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My husband’s smart phone tells me I’m 500 metres—as the crow flies—from our Ottawa home. At the minute, he and I are wandering into a thicket of bushes near the historic Rideau Canal. I’ve probably passed this spot hundreds of times, but until recently, I had no idea it contained a hidden treasure.

Every teacher since Plato has probably heard the same complaint more than once: “History is nothing but a bunch of boring names and dates!” For a number of Canadian students, however, our country’s military history has become so much more than that, thanks to the efforts of veterans, high school teachers, professors and other adults interested in ensuring that our soldiers’ efforts are not forgotten. In November 2008, for instance, some 1,400 high school students and 200 teachers from across Canada visited Ortona, a strategic port on Italy’s east coast where Canadians fought a brutal battle in 1943 (Into Ortona Then And [...]

In Powell River, B.C., a small balcony at the Manzanita Restaurant overlooks what was once the city’s biggest employer, the Catalyst Paper mill. By 2010, the mill will have just 350 employees, a fraction of the 5,000 people it employed when it was the world’s largest paper mill. And instead of the pungent odours it once spewed, today it emits mainly steam, because the wastewater treatment system has been upgraded. Inside the Manzanita, customers nosh on bison burgers, warm Brie, and fried local oysters with smoked paprika rémoulade. Eye-catching paintings—many for sale—line the brightly coloured walls. “There’s some incredible artist power [...]

Your insurance company wants to know if you’ve ever had jaundice. Your children want information about a blood disease that runs in your family. You want to find out if you’ve ever been prescribed a medication that’s now making headlines for long-term side effects. Unless you have a perfect memory, you likely can’t recall [...]

Every audience member seems to take away a different image from a Cirque du Soleil performance. For some, it is the high-tech light show or the fantastical costumes. For others, it is the aerialists moving gracefully on ropes and wires high above the ring. For me, when I went to see Cirque’s Quidam in Vancouver in May 2004, it was the young Chinese acrobats. Now, a year later, I can’t even remember exactly what they [...]

Imagine you’re the curator of a huge museum, full of so many precious works that most of them haven’t even been catalogued. Yet even as you’re racing to document and interpret them, vandals are destroying some of them with graffiti and thieves are carting others away. The ones that remain are slowly fading before your eyes—and there’s not a thing you can do to preserve them. That, in a nutshell, is the conundrum facing the archaeologists [...]

In 1916, Canada was a little less than 50 years old, but it was deeply embroiled in one of the most cataclysmic conflicts the world had known to that date: World War I. The federal government [...]

A working seaport and a historic downtown core are among Lunenburg’s greatest assets. For more than two centuries, life in Lunenburg, N.S., revolved [...]

The 50-seat Canadair Regional Jet assembly line at Dorval, Quebec. A willingness to take risks, as any modern business maverick will tell you, is one of the keys to corporate success. And Bombardier Inc., a Canadian corporation that builds everything [...]

It seems every generation has at least one massive building project that involves more science and more technology than anything that came before. The desire to build it big and build it anywhere is behind everything from the Great Pyramids [...]