons) from the Canadian Association of Broadcasters.
March 15, 1991: Vancouver-based writer and artist Douglas Coupland publishes his first novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularizing the use of the term “Generation X” to refer to those born between (roughly speaking) 1964 and 1980.note The period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the election of Ronald Reagan was one of massive and rapid social change, and by this time Gen X-ers were often stereotyped by older generations as being cynical slackers obsessed with “alternative” music and culture and stuck in a state of permanent adolescence. Regardless of one’s opinion on the matter, it shouldn’t be surprising that those who were born and raised in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the height of the Cold War, The Vietnam War, the rise and fall of the hippie movement, the career of The Beatles, and the emergence of Punk Rock and MTV might have a slightly different perspective on things than their parents.
December 1991: After three years of making a name for themselves in the local music scene, alternative rock group Barenaked Ladies is banned from performing a New Year’s Eve concert at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square by a staffer for then-mayor June Rowlands, on the grounds that the band’s name “objectifies women”. It doesn’t help that the band consists of five men and no ladies, but it is ironic considering their growing popularity and relatively clean, family-friendly image (the name was intended to sound childlike, not sexist). Though the band takes it in stride, the story becomes national news and propels “BNL” to fame, with the public overwhelmingly taking the band’s side and Rowlands being labeled a prude, despite the decision not actually being hers. The publicity boost helps their debut full-length album Gordon reach the top of the Canadian charts the following year and fuels a career that continues to this day.
1992: With society slowly liberalizing, the ban on LGBT people serving in the Canadian Forces is lifted.
January 22, 1992: Roberta Bondar is the first Canadian woman to go in outer space.
August 24, 1992: Tragedy strikes at the Concordia University in Montreal, where a professor goes on a gun rampage and murders four colleagues (Phoivos Ziogas, Matthew Douglass, Michael Hogben, Aaraon Jaan Saber) and wounds Elizabeth Horwood, a departmental staff secretary. The perpetrator is captured and sentenced to life in prison.
October 24, 1992: The Toronto Blue Jays defeat the Atlanta Braves in six games off Joe Carter catching the final hit (a pop-fly to left field), becoming the first non-American team to win the World Series.
October 23, 1993: The Blue Jays defeat the Philadelphia Phillies in six games, winning their second back-to-back World Series thanks to a walk-off home run by Joe Carter — only the second time in MLB history that a World Series has been won in this way. Blue Jays' radio announcer Tom Cheek makes a widely remembered call of the winning play.
June 9, 1993: The Montreal Canadiens defeat the Los Angeles Kings in five games to win their twenty-fourth Stanley Cup. For some reason, the Canadiens fans decided a riot would be the perfect way to celebrate the win. It is also the last time (as of 2023) that a Canadian team won the Cup.
June 25, 1993: After Brian Mulroney resigned, Kim Campbell was appointed Prime Minister, becoming the first female PM of Canada. Four months and one notorious campaign ad later, the Progressive Conservative Party suffered the most humiliating defeat in the history of Canadian politics.note
October 25, 1993: The federal election in question — while solidly won by Jean Chrétien's Liberals, it also became notable for the dramatic results outside of the government's formation. While the socially conservative Reform Party, formed in 1987 by (mainly) breakaway Tories, replaced the PCs as the main right-wing party in Canada by storming ridings in British Columbia and Alberta,note the role of Official Opposition wound up going to the pro-separatist (and somewhat social democratic) Bloc Québécois, who picked up the former Tory seats in the province. Caught in the middle are the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), who win below a million votes for the first (and last) time ever, getting fewer votes than the PCs.note
March 1, 1994: Justin Bieber was born. Do you think that warrants another apology?
Late 1994: A new and larger St. Clair Tunnel opens next to the original one, which had carried rail traffic from Port Huron, Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario since 1891. The old tunnel is closed.
October 30, 1995: Québec has its second referendum to see if the province would bargain about leaving Canada. In a tense evening, the No/Non side wins with 50.58%. As it transpired, as close as that vote was, it would be the last so far. Ironically, the Québec premier, and the most ardent separatist leader of the day, Jacques Parizeau, inadvertently helped make that possible when he publicly embarrassed the Québec sovereignty movement with a petulant speech in which he blamed the defeat on "money and ethnic votes." With that outburst, he all but guaranteed that minority communities would never support future independence with leaders who had that kind of attitude. As such, the needed "winning conditions" for a third referendum have proved hopeless to achieve since then.
