22 Facts About Canadian History

so the other day I was visiting Seattle and as I was waiting in line at the border crossing I was flipping through my Canadian passport which longtime viewers of this channel will know is something I have historically had some trouble with but anyway the thing that I noticed is that every page of the Canadian passport has an interesting little photographic montage of scenes from Canadian history or pictures of important Canadian symbols and I just thought it might be kind of fun if I flip through these pages with you and kind of went over what the pictures are of and why maybe the Canadian government thinks we should know them I'm now going to improv the rest of this video so that you guys get my authentic reaction to these different pictures from the perspective of an average Canadian although I guess I am NOT actually a very average Canadian but you get what I'm trying to say anyway so on the first page we have a feather and Inukshuk and this kind of infinity symbol now as the caption says they are symbols of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada so the way that the passport works is that there's kind of a vague chronological order so we are starting on the first page with symbols of the first peoples of Canada the aboriginal peoples of Canada and the way that the Canadian government sort of conceptualizes Aboriginal people is that they're slotted into three different categories the feather is the symbol of the sort of people we would describe as being sort of the traditional North American Indians in Canadian parlance often called the First Nations of Canada this includes all of the most famous and iconic Native American tribes and nations you know the Iroquois the Mohawk the Cree the Haida so this is the first group the first nations and the feather is kind of a symbol of their culture and then you have the Inukshuk which is like this sort of humanoid rock formation that is associated with the Aboriginal people of the northern part of Canada the people that we used to call Eskimos but we now call Inuit and then you have this infinity symbol which is kind of interesting because that is the symbol of the so called matey people of Canada and the matey people of Canada are well-liked historically the matey people are considered the offspring of like 19th century French Canadian fur traders and then indigenous people that lived in sort of the prairie region of Canada at one time these were people that were very looked down upon they were called like the half-breeds because they were half white and half Indian but you know they developed an interesting culture of their own in sort of the plains area of Canada and are now sort of recognized as being a distinct Aboriginal community although these days the definition of who is and isn't a matey person is becoming a little but more expensive and contested because you have a lot of Canadian people that have some Aboriginal blood and want to claim an Aboriginal identity and matey is sort of this ready-made identity for those sorts of people but people that have a more historic matey identity are quite defensive and protective of that name anyway that's page number one so page number two we have a boat and we have samuel de champlain the father of new france so Champlain is considered like the founder of European Canada he was a French explorer who came to this continent in the 16th century he became the first governor of the colony of New France and established various settlements that rose up into being big Canadian cities one of the big differences between Canada and America is that the conventional Canadian origin story begins with French migration not British okay and then on the next page we have fast forwarded quite a bit and we now have a picture that depicts the founding of modern Canada in 1867 this is a famous painting of the 19th century politicians who wrote the modern Canadian Constitution they are called the fathers of Confederation sort of Canada's founding fathers moment and we can see at the top here there is a little quotation it says a great nation great in thought great in action great in hope and great in position and it is by the right honourable Sir John a MacDonald and the right honourable search on a McDonald was the first Prime Minister of Canada he is actually the man standing right here in this window I find it a little bit funny that the passports history skips straight from the French explorers founding the colony of New France to the Constitution of Canada being written in 1867 it really sort of glosses over everything that happened between those two dates the most notable of which was of course the British conquering French Canada okay and then on the next page we have two photos we have a photo of a train and we have a photo of a guy hammering a spike into a railroad and then it says the last spike 1885 so this is another very very famous photo from Canadian history it might even be the most famous photograph in Canadian history I would say so when John a McDonald became the first Prime Minister of Canada in 1867 after the modern constitution of Canada was adopted he had this very ambitious plan which was to build a railroad from one end of Canada from the easternmost part of Canada all the way to here in Vancouver in British Columbia and this was an extraordinarily ambitious sort of engineering project for its time I mean this was the Victorian era this was before telephones and this sort of thing he wanted to build this enormous enormous railroad and you know people