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The RCMP Musical Ride performing in 2016.
CA-K247Symbols

The RCMP Musical Ride, first performed in 1887

The RCMP Musical Ride, a precision performance by scarlet-uniformed police on horseback set to music, was first performed in Regina in 1887 by the North-West Mounted Police. The RCMP has bred and trained black horses for the Ride since the 1940s, and it is one of the distinctive symbols of Canadian identity at home and abroad.

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Photo: Andrea_44 from Leamington, Ontario , Canada · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
Nursing Sisters at a Canadian hospital in France voting in the 1917 federal election (photograph by William Rider-Rider).
CA-K246History

Nursing Sisters, the first women with military rank

Canadian military nurses have cared for the sick and wounded in battle since 1885. In 1904, professional nurses joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps as Nursing Sisters, the first women in the British Empire to receive military rank; in the two world wars hundreds were decorated and dozens died from enemy action.

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Photo: William Rider-Rider · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
A Silver Dart display photographed in 2017; not the original 1909 aircraft.
CA-K242History

The Silver Dart made Canada’s first powered flight, 1909

On 23 February 1909, more than 100 people watched the Silver Dart lift off the ice of Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia, and fly 800 metres: the first successful powered flight in Canada. Piloted by J. A. D. McCurdy, the biplane was built by the Aerial Experiment Association, founded by Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell (see CA-K154).

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Photo: Dennis G. Jarvis · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
General Currie, commander of the Canadian troops in France, in June 1917.
CA-K232History

Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps

Sir Arthur Currie (1875–1933), who trained with the militia at Fort Rodd Hill in Victoria, commanded one of Canada’s first overseas infantry brigades in the First World War. Promoted to lieutenant-general after Vimy Ridge, he became commander of the entire Canadian Corps, the first and only Canadian to hold that position, and after the war served as principal of McGill University.

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Photo: Unknown photographer · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Salem Chapel British Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Catharines, Ontario, a centre of 19th-century abolitionist activity, photographed in 2012.
CA-K217History

Harriet Tubman led freedom-seekers to Canada

Harriet Tubman (c. 1822–1913), who escaped slavery in Maryland, was the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, leading many people on dangerous journeys to freedom in Canada and helping them settle. She became the public face of the Underground Railroad in British North America, drawing attention and funding to the abolition movement.

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Photo: Gr82c · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
A North-West Mounted Police trail marker near Glen McPherson, Saskatchewan, on the former route between Fort Walsh and Wood Mountain, in 2021.
CA-K204History

The North-West Mounted Police, 1873

The North-West Mounted Police was established in 1873 by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s government as a paramilitary force of 300 mounted constables, to assert Canadian control over the North-West Territories. Arriving in 1874 after a 1,300-kilometre trek from Dufferin, Manitoba, the force set up posts without the consultation or permission of First Nations and enforced laws that disregarded Indigenous laws and ways of life.

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Photo: Awmcphee · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
John Ware with his wife Mildred and children Robert and Nettie, 1896.
CA-K200History

John Ware, Black cowboy of the Canadian West

John Ware (c. 1850–1905), a Black cowboy who had been enslaved, entered the District of Alberta in 1882 with a trail crew driving cattle to the Bar U Ranch. Despite racism and rough frontier conditions, he built his own ranch with his wife Mildred and their children, and his skill and generosity earned him a prominent place in the history of the Canadian West.

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Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
The Richard Pierpoint Building, a courthouse in London, Ontario, named in his honour, photographed in 2026.
CA-K199History

Richard Pierpoint, Black Loyalist

Richard Pierpoint (c. 1744–c. 1838), born in Bundu in present-day Senegal, was captured and sold into slavery in the Thirteen Colonies around 1760. He fought as a free man with Butler’s Rangers in the American Revolution, settled in Niagara, and during the War of 1812 contributed to the creation of the Colored Corps; afterward he asked for passage to West Africa but was given land in Upper Canada instead.

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Photo: Chris Woodrich · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Margaret Laurence House in Neepawa, Manitoba, photographed in 2012.
CA-K193Culture & sport

Margaret Laurence and Manawaka

Margaret Laurence (1926–1987), one of Canada’s most esteemed authors, set her best-known novels in the fictional prairie town of Manawaka, with characters such as Hagar Shipley of The Stone Angel. She said Neepawa, Manitoba, where she lived from 1935 to 1944, shaped her “way of viewing,” and she helped found the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the Writers’ Union of Canada.

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Photo: Amqui · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Tommy Douglas, former Premier of Saskatchewan, around 1971.
CA-K188Institutions

Tommy Douglas and the roots of medicare

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.

