Happy birthday, Canada, you tired old fart!
Tomorrow television anchors, bored mayors and jingoistic revellers from coast-to-coast will enrobe themselves in scarlet and bathe in maple syrup like a deleted scene from Riverdale. The country’s 150th celebration will be a party unlike any other—a national celebration befitting of Canadian heroes like Bono and the cast of X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
The festive Canada 150 veneer—and its white-washing of Canada’s tremendous history of violating any people who weren’t European, straight and male—has astoundingly become even thinner this week. In a “microcosm of colonialism,” Indigenous protesters were arrested Wednesday night while trying to set up a tipi on Parliament Hill. It was an attempt to highlight the country’s history of assimilation ahead of a cloying fête that will vanilla glaze over those historical atrocities.
With that in mind—and under the belief that the first step in reconciliation is hearing truth—The Coast presents an incomplete timeline documenting just some of the events in this land’s past. It’s a list that stretches back thousands of years before confederation, and is unlikely to inspire true patriot love. Too bad. This is Canada.
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12,700 BC The earliest carbon-dated Mi’kmaw artefacts.
9,000 BC Indigenous settlements are present in what will become Nova Scotia.
796 The Three Fires Confederacy is formed by the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi nations.
1142 The Iroquois Confederacy is formed.
1606 The Wabanaki Confederacy is formed.
1628 Olivier Le Jeune, a seven-year-old slave, becomes the first Black person to live in “Canada.”
1725 The first treaty is signed by European settlers and the Mi’kmaq.
1734 Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave in Montreal, is tortured and hanged after being accused of setting a fire that spread throughout the city.
1749 The English settlement of Halifax is founded, in opposition to previous treaties and occupations. Governor Edward Cornwallis issues a proclamation for Mi’kmaw scalps.
1755 The expulsion of the Acadians.
1760 Slaves advertised for sale in Halifax.
1783 3,000 Black Loyalists flee America for Nova Scotia. Over 1,000 soon leave and emigrate to Sierra Leone.
1784 The first race riot in Canada occurs when white residents of Shelburne attack and beat Black Loyalist settlers and burn down homes in the nearby Birchtown. None of the rioters face criminal charges.
1791 Mary Postell is re-enslaved by her former owner, Jesse Gray and sold for 100 bushels of potatoes. Gray also attempts to sell her children into slavery. Postell tries to take Gray to court, but Nova Scotia magistrates acquit him.
1831 The Mohawk Institute, Canada’s first residential school, opens and attempts to assimilate Indigenous children.
1832 The African Chapel, later renamed the Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, is established.
1835 The Slavery Abolition Act outlaws slavery in British colonies.
1867 The Dominion of Canada is formed
1869 Métis, led by Louis Riel, fight against the newly formed government in the Red River Rebellion. Canada officially bans abortion.
1885 The Canadian Pacific Railway is completed. Hundreds of Chinese immigrants die during the construction.
1894 The Coloured Hockey League is founded in Nova Scotia, 23 years before the NHL.
1918 Nova Scotian women are granted the right to vote in provincial elections. A year later, Canadian women are given the federal vote.
1919 Gabriel Sylliboy becomes the first Mi’kmaq elected as Grand Chief. The League of Indians of Canada is founded by F. O. Loft to address the country’s failure to recognize land rights. The Department of Indian Affairs attempts to revoke his status in response.
1921 The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children opens, in part because white orphanages wouldn’t accept Black children.
1923 The Chinese Exclusion Act bans all Chinese immigrants from Canada for 24 years before it’s finally repealed.
1925 Canadian members of the KKK are estimated to number in the tens of thousands.
1930 The first children arrive at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School.
1931 J. Massey Rhind’s statue of Edward Cornwallis is erected in downtown Halifax.
1933 The Christie Pits riot breaks out between Jewish Torontonians and Nazi supporters.
1940 Women in Quebec are granted the right to vote.
1942 The Canadian government detains some 20,000 Japanese Canadians in internment camps and sells off their homes and businesses to pay for the costs.
1946 Viola Desmond refuses to leave a whites-only area of a New Glasgow theatre and is subsequently arrested.
1960 First Nations individuals are granted the right to vote in federal elections without having to give up treaty rights or Indian Status. An estimated 20,000 Indigenous children are stolen from their families and adopted out to white families during the “Sixties Scoop.”
1966 Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy, dies from starvation and exposure as he flees Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School.
1967 The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission is established. The Shubenacadie residential school closes after having indoctrinated over 1,000 children.
1969 Africville is demolished in the middle of the night, its former residents having been forcibly relocated in the months prior. Bill C-150 decriminalizes abortion, contraception and homosexuality. The federal government’s White Paper proposes to abolish the Indian Act and transfer all responsibility for Indigenous peoples to the provinces.