said it couldn't be done in blah blah blah but you know he did it and he built it in five years now there was a lot of corruption a lot of shenanigans you know a lot of exploitation of Aboriginal people and cheap Chinese slave labour basically to get it done but it was done and it was done in only five years and it was considered this very heroic accomplishment for this new nation of Canada to build a railroad of this magnitude across the entire North American continent and it was finished in 1885 here in British Columbia there was this big photo op the last spike they got the Governor General of Canada and the president of the railroad to hammer in the final spike in BC and it was this big deal because it showed you know Johnny MacDonald's triumphs and sort of the triumph of the new Canadian nation you know this country of enormous size was able to be unified by the most modern form of transportation that existed in those days on the next page we have a depiction of canada's northernmost territories this is a picture of the Northwest Territories and the Nunavut arch Apolo go the northernmost part of the North American continent which belongs to Canada and then there is a little photograph here of Joseph Eleazar Bernier and a dotted line which depicts his expedition from 1906 to 1913 I now I do not think that your average Canadian is very familiar with Joseph Eleazar Bernier but you know one of the themes of this passport is that we have to you know give the French Canadians equal billing to the English Canadians you know the northern part of Canada has of course been this very inhospitable you know very isolated very mysterious part of the world and the Canadian efforts to sort of tame and control and understand it have sort of been a big part of the Canadian story so when modern ship technology sort of got more advanced in the early 20th century there was a lot of interest in getting ships to sort of sail around that none of it are Chippewa go and sort of navigate and document and also stake a claim to this territory as belonging to Canada's sort of create this idea that Canada under toward the area well enough to claim ownership of it this is actually still a contentious matter to this day just because it is still a very mysterious area where humans don't often tread but you know that there's all this kind of thinking about that there might be oil there there might be natural resources there so Canada really sort of needs to show that it has a claim to this territory and that it can enforce its sovereignty over this territory if it is ever contested by other countries the purpose of why this is in the passport is to kind of reinforce this narrative this idea that Canada has had a historical claim to this area Canadians have always been interested in sort of this part of the world and I suppose that you know it's a tradition that includes our french-canadian friends as well as the Anglo Canadians alright on the next page we have the Canadian Prairies and so we see that there's a train this is probably on Johnny MacDonald's famous railroad there are oil derricks in the background there is wheat there is a grain elevator you know the Canadian Prairies were settled in the 19th century lots of immigrants particularly from Eastern Europe settled this very ocean empty part of the continent you know they created farms homesteading this sort of thing and their ability to make it in agriculturally prosperous part of North America is considered this great success story you know the Canadian wheat fields provide a lot of wheat for the world the Canadian oil fields in the prairies of Canada are very important as well economically for Canada it's some of the world's largest oil reserves can be found in the prairies of Canada another theme of this passport is sort of appeasing all of the regions of Canada making everyone feel like you know you're included and you're appreciated your contributions alright on the next page we have pier 21 Halifax historic gateway to Canada so we see a big cruise liner and then we see a dock over here Canada is of course a country of immigrants we all come from somewhere and during the 20th century there was a large inflow of Canadians from various parts of the world from Europe in particular and you know in the old days people didn't just hop on airplanes they had to actually get on boats and sail from Europe to Canada and the entry point for a lot of Europeans who arrived on the shores of Canada was pier 21 in Halifax which is the most sort of easternmost port my own mother who is an immigrant from Holland this is how she actually came to Canada came on a boat from holland in like the 1960s sailed over came to pier 21 lived in halifax for a while before she emigrated here to vancouver so pier 21 is this very sort of romanticized entry point it's sort of like Ellis Island in the United States this idea that a lot of immigrants to Canada this was their first sort of glimpse of what their new life was going to be like and so it is sort of this symbolic kind of romanticized image as of course you know immigration is still a very large part of Canada's reality today and there was also a quote here at the top it says Canada is free and freedom is its nationality the right honourable Sir Wilfrid Laurier so Sir Wilfrid Laurier was another Prime Minister of Canada he was the first French Canadian Prime Minister of Canada he was Prime Minister for I think about 15 years in sort of the late 19th century early 20th century considered a very sort of iconic statesman of Canadian