Relaxation awaits in Prince Edward County
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND THE FIRST EUROPEANS
FIRST STEPS TO A UNITED CANADA
ONTARIO’S DEVELOPING INDUSTRIES
troops in formation at Kingston’s Fort Henry.
Covering 1.1 million square kilometers (425,000 square miles), Ontario is nearly as large as France, Italy, and Germany combined. It’s not Canada’s largest province (Quebec has that distinction), but it’s twice as big as Texas, the second-largest U.S. state, and just slightly smaller than Alaska. Ontario’s northernmost regions share the same latitude as southern Alaska, while Point Pelee, the southernmost point on the Ontario mainland, is at the same latitude as Northern California’s wine country. No wonder, then, that Southern Ontario is a major wine-producing region.
Ontario sits between Manitoba to the west and Quebec to the east, but if you think it’s landlocked in the middle of the country, think again. The province borders four of the five Great Lakes—Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Superior—along more than 3,000 kilometers (2,300 miles) of shoreline. Ontario even has over 1,000 kilometers (680 miles) of saltwater shores on its northern boundary with Hudson Bay.
Beyond these major bodies of water, Ontario has nearly 250,000 lakes holding one-third of the world’s freshwater, as well as numerous rivers and streams. Of course, the province’s most impressive water feature may be Niagara Falls, which thunder down the Niagara River separating Canada from the United States.
With its granite rock formations and pine forests, the Canadian Shield covers two-thirds of Ontario, extending from Manitoba across the province nearly to Ottawa and to the Thousand Islands farther south. In the far north, in the Hudson Bay lowlands along Hudson and James Bays from Moosonee to Fort Severn, the rocks and pines give way to swamps and meadows.
In the south, in the ecological zone known as the Mixedwood Plain, more lowlands along the Great Lakes are flat farm country, while the woodlands include a mix of deciduous trees and evergreens. Bisecting a 725-kilometer (450-mile) section of Southern Ontario, extending roughly between the Niagara and Bruce Peninsulas, is the Niagara Escarpment, a forested ridge of sedimentary rock that juts above the region’s otherwise flat terrain. The highest point on the escarpment is 510 meters (1,625 feet) above sea level.
Although Toronto is northwest of Buffalo, Torontonians are quick to point out that the lake effect that dumps piles of snow on their New York State neighbors has a different result in their city. Toronto’s position on Lake Ontario’s northern shore moderates the winter weather, and the city averages 115 centimeters (45 inches) of snow per year, less than Buffalo can get on a single day. Winter is still cold and frequently snowy—January’s average temperatures range from -10°C (14°F) to -2°C (28°F)—but at least you might not always be battling major blizzards if you visit midwinter.
Toronto’s spring is fairly short, beginning in late April or May, and summers can turn hot and humid. In July, the average temperatures range from a low of 15°C (59°F) to a high of 27°C (81°F). Fall is a lovely time of year, and the best season to travel across much of the province, particularly in late September and early October when the trees put on their annual autumn color show.
South of Toronto, on the Niagara Peninsula, the Niagara wineries claim that the region’s climate is similar to that of France’s Burgundy region and Loire Valley, with Lake Ontario again moderating the more extreme winter weather found in nearby New York State. Temperatures are slightly more moderate than in Toronto, too: slightly hotter in summer, not quite as frigid in winter. Niagara’s warm summers and temperate autumns are the busiest times here, when tourism is in full swing.
These are the average annual temperatures in several of Ontario’s cities. Keep in mind that temperatures can fluctuate on a given day. On a typical July day in Toronto, for example, the temperature might be as low as 18°C (64°F) at night and as high as 26°C (79°F) during the day.
Source: Environment Canada
As you travel north of Toronto, into the Muskoka Cottage Country and along Georgian Bay, the slightly cooler summers have made these regions popular with Torontonians escaping the city’s heat and humidity. It’s still hot midsummer, but at least you can cool off with a swim in the lake. In winter, a snow belt starts north of Toronto around the city of Barrie. It can be snowing in Barrie (and on the ski hills between Barrie and Collingwood) when it’s raining or dry in Toronto.
