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Grande Société, contemporary name for war profiteers charged with providing food for Canada and the French troops stationed there during the SEVEN YEARS' WAR.

Robert John Parsons, journalist, politician (b at Harbour Grace, Nfld, c 1802; d at St John's 20 June 1883). With William Carson and other Newfoundland Liberals, he founded the weekly Newfoundland Patriot in 1833 and became its sole owner and editor (1840).

  The Patriotes was the name given after 1826 to the Parti canadien and to the popular movement that contributed to the Rebellions of 1837-38 in Lower Canada.

Dr. James Naismith, physical educator, author, inventor, chaplain, physician (born 6 November 1861 in Almonte, Ontario; died 28 November 1939 in Lawrence, Kansas). James Naismith is best known as the inventor of the sport of basketball. He was also the first full-time athletics instructor at McGill University and established the basketball program at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he worked and lived for 41 years until his death. Naismith became the first member of the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959. He was posthumously inducted to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2010, his original hand-written rules for the sport of basketball were sold at auction for $4.3 million, a sports memorabilia record. 

Blair Fraser, journalist (b at Sydney, NS 17 Apr 1909; d on the Petawawa R, Ont 12 May 1968). Fraser was one of the leading journalists of the 1950s and 1960s, and as Ottawa editor of Maclean's from 1943-60 he had a unique opportunity to influence a national audience.

These big-game hunters sought mammoths, mastodons, camels and horses that were native to North America at the time. Following the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciers, these animals became extinct, hastening the end of this stage of North American Prehistory.

Seeking to rise above "the muddy pool of politics," he tried unsuccessfully to arrange the building of the Halifax-to-Québec Railway. As chief commissioner, he began the Nova Scotia Railway in 1854, however, and saw completion of the lines from Halifax to Windsor and Truro.

Peter Fidler, fur trader, mapmaker, explorer (b at Bolsover, Eng 16 Aug 1769; d at Fort Dauphin [Man] 17 Dec 1822).

Francis Joseph Fitzgerald, Royal North-West Mounted Police inspector (b at Halifax 12 Apr 1869; d Yukon Territory Feb 1911).

Alexander Henry, fur trader (born in August 1739 in New Jersey, USA; died 4 April 1824 in Montreal, QC). He was one of the first English traders, known as the "pedlars from Quebec," to do business in the North-West following 1763.

Louis Hébert, apothecary, colonist (born circa 1575 in Paris; died in January 1627 in Québec).

Pre-Dorset culture, 2000-500 BCE, represents the first occupation of arctic North America by Palaeoeskimos.

William Kirby, novelist, journalist (b at Kingston-upon-Hull, Eng 23 Oct 1817; d at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont 23 June 1906).

Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, governor of New France 1682-85 (b in France 1622; d at Paris, France 1688). La Barre's administration in New France was disastrous, particularly from a military point of view. Like many governors, he enriched himself in the FUR TRADE.

Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, Marquis de La Galissonière, naval officer, commandant general of New France (b at Rochefort, France 10 Nov 1693; d at Montereau, France 26 Oct 1756). He was born into a powerful family and rose to lieutenant-general of the French naval forces.

James Maurice Stockford Careless, historian (b at Toronto 17 Feb 1919; d at Toronto 6 Apr 2009). A graduate of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO (1940), James Careless had just begun graduate work at Harvard when he enlisted in the Canadian military effort during WWII.

Catharine Parr Traill, née Strickland, pioneer writer, botanist (born 9 January 1802 in London, England; died 29 August 1899 in Lakefield, ON). Catharine Parr Traill’s books are some of the earliest in the Canadian literary canon. Works such as The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer (1836) offer detailed descriptions of pioneer life in Canada, while Canadian Wildflowers (1868) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885) showcase her skill as an amateur botanist.

Leif Eriksson (Old Norse Leifr Eiríksson, a.k.a. Leifr hinn heppni, Leif the Lucky), explorer, chieftain (born in the 970s CE in Iceland; died between 1018 and 1025 in Greenland). Leif Eriksson was the first European to explore the east coast of North America, including areas that are now part of Arctic and Atlantic Canada. Upon the death of his father, Erik the Red, Leif became paramount chieftain of the Norse colony in Greenland. The two main sources on him are The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red. There are also references to him in The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason and The Saga of St. Olaf.

Without doubt he was politically inept but much criticism of him was unfair. He cannot be held responsible for the crisis in Lower Canada that led to the REBELLIONS OF 1837.

Lucien Bouchard, G.O.Q., lawyer, politician and premier of Québec (born 22 December 1938 in Saint-Coeur-de-Marie, Quebec). In the 1980s, Bouchard was a member of Brian Mulroney’s government, serving first as secretary of state and then as minister of the environment. Not long before the ultimate failure of the Meech Lake Accord, however, Bouchard left Cabinet after expressing his concerns with the process. With a group of Liberal and Conservative members of Parliament, he formed a new party, the Bloc Québécois, whose goal is to represent the interests of Québec in the House of Commons. A key figure in the 1995 Quebec referendum, Bouchard succeeded Jacques Parizeau in January 1996 as premier of Québec, a position he held until March 2001. He then returned to practising law.