Canada Corner

On a wooded hillside outside Vladivostok, Russia, 14 Canadians found their final resting place in 1919. Five others died at sea. They were ordinary folk who had enlisted in the closing days of the First World War for service in an unlikely theatre—Siberia.

The Canadian Siberian Expedition Force (CSEF), which consisted of 4,213 men and one woman from across Canada, mobilized alongside 13 Allied armies to replace Lenin’s Bolsheviks with a more friendly government. The mission failed in the face of divided Allied strategies and heated domestic opposition, consigning the story to the margins of history.

Editor’s note: University of Victoria […]

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 […]

Poised atop the dome of the Manitoba Legislative Building, standing 5.25 metres (17.2 feet) tall—from the bottom of his bare feet to the tip of his torch—and weighing in at 1,650 kilograms (3,640 pounds), the Golden Boy is arguably the best-known cultural icon in the province. On a local level, this larger-than-life statue has been exceptionally popular. That should probably come as no surprise, for Manitobans pride themselves on being hardy, spirited and resilient. And right from the start, the Golden Boy showed he possessed these features in spades.

Conceived, created and cast in bronze during World War I, the […]

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 […]

They sit, majestic, on the quiet surface of Sproat Lake on the road from Parksville to Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. Waves gently lap their hulls and turn the sunshine into dances on the underside of their massive wings. Two monstrous red and white flying boats, the largest ever in service, are the queens here. But that moniker is shattered whenever their four Wright R3350 engines roar with life. “They’re certainly not belles of the ball,” says Wayne Coulson, Chief Executive Officer of The Coulson Group, whose company Coulson Flying Tankers is the airplanes’ new owners.

Indeed not. As serene and […]

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 & […]

Near the eastern tip of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, a tiny seaside town called Conche–nestled in Martinique Bay–takes you back to a time when cod fishing ruled this island. A 20-minute walk along a new […]

A hundred years ago, the Boy Scouts came to Canada. And since its arrival on our shores, hundreds of thousands of Canadians have done their best to “be prepared”, by embracing the movement’s values of honour, integrity and […]

It’s considered one of the best-kept historical secrets in the country–Partridge Island, also known as Canada’s Emerald Isle.

But unless you’ve got special permission from the Canadian Coast Guard, about the only way you’ll get a good look at this […]