The Bizarre History of "O Canada"

"O Canada" has a long and bizarre history. The song didn't become our national anthem until 1980, but it was written a hundred years earlier: the music was composed by an American Civil War veteran from Montreal with the awesome name of Calixa Lavallée. He didn't write the tune to be Canada's national anthem, he wrote it to be Quebec's. "O Canada" was composed in honour of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day: an ancient religious celebration that would eventually become Quebec's national holiday, deeply associated with the separatist movement.

We explore that strange story in the very first episode of the new web series I'm hosting: Canadiana. It takes us all the way from Montreal to Quebec City to Ottawa, from 1968 to 1646 to 1980, from Pierre Trudeau to the first French settlers to the FLQ. We visit riots, referendums and hockey arenas — all on the trail of the bizarre tale behind our national anthem

You can watch that first episode below. And it's just the beginning. In the months to come, Canadiana will be exploring many more extraordinary stories from the history of our country, including murders, massacres, rebellions, love triangles, secret laboratories, and more. You can watch a teaser for the series here.

To keep up-to-date with our hunt for the most incredible stories in Canadian history, you can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe on YouTube, or even support us on Patreon.

Toronto Boom Town, A Cheesily Aweseome NFB Film from 1951

This is great: a ten minute NFB film from 1951 all about what an up-and-coming metropolis Toronto is. The video is something like a newsreel film meets cheesy pro-Toronto propaganda, pitching viewers on "a city growing like mad, bursting at the seams".

It's plenty tongue-in-cheek and plenty self-deprecating (even back then Toronto wasn't really comfortable with its own awesomeness), filled with interesting little references that will stand out to anyone who knows the city today: a mayor who goes on CFRB every week to complain about traffic congestion, the construction of our very first subway, the naive optimism of the plans for Regent Park, a housing boom... there's even some foreshadowing of amalgamation.

My favourite bit, though, might be the shot from the tower of Casa Loma, of a city built among the trees. And the quote from a guy who looked out from the very same spot and said, "A million people, living in a forest."

Anywhoo, the video is lots of fun, well-worth the ten minutes. And it's also something of a reminder, as our villainous overlords in Ottawa take the axe to the National Film Board, that what they're out to destroy is one hell of a vital historical institution.

Canada's First Beatnik Happening

The Bohemian Embassy

In the late '50s and early '60s, while the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs were making names for themselves south of the border, Toronto's own Beatniks were taking over a swath of our city's core. Their scene was centered around Gerrard Village, at Yonge, and stretched up into Yorkville, transforming old Victorian homes into coffee houses and poetry clubs.

At the heart of it all was the Bohemian Embassy on St. Nicholas Street. "The coffee-house was on a little cobbled side-street," Margaret Atwood explains in her short story "Isis In Darkness", "up on the second floor of a disused warehouse. It was reached by a treacherous flight of wooden stairs with no banister; inside, it was dimly lit, smoke-filled, and closed down at intervals by the fire department. The walls had been painted black, and there were small tables with checked cloths and dripping candles."

The venue became a proving ground, providing vital support to the fledgling careers of an impressively long list of Toronto's finest poets, writers, folk musicians and comedians: Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Macewen, Milton Acorn,  Irving Layton, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Ian and Sylvia, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, Dennis Lee, Lorne Michaels. Bob Dylan came to see a reading when he was seventeen. Peter, Paul and Mary would hang out when they came through town. A young Bill Cosby did stand-up, taking a break from his regular gig a few blocks away at the Fifth Peg on Church.

In 1963, the Bohemian Embassy attracted the attention of the CBC when it played host to an absurd, Dadaist free-for-all billed as "Canada's First Beatnik Happening". Here's the video. (Seriously. Click it. It's worth it just for the expression on the anchor's face when they cut back to him at the end.)

This post is related to dream 11 Feeding The Annex Dennis Lee, 1974

Link: Canadian Heritage Minutes

If you lived in Canada in the 1990s and owned a television set, chances are you remember the educational minute-long history commercials produced for Canada Post. Hell, if you're anything like me, you  remember them better than most of the Canadian history you actually learned in school. And now, thanks to the superkickassing awesomeness of the internet, you can spend hours bathed in the warm glow of nostalgia, national pride and occasionally passable acting. There's an online archive of the commercials here and it has all your old favourites: James Naismith and his crazy old peach baskets, the woman who smells burning toast whenever Wilder Penfield pokes her in the brain, Jacques Plant getting hit in the face with a puck...

