Separatist and former Quebec Premier René Lévesque dies. For years, French-speaking Quebecers were treated like minorities in their own province. Then the “quiet revolution” of the 1960s fuelled the flames of separation, convincing Francophones that Canada would never give them the respect they deserved, and instilling in them a desire for their own country. In 1976, René Lévesque, a former reporter and popular television show host, became the first premier of any province to pledge separation f...
Nov 01, 2017•2 min
The Supreme Court of Canada refuses to force treatment on glue-sniffing pregnant woman. “Ms. G” was so addicted to glue sniffing that she was deemed unable to care for her children. All three of them were taken into custody by Winnipeg Child and Family Services and two were permanently disabled due to her addiction. In August 1996, while five months pregnant with her fourth child, a Manitoba judge ordered Ms. G placed in the custody of the director of the Manitoba Child and Family Services, wher...
Oct 31, 2017•3 min
Women allowed into the House of Lords through hereditary titles. The British system of peerage for the aristocracy meant that titles and other privileges always passed from father to son. This tradition persisted even after the House of Commons outlawed gender discrimination years earlier. For 40 years, the government simply refused to apply that stipulation to the House of Lords membership. The practice finally ended on October 30, 1957 when the British government announced that women would be ...
Oct 30, 2017•2 min
U.S. Supreme Court orders an immediate end to school segregation. In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States made it clear that schools segregating blacks from whites were in the wrong. In the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education, Chief Justice Earl Warren said, “We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” But the American South dragged its heels over integrating its scho...
Oct 29, 2017•2 min
Winnipeg’s Glen Murray becomes Canada’s first openly gay mayor. Glen Murray was born in Montreal on October 27, 1957. After graduating from Concordia University in Quebec, he worked for Canada Post, which transferred him to Winnipeg in 1985. In 1990, Murray ran for city council with a left-of-centre civic party; he was popular enough to win and get re-elected. That made him decide to run for mayor in 1998, despite some supporters’ concerns about how his homosexuality would affect his chances. Mu...
Oct 28, 2017•2 min
Court ruling forces Canadian Army to protect gay and lesbian members of the military. When air-force lieutenant Michelle Douglas was forced out of the Canadian military for being a lesbian, the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the armed forces had infringed on her rights. Canada’s military head, General John de Chastelain, responded to that ruling by issuing a statement on October 27, 1992. Canada’s military service, he emphasized, was open to gay men and lesbians. The court’s decision put Can...
Oct 27, 2017•2 min
Hollywood’s first black Oscar-winner, Hattie McDaniel, dies. Very few African American actresses have been nominated for Academy Awards, even today. The second black woman to win an Oscar was Whoopi Goldberg in 1990 for her supporting role in the movie Ghost. The first was Hattie McDaniel, who was born June 10, 1895 in Wichita, Kansas. She began her career by working beside other blacks in the limited roles that tent shows and vaudeville allowed. After a stint as a radio singer, she moved to Hol...
Oct 26, 2017•3 min
Prime Minister Eugenia Charles stands with Ronald Reagan announcing Grenada invasion. Mary Eugenia Charles was born on May 15, 1919 in the village of Pointe Michel, Dominica, an island nation of 290 square kilometres in the Caribbean Sea. Eugenia went to school in Canada, graduating from the University of Toronto, then attended the London School of Economics before heading back home to become a lawyer in 1949. Charles practiced law for years until the Labour government passed laws restricting cr...
Oct 25, 2017•3 min
United Nations founded. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used the term “United Nations” in reference to the Allies fighting Germany, Italy and Japan. After the term’s first formal use in 1942, the Allies referred to themselves as the “United Nations Fighting Forces.” Hence the United Nations was founded in the wake of the second world war’s destruction in the hope that a world body assigned to deal with conflict might lower the chance of future wo...
Oct 24, 2017•3 min
Pearl McGonigal named Manitoba’s first female lieutenant governor. The Honourable Pearl McGonigal was a part of the Winnipeg political scene for many years. She was the first woman elected to the St. James-Assiniboia city council, a position to which she was re-elected when Winnipeg amalgamated with its suburb cities. She went on to become Winnipeg’s deputy mayor. Then, on October 23, 1981, McGonigal became the first woman to be appointed lieutenant governor of Manitoba, and only the second Cana...
