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The Winnipeg Falcons, a hockey club made up almost entirely of Icelandic Canadian players, won the Allan Cup as Canada’s senior amateur champions in 1920. That year they represented Canada in Antwerp, Belgium, and won the first Olympic gold medal for hockey.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) was Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, leading Canada’s only Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government. Under him the province pioneered publicly funded hospital insurance, laying the foundations for national medicare; he later became the first leader of the federal New Democratic Party.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Themightyquill · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Denied university entry in Canada because she was a woman, Emily Stowe (1831–1903) studied medicine in New York City and in 1867 opened the first private medical practice in Canada run by a woman doctor, in Toronto. She led the drive to found Woman’s Medical College in 1883 and, through the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association, kept suffrage in the public eye.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Agnes Macphail (1890–1954), a rural schoolteacher, became the first woman elected to the House of Commons when she won Grey County as a Progressive in the 1921 federal election. In Ottawa she fought for penal reform, disarmament and social welfare, and later sat in the Ontario legislature from 1943 to 1951.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Yousuf Karsh · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Thérèse Casgrain (1896–1981), a pioneer of Quebec feminism, led the Ligue des droits de la femme from 1928 to 1942 and played a pivotal role in winning women the right to vote in Quebec provincial elections in 1940. The Fédération des femmes du Québec, founded under her guidance in 1966, launched a new wave of organized feminism.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: George Nakash (1892-1976) · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
During the First World War, 222 Japanese Canadian soldiers overcame barriers to enlistment and prejudice to fight on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918; a quarter of them died in battle. In 1931, the returning veterans became the first group of Asian Canadians to win the right to vote in British Columbia.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Spudgun67 · Photo licence: CC0 · Credit & context
After the Maroon War of 1795–1796, Britain exiled more than 500 Maroons of Trelawny Town, Jamaica, to Nova Scotia. They kept a strong sense of community despite pressure to assimilate and demands for their labour, including at the Halifax Citadel; most were resettled in Sierra Leone in 1800, while a few remained.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Moneywagon · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Chanie Wenjack was an Anishinaabe boy from Marten Falls First Nation who lived for three years at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario, and died after escaping. His story represents thousands of children driven by loneliness, abuse and desperation to run away from residential schools, and was amplified at the time by official procedures and national news coverage.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Quintin Soloviev · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & context
John McCrae (1872–1918), a physician born in Guelph, Ontario, joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1914 and served overseas until his death. His poem “In Flanders Fields,” published anonymously in 1915, became one of the most celebrated poems of the First World War and made the poppy a lasting symbol of the Allied soldiers who died.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Peter K Burian · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960) was a pioneer of abstract art in Canada and the creator of automatism, an avant-garde movement at the forefront of gestural abstraction in Quebec in the 1940s. He was the main author of Refus global, published in 1948 and co-signed by other artists, which made him a key figure in 20th-century Quebec history.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ronny Jaques (1910-2008) · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld (1903–1969), an all-round athlete who excelled in hockey, basketball, tennis, softball and track, won gold and silver medals at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. In 1949 she was chosen Canada’s outstanding female athlete of the half-century, after a later career as a Toronto sports columnist.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Contralto Portia White (1911–1968), from the Black Nova Scotian community, was the first African-Canadian woman to win international acclaim as a singer. Between 1940 and 1948, her debuts in Toronto and New York and recitals across the Americas and the Caribbean became a source of pride for Canadians.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Yousuf Karsh · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
The Spanish flu pandemic killed more than 50 million people worldwide, including nearly 50,000 Canadians, between 1918 and 1920. The first civilian cases in Canada were reported in Victoriaville, Quebec, in autumn 1918, and the pandemic led to the creation of the federal Department of Health in 1919.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Société d'histoire de Victoriaville · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
The Preston Rivulettes of Preston (now Cambridge), Ontario, are considered the most successful early women’s hockey team, winning more than 95% of their games in their ten-year existence. Led by right-winger Hilda Ranscombe, they won most provincial, regional and national championships between 1931 and 1940.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Preston Rivulettes · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Between 1914 and 1941, when Japanese Canadians faced racism, Vancouver’s Asahi Baseball Team won championships in senior amateur leagues with its “brain ball” style of bunting and speed. The team became a symbol of the Japanese Canadian struggle for equality and respect, and was disbanded during the Second World War internment.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Vancouver Public Library Historical Photographs · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
In the early 1880s, thousands of labourers from China helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway through British Columbia’s mountains; about three-quarters of the men on the section between the Pacific and Craigellachie were Chinese. They were paid a dollar a day, half a white worker’s pay, and hundreds died from accidents or illness.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Shaun Merritt · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
Tommy Prince (1915–1977), an Anishinaabe veteran, was a founding member of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion and the First Special Service Force (Devil’s Brigade) in the Second World War, and served in the Korean War. He represented Manitoba First Nations’ interests nationally, and his story illustrates both First Nations soldiers’ contributions and their poor treatment on returning home.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Christopher J. Woods - Canada. Dept. of National Defence · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Abenaki weavers in Odanak and Wôlinak, Quebec, use black ash splints and sweetgrass to make baskets using skills passed between generations. Basket-making was Odanak’s main source of income from 1870 to 1920 and remains a symbol of Abenaki identity.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Société historique d'Odanak, Musée des Abénakis, Odanak, Québec, Canada · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), best known as the inventor of the telephone, was born in Scotland, became a citizen of the United States and was a longtime resident of Canada. In 1907 he and his wife Mabel co-founded the Aerial Experiment Association, which led to the flight of the Silver Dart; he died at his summer home, Beinn Bhreagh, near Baddeck, Nova Scotia.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Skeezix1000 · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
The riot of the Acadians of Caraquet in January 1875 was the culmination of four years of Catholic opposition to New Brunswick’s Common Schools Act of 1871, which aimed to eliminate denominational schools. After the violent arrest of protesters and the deaths of two men, the law was amended; the riot is an early example of religious and linguistic minorities resisting discrimination.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Quintin Soloviev · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & context
In September 1864, the Charlottetown Conference brought together leaders from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada, who agreed in principle to a federal union. At the Québec Conference the following month, the delegates drafted the 72 Resolutions, which laid the foundation of the British North America Act.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Doug Kerr · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
Mary Travers (1894–1941), known as La Bolduc after her husband’s surname, was a singer-songwriter with a tremendous impact on Quebec popular culture. From 1929 to 1939 she recorded close to 100 songs that she composed herself, touching on current events, social conditions and relationships.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Famous Studio, Montréal · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Gabrielle Roy (1909–1983) gained immediate recognition with her first novel, The Tin Flute (Bonheur d’occasion, 1945), as a pioneer of social realism in Quebec. Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, she drew on the immigrant experience and her years in the Franco-Manitoban community in later works.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Miguel Tremblay · Photo licence: CC0 · Credit & context
Expo 67, a World’s Fair held in Montréal from April to October 1967, was the centrepiece of Canada’s centennial celebrations and drew more than 50 million visitors. Its legacy includes Habitat 67, the Biosphere and Parc Jean-Drapeau.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ziko · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context