1924 began with a decision that seemed minor in Ottawa but meant everything to Canadians posted overseas. On Jan. 26, Cabinet passed Order in Council P.C. 123 requiring every Canadian legation, consulate, and government office outside the country to fly the Canadian Red Ensign instead of the plain Union Jack. It was the first time a distinctly Canadian flag was mandatory abroad. In London, the high commission staff hauled down the old flag and ran up the new one with the composite shield showing the arms of the provinces. Veterans from Vimy Ridge who happened to be walking past stopped and saluted without being told why it suddenly felt right.
Three days later, on Jan. 29 in Louiseville, Quebec, Marcelle Ferron was born into a family where her father sold insurance and her mother painted watercolours. She contracted tuberculosis as a child, spent years in and out of sanatoriums, and discovered art while staring at light through coloured windows. By the 1940s she was painting with Paul-Émile Borduas, signing Refus Global, getting excommunicated by the Church, and eventually moving to Paris. There she apprenticed in the best stained-glass ateliers and came home in the 1960s to flood Montreal’s new metro with sheets of pure colour. Walk into Vendôme station today and you’re inside a Ferron painting that weighs twenty tons.
Feb. 24 was a remarkable birthday double. In Whitehorse, Yukon, Erik Nielsen was born in a log cabin during –50 °F weather; his father was the territorial gold commissioner. Erik flew Hudsons and Lancasters in the war, came home, read law, and entered Parliament in 1957 as the lone Conservative north of sixty. He served twenty-eight years, became Mulroney’s deputy prime minister, and was so ferocious in Question Period that Liberals called him “the Yukon Grizzly” and kept a spare tie in their desks because he shredded so many. That same Feb. 24, in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood, Douglas Jung was born to parents who had arrived via the head-tax era and were still barred from voting. Douglas enlisted in 1944 when the rules finally changed, trained with Force 136 for covert operations behind Japanese lines, came home, finished law school at UBC, and in 1957 won Vancouver Centre to become the first Chinese-Canadian MP anywhere in the Commonwealth. Two babies, same day, one from the frozen North, one from Chinatown, both ended up sitting in the House of Commons changing the country.
April 1 marked the real birthday of the Royal Canadian Air Force. The government merged the temporary Canadian Air Force with the naval air bits and made it permanent. The first commander was Wing Commander Stedman, the roundel was painted on a handful of flying boats and some war-surplus Sopwiths, and within a couple of years RCAF pilots were hauling mail, fighting forest fires, and photographing half the Arctic from open cockpits. That single act turned Canada into an aviation nation overnight.
Exactly thirty days later, Prince Edward Island pulled off one of the smoothest traffic revolutions in history. On May 1, at 6 a.m., the province switched from left-hand to right-hand driving to match the mainland. The government had been planning for two years: new signs were painted on both sides, ferries carried leaflets, every horse was walked the new route the day before, and provincial police stood at every major intersection with white gloves and loudspeakers. By noon the Charlottetown Guardian declared the switch “remarkably free of incident,” though old-timers swore they could still feel phantom carriages coming at them on the wrong side for months.
On May 24, Alberta finally ended Prohibition, five years after the federal ban was lifted and four years after BC and Quebec had reopened the bars. The 1923 plebiscite had been decided by fewer than 4,000 votes, but once the returns were in, the government wasted no time. Hotels that had been serving “near-beer” ripped out the soft-drink taps, former bootleggers applied for licences, and the province set up the Alberta Liquor Control Board.
June 2 saw the birth of June Callwood in Belle River, Ontario. She started writing for the Brantford Expositor while still in high school, covered the war from Toronto, then spent fifty years making trouble for the comfortable. She founded Casey House, Canada’s first AIDS hospice, when the city wanted nothing to do with it; she went into Kingston Penitentiary with a tape recorder when no one else would; she hosted TV shows that let ordinary people tell their own stories. If there was an injustice and a microphone nearby, June Callwood found both.
