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Lawrence Hill was appointed Member of the Order of Canada in 2015. The appointment recognizes an author and activist whose work addresses Canada’s Black communities and the lives of women and girls in Africa.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Nigel Dickson; copyright: Lawrence Hill (work for hire) · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Father Henry Carr, a priest of the Congregation of St. Basil, promoted Catholic colleges within secular universities in Canada. In the early 1900s he modernized St. Michael’s College, turning it into a noted arts college federated with the University of Toronto, and later led similar Catholic colleges at the universities of Saskatchewan and British Columbia. In 1929 he co-founded what became the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
For more than 40 years Marie Lacoste-Gérin-Lajoie worked to improve the lives of women in Quebec. In 1907 she co-founded the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, an important French-Canadian feminist association, which she led from 1913 to 1933 while writing for its review La Bonne Parole. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, access to higher education and, through the 1931 Civil Code reform, the rights of married women.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Thomas Alexander Crerar began as an agrarian reformer at Russell, Manitoba. As head of the Grain Growers’ Grain Company he helped shape Canadian grain marketing, and championing western farmers he led the Progressive movement to great influence in the 1921 election, ending the federal two-party system. He later served in Mackenzie King’s cabinets and was an active Senate leader until 1966.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown photographer; Library and Archives Canada · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
John Skirving Ewart, a noted constitutional lawyer born in Toronto, practised in Winnipeg from 1882 to 1904, founding the Manitoba Law Journal and serving on Louis Riel’s appeal defence team. He was counsel for Manitoba’s Roman Catholic minority in the schools dispute of the 1890s, then argued cases before the Supreme Court and Privy Council from Ottawa. He was an early, ardent advocate of Canadian autonomy at home and abroad.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown photographer · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Charles William Gordon, born in Glengarry, Ontario, was a Presbyterian minister and pastor of St. Stephen’s Church in Winnipeg from 1894 to 1924. As “Ralph Connor” he entertained and instructed millions with novels, many about the settlement of western Canada. An ardent Canadian nationalist, he worked for causes such as temperance and help for immigrants, and his optimism reflected the views of many Canadians of his time.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Wide World Photos · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Abbé Léon Provancher was a naturalist and entomologist known for his work on bees, wasps and ants. His publications include Flore canadienne and Petite faune entomologique du Canada. In 1868 he founded Le Naturaliste canadien, and he assembled several insect collections.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: The Canadian field-naturalist ("courtesy les Archives Léon-Provancher, l'Université Laval") · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Vincent Massey, diplomat, philanthropist and patron of the arts, was Canada’s first diplomatic minister to Washington (1926–30) and High Commissioner in London (1935–46). He chaired the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, whose 1951 report was a landmark in Canada’s cultural history. In 1952 he became the first Canadian-born Governor General, serving until 1959.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Gar Lunney · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, a jurist and reformer born at Boucherville in 1807, was one of the architects of responsible government in Canada. With Robert Baldwin he led the reform governments of the Province of Canada in 1842 and 1848. He left politics in 1851, became Chief Justice of Lower Canada in 1853 and was made a baronet in 1854.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Indéterminé · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Lemuel Allan Wilmot, born in Sunbury County, entered politics as a Reformer and represented York County from 1835 to 1851. As Attorney General he was in effect the head of New Brunswick’s first government under responsible government. Named to the Supreme Court in 1851, he resigned in 1868 to become Lieutenant-Governor until 1873.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: JJonahJackalope · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
George McDougall was an influential Methodist missionary in the Prairie West from 1860 until his death in 1876, founding the Victoria mission in 1862 and leading others as part of colonization efforts. He urged First Nations to abandon traditional ways, removed the sacred stone Manitou Asinîy in 1866 with damaging results, and carried word of the coming Treaty Six talks in 1875. Missions linked to him at Norway House and Morley later developed residential schools.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
