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On May 21, 1765, approximately 100 farmers from the District of Windsor in central Nova Scotia, just west of Halifax, trudged along rough and rutted dirt roads to the settlement that had sprung up around the British garrison known as Fort Edward. They left behind fields and farms to participate in the first country fair to be held in North America and they brought with them their best livestock—horses, cattle, oxen, hogs and sheep—not to mention samples of their grain and homemade foodstuffs.

The farmers exhibited their animals and goods, and those judged best in their class took home some […]

Residents of Quebec City went to the polls in a byelection late last year to choose a successor to Andrée P. Boucher, the popular and effective mayor who died in late August. Fifteen candidates ran and the voters chose Régis Labeaume, a 51-year-old businessman and political novice who started the campaign at three per cent in public opinion surveys, but finished with 59 per cent of the vote. Labeaume ran on a platform of making Quebec City a recognized centre of excellence for advanced research and scientific innovation. But the new mayor says he has not devoted much of […]

James Creighton—the law clerk of the Canadian Senate for 48 years and a man who has been called “the inventor of hockey”—was one of history’s forgotten figures for more than half a century after his death on June 27, 1930. And he may well have remained obscure and unknown were it not for the efforts of Bill Fitsell, a Kingston, Ont., journalist and hockey historian, who spent two decades combing through old newspapers and other aged records searching for references to the man.

Fitsell found lots—enough to devote a chapter to Creighton in his 1987 book Hockey’s Captains, Colonels & […]

In late June, as schools across the country closed for the summer and families prepared for their annual vacations, 67-year-old Norm Crerar planned to slip into an eight-metre (25-foot) wood-and-Fiberglas canoe with five other paddling enthusiasts at Canal Flats, […]

Deirdre McIlwraith was 24, a graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and fluent in French and Spanish when she landed a job as a protocol officer with the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, the organization that planned, […]

Craig Macdonald has been smitten all his life by wanderlust, an itch to travel, not to the summits of the world’s tallest mountains, nor to distant lands and exotic cities, but up and down the waterways of eastern North America. Macdonald, now 59 and a resident of Dwight, Ont., 200 kilometres northeast of Toronto, has paddled, snowshoed […]

With his tanned complexion, his business casual attire and the fine gold chains hanging loosely around his neck, Peter Scapeti has the look of a man who would fit in nicely at the local golf and country club or a board meeting of the chamber […]