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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.

The Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic was a British luxury passenger liner that sank on its maiden transatlantic voyage. At approximately 11:40 p.m. on 14 April, 1912, about 740 km south of Newfoundland, Titanic’s starboard (right) side scraped along an iceberg. The collision ruptured several watertight compartments. Water poured in, but the first lifeboat was not launched until an hour later. Approximately two-thirds of the liner’s passengers and crew died. Titanic’s sinking was one of the worst marine disasters in history and remains firmly embedded in popular culture today.

A crushing defeat for the British in the War of 1812, the sacking of York began on the morning of 27 April 1813. At dawn, a flotilla of 16 American ships under Commodore Isaac Chauncey made its way to the capital of Upper Canada, York [Toronto]. Landing to the west, the Americans suppressed the small group of warriors defending the shore, while knocking out the town's meagre batteries. The American force of approximately 1,700 men easily assumed control. With the fort poorly defended by an undersized garrison of 700 soldiers and backed by an unenthusiastic (indeed, almost wholly absent) militia, the British general, Sir Roger Hale Sheaffe, retreated. He left behind two local militia officers to negotiate the terms of surrender.

Hector, the ship which carried 178 Scottish immigrants to the Pictou area of northern Nova Scotia in 1773. Pictou was located on the "Philadelphia Plantation," an 81 000 ha tract granted to 14 Scots proprietors and settled desultorily since 1767.

The Treaty of Utrecht was an agreement between Britain and France, concluded on 11 April 1713 at Utrecht in the Netherlands, as part of the series of treaties ending the War of the Spanish Succession.

Clement Courtenay Ligoure, physician (born 13 October 1886 in Trinidad; died 23 May 1922 in Halifax, NS). Dr. Ligoure was Halifax’s first Black doctor and an unsung hero of the Halifax Explosion, as he treated hundreds of patients free of charge in his home medical office. Dr. Ligoure was also instrumental in the formation of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, Canada’s first and only all-Black battalion (see Black Canadians; Caribbean Canadians).

Treaty 11 is the last of the Numbered Treaties signed on 22 August 1921 between First Nations and the Canadian government following Confederation, as Canada expanded its borders north and west. It covers more than 950,000 km² of present-day Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The First Nations involved were predominately Dene, and include the Gwich’in, Tlicho (Dogrib) and Sahtu. As with other Numbered Treaties, the government did not want to enter into treaty until its interests would be served by doing so; accordingly, Treaty 11 was only created in 1921, after oil and gas prospects in the Mackenzie region sparked its interests. However, hasty negotiations combined with weak implementation of the terms — particularly with regard to reserves and land claims — have led to considerable disagreement between the parties on what was meant by the treaty and which promises have not been fulfilled. As a result, many of the signatories to Treaty 11 have also been involved in the modern treaties process ( see Indigenous Peoples: Treaties).

In 1982, Canada fully broke from its colonial past and “patriated” its Constitution. It transferred the country’s highest law, the British North America Act (which was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867), from the authority of the British Parliament to Canada’s federal and provincial legislatures. The Constitution was also updated with a new amending formula and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These changes occurred after a fierce, 18-month political and legal struggle that dominated headlines and the agendas of every government in the country.

​On 7 June 1939, 907 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis were denied entry to Canada. The ship returned its passengers to safe harbour in four European countries. Sadly, 254 of its passengers later perished in the Holocaust.

In the early 1600s, Catholic nuns and priests established the first residential schools in Canada. In 1883, these schools began to receive funding from the federal government. That year, the Government of Canada officially authorized the creation of the residential school system. The main goal of the system was to assimilate Indigenous children into white, Christian society. (See also Inuit Experiences at Residential School and Métis Experiences at Residential School .)

(This article is a plain-language summary of residential schools in Canada. If you are interested in reading about this topic in more depth, please see our full-length entry Residential Schools 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.)

The October Crisis happened in the fall of 1970. It was sparked by the Front de liberation du Québec (FLQ). The FLQ used terrorist tactics to try and make Quebec independent from Canada. On 5 October, the FLQ kidnapped James Cross, a British trade commissioner. The FLQ also kidnapped Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act. The Act had never been used before during peacetime. It suspended civil liberties and led to hundreds of arrests. Laporte was murdered and found on 17 October. Cross was freed on 3 December. The crisis ended on 28 December, when Laporte’s killers were captured.

(This article is a plain-language summary of the October Crisis. If you are interested in reading about this topic in more depth, please see the full-length entry.)

On 3 October 1873, some Saulteaux peoples (an Ojibwe people) and the Government of Canada signed Treaty 3, also known as the North-West Angle Treaty. This agreement provided the federal government access to Saulteaux lands in present-day northwestern Ontario and eastern  Manitoba in exchange for various goods and Indigenous rights to hunting, fishing and natural resources on reserve lands. The terms and text of Treaty 3 set precedents for the eight Numbered Treaties that followed. (See also Treaties with Indigenous Peoples in Canada.)

Treaty 10 is the 10th of the 11 Numbered Treaties. It was signed in 1906–07 by the Canadian government and Indigenous peoples in northern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Treaty 10 covers nearly 220,000 km2 of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The terms of Treaty 10 have had ongoing legal and socioeconomic impacts on Indigenous communities.

Treaty 4 — also known as the Qu'Appelle Treaty — was signed on 15 September 1874 at Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. The Indigenous signatories include the Cree, Saulteaux bands of the Ojibwa peoples and the Assiniboine. In exchange for payments, provisions and rights to reserve lands, Treaty 4 ceded Indigenous territory to the federal government. The majority of Treaty 4 lands are in present-day southern Saskatchewan. Small portions are in western Manitoba and southern Alberta.

Treaty 7 is the last of the Numbered Treaties made between the Government of Canada and the Plains First Nations (see Indigenous Peoples: Plains). It was signed on 22 September 1877 by five First Nations: the Siksika (Blackfoot), Kainai (Blood), Piikani (Peigan), Stoney-Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina (Sarcee). Different understandings of the treaty’s purpose, combined with significant culture and language barriers and what some have argued were deliberate attempts to mislead the First Nations on the part of the government negotiators, have led to ongoing conflicts and claims.

Fatty Legs (2010) is a memoir about a young Inuvialuit girl’s two years at a religious residential school. It is based on the experiences of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, who cowrote the novel with her daughter-in-law Christy Jordan-Fenton. Published by Annick Press, the book features illustrations by Liz Amini-Holmes and archival photographs from Pokiak-Fenton’s personal collection. Fatty Legs was a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize. It received many other nominations and was named one of the 10 best children’s books of the year by the Globe and Mail.

On 14 April 1826, an obscure police magistrate in London, England, Robert Chambers, told a committee of the British Parliament dealing with emigration: "I conceive that London has got too full of children." Chambers was alarmed at the number of youngsters, victims of east-end London's chronic poverty, who were begging in the streets and sleeping in the gutters. He had a recommendation which may well have been in the minds of others and which was to become reality several decades later in one of the most Draconian movements in the history of emigration. Chambers recommended that Britain's surplus children be sent to Canada as farm labour.