Enjoying a slice of Life from 1936

My husband came home from an antique store the other day with a great find: the very first issue of Life magazine to roll off the press.

As memories fade, Canadians mark 80 years since the end of the Second World War

OTTAWA - Relatives of war veterans gathered at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on Friday to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender and the official end of the Second World War.

Sweat poured down the faces of those assembled in the August midday heat as the Canadian Armed Forces bugler performed the Last Post.

Michael Babin, president of the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association, said there are no living veterans remaining out of the nearly 2,000 Canadians who took part in the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941.

He said the last known veteran from that fight died a little more than a year and a half ago, at the age of 106.

Cessation of war in Europe 80 years ago brought Winnipeggers together in record numbers

When the news reached Canada in May 1945 that the German army had surrendered, and the threat and horrors of the Nazi regime had finally been defeated, Canadians from coast to coast took to the streets to celebrate.

And as they often do in times of joy and jubilation, Winnipeggers gathered that day at the intersection of Portage and Main.

An image by famous Winnipeg photographer L.B. Foote captured the moment — troops, citizens and dignitaries congregated around a small grandstand erected at the famous intersection.

“It was a universal reaction, and a very spontaneous and organic reaction around the world on VE-Day,” said Bill Zuk, secretary of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society’s Manitoba Chapter.

Thirty years on, is Quebec headed for another independence referendum?

MONTREAL - Ten years ago, Jean-François Lisée predicted that Quebec’s independence movement would be reborn.

“It could rise again given the right circumstances,” he said in 2015. “What could trigger it, I cannot say."

Three years later, as leader of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois, Lisée lost his riding and saw his party reduced to 10 seats when the upstart Coalition Avenir Québec, led by François Legault, swept to power for the first time.

The 2018 election was widely seen as proof that separatism was no longer a defining issue in Quebec politics, and pollsters speculated that the PQ’s days were numbered. The province’s new leader was a former sovereigntist at the helm of a conservative-leaning, nationalist party promising not to hold a referendum, and Quebecers rewarded him with a decisive majority.

Life of pioneer for women’s rights in Manitoba chronicled in new account

Manitobans with an interest in history are proud that our province was the first in Canada to grant women the vote, but if asked who led the women’s suffrage campaign here, most would say Nellie McClung. A minority might say it was a team effort. Few would name Lillian Beynon Thomas.

Law professor Robert Hawkins became interested in Thomas because of her determined efforts to have a dower act passed in Manitoba. After devoting several years to the dower campaign, Thomas realized it would never happen without women’s suffrage. So in 1913, she organized the Political Equality League to lead the fight.

Born in 1874, Thomas came from a relatively poor family homesteading near Hartney. After finishing high school, she taught in rural schools off and on for 13 years, saving enough money to further her education; in 1905, when only 11 per cent of university grads were women, Thomas graduated from Brandon University. The following year, having had enough of teaching, she landed a job with the Manitoba Free Press.

For the next 11 years, Thomas edited the women’s page of a widely distributed weekly, The Prairie Farmer, and for five years wrote a daily column in the Free Press as well.

Rise of FLQ in 1960s documented in Montreal cartoonist’s graphic novel

Ever since he was a teenager, Montreal cartoonist Chris Oliveros has been fascinated by the story of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).

In high school, his history class was shown Robin Spry’s 1973 National Film Board documentary Action: The October Crisis of 1970, which detailed the acts of terrorism, including the kidnapping and murder of Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte, carried out by the militant separatist group in Montreal — under the auspices of liberating Quebec from anglophone rule — and the military response that followed. (The film is available to watch free online at wfp.to/6pe.)

“I was really struck by the fact that events like these, these incredibly tumultuous events, kidnappings and the army in the streets of Montreal, all of this could happen here, in the city where I lived,” says Oliveros from his Montreal home. “I was really blown away.”

Earlier this month, Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly (which Oliveros founded in 1990) published his graphic novel Are You Willing To Die For The Cause?: Revolution in 1960s Quebec, the first of two books about the FLQ by the 57-year-old cartoonist.

Liberal insider reflects on struggle to entrench Indigenous rights during the constitutional process of the early 1980s

The following is an abridged excerpt from Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa, by Jack Austin, a former federal Liberal policy adviser, chief of staff to prime minister Pierre Trudeau and senator, with Edie Austin (McGill University Press, 2023). In the book the Liberal insider reflects on the struggle to entrench Indigenous rights during the constitutional process of the early 1980s.

Documentary tells story of Ukrainian immigrants who put lives on the line for adopted homeland

A new war documentary follows a journey of acceptance for Ukrainian-Canadians that came at a heavy cost.

A Canadian War Story, directed by John Paskievich, a Winnipeg filmmaker and photographer, follows the plight of Ukrainian immigrants, who first came to Canada in the 1880s and for decades settled on homesteads across Western Canada, including Manitoba.