November 3, 1995: The Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies make their NBA debuts, becoming the league's first Canadian teams since the Toronto Huskies played their only league season in 1946–47. The Raptors started their season at home in SkyDome (now Rogers Centre), beating the New Jersey Nets 94–79. The Grizzlies beat the Portland Trail Blazers 92–80 in Portland, and two days later won their home debut at General Motors Place (now Rogers Arena), beating the Minnesota Timberwolves 100–98 in overtime.
November 1, 1996: The last residential school closes in Saskatchewan. Since the 1800s, such schools had removed Native children from their families with the intent of making them fit with Canadian society through "aggressive assimilation". By the time the federal government realized the serious problems with this policy and begins shutting down the schools in the 1970s, thousands of kids had suffered physical, emotional, and in some cases sexual abuse in these schools, and a great deal of cultural heritage was lost as the kids never learned their own culture or language. In 2008, the Prime Minister formally apologized for the tragedy, and in 2009 the Governor General reintroduced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to collect stories from survivors of the residential school system and aid in healing.
November 24-25, 1997: That year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference is held on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The series of meetings with the leaders of Pacific Rim countries is marred by protests over the presence of authoritarian rulers, most notably Indonesia’s president Suharto. Eventually the RCMP is brought in to deal with one of the protests, and they use tear gas to disperse the crowd. At a press conference later that day, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is questioned by local media figure Nardwuar the Human Serviette about whether it is appropriate to use pepper spray on protestors in a free country. Chrétien, notorious for his occasionally less-than-perfect command of the English language, seems confused by and unfamiliar with the term “pepper spray” and famously responds “For me, pepper, I put it on my plate.” The comment is widely mocked, and a public inquiry eventually finds in 2001 that the Mounties did indeed use excessive force.
January 1998: The January 1998 North America Ice Storm hits parts of Eastern Ontario, Southern Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the northern parts of Vermont, Maine and New York. An abundance of freezing rain, where the rain itself is liquid and kept liquid by air pressure but immediately freezes on contact from subzero temperatures, caused major damage, paralyzing roads, railways and airfields and damaging or destroying the power grid (either from frozen cables or utility poles and pylons breaking, or trees breaking and taking down cables with them). Millions of Canadians, mostly in the province of Quebec, go without lighting and sometimes without heating (in January, in Canada) and some power outages last for over a month. The military is mobilized with 12,000 soldiers in Quebec alone and 4000 in Ontario, the largest mobilization since The Korean War. The power grid is rebuilt with lessons learned in winterization to prevent something similar happening.
September 1998: Quebec-born director Denis Villeneuve releases his debut feature film August 32nd on Earth, which marks the start of the career of one of Canada's most celebrated arthouse filmmakers.
April 1, 1999: Canada's newest political entity, the territory of Nunavut, is founded in the eastern half of the Northwest Territories. Meaning "Our Land" in Inuktitut, it is created in response to the land claims of the Inuit, one of the northern Aboriginal populations.
April 18, 1999: Wayne Gretzky, by this time playing for the New York Rangers, skates in his final hockey game. By this time, he holds pretty much every major hockey record, has been on four Stanley Cup teams and has become an international symbol for both Canada and ice hockey. Upon his retirement, he is immediately inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. In February 2000, his number 99 is retired across the entire NHL.
September 28, 2000: Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau dies. He is mourned throughout the country, with 60,000 people visiting his open casket at Parliament Hill before his body is taken by train to Montreal for his state funeral on October 3. A tearful eulogy by his 28-year-old son Justin is the highlight of that ceremony, as it's widely considered to be the start of the younger Trudeau's eventual rise to being elected prime minister himself.
June 23, 2001: Yvette Dionne, the oldest of the Dionne quintuplets, dies, leaving Annette and Cécile as the last two (with both still alive in 2024).
