COMPULSORY SCHOOLING. There are five thousand children running around the streets of Montreal who never enter a school. It is now proposed that compulsory education shall be enforced in the great centre of mercantile life, and certainly the principle is necessary. These children are to be our future leaders, and they ought to know something. […]
Author: Earle Gray
Toronto Star spreads racism, sectarianism, bigotry and misogyny of evangelist Frank Norris
Evangelist Frank Norris, the most famous fundamentalist U.S. preacher in the 1920s. Wikimedia Commons. Early 20th-century naked bigotry, sectarianism and misogyny were on prominent display in the Toronto Star, August 30, 1924, with the reported teaching and preaching of U.S. evangelist and self-styled “Texas Tornado,” Frank Norris (1872-1952). “SAYS KU KLUX KLAN KEPT OUT […]
1867: The First Canada Day welcomes Confederation
As midnight broke on July 1, 1867, there was neither peace nor quiet across the land, on the first day of Canada’s Confederation. From Halifax to Windsor, guns boomed, bells chimed, rifles, pistols, and muskets were fired, bonfires were lit, as millions of Canadians poured out into the streets of towns and villages to […]
The failed life of Donald Trump
Donald Trump (presidential portrait, cropped). Intelligence is one thing. Wisdom is something else entirely. Saddest are those with a plethora of intelligence and a paucity of wisdom—or even common sense. They are doomed to failed, unhappy, and often destructive lives. The greatest and most destructive failures combine intelligence with unwisdom, wealth, and power. We are […]
Toronto in great uproar as U.S. seeks fugitive slave
John Anderson, a proclaimed fugitive slave in Toronto who escaped from Missouri to Canada on the Underground Railway, was wanted by the Americans in 1860. English engraving, from “The Story of the Life of John Anderson,” 1863. “It was an anxious moment, as the Chief Justice produced his papers and began to read. The life […]
Wild speculation and wasted energy marred Turner Valley, British Empire’s biggest oilfield
Epic oil In the foothills of Alberta, some 20 miles southwest of Calgary, lies Canada’s first big oilfield, the largest in what was once the British Empire, and among the largest in North America. It took 22 years to reveal the full extent of the energy stored in the Turner Valley oilfield. Most of it was […]
How Canada created the oil industry
Epic oil In 1854, Abraham Gesner laid the foundation of the oil industry when he built the first of some U.S. 70 plants that used coal to refine a lamp fuel he called kerosene, a.k.a. coal oil. In Britain, James Young had earlier started distilling a lubricating and solvent from coal. In 1856, two years after […]
You could be jailed for just talking about the Great Uranium Cartel
In the 1970s, continued nuclear power development was still seen by many as essential to the energy needs of an increasing, and increasingly affluent, world population. But supplies of uranium fuel were threatened by a U.S. embargo that compelled U.S. power utilities to use only U.S. uranium. The embargo depressed prices from other sources, […]
A walk across the Northwest Passage
It is September 1969 and I am aboard the SS Manhattan as it sits trapped in polar ice while attempting to complete a crossing of the Northwest Passage through McClure Strait, around the northern coast of Banks Island. The Manhattan is stuck in the polar ice grip for 34 hours before she is released […]
SS Manhattan signals an open Northwest Passage
All photos by author As the ice continues to shrink, the 2017 sailing season could see a record number of vessels transiting the fabled Canadian Northwest Passage. The first vessel has already left port. An ancient resuscitated icebreaker is on a 23,000-kilometre, 150-day voyage from Toronto to Victoria to help mark Canada’s 150th birthday. A giant […]