Gerry Bowler

Christmas: As Canadian as Hockey and Maple Syrup

Christmas: As Canadian as Hockey and Maple Syrup

  Well, they’re at it again. A year after a Canadian Human Rights Commission position paper labeled Christmas "discriminatory" and an example of "colonialist religious intolerance", an Alberta public school has cancelled a winter concert because marking Christmas...

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Of Kings and Taxes: Behind the Arrest of Pope Boniface in 1303

Of Kings and Taxes: Behind the Arrest of Pope Boniface in 1303

On Sept. 7, 1303, a French military force which had crossed into Italy seized the pope at his summer palace at Anagni, south of Rome. The soldiers dragged him from his throne, beat him, and threw him in a jail cell, intending to take him back to France for trial. What...

Why the Irish Fenians Tried to ‘Capture Canada’ in 1866

Why the Irish Fenians Tried to ‘Capture Canada’ in 1866

It was 1866 and in the aftermath of the American Civil War, thousands of Irish immigrants who had fought in both the Union and Confederate armies were of a mind to invade Canada. They were followers of the Fenian Brotherhood, a group formed in the United States in...

How Canada Was Forced to Build Up Its ‘Tin-Pot’ Navy

How Canada Was Forced to Build Up Its ‘Tin-Pot’ Navy

As the proud possessor of the world’s longest coastlines and home of the world’s sixth-largest merchant navy, one might have thought that the newly independent Canada would have an interest in developing a strong navy. In fact, as a Dominion of the British Empire, it...