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Alphonso Boyle Davies, soccer player (born 2 November 2000 in Buduburam, Ghana). Alphonso Davies is one of the world’s most promising young soccer stars. The youngest player ever on Team Canada, he was named the Canadian Men’s Player of the Year in 2018 and 2020. After being named an MLS All-Star and the Player of the Year with Vancouver Whitecaps FC in 2018, he signed a six-year contract with FC Bayern Munich of the Bundesliga in 2019. He was named the Bundesliga Rookie of the Season in 2019–20 and became the first Canadian men’s international to play on a team that won the Champions League. In 2020, he received the Lionel Conacher Award as Canada’s top male athlete and was a co-winner, with football player Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, of the Lou Marsh Trophy (now the Northern Star Award) as Canada’s athlete of the year.

Sammy Luftspring, boxer, referee, businessman (born 14 March 1915 in Toronto, ON; died 27 September 2000 in Toronto). Sammy Luftspring was the Ontario amateur featherweight champion in 1933 and the Canadian amateur welterweight champion in 1938. A proud Jew, Luftspring wore the Star of David on his trunks and was subjected to anti-Semitism throughout his life. He fought Nazi youth in the Christie Pits Riot and is perhaps best remembered for boycotting the 1936 Olympic Summer Games in Berlin. He also landed in the Guinness Book of World Records for officiating some 2,000 fights. He has been inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame.

From 1941 to 1978, the Government of Canada issued personal identifying numbers to all Inuit, then referred to as Eskimos, in Canada’s Arctic. The Eskimo Identification system was implemented to identify and register individuals for administrative purposes, such as taking censuses. Each Inuk was given a small leather or pressed fibre disc with a number on it, referred to as their disc number. Ultimately, disc numbers were required for any government interaction, such as keeping track of hunting, trapping, medical services, education, housing, family allowance and getting food and supplies. The system was unique to the Inuit. No other Canadian was required to have a number to access basic services or monitor their actions.

Donna Theo Strickland, CC, physicist (born 27 May 1959 in Guelph, ON). Donna Strickland is a pioneering physicist, known for her work on ultrafast lasers. She is currently a professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. She has authored more than 90 publications and has made seminal contributions to the field of laser technology. In 2018, Strickland was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on the development of laser technology.

Elisapie Isaac (a.k.a. Elisapie or ᐃᓕᓴᐱ in Inuktitut syllabics), singer, musician, songwriter, documentary filmmaker, writer, director, actor, broadcaster (born 1977 in Salluit, QC). Elisapie is an Inuit singer/songwriter and actor who has been professionally active since the early 2000s. She has won numerous awards for her artistic endeavors. She sings in French, English and Inuktitut.

In 1959, an article in the Journal of Negro History announced the discovery of copies of a weekly newspaper long believed lost to history. A sizeable print run of a dust-covered bound volume of The Provincial Freeman, which was published from 1853 to 1860, had been sitting in the library tower at the University of Pennsylvania since the early 1900s. What made this newspaper unique was not just that it was the second paper run by and for African Canadians. It made history as the first newspaper in North America to be published and edited by a Black woman, Mary Ann Shadd.

Douglas Jung, CM, OBC, politician, lawyer, soldier (born 25 February 1924 in Victoria, BC; died 4 January 2002 in Vancouver, BC). Douglas Jung was a member of Force 136, a group of Chinese Canadian soldiers who fought behind enemy lines in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War. After the war, Jung became a lawyer in British Columbia and was the first Chinese Canadian lawyer to appear before the BC Court of Appeal in 1955. On 10 June 1957, Douglas Jung was elected as the first Chinese Canadian member of Parliament.

Oskar Morawetz developed at an early age an ability to sight-read orchestral scores at the piano, and at 19 was recommended by George Szell for the assistant conductor's post with the Prague Opera, a post he turned down.

Ridout began teaching at the TCM in 1940 and at the University of Toronto in 1948; he retired from the latter in 1982as professor emeritus.

Larry Kenneth Robert Walker, baseball player, coach (born 1 December 1966 in Maple Ridge, BC). Larry Walker is arguably the greatest Canadian position player in Major League Baseball (MLB) history. He and pitcher Ferguson Jenkins are the only Canadian players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. A five-time all-star, Walker won seven Gold Gloves, three Silver Sluggers and the 1997 National League MVP award. He hit more than .300 in nine seasons, led the Major Leagues in batting average three times and was the first Canadian-born player to win a batting title since Tip O’Neill in 1887. Walker leads all Canadian MLB players in hits, home runs, RBI, doubles and runs scored. He won the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s athlete of the year in 1998 and received the Tip O’Neill Award as Canada’s best baseball player nine times — more than any other player. He has also been inducted into the BC Sports Hall of Fame, the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame, Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

Zacharias Kunuk, OC, filmmaker, carver, sculptor, visual artist (born 27 November 1957 in Kapuivik, Nunavut). An internationally acclaimed media maker, Zacharias Kunuk has played a crucial role in the redefinition of ethnographic filmmaking in Canada and has been at the forefront of the Inuit’s innovative use of broadcast technology. He is perhaps best known for his debut feature film, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), which won six Genie Awards (including Best Screenplay, Best Direction and Best Motion Picture) and was ranked the No. 1 Canadian film of all time in a 2015 poll conducted by the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Kaska Dena or Denek’éh (often referred to simply as Kaska) are a Dene-speaking people who live in southern Yukon and northern British Columbia, primarily in the communities of Lower Post, Upper Liard (near Watson Lake), Watson Lake and Ross River in the Pelly drainage. In the 2016 census, 1,440 people reported having Kaska ancestry.

In Canada, the term Indigenous peoples (or Aboriginal peoples) refers to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. These are the original inhabitants of the land that is now Canada. In the 2021 census by Statistics Canada, over 1.8 million people in Canada identified as Indigenous, making up 5 per cent of the national population. Though severely threatened — and in certain cases extinguished — by colonial forces, Indigenous culture, language and social systems have shaped the development of Canada and continue to grow and thrive despite extreme adversity.