September 11, 2001: In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, all air traffic in Canada and the United States is grounded. Two hundred thirty-eight flights were diverted from US airspace and forced to land at Canadian airports. While not the largest recipient of diverted flights, Gander International Airport in Newfoundland is noteworthy for its ratio of arriving passengers and crew to population: 38 flights and nearly 7,000 on board, all of whom had to be housed in a city of about 9,000. The generous response of the town's residents to the "plane people" over the following days is the subject of the Broadway musical Come from Away.
2001:
- Canada invades Afghanistan as part of a NATO mission to capture Osama bin Laden in retaliation for 9/11. For the next ten years, Canadian troops were mostly based around Kandahar.
- After six seasons of pathetic play (never having won more than 23 games out of 82 in a season), the Vancouver Grizzlies move across the border to Memphis, leaving the Raptors as Canada's only NBA team.
February 21 and 24, 2002: Canada's women's and men's ice hockey teams win gold at the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was Canada's first gold in women's ice hockey and first gold in men's ice hockey since 1952. Both games were legendary for the placement of a "lucky loonie" at centre ice by Canadian icemaker Trent Evans. Both teams would win gold once again in 2010 and 2014 (with the women's team also winning in 2006).
2002: Amidst pressure from the States, Canada largely refuses to participate in military action in Iraq. One noted Canadian political figure remarks, "Iraq and Afghanistan are dangerous enemies, but the United States is a dangerous ally." As such, while still involved in prolonged operations in Afghanistan for years, Canada is spared being sucked into the bloody quagmire of the occupation of Iraq as well.
2003: The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada merges with the Canadian Alliance, which succeeded the Reform Party in 2000, to form the Conservative Party of Canada.
2004: A third road crossing of the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit is first proposed. It meets immediate opposition from Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun.
September 29, 2004: Major League Baseball officially announces that the Montreal Expos will relocate to Washington, D.C. after the season. That night, the Expos play their final home game at Stade Olympique, a 9–1 loss to the Florida (now Miami) Marlins—a team owned at the time by Jeffrey Loria, whose former ownership of the Expos is frequently cited to this day as one of the many reasons for the team's relocation. The Expos would finish the season on the road, losing their last-ever game before relocation 8–1 to the New York Mets on October 3.
July 20, 2005: Canada becomes the fourth country to legalize gay marriage. Eight provinces had already done so. The political support proved so powerful that when the new Conservative Party formed a government under new Prime Minister Stephen Harper six months later, he staged a free vote in Parliament on the issue in anticipation of it going against him in order to move past the issue without alienating his base as fast as he could.
September 27, 2005: Michaëlle Jean, a refugee from Haïti, becomes Governor General of Canada. She is the first born outside of Canada and the first "visible minority" note to hold the (mostly symbolic) office.
February 24, 2006: Brad Gushue becomes the first Newfoundlander to win an Olympic gold medal when Team Canada wins gold in men's curling in Torino. Schools across Newfoundland closed so students could watch the game live.
June 22, 2006: Prime Minister Stephen Harper publicly (and in Cantonese) apologizes for the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants early in the country's history and announces that the survivors and their families will receive compensation for the head tax.
September 13, 2006: A lone gunman opens fire at the Dawson College in Montreal. One person, Anastasia de Sousa, was murdered, 19 were injured (8 critically, with 6 requiring surgery). The shooter took his own life.
April 7, 2007: Toronto FC starts play in Major League Soccer, losing its first game to Chivas USA in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson, California. TFC would also lose its first home game on April 28 at BMO Field, built on the former site of the demolished Exhibition Stadium, to the Kansas City Wizards (now known as Sporting Kansas City).
February 13, 2009: Degrassi actor Aubrey Graham, who had started a rap career under his middle name of Drake, releases his first major label single "Best I Ever Had", which would become an international hit that summer. Drake would spend the next decade as one of the biggest musical acts in the world.
September 30, 2009: Guy Laliberté, billionaire, co-founder of the Cirque du Soleil and clown, spends 35 million USD to go to space, becoming the first Canadian space tourist. He tried to pass it off as a publicity stunt so he could say it's a business expense when tax season came, but the government didn't buy it and brought him down to Earth.