history although I do think that he's an interesting guy because I don't think that people really know that much about what he did in particular he's just sort of a man associated with late nineteenth century Canada at a time when the country was really sort of growing and thriving all right next page we have the Parliament Buildings of Canada so this is Canada's most famous architectural masterpiece this is the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa it's this enormous neo-gothic sort of building in Canada's capital in Ontario there is this enormous clock in the middle the so called peace tower the central block of parliament is also what it's called that's what it says right down here the peace tower separates the two wings of the Canadian Parliament you have the House of Commons on this side and then the Senate on this side and then there is another quote up here that says Parliament is more than procedure it is the custodian of the nation's freedom the right honorable john diefenbaker so john diefenbaker was a conservative Prime Minister of Canada in the late 50s early 60s he was sort of a controversial and contentious figure very sort of erratic had sort of a very odd personality but he was also a great romantic of parliament you know very defensive of Parliament's traditions and so forth so this line here that Parliament is more than procedure it is the custodian of the nation's freedom that is a very sort of Diefenbaker kind of sentiment the interesting thing about Diefenbaker is that even after losing election he still hung around in Parliament for a very long time until his death in 1979 so he very much considered sort of the grand Dean of the house you know man with a lot of institutional reverence and knowledge and I'm sure no one considered himself more that way than deef himself all right on the next page we have the iconic Niagara Falls of Ontario I think everybody knows Niagara Falls that is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Canada this enormous enormous waterfall I actually had the chance to visit Niagara Falls a few years ago it was quite a cool thing to see you can go on a little boat and sail all the way through the mist at the bottom of the falls I think at one time they claim that Niagara Falls was like the honeymoon capital of the world but I must say that Niagara Falls is also like a really really tacky tourist trap like it might look beautiful in these photographs but if you are away from the Falls themselves everything is just like tacky restaurants and like wax museums and like horrible tourist shops selling you t-shirts and snow globes like it is not a dignified place it is very much like being in Vegas or something so on the next page we have the Canadian national Vimy memorial in France so Canada was of course a participant in World War one and the most iconic battle for the Canadian side in the First World War was the Battle of Vimy Ridge over 3,000 Canadian soldiers died in the Battle of Vimy Ridge which was this strategic battle to secure this important piece of territory from the Germans and the loss of life was so dramatic it really sort of changed the way the Canadians conceptualized a lot of things about their country you know the strength of its military its relationship with Great Britain it's sort of role in the world there was very much this sense that Canada was now like very clearly a country engaged in the politics of the wider world and thus had a right to a sort of independent nationalism that was greater than had been previously in existence you know the only reason Canada was even fighting in World War one was because it was still technically a colony of Great Britain so there is all this kind of like you know romantic notions about how like the Battle of Vimy Ridge helped Canada become a country and this sort of thing and of course there was this huge memorial that was built to commemorate the loss of life of the Canadian soldiers in Vimy Ridge in France these two grand obelisks yeah you see there's even a quote right here in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation says Brigadier General ie Ross the Vimy Ridge memorial was actually in the news not too long ago because the Battle of Vimy Ridge was in 1917 and so the 100-year anniversary was recently and a bunch of you know the Canadian politicians and British politicians and French politicians and whatnot were all at this big sort of grand ceremony at the memorial okay and now we have a little tableau of Quebec City and then at the bottom here it says the city of Quebec founded in 1608 so Quebec City which is the capital of the province of Quebec is one of the oldest cities in Canada founded in 1806 by good old Champlain who we remember from earlier I've never been to Quebec City myself but it's supposed to be a very beautiful city very European seeming they have a lot of very old architecture you know very well preserved buildings from the colonial times and in this building up here is the hotel Frontenac which is one of the most famous buildings in Canada they say it is the most photographed hotel in the world although that also seems like a weirdly specific compliment but it is a very beautiful building in a very beautiful city next page we have the Northwest Mounted Police and then we have the Royal Canadian Mounted Police so another very iconic symbol of Canada is the Mounties the RCMP the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with their red uniforms and their big brown hats soon to be making an appearance in Super Troopers 2 