Phil Egan & George Mathewson The sun rose over Sarnia into a clear, blue sky on the morning of July 1, 1867. That was the day the British North America Act took effect, forging Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into the new Dominion of Canada. It was the day parishioners would gather on. Read more »
March 8 is a very important date in Canadian history. It is the day in 1867 that the British Parliament gave final reading to the British North America Act (BNA Act), which created Canada. The Act, now the Constitution Act, came into effect July 1 of that year, but the March 8 vote was also historic paving the way for self-government. Obviously, there was no Yorkton newspaper on that date in 1867 because there was no Yorkton. In 1982, however, March 8 was the day the British Parliament passed the Canada Act allowing this country to patriate the Constitution. Despite Canada’s independence from Britain, until 1982 the Constitution remained under the control of the British Parliament.
This is the first of a two-part series on residential schools in Canada. In part one, we will examine the subject from a national perspective, while in part two, we will narrow our focus to southern Ontario.
I hope to start the discussion by addressing some facts that you may not currently know or perhaps are perhaps unclear about. This article is a result of my research on the subject over the past months and is intended as a primer to the history.
The research and documenting of our collective histories is a process that I have relished over the years. I have written about the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, Prohibition, and a variety of local fires and floods in my past articles on NewmarketToday, but this article is the saddest recollection that I have done in this series.
The reaction across Canada to Quebec’s Bill 96, another language law invoking the professed threat to the survival of the French language in Quebec in order to justify an obnoxious retrenchment of freedom of expression in the province, has been quite different to the response to its predecessors, Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa’s Bill 22 in 1974, and Parti Québecois Premier Rene Levesque’s Bill 101 in 1977. On those occasions, there were intense.