The library
Every story in the library, in the order published: sourced, readable, long form Canadian history, starting with the first post.
Canada bought the northwest in 1869 without asking the people who lived there. The Métis of Red River, led by Louis Riel, stopped the transfer, formed a government, wrote a List of Rights, and negotiated Manitoba into existence, at a cost that followed Riel to the gallows.
Read the story · 12 min
On December 6, 1917, a collision in Halifax Harbour touched off the largest explosion of the age, killing 1,782 people and remaking a city.
Read the story · 8 min
In April 1980 a 21 year old from Port Coquitlam dipped his artificial leg in the Atlantic and started running a marathon a day across Canada. He never reached the Pacific. Canada has been finishing his run ever since.
Read the story · 9 min
For more than a century, Canada and the churches ran a school system designed to separate Indigenous children from their families, languages, and cultures. This is what the record shows, in the words of the commission that documented it.
Read the story · 7 min
A grassy cove at the tip of Newfoundland held the answer to a thousand year old question. How the Norse reached Canada around the year 1000, what they built, the evidence they left, and the tree ring study that dated their axes to the exact year 1021.
Read the story · 9 min
In 1755 British authorities deported the Acadians, a farming people who had lived in the Maritimes for five generations. The oath they would not swear, the order read aloud in the church at Grand Pré, the ships, the deaths, and the long road home.
Read the story · 10 min
In 1942 Canada removed about 22,000 Japanese Canadians from the British Columbia coast, sold their property without consent, and lifted the last restrictions only in 1949. This is how it happened, and how the community won redress.
Read the story · 9 min
The Avro Arrow was a genuinely advanced interceptor built at Malton, Ontario. On February 20, 1959, Ottawa cancelled it, 14,000 people lost their jobs, and the aircraft were cut up. This is what the record supports.
Read the story · 8 min
On April 1, 1999 Canada redrew its map for the first time in half a century, dividing the Northwest Territories to create Nunavut, a homeland governed by Inuit, in Inuit languages, by design.
Read the story · 9 min
When United States airspace closed on September 11, 2001, 38 airliners landed in Gander, Newfoundland, a town of about ten thousand people. What Gander did in the next five days became world famous. The plain record is even better.
Read the story · 9 min