The very next day, June 3, Colleen Dewhurst was born in Montreal to a Canadian father and an American mother. The family moved to Massachusetts when she was small, but she came back every summer and eventually settled in Canada for good. That voice – low, gravelly, impossible to ignore – first shook the rafters at Stratford in 1956 and kept going on Broadway, film, and television. She won two Tonys, two Obies, four Emmys, and still insisted Prince Edward Island was home because that’s where she could walk barefoot and swear at seagulls.
July 3 brought disaster to one of the most famous views in the country. The original Chateau Lake Louise, the big wooden palace the CPR had built in 1911, caught fire around midnight. Guests in evening dress from the dining room ran outside in slippers; staff formed bucket brigades from the lake that did nothing against 40-foot flames. By dawn only the stone chimneys stood. The railway rebuilt it in eighteen months, this time in Tyndall limestone and reinforced concrete, and the hotel that reopened in 1925 is essentially the one on every postcard today.
Oct. 1 was the night Canada’s prime minister first spoke live to the entire country. William Lyon Mackenzie King travelled to Vancouver, climbed the steps to a makeshift studio in Denman Arena, and sat down in front of two carbon microphones linked by long-distance lines to stations from Sydney to Victoria. He talked for twenty minutes about national unity, the budget, and the new radio age. Listeners in farm kitchens turned up the volume on their crystal sets and heard the leader’s voice crackle across 4,000 miles of wire. It was stiff, it was cautious, it was historic.
Oct. 18 gave Cape Breton its fiddling king. Buddy MacMaster was born on a farm near Judique, started playing at twelve, and spent forty years working as a station agent for CN Railways while driving hundreds of miles every weekend to play dances. He never read music, never needed to; the tunes were in his head and his bow arm. When Natalie MacMaster, his niece, took Cape Breton music global in the 1990s, she always pointed back to Uncle Buddy as the source. Dancers still say if you can’t follow Buddy’s timing, you might as well hang up your shoes.
Oct. 29 is still one of the darkest unsolved crimes in Canadian history. Peter Verigin, leader of the Community Doukhobors, was on the overnight train from Brilliant to Grand Forks, BC. Just past Farron, a massive explosion ripped the parlour car apart, killing Verigin, his secretary Rhoda Malakoe, six other passengers, and the train’s porter. The bomb had been placed under Verigin’s seat and was powerful enough to throw wreckage 200 feet. The RCMP, the provincial police, even Pinkertons got involved; theories ranged from Russian agents to internal Doukhobor rivals to Ku Klux Klan involvement. A century later the file is still open and the crater is still there beside the old rail bed.
On Nov. 29 the Montreal Forum opened at the corner of Ste-Catherine and Closse. It cost $1.5 million, sat 9,300 for hockey, and the Canadiens christened it the same night with a 7-1 thrashing of the Toronto St. Patricks. From that first face-off it was the loudest building in the sport. The Forum would see the Richard Riot, five overtime Cup winners, the 1976 New Year’s Eve game, and the final night in 1996 when the lights went dark and the place felt like a cathedral that had lost its religion.
Dec. 19 gave hockey its smoothest defenceman. Doug Harvey was born, grew up playing shinny on frozen parking lots, and joined the Canadiens in 1947. He quarterbacked the power play, carried the puck end-to-end when nobody else dared, and made the rush look easy. Toe Blake said Harvey was the only player he never had to draw up plays for; he just told him “go win the game” and Doug did. Seven Cups, six Norris trophies, and a style so influential that every modern defenceman owes him royalties.
One day later, on Dec. 20, Judy LaMarsh was born in Chatham, Ontario. She trained as a lawyer, served in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, got elected in 1960, and within three years was Pearson’s Secretary of State and then Minister of National Health and Welfare. She stood toe-to-toe with the Canadian Medical Association over Medicare, helped create the Canada Pension Plan, and co-chaired the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. She also hosted a CBC series called This Week in Parliament that let Canadians watch sausage being made in real time. Big, blunt, fearless, and unmistakably Canadian, she once told the House, “I didn’t come here to be a little lady; I came here to get things done.” 1924 gave Canada the raw material; she spent the rest of her life shaping it.