Oct 23, 2017•2 min
Canada appoints world’s first woman ambassador, Margaret Meagher. Margaret Meagher was a Nova Scotia teacher who entered Canada’s foreign service before women were formally allowed to do so. In fact, she managed to achieve a diplomatic position in Mexico before women were allowed to take a foreign service officer’s entry exam, so she wrote hers in 1947 from Mexico. When she was appointed Canada’s ambassador to Israel on October 22, 1958, she became the first woman in the world to hold such a job...
Oct 22, 2017•2 min
UN speaks out against human rights violations in Tibet. Ever since China invaded the country of Tibet in 1949, the world has been calling for Tibet’s independence. When the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s political and spiritual leader, appealed to the United Nations on the question of Tibet, the UN adopted three resolutions in 1959, 1961 and 1965 that called on China to respect the human rights of Tibetans and their desire for self-determination. The UN General Assembly’s resolution on October 21, 1959 con...
Oct 21, 2017•2 min
Tommy Douglas, Canada’s “Father of Medicare,” is born. Tommy Douglas was born in Scotland on October 20, 1904. When he was seven, his family moved to Manitoba. As an adult, he settled in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where he served as a Calvary Baptist minister. Once he entered politics, he tapped his speaking skills to help create the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a left-leaning political party he represented as a member of Parliament. After returning to Saskatchewan, he became premier o...
Oct 20, 2017•2 min
Supreme Court Upholds mandatory retirement for police. There was no question that Stratford Ontario police officer Albert Large had to retire at the age of 60; both the police board and his union had agreed on that. But Large regarded it as age discrimination, and took his case to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which agreed. The city appealed, only to lose at two separate Ontario court levels. However, on October 19, 1995, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against Large, saying the policy ...
Oct 19, 2017•2 min
Canadian constitution finally deems women “persons” able to hold public office. Until 1929, the Canadian constitution did not regard women as “persons” under our constitution for appointment to the Senate and to sit as judges. Five Alberta women decided to challenge that in 1927: Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Muir. Undeterred when defeated at the Supreme Court of Canada, these “famous five” women took their case to the judicial committee of the Privy C...
Oct 18, 2017•3 min
Supreme Court of Canada agrees to hear appeal of criminal exemption for hitting children. Canadian adults have protections from assault. The criminal code of Canada makes an offence of using force against anyone without their consent. However, an exception is made for children. Section 43 of the code states, “Every schoolteacher, parent or person standing in the place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child, as the case may be, who is under his care, ...
Oct 17, 2017•3 min
Claude Pattemore was born in Athens, Ontario in 1927. In 1948, a construction explosion at work blinded and nearly killed the 21-year-old. He underwent rehabilitation in Toronto and Hamilton before working first for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, then running cafeterias for a number of local Hamilton plants. Three years after his injury, Pattemore took up golf and immediately excelled at the game. He won tournaments for blind golfers in Ontario and Canada before clinching the tit...
Oct 16, 2017•2 min
Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On October 15, 1993, two very different men shared the Nobel Peace Prize: former prisoner Nelson Mandela, and South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk. De Klerk was the last president to reign over the apartheid system, which denied South Africa’s black majority of basic rights. From the day he was elected, de Klerk worked to end apartheid. First, he legalized the African National Congress (ANC). Then, in 1990, he freed Mand...
Oct 15, 2017•2 min
Dr. Martin Luther King awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A dedicated activist who worked to end discrimination against African Americans, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King became the symbolic leader of the American civil rights movement. Between 1957 and his assassination in 1968, King traveled millions of miles to speak thousands of times to hundreds of thousands of people. His quest was for equality among all men and women. In 1963, 250,000 predominantly African Americans marched on Washington, D.C...
Oct 14, 2017•2 min
Challenger brings home the first American woman to walk in outer space. Kathy Sullivan was born October 3, 1951, in Paterson, New Jersey, but spent most of her life in California. After receiving a degree in earth sciences in California, she pursued a doctorate in geology from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating in 1978. As an astronaut with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1979, she took part in three space missions. On October 13, 1984, the spaceship Ch...