1973 The Calder case becomes the Supreme Court of Canada’s first Indigenous land claims decision and spurs the federal government to adopt a land claims policy.
1981 Toronto police raid four gay bathhouses and arrest over 300 men during Operation Soap. Mass protests held in response eventually evolve into Toronto’s Pride festival.
1982 The Constitution Act recognizes “existing Aboriginal and treaty rights.” Legal abortion access is discontinued in PEI.
1983 Donald Marshall Jr. is acquitted after serving 11 years after a wrongful murder conviction. Nova Scotia’s last racially segregated school closes.
1989 Fourteen female engineering students are murdered at the University of Montreal.
1990 The Oka Crisis sees thousands of military troops confronting Indigenous activists who are protesting the expansion of a golf course on Mohawk land.
1996 The last federally operated residential school closes.
1997 All education on reserves is handed off from Nova Scotia to the Mi’kmaq.
2003 Kirk Johnson wins a racial profiling case against Halifax police, who had stopped him 28 times over a five-year period.
2005 Same-sex marriage is legalized throughout Canada. The RCMP launch project E-PANA, focusing on the unsolved murders and disappearances of young women along the Highway of Tears.
2007 Canada’s $2-billion settlement with residential school survivors comes into effect. The federal government refuses to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
2008 Stephen Harper publicly apologizes for the residential school system and the forced assimilation of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.
2009 Black Nova Scotian Shayne Howe awakens to find a burning cross with a noose on it placed outside his home.
2010 Halifax officially apologizes for the destruction of Africville. Viola Desmond is granted a posthumous pardon. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission officially launches, two years after it was first created.
2011 Halifax Regional School Board votes to change the name of Cornwallis Junior High to Halifax Central Junior High.
2012 Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence begins a hunger strike in support of Indigenous rights. The grassroots Idle No More movement is founded.
2013 The Elsipogtog First Nation sets up a blockade against SWN Resources’ fracking exploration.
2014 Premier Stephen McNeil apologizes to former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children who suffered decades of physical and sexual abuse.
2015 The Liberals promise to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016.
2016 The Canadian government launches a national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and girls. The Supreme Court rules that the legal definition of “Indian” includes Métis and non-status Indigenous peoples.
2017 Six people are killed and 19 injured in the Quebec City mosque shooting.
2017 Bill C-16 grants federal protection to transgender individuals. Prince Edward Island becomes the last province to provide local, legal access to abortion services.
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This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2017.
You missed the Vatican Concordat of 1610 that recognized the Mi’kmaq as the 1st Catholic Nation recognized in North America. It allowed us to do trade with Europe. We have a wampum.
It was Amherst who ordered the use of smallpox blankets and handkerchief taken from hospitals to be distributed to the Mi’kmaq. He order Cornwallis to do the scalpings. He violated the Treaty of Utrecht against orders from Europe when he ordered deportation. He carried the genocides east to west and killed the Dakota Sioux and Lakota people. Their genocide was done the same as ours with smallpox and deportations etc.
My grandparents were forbidden to read. British troops would raid homes to take all books and bibles to burn them. My great grandfather paid a girl to come from Montreal to teach his kids to read in secret. My grandma was her first student. Both my parents grew up hiding crosses and rosaries as well as Acadian flags from the British Inspectors who visited their schools. These items were forbidden. When the priest took over the schools they beat and molested the kids. Things were done to make us forget the Vatican Concordat. We never did.
Nova Scotia School for the Deaf and the Shelburne Reform School for Boys could make this list I would think.
Speaking for all people of European decent, we’re not sorry for one damn thing.
So what’s the point? There is not a single country in the world that doesn’t have a similarly repressive and or violent history. I look at Canada today and how far we’ve come. Yes, we definitely need to do better when it comes to our First Nations people, but we are a great country with a great standard of living and we’ve been pretty peaceful for the most part. When there is an urgent need Canadians pull together and are very kind. As an immigrant from Jamaica I have never been happier and enjoy a rich life here. (And I’m not talking money rich, I’m talking a wealth of Canadian friends and Canadian experiences that I love) I’m really getting tired of hearing Canada trash talk!
It is a fool’s game to dissect the past looking for indiscretions, behaviours and events to support a victim mentality. This foments anger and division, and ultimately does little to actually help anyone. Every society past and every person was/is imperfect; Solzhenitsyn wisely stated that the line between good and evil cuts through every heart.
You rail against “colonialism” but you forget that pre-colonial indigenous life was “nasty, brutish and short”. Whites held slaves, but slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833; it continues now as slavery per se but also forced marriages and childhood labour in Africa and some parts of South Asia. Why are these not decried?
Anyone can find fault with the past. It is much more difficult but, I believe worthy, righteous and honourable to try to make changes in how we behave now that actually make the lives of us or others better.