February 12–28, 2010: Vancouver hosts the XXI Winter Olympic Games. Alexandre Bilodeau breaks his home country's winter gold drought and sparks a gold rush to put Canada at the top of the medals ranking with fourteen gold medals, more than any other host country, capped with a spectacular overtime win in men's ice hockey. The closing ceremonies feature always-enjoyable giant inflatable beavers and possibly the densest concentration of Canadian stereotypes and tropes yet achieved.
March 19, 2011:
- Canadian Forces participate in the UN-sanctioned 2011 NATO military interventions in Libya, as part of the wider Arab Spring. Canada, along with France, the UK and the USA, enforce a no-fly zone over the country to prevent airstrikes on rebels and civilians by the Gaddafi government. This is codenamed Operation Mobile note , and the command of the whole NATO operation (called Unified Protector) is given to Quebec-born Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard, since his mastery of French and English lets him talk to all 4 armed forces present in the theater of operation.
- Vancouver Whitecaps FC debuts as the second Canadian team in MLS, defeating Toronto FC at Empire Field, a temporary stadium the Whitecaps used while their permanent home of BC Place was being renovated.
May 2, 2011: The federal election saw a huge win for the NDP, with Jack Layton's "Orange Crush" leads the NDP becoming the official opposition the first time in the party's history. The Conservatives also saw a victory as they move from a minority government to a majority government. The Liberals lost over half their seats and were demoted to third party status. The Bloc Québécois suffered heavily as they lost most of their forty seats to the NDP. Also the Green Party acquired a single seat.
July 2011: The Canadarm is used for the last time. Since the Space Shuttles have been decommissioned, the Canadarm is now obsolete. The Canadarm2, a component of the International Space Station, continues in use alongside the "Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator", or Dextre.
August 22, 2011: Only a few months after the NDP's success, its leader, the charismatic and popular Jack Layton, dies of cancer. Politicians of all parties, who considered him a Worthy Opponent, express their sorrow, and Stephen Harper (Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader) declares a state funeral.
March 10, 2012: The Montreal Impact, now known as CF Montréal, starts play in Major League Soccer, losing its first game to Vancouver Whitecaps FC in the latter team's first match at BC Place. The Impact would draw its first home game on March 17 at Stade Olympique against the Chicago Fire.
2012: The Windsor–Detroit Bridge Authority, a Canadian crown corporation, is established to coordinate the construction of the third border road crossing.
April 12, 2013: The US government approves a building permit for the third Detroit–Windsor border road crossing.
July 6, 2013: A runaway freight train carrying crude oil derails and explodes in the small town of Lac Mégantic, Québec, killing 47 and obliterating the downtown area.
October 2013: Short-story writer Alice Munro becomes the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
May 2014: The US Coast Guard issues a bridge permit for the third Detroit–Windsor border crossing, removing the last US federal obstacle to construction.
October 22, 2014: A gunman with self-proclaimed ties to ISIS and a stolen lever-action rifle ambushes and kills Corporal Nathan Cirillo, standing on ceremonial duty at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. He then makes his way to the nearby Parliament's central building where MPs are conducting caucuses. There he wounds 3 more people before being shot and killed by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons Kevin Vickers. This is the most serious security breach at Parliament since the 1966 bombing. Fun fact, Conservative MPs had grabbed flagpoles to serve as impromptu spears and were ready to make a Last Stand in their hastily barricaded meeting room. Badass Bureaucrat indeed.
May 14, 2015: The third Detroit–Windsor road crossing is officially named the Gordie Howe International Bridge, honouring the Saskatchewan-born hockey great who played most of his NHL career in Detroit.
August 1, 2015: Rush plays what would prove to be their final concert. The trio had played together for over 40 years and had become one of Canada's best-selling bands worldwide. That December, drummer Neil Peart announces he has retired, and the band would never perform together again before his death in January 2020 from brain cancer (a condition that he hadn’t revealed publicly in his lifetime).
October 19, 2015: After nearly ten years of hard-right rule (for Canada) by the Conservative Party under PM Stephen Harper, the party was toppled from power. The new PM is Pierre Trudeau's eldest son, Justin Trudeau, who helped leapfrog the Liberal Party of Canada from third place to the governing one with a strong majority in Parliament.note This kind of victory has not happened since 1925 and it is the first time that the child of a Canadian Prime Minister has won the position himself.