Oct 13, 2017•2 min
Victim of violent gay-bashing, Matthew Shepard dies in Laramie, Wyoming. Two male thugs with a hatred for gay men lured Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay freshman at the University of Wyoming, from Laramie, Wyoming’s Fireside Bar & Lounge. They tortured and beat him, then left him tied to a wooden fence in the October cold. A cyclist who spotted the 105 - pound, five-foot-two student 18 hours later, initially thought he was seeing a scarecrow. Rushed to a hospital, Shepard caught the attent...
Oct 12, 2017•2 min
Alberta teacher James Keegstra’s license revoked for racist teachings. James Keegstra taught students at Eckville Junior-Senior High School in Alberta starting in 1968. In 1982, a parent objected to his teaching students that when Protestants ruled England, all was good, while Catholic rule was marked by drunkenness and atrocities. In fact, Keegstra went beyond that, teaching students that Jews were inherently evil and that the Holocaust was a hoax. On December 7, 1982, the school board voted to...
Oct 11, 2017•3 min
Christine Silverberg becomes the first female police chief of a major Canadian city. Christine Silverberg became the first woman police chief of a major Canadian city when she was sworn in as Calgary’s chief of police on October 10, 1995. Born Christine Bertram in 1949 and raised on a dairy farm close to Brampton, Ontario, Bertram met her husband, Ben Silverberg, while studying at York University in Toronto. At the age of 21, Silverberg became one of the first women recruits at the Mississauga p...
Oct 10, 2017•2 min
Maher Arar begins ten months of detention, beatings and torture in Syrian jail. Maher Arar was born in Syria in 1970 before his family moved to Canada in 1987. He obtained bachelors and masters degrees in computer engineering, became a Canadian citizen in 1991 and worked as a wireless technology consultant in Ottawa. On September 26, 2002, while changing planes in New York, Arar was detained by American officials. Believing he was linked to the terrorist group Al Qaeda, officials interrogated Ar...
Oct 09, 2017•3 min
Anne Murray becomes the first woman and first Canadian to win a country music award. Anne Murray was one of Canada’s first country singers to gain international notoriety. Born June 20, 1945 in Springhill, Nova Scotia, Murray grew up intending to become a phys-ed teacher. She graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a degree in physical education and began teaching – while singing on television as a side job. But when she recorded the single “Snowbird” in 1970, it sold more than a mil...
Oct 08, 2017•2 min
Anita Hill offers to testify against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. On October 7, 1991, a U.S. Senate judiciary committee was scheduled to meet in Washington, DC to decide on whether to appoint Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. When a law professor by the name of Anita Hill offered to show up to speak that day, she was given the go-ahead. Once in front of the Senate committee, she dropped a bombshell: She accused Thomas of sexual harassment years before, when both had worke...
Oct 07, 2017•2 min
Mississippi’s black civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer is born. Fannie Lou Hamer – born in Montgomery County, Mississippi on October 6, 1917 – became known as the woman who was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The youngest of 19, she was the granddaughter of slaves who had yet to gain basic human rights In 1962, a civil rights group came to her town and Hamer was the first to volunteer to register to vote. Hamer and other volunteers were jailed and beaten by police and Hamer was throw...
Oct 06, 2017•2 min
Supreme Court allows B.C. cabinet minister to be fired for sexual harassment. The British Columbia government received two complaints of sexual harassment against cabinet minister Robin Blencoe: one from an employee working in the minister’s office and the other from a representative of a sports organization receiving funding from the minister’s office. In March 1995 Premier Michael Harcourt released Blencoe from his cabinet portfolio. But were those allegations proper grounds for firing? Blenco...
Oct 05, 2017•2 min
The U.S. CIA settled out of court with “brain-washed” Canadians. Did the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) finance “brain-washing” experiments during the 1950s and 1960s? When nine Canadians accused the CIA of that, observers were surprised by the agency’s unprecedented willingness to settle out of court. The nine plaintiffs were among 50 patients subjected to experiments involving drugs such as LSD, electro-shocks, sensory deprivation and isolation. They were all under the care of Dr. Ew...
Oct 04, 2017•2 min
East and West Germany reunite. After World War II, Germany was divided into four zones controlled by the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. In 1949, however, the Western countries combined their zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany, while the Soviet Union made its zone the communist-controlled German Democratic Republic. Germany’s divide was not only physical; it was also a symbol of the cold war that existed between Western nations and the Soviet Union. In 1955, Wes...
Oct 03, 2017•2 min
