Search for "residential schools"

John Beckwith, CM, composer, writer, educator, pianist, broadcaster, administrator (born 9 March 1927 in Victoria, BC; died 5 December 2022 in Toronto, ON). One of English Canada’s most distinctive composers, John Beckwith created a wealth of music rooted in his sensitive experience of the Canadian environment. Widely read and highly articulate in both official languages, he was dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto (1970–77) as well as a writer, administrator and broadcaster. A committed champion of Canadian music, Beckwith was for five decades one of the most important influences on Canada’s musical life. He was a Member of the Order of Canada and an associate of the Canadian Music Centre.

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.)

​Ernest Adolphe Côté, MBE, soldier, civil servant and diplomat (born 12 June 1913 in Edmonton, Alberta; died 25 February 2015 in Ottawa, Ontario).

From the earliest years of the 17th century, the Dutch were engaged in the fur trade on the Hudson River. In 1614, they established trading posts on Manhattan Island and at Fort Orange (present-day Albany, New York). But only after the American Revolution (1775-1783) did Dutch immigration to British North America (now Canada) begin. The Dutch who had long been settled in the Thirteen Colonies fit easily into Canadian society. Since that time, Canada has experienced three waves of immigration from the Netherlands, the largest of them after the Second World War.

Viola Irene Desmond (née Davis), businesswoman, civil rights activist (born 6 July 1914 in Halifax, NS; died 7 February 1965 in New York, NY). Viola Desmond built a career and business as a beautician and was a mentor to young Black women in Nova Scotia through her Desmond School of Beauty Culture. In 1946, Viola Desmond challenged racial discrimination when she refused to leave the segregated Whites-only section of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Viola Desmond was arrested, jailed overnight and convicted without legal representation for an obscure tax offence as a result. Despite the efforts of the Nova Scotian Black community to assist her appeal, Viola Desmond was unable to remove the charges against her and went unpardoned in her lifetime. Desmond’s courageous refusal to accept an act of racial discrimination provided inspiration to later generations of Black persons in Nova Scotia and in the rest of Canada. In 2010, Lieutenant-Governor Mayann Francis issued Desmond a free pardon. In December 2016, the Bank of Canada announced that Viola Desmond would be the first Canadian woman to be featured by herself on the face of a banknote — the $10 note released on 19 November 2018. Viola Desmond was named a National Historic Person by the Canadian government in 2018.

Islam is one of the major religions of the world and is estimated to be the fastest-growing religion in Canada and worldwide. Its 1.6 billion adherents are scattered throughout the globe, though concentrated most densely in South and Central Asia, the Middle East, and North and East Africa. In 2021, there were nearly 1.8 million Muslims in Canada (4.9 per cent of the population).

Justin Drew Bieber, singer, songwriter, actor (born 1 March 1994 in London, ON).

Jean Coulthard, OC, OBC, composer, teacher (born 10 February 1908 in Vancouver, BC; died 9 March 2000 in North Vancouver, BC). A pioneering woman composer and the first composer from Canada's West Coast to receive wide recognition, Jean Coulthard’s music is remarkable for its integrity, purity of expression and deeply emotional language.

When Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, tens of thousands of Canadians enlisted to serve in the army, navy,  air force and supporting services. The military scrambled to buy equipment, train recruits and prepare for war. Little thought was given, at first, to documenting the war effort. By 1940, however, the military was recruiting historians, most notably Charles Stacey, to collect records and write accounts of Canadian operations. In the following years, artists, photographers and filmmakers also served with the various branches of the armed forces. Today, their diligent work provides a rich visual and written catalogue of Canada’s history in the Second World War.

French fishermen, settlers, fur traders, missionaries and colonial agents were among the earliest Europeans to have sustained contact with ​Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada and North America. The relationship between French and Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands in the early colonial period was complex and interdependent. France saw Indigenous nations as allies, and relied on them for survival and fur trade wealth. Indigenous people traded for European goods, established military alliances and hostilities, intermarried, sometimes converted to Christianity, and participated politically in the governance of New France. With the transfer of New France to Britain in 1763, diplomatic relations between the French and Indigenous people in Canada ceased. Naturally, social and economic interaction between the European and Indigenous inhabitants of New France continued.

The term Arctic peoples in Canada generally refers to the Inuit population. The Inuit are descendants of the Thule people, who lived in the Arctic from 400 to 1,000 years ago. The Inuit refer to their homeland as Inuit Nunangat. In 2021, there were 70,545 Inuit in Canada. According to that census, 69 per cent of all Inuit lived in Inuit Nunangat.

The forcible expulsion and confinement of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War is one of the most tragic sets of events in Canada’s history. Some 21,000 Japanese Canadians were taken from their homes on Canada’s West Coast, without any charge or due process. Beginning 24 February 1942, around 12,000 of them were exiled to remote areas of British Columbia and elsewhere. The federal government stripped them of their property and pressured many of them to accept mass deportation after the war. Those who remained were not allowed to return to the West Coast until 1 April 1949. In 1988, the federal government officially apologized for its treatment of Japanese Canadians. A redress payment of $21,000 was made to each survivor, and more than $12 million was allocated to a community fund and human rights projects.

This article is the full-length text on Japanese Internment in Canada. For a plain-language summary, see Internment of Japanese Canadians (Plain-Language Summary).

Harry Freedman (b Henryk Frydmann). Composer, english hornist, educator, b Lodz, Poland, 5 Apr 1922, naturalized Canadian 1932, d Toronto 16 Sep 2005.

Canada is home to the third largest Czech diaspora after the United States and Germany. Today, Czech Canadians form an ethnocultural community with a rich history dating back to the 1880s.

Sir Ernest (Alexander Campbell) MacMillan.