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Photo: Themightyquill · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
A portrait of Emily Stowe, no later than 1895.
CA-K187History

Emily Stowe, Canada’s first woman doctor in private practice

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.

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Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Agnes Macphail, MP, photographed by Yousuf Karsh on 14 May 1934.
CA-K186Institutions

Agnes Macphail, first woman elected to the House of Commons

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.

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Photo: Yousuf Karsh · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Thérèse Casgrain photographed by George Nakash (Library and Archives Canada).
CA-K185History

Thérèse Casgrain and the Quebec vote for women, 1940

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.

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Photo: George Nakash (1892-1976) · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
The sign at McCrae House, John McCrae’s birthplace in Guelph, Ontario, on Remembrance Day 2018.
CA-K174Culture & sport

John McCrae and “In Flanders Fields”

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.

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Photo: Peter K Burian · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Paul-Émile Borduas in 1946, photographed by Ronny Jaques.
CA-K173Culture & sport

Paul-Émile Borduas and Refus global

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.

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Photo: Ronny Jaques (1910-2008) · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
The National Canadian Liberation Monument in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, photographed in 2009.
CA-K170History

Canadians and the liberation of the Netherlands

Between October 1944 and May 1945, the Canadian military opened the Scheldt estuary and the port of Antwerp to Allied supplies, cleared much of the Netherlands of the enemy and fed a starving Dutch population. On 5 May 1945 in Wageningen, German forces surrendered to Canadian Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

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Photo: Brbbl · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
A monument to the Asian boat people in Ottawa, photographed in 2015.
CA-K167History

Refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos

Between 1975 and the 1990s, Canada admitted more than 210,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos who fled persecution and violence after the wars there. After the Hai Hong incident in 1978, tens of thousands of Canadians and many organizations sponsored refugees, and the newcomers built communities across Canada.

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Photo: Ross Dunn - Thanks for 13 million + views · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
The Memorial to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada, Toronto, by Eldon Garnet and Francis LeBouthillier, photographed in 2008.
CA-K165History

Chinese workers who built the CPR in British Columbia

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.

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Photo: Shaun Merritt · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
A bust of Mary Ann Shadd Cary by Artis Lane in BME Freedom Park, Chatham, Ontario, photographed in 2025.
CA-K164History

Mary Ann Shadd and the Provincial Freeman

Mary Ann Shadd (1823–1893) became a prominent activist in the Underground Railroad refugee communities of Upper Canada in the 1850s. In 1853 she established the Provincial Freeman, an influential newspaper that argued for the rights of Black people and women and became the leading voice of refugees in Canada.

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Photo: Chris Woodrich · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The statue of John Graves Simcoe at Queen’s Park, Toronto, photographed in 2008.
CA-K162History

Upper Canada’s 1793 Act against slavery

Upper Canada’s 1793 Act against slavery, passed under Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, prohibited the importation of enslaved people. It did not free people already enslaved, but provided that children subsequently born to enslaved mothers would become free at age 25. Slavery in Upper Canada ended in 1834.

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Photo: User:Saforrest · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
The National Aboriginal Veterans Monument in Confederation Park, Ottawa, photographed in 2019.
CA-K156Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Indigenous soldiers in the First World War

During the First World War, Indigenous people volunteered in significant numbers, even though many were denied the right to vote; it was the first time Canada’s forces integrated a substantial number of Indigenous men as individual soldiers. As veterans, they were an active force behind the League of Indians of Canada, the first organization to give their communities a national voice.

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Photo: Jeangagnon · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Province House in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, photographed in 2012.
CA-K152History

The Charlottetown and Québec Conferences of 1864

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.

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Photo: Doug Kerr · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
Tom Longboat as pictured in the Boston Post, 19 April 1907.
CA-K149Culture & sport

Tom Longboat won the 1907 Boston Marathon

Tom Longboat (1886–1949), an Onondaga athlete from the Six Nations of the Grand River, became the foremost long-distance runner of his time and won the 1907 Boston Marathon. He competed at the 1908 Olympics and was one of the first Canadian athletes to make a living solely from sport.

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Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
The former Montréal Forum building on Sainte-Catherine Street, where Game One was played, photographed in 2014.
CA-K143Culture & sport

The 1972 Summit Series

The 1972 Summit Series, eight games played in September 1972, was the first encounter between top Canadian professional hockey players and the Soviet Union’s national team. Team Canada won the series in Moscow with a come-from-behind victory, scoring the winning goal with 34 seconds left in the final game.

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Photo: Jeangagnon · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context