Those settlers, and their children, would join the Canadian effort during the Second World War, and the film offers their stories of sacrifice, tragedy and eventually victory.

“The film isn’t just a series of veterans’ testimonials, like how it was to be in Hong Kong or D-Day. It was a coming-of-age story,” says Paskievich, who spent three years making the hour-long movie.

Time to make McClung a pioneer — again

A famous Winnipegger enthusiastically promoted selective breeding among humans for the refinement of the species. She championed the forced sterilization of people who were considered “unfit,” meaning people judged as “feeble-minded.”

She left Winnipeg and moved to Edmonton, where she was elected as an MLA and was a main promoter of the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, legislation that allowed the sterilization of almost 3,000 people. The victims were disproportionately immigrants and Indigenous people.

By today’s standards, she would be considered a racist.

What do we do about Nellie McClung?

Canadian veterans' stories detail selfless sacrifice, struggle

The lives of the men and women who served and are serving in the Canadian Armed Forces are a mystery to many Canadians.

Remembrance Day may be a time when family memories of what a grandparent or great-grandparent did in the First World War or Second World War are vaguely recalled. Winnipeggers over 30 likely remember the flood of 1997, when the army was deployed to protect the city from the raging Red River, but what else have our Armed Forces done? Jody Mitic offers readers an answer.

In his 2015 autobiography Unflinching: The Making of a Canadian Sniper, Mitic told the story of his life in the Canadian Armed Forces: the physical and mental challenges he had to overcome, the years of training he endured, his deployment to Bosnia, becoming a sniper-team leader in Afghanistan, losing his legs to a landmine and overcoming this life-changing injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Everyday Heroes is Mitic’s collection of 21 first-person accounts of life in the Canadian Armed Forces. He turns from his story to one “encouraging Canadians to get to know the men and women who wear the Canadian flag on their shoulders… to see beyond the uniform to the person.”

Map-based history of Canada a marvel

If you like maps, you’ll like this book; if you like both maps and crisply recounted Canadian history, you’ll love it.

Adam Shoalts is the author of a previous Canadian bestseller, 2015’s Alone Against the North, which recounted his exploration of the muskeg and river wilderness that is the Hudson Bay Lowlands.

The maps of his second book are springboards for his accounts of how this country’s vast expanses were charted.

Shoalts believes maps have been fundamental in shaping our view of Canada. He supports this belief by offering up pivotal moments in our country’s history via stories built around 10 specific maps, most of which, in turn, are the product of specific explorations.

Canada’s autonomy took more than Vimy Ridge

Last month, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as is his style, waxed eloquently about the terrible sacrifice of the soldiers who fought there and the battle’s larger meaning for Canadian history. But he went a bit overboard attributing to Vimy something that is not so: that Canada “was born” on that battlefield.

It is true that at Vimy, for the first time in the war, “the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together and drove the Germans off a ridge that dominated the terrain in the area of Arras in northern France,” as historian Jack Granatstein explains. Yet as he also adds, despite the 3,598 Canadians killed in the fighting, Vimy did not end the war, nor did Canada achieve autonomy within the British Empire.

This nation-building narrative was somewhat promoted in 1917 and then in 1936 when the Vimy memorial was opened, but it did not truly take hold for another generation. In 1967, on the 50th anniversary of the Vimy Ridge battle that coincided with Canada’s centennial, then-prime minister Lester Pearson reimagined Vimy as “the birth of a nation.”

The fact was that several months after the fighting at Vimy, Canada’s soldiers found themselves knee-deep in the mud in the area around the village of Passchendaele, near Ypres in Belgium. That battle had started at the end of July 1917, because the British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, had insisted stubbornly that the key to victory on the Western Front was capturing the Passchendaele ridge.

Gripping drama Elle brings outdoor hardship to PTE's indoor stage

The medium of theatre doesn't necessarily lend itself to a story of survival in the wilderness.

There's a reason The Revenant was a movie and not a Broadway play.

And yet the historical drama Elle, an adaptation of the Governor General’s Award-winning novel by Douglas Glover of the same name by Toronto actress Severn Thompson, manages to be an engaging, gripping piece of work... even in the civilized Prairie Theatre Exchange environs in Portage Place.

Over the course of 90 minutes (without intermission), Thompson connects us to an extraordinary character, based on Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, a headstrong young Frenchwoman tantalized to a trip to Canada in 1542 by exotic tales of naked natives and strange customs.

When war came to Winnipeg

If Day, the simulated Nazi invasion of Winnipeg, was a daring publicity stunt that involved weeks of planning, thousands of volunteers and garnered media attention across North America. Most importantly, it raised millions of dollars for Canada’s war effort.

The purpose of If Day was to drum up sales for Victory Bonds. Sold to businesses and individuals, often through payroll deduction plans, they were an essential tool for financing Canada’s war effort.