the Mounties are the national police force of Canada they do not always wear those red uniforms only on sort of symbolic occasions but before the Mounties came into existence there was this other police force in Canada called the Northwest Mounted Police which we see over here they existed from 1873 to 1904 apparently and part of the reason why the Mounties were created and the Northwest Mounted Police before them was to sort of bring law and order to the big empty parts of Canada you know they would ride over on Johnny MacDonald's railroad into the empty middle part of the country the prairies where they would you know keep the Indians from getting too uppity and help protect the white settlers you know it is not an uncontroversial legacy but it is sort of part of the Canadian story in the old days the Northwest Mounted Police officers dressed in a much more sort of British Imperial kind of way with these little white helmets they look like the kind of people that were you know helping quell unrest in India so there's obviously a sort of a lot of racial politics bound up in all of this and now we have this nice little tableau of Canada's two most beloved sports football and hockey so Canadians love ice hockey I think that's kind of well known Canadians also love American football that is perhaps a little bit less well known but the two highest awards in these two sports in Canada is the Stanley Cup which I think everybody knows this is the prize that the NHL gives to the top hockey team every year and then the other trophy is the Grey Cup which is the Canadian Football League's equivalent to the Super Bowl Canadian rules for American football are a little bit different than American rules for American football and thus there is a separate Canadian Football League although it is not as popular in Canada as the NFL most Canadians who are football fans follow the NFL I would say more than they follow the CFL but the Grey Cup is the highest award for the CFL championship Grey and Stanley were two famous governors of Canada okay so these two pages are quite different from each other so we'll have to take them one at a time so the first one it says is Nellie McClung from the statue of the famous five by the way you've probably noticed that all of these quotes are in French and English that's official Canadian bilingualism for you any work of the Canadian government must always print all texts in French and English so in the old days Canadian women did not have a lot of political rights so they couldn't vote and they couldn't become members of the Senate of Canada for a very strange reason because the constitution of Canada says that you know that the Prime Minister shall appoint qualified persons to the Senate of Canada and the understanding of the law at that time was that a woman was not legally a person she was something else and so she couldn't be appointed to the Senate and Nellie McClung who was like a politician and a sort of activist a feminist in early twentieth century Canada she was very upset about this and she along with some other high-profile feminists of her time who were known as the famous five did court challenges to argue that a woman was in fact a legal person and should be appointed to the Senate and the Canadian courts were not into this idea but the British were and ultimately the British overruled the Canadian courts and allowed a woman to be appointed to the Senate of Canada you know around the same time a lot of the Canadian provinces were passing laws allowing women to vote but anyway there is now a statue of the famous five in Ottawa in the shadow of the Parliament Buildings and in the middle of the statue is a statue of Nellie clong holding this big sort of piece of paper and you can see in the picture here it says women are persons and of course it says it in French although that I can guarantee you was not the case at the time Nellie McClung and the famous five are kind of controversial now because like the early 20th century Canadian feminism movement was about three things you know it was about political rights it was also about prohibition they were really against alcohol and it was also really big into eugenics they were really big into the idea that like the lesser races shouldn't breed and shouldn't have children and they should be like sterilized and Canada should be like this perfect white utopia so I mean this is kind of complicated because you have this woman who sort of on the one hand represents a lot of values that I think most Canadians are down with you know political rights for women but then you know she's also sort of bound up in a lot of like real crackpot stuff from the early 20th century so it's kind of difficult to know really how to deal with her I imagine that at some point people are probably gonna be calling for her statue to be torn down and then on the next page we have statue of Terry Fox Calma Marathon of Hope so Terry Fox is a much less controversial figure he's almost a sort of saintly christ-like figure in Canada like someone who was just sort of considered so perfect that there's like nothing bad that can ever be said about him in any context so Terry Fox was a young man from here from British Columbia you know very handsome charismatic young man very active in sports and this sort of thing but he had cancer and they had to cut off one of his legs and replace it with this like very crude mechanical leg and so you know in those days this was sort of the late 70s early 80s having cancer was still considered like quite controversial