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Nadia Jarvis was nine years old in September 1939. Her parents, Ukrainian immigrants by the name of Peter and Anastasia BosHuck, owned the Venice Cafe on a busy street in downtown Saskatoon and the family lived in a second-floor apartment above the restaurant. Young Nadia had spent her summer holiday roaming back alleys and playing games in vacant lots with the children of the blacksmith, the grocer, the barber and others in the neighbourhood. She had no idea the world was on the brink of the biggest and deadliest military conflict in human history until one afternoon in early September. Suddenly, her tranquil life was upended by newsboys racing up and down the street brandishing hastily printed editions of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and screaming—at the top of their lungs—Extra! Extra! War Declared!

On April 14, 1941, federal agriculture minister James Gardiner delivered an urgent address to the nation’s farmers. His words were broadcast coast-to-coast by CBC Radio. Canada had been at war for nearly 20 months and Gardiner began by summarizing where things stood. The Allies were in the midst of a titanic and deadly struggle with Nazi Germany for control of the North Atlantic. They had to win, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had earlier warned, or totalitarianism would triumph over democracy, slavery over freedom, evil over good. “I do not come offering,” Gardiner declared, “I come asking. Asking that every Canadian dollar and every Canadian acre be made to yield its utmost toward the accomplishment of Churchill’s double purpose—the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic in order that Britain and her allied nations may be armed, munitioned and fed while the forces of democracy are making ready for the greatest battle of all time....”

Robert Cote is 74 now, retired and living in east end Montreal, the city where he was born, raised and worked most of his life. He is a former city councillor, Montreal police officer and Canadian soldier who served on peacekeeping missions in Europe in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. In the course of a long conversation about his varied and colourful career, Cote rhymes off certain dates with an ease and familiarity that suggests he is talking about the birthdays of his children or perhaps nieces and nephews: May 7, 1963; May 5, 1966; Nov. 18, 1969; July 12, 1970. But the dates have nothing to do with such pleasant events. On those occasions, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) planted homemade bombs in various parts of Montreal.

“Thank goodness for Sidney Crosby,” exclaims Janice Kirkbright. The NHL star and captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins has done something she and many of her friends and neighbours have been unable to do, despite years of trying. Crosby has proudly told the world that he is from Cole Harbour, N.S., and in so doing has kept alive the name of a once thriving farm community that has all but disappeared in recent years due to urban sprawl from nearby Dartmouth and Halifax. “There used to be a lot of farming in this area,” says Kirkbright, director of the 220-member Cole Harbour Rural Heritage Society, “but it’s all subdivisions now. It’s disappeared as a postal address and a lot of people don’t even use the name anymore. They just say they’re from Dartmouth.”

Danny Doyle grew up in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighbourhood of Bay Ridge, the sixth of eight children of Newfoundland-born ironworker Fred Doyle. His father’s friends were mostly ironworkers and most were former Newfoundlanders who left home for New York in the middle of the last century. They said goodbye to a place of high un­employment and dismal prospects to risk life and limb raising the steel columns and beams that formed the frames of some of the New York’s most famous skyscrapers. These men earned good money, lived in the same sections of Brooklyn and frequently spent their off-hours together. “My [...]

Jim Coke graduated from Montreal’s McGill University in 1953 with a degree in electrical engineering, worked for a year and in the spring of 1954 embarked on a backpacking tour of western Europe with a friend. As Coke tells it, they spent the summer sleeping in fields and barns when they couldn’t find an appropriate bed and headed for home when they ran out of money. The young engineer returned to Montreal just in time to land a job on what was arguably the biggest Canadian construction project of the postwar era—the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway. “It was [...]

George Tsioros—proprietor of the Olympic Food and Cheese Mart in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market—can tell you the story of his life in a sentence, which is a small miracle of brevity when you consider that he was born in Greece, that he is now 64 years old, that he has run his own business since age 18 and that he has more than 600 different cheeses packed into his 75-square-metre (800-square-foot) shop, some of which sell for $100 a kilogram. “I came to Canada when I was 16,” he says. “I got off the boat in Montreal, caught a train [...]

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 dandy [...]

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 his [...]

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 & Kings. [...]