Dr. Jody Perrun has researched If Day and Winnipeg’s participation in Victory Bond campaigns for his book The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale, and the Second World War in Winnipeg. He estimates that of the $22 billion the federal government spent fighting the war between 1939 and 1945, more than $12 billion was offset through the sale of Victory Bonds.

The promotion of the bonds was the responsibility of the National War Finance Committee in Ottawa. The short-term sales campaigns were initially quite centralized, with a national theme and propaganda products that were forwarded to provincial committees who used rallies, concerts and other tried-and-true public events to make up their portion of the national sales goal.

Century of progress: 'Prairie grit' helped Manitoba women secure the right to vote

OTTAWA — Almost a century after Nellie McClung pushed Manitoba to become the first province to allow women to vote or run for office, she would have been pretty proud of what women have achieved, says her granddaughter Marcia McClung.

But she also probably would have been a little disappointed to see women have not achieved true equality, be it in the workplace, the political world or even in many families.

Although Nellie McClung dreamed that if women could secure the right to vote, all the other rights to become equals with men would surely follow, she knew when she died, in 1951, that had not happened.

“She did acknowledge there wouldn’t have been any progress without the vote,” Marcia said in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press. “It was a really significant step.”

Boom and gloom

Stefan Epp-Koop's We're Going to Run This City explores the dynamic political movement that came out of the 1919 General Strike, the largest labour protest in Canadian history, and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Winnipeg was a deeply divided city. On one side, the conservative political descendants of the General Strike's Citizen's Committee of 1000 advocated for minimal government and low taxes. On the other side were the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Canada, two groups rooted in the city's working class, though often in conflict with each other.

The political strength of the left would ebb and flow throughout the 1920s and 1930s but peaked in the mid-1930s when the ILP's John Queen became mayor and the two parties on the left combined to hold a majority of council seats. Astonishingly, Winnipeg was governed by a mayor who had served jail time for his role in the General Strike.

Winnipeg had grown rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century. The city had all the appearances of a boom town, tripling in size in the first decade. Businesses flocked to the city to service the growing population of Winnipeg and the Canadian West. Manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers opened in the city, establishing it as the pre-eminent commercial hub of Western Canada. The city also profited from the growing agricultural production of the Prairies as the home of the grain exchange and many companies producing agricultural implements and supplies.

Optimism abounded, anything was possible. Civic boosters imagined Winnipeg as the "Chicago of the North," a world-class city. That became the commonly accepted narrative of the city's growth. Indeed, many Winnipeggers did become quite wealthy during those boom years, and there was significant economic opportunity for those who were able to access it.

Constitution Act, Treaty 1 at CMHR

The original Treaty No. 1 land agreement of 1871 and the 1982 Proclamation of the Constitution Act are two of 11 historic and rarely loaned artifacts on display at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The documents can be viewed in the CMHR's Protection Rights in Canada gallery and Canadian Journeys gallery and are on loan until September 2015 from the Library and Archives Canada based in Gatineau, Que. The display has been open to public viewing since the museum's opening day on Nov. 11.

Signed at Lower Fort Garry by Chippewan and Cree First Nations leaders and Queen Victoria, the Treaty No. 1 agreement is the original document with affixed seals and ribbon.

"Just looking at the display in the case, we've got 250 years of Canadian legal tradition and human rights tradition in these documents. There is a really wide breadth of historical significance," said Heather Bidzinski, the CMHR's head of collections.

A war for Britain

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 1, 1939, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was awakened early in the morning with news that the German Wehrmacht had crossed the border into Poland.

For the British and French this was the final straw in the frustrating negotiations with Adolf Hitler that had been ongoing for several years. The two western European powers declared war on Germany on Sept. 3.

Within a week Canada had also issued its own declaration of war; for unlike in August 1914 the country -- as a result of the Statute of Westminster of 1931 -- was not automatically at war with the British declaration. Nonetheless, despite Canada's new autonomous status within the empire, there really was never a doubt that Canada would stand by Britain's side in 1939, just as the country had during the First World War.

Ever since his celebrated meeting with Hitler in Berlin in June 1937, King believed war with Nazi Germany could be averted. Like many other world leaders who came into contact with the Hitler in the late '30s, King regarded him as a charismatic visionary, though unpredictable and possibly dangerous. As the situation worsened in the spring of 1938, King wrote in his diary that he was confident the world "will yet come to see a very great man ... in Hitler."

Uncovering Canada’s Arctic sea battle

In 1697, a single French ship sank a British warship, captured a second ship and chased off a third ship.

It was an audacious act of war that nearly turned into a suicide mission, but the Battle of Hudson Bay is a forgotten chapter in Canada's history.

That could change with an intrepid group's plan to film an educational video in Churchill this summer for a curriculum kit aimed at high school students. And if they can find the ship that sank, it would be a bonus.

Three hundred years ago, an imperious colonial aristocrat pointed his sails north from New France (modern Quebec), departing with a fleet of wooden sailing ships.