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Victoria’s Chinatown is the oldest surviving Chinatown in Canada. Before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, Victoria was a major port of entry for Chinese immigrants, and the neighbourhood became an important centre of Chinese Canadian community life.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Michal Klajban · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The Vancouver Japanese Language School, in the city’s Japantown, was the first and largest Japanese language school in Canada, and its 1928 Art Deco building is a rare surviving interwar language school. Of the thousands of properties the federal government confiscated from Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, it is one of very few known buildings returned to its owners after internment.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Cordovanorth · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The Buxton Settlement National Historic Site in southwestern Ontario encompasses a cultural landscape of about 4,680 hectares, including North and South Buxton. Its farms, religious institutions and schools preserve the history of a planned settlement founded by Underground Railroad refugees and remain a living memorial to its founders.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
Africville, on Bedford Basin in Halifax, was a Black community settled in the 1830s and 1840s, with its own school and church. Its houses were demolished in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal and the land became Seaview Park; the clearance became an enduring symbol to Black Canadians of the need to defend their institutions, and the site is now a place of remembrance and pilgrimage.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Coastal Elite from Halifax, Canada · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
L’Anse Amour in southern Labrador, one of the largest and longest-used Indigenous habitation sites in Labrador, has the oldest known First Nations funerary monument in North America, built about 7,700 years ago over a young person’s burial. The grave goods include the earliest known toggling harpoon in the world.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Pierre Gingras · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Mehtawtik (Meductic), on the west bank of the Wəlastəkw (Saint John River) in New Brunswick, was the principal settlement of the Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) from before the 17th century, valued for hunting, fishing and fertile soil where families planted corn. The village site has been under the waters of the Mactaquac hydroelectric dam since 1968.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: W.O. Raymond. · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Tr’ochëk, at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers just south of Dawson City, represents the Hän cultural landscape of the middle Yukon River valley. For countless generations the Hän spent mid-summer to late fall at fishing camps there; its name means “the place at the mouth of the river,” and it is the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in “home” on the Yukon River.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Larss & Duclos · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Mabel Hubbard Bell (1857–1923), deaf since childhood, married Alexander Graham Bell in 1877 and gave crucial support to his research, including at their Beinn Bhreagh estate in Cape Breton. In Baddeck she helped establish the Young Ladies’ Club in 1891, the first Montessori classes and the earliest home and school association in Canada.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Harris & Ewing · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Henry Youle Hind (1823–1908), a scientist and explorer, led surveys of the North-West between 1857 and 1860 that produced scientific reports, photographs and maps. His reports on arable land helped shape Canada’s decision to pursue the acquisition of Rupert’s Land, a decision taken, as Parks Canada notes, without regard for Indigenous peoples.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Cox, A. W. · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The Prince Edward Island Railway was built between 1871 and 1875 to bring economic growth and better communications. Its costs threatened the colony with bankruptcy, and in 1873, after Ottawa agreed to pay for completing the line, Prince Edward Island joined Confederation; after service ended, its roadbed became part of the Confederation Trail.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Larry from Charlottetown, PEI, Canada · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
In 1880, Canada became the first country of the British Empire to establish a high commission in London, mainly to promote trade and immigration, with former finance minister Sir Alexander Galt as the first high commissioner. Canada’s oldest diplomatic posting moved in 1925 to Canada House on Trafalgar Square, now a symbol of Canada in the British capital.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: PAUL FARMER · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
The Chinese Immigration Act (Chinese Exclusion Act), which took effect on 1 July 1923, imposed discriminatory restrictions on Chinese immigration and replaced the head tax. All Chinese people in Canada, including those born here, had to register or risk fines, detention or deportation. Chinese Canadians challenged the law until its repeal in 1947.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Kyle Lawrence · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
In September 1931, coal miners in Bienfait, Saskatchewan, went on a 30-day strike when mine owners refused to recognize their union. A motor cavalcade of strikers and supporters turned deadly in Estevan when police shot and killed three miners and injured 23 others; known as Black Tuesday, it remains a tragic legacy of the Depression.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Quintin Soloviev · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & context
George Brown (1818–1880) founded the influential newspaper The Globe in 1844 and became a leading reformer and head of the “Clear Grit” party. In 1864 he was a key figure in the Great Coalition that made Confederation possible, and he co-founded the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Hunter & Co. · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Adams George Archibald (1814–1892), first lieutenant-governor of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (1870–1872), was charged with administering the Manitoba Act’s guarantee of Métis land rights, which proved difficult amid settler encroachment and while Canadian militia subjected Métis people to a “reign of terror.” In 1871 he represented the Crown in negotiating Treaties 1 and 2, but several promises he made were not written into the treaties.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: User Magnus Manske on en.wikipedia · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Adelaide Hunter Hoodless (1857–1910), an educator and social reformer, promoted domestic economy as a school subject and helped establish household science institutes at Guelph, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Toronto. She supported women’s organizations including the National Council of Women and the Federated Women’s Institutes, and helped establish the Victorian Order of Nurses.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Paranoidpurist · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Ducks Unlimited Canada was founded in Winnipeg in 1938 by Canadian and American sportsmen responding to declining waterfowl populations and wetland loss. The organization helped develop wetland restoration and carried out one of the first large-scale surveys of breeding waterfowl, an early example of international, grassroots conservation.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Robert Linsdell from St. Andrews, Canada · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
The telegraph was inaugurated in Canada on 19 December 1846, when the Toronto, Hamilton and Niagara Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Company’s line carried the first message, from the mayor of Toronto to the mayor of Hamilton. At first an expensive novelty, the telegraph was soon adopted by the press and business.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Spudgun67 · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The Toronto Maple Leafs trace their origins to one of the first National Hockey League teams, formed in 1917; co-owner Conn Smythe renamed the St. Patricks the Maple Leafs in 1927 and built Maple Leaf Gardens during the Depression. Foster Hewitt’s broadcasts brought the team national attention, and it won 13 Stanley Cups between 1918 and 1967.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Jeff Hitchcock · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
Ernest Cormier (1885–1980), born in Montréal and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, was an engineer and one of the most renowned Canadian architects of the 20th century, known for innovative design, new materials and attention to every detail. The federal government chose him to represent Canada in designing the United Nations Headquarters in New York (1949–1952).
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Laurent Bélanger · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946), largely self-taught, made major contributions as a naturalist, ornithologist, conservationist and wildlife artist, and his bestselling realistic animal stories developed a distinctive Canadian genre. His “Woodcraft Indians” youth program influenced the Boy Scout movement and summer camps but, as Parks Canada’s 2022 review notes, also contributed to inaccurate stereotypes of First Nations.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Bain News Service · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861–1922), a pioneering late-19th-century journalist, challenged norms by examining women’s changing roles, the need for a national culture and Canadian politics. After leaving Canada in 1890 she lived in India and England and wrote more than 20 popular books, including The Imperialist (1904), a Canadian classic set in a fictionalized Brantford.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: not stated · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Irish-born Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850–1887) came to Canada as a girl, settled in Peterborough and supported her family by writing after 1875. Largely unknown in her short life, she is now considered one of the finest Canadian poets of her generation, best remembered for the long poems “Malcolm’s Katie” and “Old Spookses’ Pass.”
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Caswell, Edward S. (Edward Samuel), 1861-1938 · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Kathleen Blake Coleman (1856–1915), writing as “Kit,” ran the “Woman’s Kingdom” pages of Toronto’s Daily Mail, later the Mail and Empire, from 1889 to 1911, winning a wide following with her witty, irreverent style. As the first American-accredited woman war correspondent, she covered the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Photographer unidentified · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context