I could go on listing them forever so, here, I'll just give you a bunch of links to some of my favourites and embed a few of the more Toronto-related ones below:

James Naismith invents basketball here.
Wilder Penfield performs brain surgery here.
Jacques Plant wears a hockey mask here.
The Avro Arrow is developed here.
Winnie-the-Pooh is here.
Pierce Brosnan is Grey Owl here.
Baldwin and LaFontaine help invent Canadian democracy here.

Joseph Tyrrell finds dinosaur bones here.
Frontier College (where my father used to work, thank you very much) teaches people to read here.
Nat Taylor helps invent the multiplex here.

Video: Canada's First Subway Opens In 1954

The world's first subway—in London—had been running for about a hundred years before Toronto finally got ours. People had started suggesting one in the early days of the 1900s, but it took decades of lobbying, a rapidly growing population and fears that the downtown was going to be overwhelmed by cars before a referendum on the issue overwhelmingly passed in 1946. Three years later, construction started. It was, of course, a massive project: workmen spent the next six years ripping up Yonge Street pretty much all the way from Front to Eglinton. In 1954, it opened: an underground railroad that could take you from Union Station to Eglinton in just 20 minutes. To mark the occasion, the CBC produced this video, a seven-minute documentary about the new line. The sound is kind of crappy, but it's well worth  having to squint your ears a little.

The construction project also made for a lot of good photos. I'll post one of Front Street below (click to make it bigger), but there's another great one of Yonge Street near Queen here. You can also find some more, including a neat aerial shot of the trench, if you scroll down on  this article. There's a photo of the official opening ceremonies at Davisville Station here. And there's a YouTube video of one of those very first, very red subway trains rolling into Rosedale Station here.

Front Street outside Union Station, 1950

Video: TTC Commercials From The '80s

YouTube is full of these TTC commercials from the '80s, and each one is better, cheesier and more fluorescent than the last. The one I've embedded is from 1985, and there are two more jingle-based ones from a couple of years later here and here. There's one with a bunch of big name celebrities like "Soap Opera Broadcaster" Vic Cummings and "Consumer Advocate" Lynne Gordon here. And in 1988, they did a whole series highlighting all the fun things you can't do on the TTC, like watch a movie or a hockey game or eat dinner. Then, in 1990, someone was clearly fired; they suddenly went in a completely different, much more poetic direction.

Video: Sidewalk Surfers, 1965

In 1965, there was—as the woman with the hysterical hairdo in this video puts it—"a new terror loose in the streets of the city": early skateboarders. According to Wikipedia, sidewalk surfing (also known as "skurfing", because who doesn't like adding extra k's to things?) started in the late '40s or early '50s in California when actual surfers got bored. And while it didn't really take off until the '70s, there was a spike in popularity during the mid-'60s. Skateboarders got their own magazine, their own Life cover story ("Skateboard Mania—and Menace"), their own Toronto police crackdown and this awesome CBC report by an oh-my-god-he's-so-young Lloyd Robertson. You're going to want to click here to watch the full video, because he actually gives it a try—and when did you ever think you were going to get to see Lloyd Robertson riding a skateboard?

Video: Building the CN Tower

It's un-narrated and, at six minutes, a little longer than it really needs to be, but here's some neat raw footage from the CBC's archives on YouTube. It shows a bit of the CN Tower's opening night in 1976 and then some shots of the construction of the very top of the spire, with people pulling over on the side of the Gardiner to watch and take photos, and a few fellows who clearly have a better relationship with heights than I do.

The Casa Loma Orchestra

By 1927, when The Orange Blossoms started an eight month stint as the house band at Toronto's "castle", Casa Loma, they had already been home to an impressive line-up of musicians over the years, including the Dorsey brothers and alcoholic trumpet genius Bix Beiderbecke. But it wasn't until after their time at the then-classy-hotel-and-nightspot, now-cheesy-tourist-trap, that they changed their name to The Casa Loma Orchestra and (according to my copy of Wikipedia) went on to become one of the most popular swing bands in North America thanks to hits like "No Name Jive", "Maniac's Ball" and "Casa Loma Stomp". There's a bunch more of their stuff on YouTube, here.