May 3, 2016: A wildfire south of the town of Fort McMurray, Alberta, hotbed of tar-sands-oil-based development, surges out of control to jump two rivers and surround the town, forcing a mass evacuation of over 88,000 people. The fire, nicknamed "The Beast" by firefighters for its tendency to be savage and unpredictable, destroyed over 2,400 homes (10% of the town) before being turned away, though the dedicated action of the firefighters resulted in zero deaths from the fire (two people died in a car accident while evacuating). As well, firefighters were able to save all significant infrastructure, allowing residents to return home starting June 1. This was the largest mass evacuation in Alberta's history and the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history according to the Canadian Insurance Bureau.
June 10, 2016: Gordie Howe passes away at the home of one of his sons near Toledo, Ohio. His funeral is held in Detroit, where he played for most of his NHL career, and his cremated remains are later interred at the base of his statue outside Saskatoon's main arena, SaskTel Centre.
August 20, 2016: The Tragically Hip play their last-ever concert, in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Frontman Gord Downie had been diagnosed with terminal glioblastoma (a rare form of brain cancer)note earlier in the year, but the band decided to go ahead with the tour as a final farewell and celebration. National broadcaster CBC cancels all other programming (during the Olympics) to play the concert with no commercial breaks, and towns and cities across the country host livestream events. An estimated 11.7 million people watch, making it the second most watched moment in Canadian broadcast history.
January 29, 2017: Six worshippers are killed note and another nineteen injured when a lone gunman opens fire at a mosque in Québec City; the shooter is apprehended and charged with murder. In February 2018, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 40 years. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard told the Muslim community of Quebec "We're with you. You are home, you are welcome in your home. We're all Québécois."
October 1, 2017: Jagmeet Singh becomes leader of the New Democratic Party. Born in Canada from Indian Punjabi immigrants, and a practitioner of the Sikh religion, he is the first visible minority to hold permanent leadership in a major Canadian party, and second visible minority overall to hold party leadership in a major partynote .
December 9, 2017: Toronto FC becomes the first Canadian team to win the MLS Cup (league championship), defeating Seattle Sounders FC 2–0 at BMO Field.
April 23, 2018: Ten pedestriansnote , most of them women, are killed when a lone male rams them down with a rented van in the north Toronto district of North York. He is arrested cleanly by the consummate professional Constable Ken Lam who was praised for not falling for the criminal's Suicide by Cop even while he insisted he was just doing his duty. He is later revealed to have identified himself as an incel ("involuntary celibate"); although he is not charged under Canada's terrorism laws, the attack sheds light on the misogynistic online subculture.
May 10, 2018: The Michigan Court of Appeals, that state's intermediate appellate court, rejects Matty Moroun's attempt to stop purchases of land on the Detroit side of the Gordie Howe International Bridge. This removes the last significant obstacle to construction of the new crossing.
July 17, 2018: Construction of the Gordie Howe International Bridge starts.
October 17, 2018: True to a campaign promise that helped get Justin Trudeau elected, Canada becomes the second country in modern history (after Uruguay) to legalize recreational cannabis, with the first purchase taking place at midnight in St. John's, Newfoundland. Medical marijuana had already been legal for several years (with many dispensaries employing on-call physicians to write prescriptions for prospective customers patients) and open recreational use had been increasingly tolerated by law enforcement, but the Cannabis Act made it official. The cultivation, manufacture and sale of cannabis products continues to be a booming industry in Canada, with dispensaries found on seemingly every street corner in major cities and even the smallest of towns, as well as providing revenue streams for First Nations and even provincial governments (who, as they also often do with alcohol, run their own retail dispensary chains whose workers are on the government payroll).
February 7–April 7, 2019: The SNC-Lavalin affair: A controversy surrounding the Trudeau government with accusations of interference in the criminal case against the construction company SNC-Lavalin. This scandal led to the resignations of Cabinet ministers Jody Wilson-Raybould (who claimed the PMO pressured her into intervening, and blew the whistle) and Jane Philpott, and later, their expulsion from the Liberal caucus.