and people that were sort of crippled in that way were still considered kind of outcasts and and you know kind of embarrassing and shocking and this kind of thing and so Terry Fox wanted to rehabilitate the reputation of disabled people and people that had cancer and so he had what they called the Marathon of Hope and so Terry Fox said that I'm gonna go to the furthest eastern edge of Canada and I am going to go on a marathon I'm going to run from the easternmost point of Canada to the westernmost point of Canada on my mechanical leg and it was like this big exciting thing it was this big photo op you know people followed him around the news media and all that kind of stuff very inspirational but then you know unfortunately as he made his way to Ontario the cancer in his body spread into his lungs and he died and it was a very sort of abrupt end to something that seemed to have a lot of promise and since then his legacy has lived on and there's you know the Terry Fox Charitable Foundation is one of the big charities of Canada raises an enormous amount of money for cancer research and the aftermath of that has sort of made him this very sort of sainted figure in Canada you know there's lots of statues in his honor you learn about him in school he's sort of this very inspiring role model of you know how you can achieve anything and tolerance and you know just and all of your own sort of good guy all right and now we have a montage of Canada's various Wars I will try to get through these we have Billy Bishop first world war flying ace so Billy Bishop is perhaps the most famous soldier in Canadian history in World War one he was like an expert dog fighter who killed a whole bunch of Germans he won the Victoria Cross which was you know like the highest award of the British Empire then underneath Billy Bishop we have the HMCS Sackville from the Second World War HMCS stands for His Majesty's Canadian ship I'm not very great at military history but the Sackville was a Canadian battleship that was very active I think on the Pacific front but the bigger thing about it was that he just lasted for a very long time in fact it is still in existence to this day and they have converted it into a like World War two Museum in Halifax I think so you can go in and you know check out what it was like to be on a warship at that time so a very sort of iconic symbol of Canada's war history then we have a picture of the Canadian infantry during the Korean War Canada was one of many Western nations that fought under the UN flag to liberate South Korea from the invasion of North Korea and of course as we know there has been no problems on that peninsula ever since and then we have the National War Memorial in Ottawa which is this big monument commemorating the death of all the Canadian soldiers in all of Canada's wars it is this very grand construction and once a year on Remembrance Day on Veterans Day the Prime Minister and the governor-general and all the other big shots you know they lay a wreath in commemoration the National War Memorial was also the site of a shooting a few years back in which an Isis guy shot and killed this guard who was guarding the National War Memorial in a sort of ceremonial capacity the shooter then went on and tried to shoot up Parliament Hill but he was luckily shot before he did much damage and then lastly we have cape speare in Newfoundland and Labrador and a picture of the blue nose so cape speare is basically just the single most eastern point in Canada it is part of the rock of Newfoundland Newfoundlands eastern position which is actually the most eastern point in the entire North American continent has made it a very strategically useful place over the years you know in the early 20th century when people would try to fly from America to Europe they would often begin their journey in Newfoundland it was also big when like Telegraph's were being designed you know they would try to do cables from Europe to America it would go through Newfoundland as well and then the Bluenose is a sailboat most Canadians are probably most familiar with it because it is on the Canadian dime it was just a very successful racing boat that was sort of the undefeated champion for a period in the early 20th century it beat the Americans in some high-profile race which I guess is enough to make it a great hero in Canada so yes that's it that is every page in the Canadian passport if you would like to learn more about Canada I highly recommend you check out my awesome Canada website called the Canada guide calm everything that I've talked about in this video I talked about in more detail on that website I really put a lot of effort into it so if you haven't taken a look at it yet I highly encourage you to do so let me know in the comments if there is anything that I talked about in this video that you would like to hear me describe in more detail in a future video because remember my only goal is to help you learn

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 427,329

Keywords: Canada, history, educational, canadian, school, teach, learn, 19th century, 20th century, John A. Macdonald, prime ministers, John Diefenbaker, Wilfrid Laurier, French, Champlain, Quebec, New France, Mounties, RCMP, Stanley Cup, Grey Cup, Football, Hockey, Dime, Bluenose, Terry Fox, Railroad, CPR, Vimy Ridge, World War I, Wolrd War II, Nellie McClung, Persons Case, Famous Five, Sackville, Billy Bishop, Metis, First Nations, Aboriginals, Last Spike

Id: astJLpEVa9c

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 07 2018