History | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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  • Article

    Canadian Arctic Sovereignty

    Arctic sovereignty is a key part of Canada’s history and future. The country has 162,000 km of Arctic coastline. Forty per cent of Canada’s landmass is in its three northern territories. Sovereignty over the area has become a national priority for Canadian governments in the 21st century. There has been growing international interest in the Arctic due to resource development, climate change, control of the Northwest Passage and access to transportation routes. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in 2008, “The geopolitical importance of the Arctic and Canada’s interests in it have never been greater.”

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  • Article

    Editorial: Canadian Art and the Great War

    The following article is an editorial written by The Canadian Encyclopedia staff. Editorials are not usually updated. Canadian painting in the 19th century tended towards the pastoral. It depicted idyllic scenes of rural life and represented the country as a wondrous Eden. Canadian painter Homer Watson, under the influence of such American masters as Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, created images that are serene and suffused with golden light. In On the Mohawk River (1878), for instance, a lazy river ambles between tall, overhanging trees; in the background is a light-struck mountain. In Watson’s world, nature is peaceful, unthreatening and perhaps even sacred.

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  • Article

    Balfour Report

    The Balfour Report of 1926 was an important document in Canada’s evolution to become a fully self-governing nation. The report declared that Britain and its Dominions were constitutionally equal. The findings of the report were made law by the British Parliament in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. This was the founding document of the modern Commonwealth. Canada remained linked to Britain politically. But legal power shifted decisively to the Canadian Parliament and its prime minister. This shift quickly led to an independent Canadian foreign policy and to the creation of its diplomatic service. It took several decades before Canada assumed all of its other powers under the Statute.

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    https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/fb8b6e92-b549-4842-8b58-76626f1e9087.jpg Balfour Report
  • Article

    Battle of Frenchman's Butte

    The 1885 battle was fought north of a prominent hill called Frenchman's Butte, about 45 km northwest of modern Lloydminster.

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    https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/Battle_Frenchmans_Butte.jpg Battle of Frenchman's Butte
  • Article

    Battle of Hudson Bay

    The Battle of Hudson Bay took place on 5 September 1697 during King William’s War, the North American theatre of the Nine Years’ War between England and France. Throughout the conflict, French forces tried to capture enemy forts in and around Hudson Bay. One of these was York Factory, a lucrative and important trading post the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) built in 1684. The French captured York Factory in 1694, only to have the English take it back a year later. Then, in 1697, a naval battle ensued in Hudson Bay between English and French forces. Captain Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville succeeded in taking York Factory for the French. The fort was later transferred back to the British after the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. (See also Fur Trade in Canada.)

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    https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/The_Sinking_of_the_Pelican.jpg Battle of Hudson Bay
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    Battle of Ridgeway

    The Battle of Ridgeway is also known as the Battle of Lime Ridge or Limestone Ridge. It was fought on the morning of 2 June 1866, near the village of Ridgeway and the town of Fort Erie in Canada West (present-day Ontario). Around 850 Canadian soldiers clashed with 750 to 800 Fenians — Irish American insurgents who had crossed the Niagara River from Buffalo, New York. It was the first industrial-era battle to be fought exclusively by Canadian troops and led entirely by Canadian officers. It was the last battle fought in Ontario against a foreign invasion force. The battlefield was designated a National Historic Site in 1921.

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    https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/1354ebca-0c98-466e-88d2-cbb9b2cabab1.jpg Battle of Ridgeway
  • Article

    Canada and the Second Battle of Ypres

    The Second Battle of Ypres was fought during the First World War from 22 April to 25 May 1915. It was the first major battle fought by Canadian troops in the Great War. The battle took place on the Ypres salient on the Western Front, in Belgium, outside the city of Ypres (now known by its Flemish name, Ieper). The untested Canadians distinguished themselves as a determined fighting force, resisting the horror of the first large-scale poison gas attack in modern history. Canadian troops held a strategically critical section of the frontline until reinforcements could be brought in. More than 6,500 Canadians were killed, wounded or captured in the Second Battle of Ypres.

