Browsing: Canadian History

On Oct. 1, 1940, a photographer in New Westminster, B.C., caught a five-year-old boy reaching for his soldier father, creating Canada’s best-known war photo.

Ceremonies across Canada honoured residential school survivors on Sept. 30 as Carney said the country owes them action, with just 14 of 94 Calls to Action complete.

In 1997, the Supreme Court weighed whether Judge Corrine Sparks, Canada’s first Black woman judge, was biased for naming racism in policing from the bench.

Canadian railways hired Black men as sleeping car porters from the late 1800s but barred them from conductor jobs. After the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters filed a 1953 federal fair employment complaint, George V. Garraway became the first Black conductor on a Canadian railway, in 1954 or 1955 depending on the source.

Canada launched Alouette 1, its first satellite, on Sept. 29, 1962. Built to last a year, the ionosphere probe worked for a decade and fed nearly 300 papers.

In January 1792, 1,196 Black Loyalists sailed from Halifax for Sierra Leone. Broken land promises, riots and denied rights drove one of Canada’s first exoduses.

In 1860, an enslaved Missouri man who fled to Canada faced extradition for killing his pursuer, testing whether the colony was truly a refuge from slavery.

Born Sept. 28, 1962, in Spruce Grove, Alberta, Grant Fuhr won four Stanley Cups with Edmonton and became the first Black Hockey Hall of Fame inductee.

In 1911 Canada approved, then quietly revoked, a ban on Black immigration, but kept blocking arrivals through medical exams and fare rules for decades.

On Sept. 27, 1918, Canadian troops crossed a dry stretch of the Canal du Nord in France, breaching the Hindenburg Line in one of the war’s costliest battles.