Canada played the lead role in establishing the International Criminal Court in 1998. It was the climax of a 126-year quest for a body to bring to justice those guilty of the world’s war and humanitarian crimes. But control by the UN’s Permanent Security Council has hampered its efforts to prosecute the worst […]
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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 […]
Perilous speeding trains
Trains race through Toronto at speeds up to 30 or 40 miles per hour “to the imminent peril of life and limb,” complains The Growler, August 12, 1864. If a cabman or a farmer be caught driving at a dangerous pace through our streets, he is instantly and properly taken up, and punished by the […]
Immigrants sleep on streets
Scottish immigrants evicted from their crofts to make way for sheep during the highland clearances of the nineteenth century, flooded into Canada. In Toronto, their first accommodation was sometimes a police station, and sometimes on the streets, according to this item from the Toronto Leader, July 7, 1864. About a hundred Scotch immigrants arrived in […]
Bloomers ignite an apoplectic fit of misogyny
Women who wore trousers in the mid-nineteenth century were known as Bloomers, after Amelia Jenks Bloomer, U.S. campaigner for temperance and women’s rights. The impending arrival of Mrs. Bloomer in Toronto caused the Daily Leader to suffer this apoplectic fit of misogyny, September 12, 1853. Bloomerism, women’s rights ism! and the Maine Law ism […]
Death penalty abolished in 30-year reform campaign
Law and order 1822-1967 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. For some two centuries, the death penalty hung over the parts of North America that eventually became Canada, before it was abolished—for all but military crimes. Under British law, there were some 230 crimes that carried the death penalty, early in […]
Regulated Life in old muddy York
York, Upper Canada, the future Toronto in 1803. Unknown artist. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231,F1231_it0897. Wikimedia Commons. York (Toronto), bakers were required to “stamp each Loaf or Biscuit” with their initials, and homeowners were required to keep a ladder leaning against the eves, as stipulated in “REGULATIONS for the POLICE,” published in the Upper […]
Wolfe fails to conquer Canada
From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. British General James Wolfe is widely credited with the conquest of Canada by defeating Louis-Joseph Montcalm and the French on the Plains of Abraham, September 13, 1759. Not so. Wolfe won the battle, but not the war. The French lost a battle but their […]