Search for ""

In February 1997, the Ontario government decided to close Montfort Hospital in Ottawa. This decision led to a massive mobilization of the Franco-Ontarian community and the founding of the SOS Montfort coalition, which fought to keep the hospital open. After five years of political activism and legal battles, the cause was won. From an historical standpoint, this episode marked a key moment in the affirmation of Franco-Ontarian identity. From a legal standpoint, it confirmed the protections that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms affords to Ontario’s French-speaking linguistic minority.

A statue of Edward Cornwallis, the colonial founder of Halifax, was erected in the city’s downtown in 1931 as a celebration of British settlement. It later became an object of controversy in the midst of a growing public debate about Cornwallis’s treatment of the Mi’kmaq people.

Bloody Sunday was a violent confrontation between protesters and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Vancouver police in Vancouver on Sunday 19 June 1938.

​Women’s movements (or, feminist movements) of the 19th and early-20th century — often referred to as first-wave feminism — included campaigns in support of temperance, women’s suffrage, pacifism, as well as labour and health rights.

In 1917, Canadians went to the polls on an issue that was literally one of life and death. The federal election of 1917, fought over the issue of conscription during the First World War, deeply divided French and English Canada.

The “mock parliament” was a type of agitprop — art with explicit political messaging — such productions were written to raise money and generate sympathy for women’s suffrage.

By December 1837 and January 1838, rebels from Upper and Lower Canada had suffered heavy defeats at the hands of British and Loyalist forces. (See: Rebellion in Lower Canada; Rebellion in Upper Canada.) They fled to the United States to seek financial and military assistance. The American public was aware that there had been armed conflicts in the Canadas. Many were even initially supportive. However, the presence of Canadian rebels on American soil forced many to question American involvement. The growing tensions with Great Britain over the Caroline Affair complicated matters. The creation of the Republic of Texas and the fight over the abolition of slavery were also factors. In January 1838, US President Martin Van Buren took steps to ensure America’s neutrality in the Canadian rebellions.

The King-Byng Affair was a 1926 Canadian constitutional crisis pitting the powers of a prime minister against the powers of a governor general.

To a tremendous extent, the enslavement of Indigenous peoples defines slavery in Canada. Fully two-thirds of the slaves in the colony of New France were Indigenous. After 1750, the number of Indigenous slaves brought into French Canada began to decline. When slavery was abolished in British colonies in 1834, Black slaves far outnumbered Indigenous slaves. (See also Black Enslavement in Canada.) The enslavement of Indigenous peoples is part of a dark legacy of colonization that has had implications on generations of Indigenous peoples in Canada and throughout North America.