Canada Corner

On Dec. 7, 1941, in a co-ordinated strike without equal in the annals of war, the Japanese wrought havoc on units of the United States Pacific Fleet in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, invaded the Philippines and Hong Kong, assumed control of Saigon and the rest of French Indochina, landed invading forces at two points on the northeast coast of Malaya, and bombed Singapore. Other units headed for key invasion points in Sarawak, North Borneo and the Dutch East Indies. Using bicycles as their principal means of transport through the Malayan rubber plantations, the Japanese advanced swiftly and silently, outwitting and outdistancing the British, Australian and Indian defenders. These co-ordinated attacks gave Japan control of the Indian Ocean and severed the artery of the Allied rubber supply.

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....”

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.

More than 100 years ago—in the era of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Baden-Powell and the beginning of the scouting movement, the reading public had a great interest in stories about animals, both domestic and wild.

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.

Canada is a large, rough country. It took tough, determined men and women to explore it, map it and give it place names. But when it came to defining the country in the minds of its citizens, it took artists, painters, novelists and poets. For Canada’s early English-language poets, they had the classics of literature to draw their skill from, but when they came to describing this land, it was new. No one had written about it before. Many doubted that anyone would ever write about it. But as Confederation became a reality and the railway began to unite the scattered populations [...]

“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.”

When early homesteaders arrived to claim their quarter section of western Canadian prairie, sod was often all they had to build temporary homes. One has endured nearly a century. If you follow Highway 21 north of Kindersley, Sask., then turn east on a dusty road called Gleneath, past scores of oilfield pump jacks that dot the horizontal landscape, you’ll come to a house that should have dissolved into the prairie at least 90 years ago. The Addison Sod House is the last one of its kind standing in Western Canada. From the late 1800s to the First World War, sod houses, affectionately [...]

From his trench barrack on the front line at Avion near Vimy Ridge, Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Molson ripped a piece of paper from his notebook and began writing his eldest son. “When this war is finished, when the battle has been won,” he resolutely stated on July 25, 1917, “I will return to Canada to fight an enemy which is as tyrannical as the Kaiser.” Herbert Molson would not be alone, however, in his fight against his Canadian enemy—the prohibitionists. As they had in the trenches during the First World War, his brothers in arms would stand beside him. Together, they proved a potent force.