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    https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/new_article_images/ypres/a022718.jpg Canada and the Second Battle of Ypres
  • Article

    Beauharnois Scandal

    Beauharnois Scandal Beauharnois Scandal became public between June 1931 and April 1932 when committees of the House of Commons and Senate investigated allegations that the Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power Co had made substantial contributions to the Liberal Party in return for permission to divert the St Lawrence River 30 km west of Montréal to generate hydroelectricity. Company director R.O. Sweezey testified that Liberal senators W.L. McDougald and Andrew Haydon had personally received Beauharnois funds,...

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    https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/images/tce_placeholder.jpg?v=e9dca980c9bdb3aa11e832e7ea94f5d9 Beauharnois Scandal
  • Article

    Beaver (Steamer)

    From 1862 to 1874 the HBC trader became Her Majesty's Hired Survey Ship Beaver. After the HBC sold the ship in 1874, it was used as a workhorse and tow until 1888, when it was wrecked in the First Narrows in Vancouver harbour. Only a few relics remain.

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  • Article

    Bedford Magazine Explosion

    Bedford Magazine Explosion, 18-19 July 1945, initiated when an ammunition barge blew up at the naval magazine jetty on Bedford Basin, Halifax harbour. Fire spread quickly to adjacent piles of ammunition, which had been temporarily stored outside because of overcrowding in the main compound.

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    https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/images/tce_placeholder.jpg?v=e9dca980c9bdb3aa11e832e7ea94f5d9 Bedford Magazine Explosion
  • Article

    Bennett's New Deal

    In the mid-1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s political demise seemed inevitable. He sought to reverse the tide running against his Conservative Party. In January 1935, he began a series of live radio speeches outlining a “New Deal” for Canada. He promised a more progressive taxation system; a maximum work week; a minimum wage; closer regulation of working conditions; unemployment insurance; health and accident insurance; a revised old-age pension; and agricultural support programs. But Bennett’s 11th-hour proposals were seen as too-little, too-late. He lost the 1935 election to William Lyon Mackenzie King and the Liberals.

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  • Article

    Beringia

    The importance of Beringia is twofold: it provided a pathway for intercontinental exchanges of plants and animals during glacial periods and for interoceanic exchanges during interglacials; it has been a centre of evolution and has supported apparently unique plant and animal communities.

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    https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/b91c5592-6724-4e23-8a45-aa3a4ce223f0.jpg Beringia
  • Article

    Biculturalism

    This neologistic term came into public consciousness with the appointment of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963. On examining its terms of reference the commission could not find the word in a dictionary.

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    https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/images/tce_placeholder.jpg?v=e9dca980c9bdb3aa11e832e7ea94f5d9 Biculturalism
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    Billion Dollar Gift

    Billion Dollar Gift, the Canadian government's first comprehensive attempt to help finance Britain's war effort during the Second World War. Canada's war production, and its wartime prosperity, was dependent upon British orders, but Britain lacked gold and dollar reserves.

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    https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/images/tce_placeholder.jpg?v=e9dca980c9bdb3aa11e832e7ea94f5d9 Billion Dollar Gift
  • Article

    Black Enslavement in Canada

    In early Canada, the enslavement of African peoples was a legal instrument that helped fuel colonial economic enterprise. The buying, selling and enslavement of Black people was practiced by European traders and colonists in New France in the early 1600s, and lasted until it was abolished throughout British North America in 1834. During that two-century period, settlers in what would eventually become Canada were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Canada is further linked to the institution of enslavement through its history of international trade. Products such as salted cod and timber were exchanged for slave-produced goods such as rum, molasses, tobacco and sugar from slaveholding colonies in the Caribbean. This is the full-length entry about Black enslavement in Canada. For a plain language summary, please see Black Enslavement in Canada (Plain Language Summary). (See also Olivier Le Jeune; Sir David Kirke; Chloe Cooley and the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada; Underground Railroad; Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Slavery Abolition Act, 1833; Slavery of Indigenous People in Canada.)

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