William Henry Pope, born at Bedeque, Prince Edward Island, became Colonial Secretary in 1859 and represented Queen’s County in the Assembly from 1863 to 1867. A strong supporter of Confederation, he was a delegate to the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences of 1864. He became a judge of Prince County in 1873.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: William James Topley · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Dorothy Dworkin, a nurse, midwife and entrepreneur, managed Toronto’s free Jewish Dispensary and helped found Mount Sinai Hospital in the 1920s, which served Jewish Canadians and employed doctors often shut out of hospitals by antisemitism. During the Holocaust she led relief fundraising and, through her family’s steamship agency, helped hundreds of Eastern European Jews settle in Canada.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Modeste Demers, a Catholic priest in the Pacific Northwest from 1838, worked in part to convert Indigenous Peoples, part of the region’s colonization, and in 1847 became the first Bishop of Vancouver Island, New Caledonia and Haida Gwaii. The practices of Demers and his Church, together with colonization and assimilation, had drastic consequences for later generations of Indigenous Peoples.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: J.E. Livernois · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Alice Ravenhill, an educator and social reformer prominent in public health and home economics in Britain, came to Canada in 1910 and worked with the University of British Columbia, Victoria College, the Women’s Institutes and the province on educational reform. Later she wrote a pioneering school text on Indigenous societies and founded a society to promote British Columbia Indigenous arts and crafts.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Norman Bethune made significant contributions to thoracic surgery in Canada and was an early advocate of socialized medicine. Embracing communism, he led a Canadian team that pioneered front-line blood transfusions in the Spanish Civil War, then served as a battlefield surgeon with Mao Zedong’s Eighth Route Army; after his death in 1939 he became a national hero in China.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Credit: Library and Archives Canada/PA-160708Copyright: Expired · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
John Strachan, born in Scotland, came to Kingston in 1799, taught at Cornwall and became rector of York in 1812 and first Anglican Bishop of Toronto in 1839. A central figure of the Family Compact, he promoted public schooling and in 1827 secured a charter for King’s College; when it became the secular University of Toronto in 1849, he founded the Anglican Trinity College in 1851.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Ambrose Shea of St. John’s sat in Newfoundland’s House of Assembly almost continuously from 1848 to 1882. An advocate of union with the other British North American colonies, he was a delegate to the Québec Conference of 1864, though his pro-Confederation coalition was defeated in 1869; his career also included service as Speaker and governor of the Bahamas.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown photographer; Library and Archives Canada · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Georges-Antoine Belcourt, a former missionary at Red River, led his parishioners in Rustico, Prince Edward Island, to found one of Canada’s first people’s banks, chartered in 1864 and run by farmers and fishers until 1894. By providing cheap credit it helped this mainly Acadian community gain economic independence and foreshadowed the credit union movement.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Jules-Isaïe Benoît · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Charles Mair, born at Lanark, Upper Canada, was a journalist, poet, advocate of western expansion and an original member of the Canada First movement. A controversial figure during the Red River Resistance of 1869–1870, he later worked in business in the West and for the immigration service, and wrote works including Tecumseh and Through the Mackenzie Basin.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Photographer not named. · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Helena Gutteridge, a feminist reformer who had campaigned for the vote in Britain, came to Vancouver in 1911 and brought wage-earning women into Canada’s mostly middle-class suffrage movement. She helped organize women workers through the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, and in 1937 became the first woman elected to Vancouver City Council, helping lay the foundations of social housing in British Columbia.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Matthews, James Skitt, Major · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Mary Southcott, an educator, suffragist and nursing leader, led the campaign to professionalize nursing in early 20th-century Newfoundland. Trained in London, she founded the St. John’s General Hospital School of Nursing in 1903, the only one in Newfoundland until 1929, and helped raise standards, train midwives and found a professional association of nurses.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: The Distaff, 1917 · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Alexandre-Antonin Taché, Bishop and then Archbishop of St. Boniface from 1853 to 1894, was the foremost Catholic leader in the West and oversaw missions, day schools and residential schools that sought to convert and assimilate Indigenous Peoples. He helped secure Catholic and French education rights in the Manitoba Act of 1870 and fought in vain to restore them after they were eroded from 1890.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: William Notman · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Monsignor Alexandre Vachon (1885–1953) was a strong advocate of scientific education and the promotion of science for French-speaking Canadians. He founded scientific institutions, served as faculty dean and president of Université Laval, and as Archbishop of Ottawa defended the rights of Franco-Ontarians.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Montminy & Cie · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context