June 13, 2019: The Toronto Raptors win their first NBA championship, the first team outside the US to do so.
September 2019: Margaret Atwood publishes The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, amid significant media attention thanks to the television adaptation of the earlier novel. The Testaments is one of two winners of that year's Booker Prize.
October 21, 2019:
- The 2019 election saw Trudeau's Liberals winning a second term, but at the cost of becoming a minority government, much like what happened to Justin Trudeau's father in 1972. The Conservatives snagged more seats and the popular vote, and the Bloc Québécois saw considerable gains in Quebec while the NDP took some losses. The Green Party gained two seats (including their first outside British Columbia) while the newly formed People's Party of Canada (formed by former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier) lost its only seat. Jody-Wilson Raybould was able to win her seat as an independent.
- Amidst a general movement in North America to reexamine monuments and place names related to... controversial past figures (such as Confederate generals in the USA), Amherst Street in Montreal is renamed to Atateken Street. note
November 2019: Toronto R&B singer The Weeknd releases his Retraux synthwave single "Blinding Lights", which over the course of the next year becomes one of the biggest hit singles of all time (particularly in the United States where in addition to being a #1 hit, it spends over an entire calendar year in the Top 10 and an all-time record 90 weeks on the Hot 100).
2020: Over 10,000 note Canadians die during the COVID-19 pandemic. As with most countries, schools, businesses and gathering places around Canada are closed for most of the spring due to the pandemic. Trudeau's wife Sophie is one of 106,100 Canadians to be diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020, but she is also one of (at least) 69,500 to make a full recovery. As for Justin Trudeau himself, his bold and nimble government policies and his daily public addresses prove a major political shot in the arm, especially compared to the Trump Administration's incompetent handling of the pandemic.
February 24, 2020: 24 year-old Ashley Noell Arzaga is stabbed to death at a Toronto massage parlour by an unidentified 17 year-old male. Though initially charged with murder, in May the charges are upgraded to terrorism after evidence surfaces that the attack was linked to the incel ideology. This marks the first time someone subscribing to incel beliefs is charged under Canada's anti-terrorism laws, and only the second time someone has been charged under those laws for non-Islamist extremism.
April 18, 2020: In the largest mass shooting in Canadian history, a denturist from Nova Scotia murders 22 people and destroys several homes before he is killed by the RCMP at a gas station in Enfield. The perpetrator had an obsession with the RCMP, and owned a replica uniform and cruiser which he used to commit the spree. The perpetrator did not possess a firearm license, having illegally stockpiled rifles traced within Canada and the US.
May 1, 2020: As a result of the aforementioned largest mass shooting, Justin Trudeau enacts strict gun control laws to gradually phase out 1500 models of what are considered "assault-style weapons". This decision is received with unanimous positivity, and is not controversial in the slightest.
July 21, 2020: After pressure from corporate sponsors (including a First Nations-owned betting company they were trying to make a deal with) and in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Edmonton’s CFL team the Eskimos announces they will change their name to something that isn’t considered offensive by many Indigenous peoples of the Arctic. After calling themselves simply the Edmonton Football Team or the EE Football Team for a season, they announce on June 1, 2021 that they will henceforth be known as the Edmonton Elks.
February 22, 2021: The House of Commons officially recognized the treatment of Uyghur Muslims under the Chinese government as a genocide. With a unanimous 266-0 from all opposition parties and select Liberal MPs. Members of the Cabinet, including Justin Trudeau have abstained from the vote.
May 28, 2021: An unmarked grave of 215 children is discovered near the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia; most of the deaths are believed to be from tuberculosis due to the poor quality of life in the school. This, along with the discovery of 23 other gravesites elsewhere in the country throughout the rest of the year, leads to Canada's equivalent of the post-George Floyd changes: renaming places named after founders of the residential school system and establishing Sept 30th as National Day for Truth and Reconciliation annually.
August 6, 2021: At the COVID-delayed 2020 Summer Olympics, the Canada women's national soccer team claims its first-ever victory in a senior FIFA tournament, winning the gold medal in a penalty shootout against Sweden.
September 20, 2021: A snap election had been called by Trudeau, having the election take place ahead of schedule by two years. Little change has been made, the Liberals saw small gains, still leading with a minority government and the Conservatives won the popular vote. The PCC saw a larger voter turnout despite not securing a seat.
November 16, 2021: Not to be outdone by the women, the men's national soccer team defeats traditional CONCACAFnote top dog Mexico 2–1 in the final round of FIFA World Cup qualifying. The match, held in Edmonton at a snowy Commonwealth Stadium with a kickoff temperature of –9°C, came to be known as the Battle of the Iceteca, a play on Mexico's traditional home of Estadio Azteca. In an iconic moment, during the celebration of Cyle Larin's second goal, Canada defender Sam Adekugbe jumps into a snowbank that had developed near the corner of the pitch. More significantly, the match puts Canada atop the qualifying group, a position it would not relinquish, and is seen as a turning point for the men's sport in the country.
January 22 - February 23, 2022: The Canadian Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa from Western Canada. Formed to protest vaccine mandates levied against truck drivers working in and out of Canada. The protests has seen international coverage with praise and criticism from differing points of view. Despite the majority of the protesters being peaceful, a small Vocal Minority of unsavory elements including white supremacists and QAnon conspiracy theorists give the movement a bad image. The most controversial of the protests took place in Ottawa, where locals became annoyed by the disruptions to their daily lives and harassment from some protesters, in particular the honking of truck horns during the night, which were ultimately stopped by court order. On Feb. 7, convoy protesters blockaded the crucial Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, Michigan and caused disruption to international trade and travel. The bridge was one of several border crossings that were blocked by the protesters. After nearly a week of blockages, the bridge was cleared by the police by Feb. 13 and re-opened to traffic.
February 14, 2022: In response to the continued Freedom Convoy protests, Trudeau invokes the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history. The invocation of the Emergencies Act proved to be just as controversial as the protests themselves, with both support and detraction from even those who disproved of the convoy. Trudeau lifted the act on Feb. 23.
June 10, 2022: Canada and Denmark reach an agreement on the division of Hans Island, located in the middle of Nares Strait that separates Ellesmere Island, part of Nunavut, and the semi-autonomous Danish territory of Greenland. This ends a border dispute that lasted over 40 years and led to a tongue-in-cheek and completely nonviolent "conflict" known as the Whisky War. The countries officially unveil the division plan four days later; it currently awaits ratification by the Canadian, Danish, Greenlandic, and Nunavut parliaments. Incidentally, this gives both Canada and Denmark a second land border, and also creates the world's northernmost international land border.
September 4, 2022: A series of mass stabbings took place in the James Smith Cree Nation reserve and Weldon, Saskatchewan by two men over the course of the morning. Leading to the deaths of twelve people, including the perpetrators, and wounding another eighteen people, this was one of Canada's most lethal massacres in recent memory.
March 1, 2023: A series of massive forest fires begins all over Canada, caused by a relatively mild winter leaving fewer snow to moisturize the soil. Fires burn in most provinces, sending massive clouds of smoke towards the south. These are the worst wildfires in Canadian history, and the air quality in some cities like Montreal is considered the worst in the world on some days.
March 8–April 4, 2023: Toronto native Zach Edey became the first Canadian to claim all of the most significant player of the year awards in NCAA Division I men's basketball in the States. In fact, the 7'4" (2.24 m) center for Purdue was the first Canadian to claim any of those awards.note
September 22, 2023: Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to a session of the House of Commons, followed by House Speaker Anthony Rota introducing Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old WWII veteran who fought in a Ukrainian unit before becoming a Canadian citizen after the war, as a Ukrainian hero. A standing ovation follows. The episode becomes a major embarrassment when it comes out that said Ukrainian unit was part of the Waffen-SS. Apologies quickly follow from Rota and PM Trudeau (among many others), and Rota resigns as Speaker (though he remains in Parliament). The episode is hilariously parodied by The Babylon Bee.
March 14–April 10, 2024: Zach Edey repeated as winner of all of the NCAA basketball awards he claimed in 2023.
2030s: Scientists expect that due to Global Warming, Arctic summers may begin to be ice free.