Ottawa residents will maintain, with a certain perverse pride, that their city is the coldest capital in the world. Moscow may also claim that distinction, but there’s no disputing that winter in Ottawa—320 kilometers (200 miles) north of Syracuse, New York—can be frigid. While Ottawa may not get the heavy snows that towns like Syracuse do, it’s definitely in the snow belt, averaging 235 centimeters (nearly eight feet) of snow per year. Still, the city celebrates its winter weather with the popular Winterlude Festival in February and with lots of outdoor activities. Spring comes late to Ottawa (it might begin to warm in April, but it’s not consistently springlike till May), and summers, as in Toronto, are hot and sticky. Fall, as it is throughout Ontario, is one of Ottawa’s best seasons.
Across Northern Ontario, winter temperatures, as you’d expect, dip well below freezing, and snowfall is heavy. Summers, though, can be surprisingly hot and humid, with daytime highs above 30°C (86°F). Even along Hudson and James Bays, expect warm temperatures if you’re traveling in July and August.
Although you might not know it from a downtown Toronto street corner, forests dominate Ontario’s landscape, covering more than 60 percent of the province’s land. The types of trees you’ll find vary from the southern to northern regions.
In the south, along Lake Erie and Lake Ontario and extending to Lake Huron’s southeastern shore, deciduous forest is dominant. Trees common to this region include maple, oak, and walnut. You’ll find the white trillium, Ontario’s official provincial flower, blooming in deciduous forests in late April and early May.
Moving north, the forests become a mix of deciduous and coniferous trees, the former including red maples, sugar maples (accounting for most of the province’s maple syrup production), yellow birch, and red oak, and the latter including eastern white pine (Ontario’s official provincial tree), eastern hemlock, red pine, and white cedar. This forest region, known as the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Forest, extends across the central part of the province, along the St. Lawrence River, on the Lake Huron shores, and in the area west of Lake Superior.
If you think of orchids as tropical plants, you may be surprised to learn that more than 40 species of orchids grow on the Bruce Peninsula, which juts into Lake Huron. The best time to see the orchids in bloom is mid-May through early June.
Boreal forest spreads across most of Northwestern Ontario, covering 49 million hectares (121 million acres). The predominant species here are jack pine and black spruce, as well as white birch, poplar, and balsam fir.
In the far north’s Hudson Bay Lowlands, constituting the remaining 25 percent of Ontario’s land and bordering the subarctic tundra, trees include black spruce, white spruce, white birch, balsam fir, and balsam poplar. This area is also one of the world’s largest expanses of wetlands.
Ontario’s provincial government owns more than 90 percent of the province’s forests. About one-third is classified as “production forest,” meaning that it’s available for logging. Although some provincial parks and reserves, like Algonquin Provincial Park, are protected from further development, logging has historically been part of their economy, and limited logging is still allowed.
Even in its urban areas, Ontario is beginning to realize that its trees are an important asset. In Toronto, which currently has an estimated 10 million trees, the city is working toward a goal of increasing its tree canopy from 28 percent to 40 percent by 2057. The city hosts annual tree-planting days and plants free trees on residential streets.
Southern Ontario is home to the white-tailed deer as well as other small animals, including raccoons, skunks, beavers, red foxes, and gray squirrels. In fall, thousands of monarch butterflies typically pass through the province’s southwest, crossing Lake Erie as they migrate south to Mexico. Although butterfly numbers have been fluctuating in recent years, Point Pelee National Park remains one of the best spots to witness the monarch migration. The Point Pelee region is also prime bird-watching territory. More than 370 species of birds have been recorded in the vicinity, and in the spring, thousands of birders come to witness the migration of songbirds returning to the north.
In the Canadian Shield region that covers much of central Ontario, the animals get bigger. While you’ll still see foxes, squirrels, and beavers, this region is also home the eastern timber wolf, the gray wolf, white-tailed deer, caribou, Canadian lynx, and black bear. One of the most popular events in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park is the summer Wolf Howl, when park naturalists imitate wolf calls and wild wolves may howl in response. Many of the fish that you see on Ontario tables, including pike, lake trout, and walleye, come from this region.
In the far north, caribou, moose, and black bears become more prevalent, and in the extreme northern reaches, including the vast protected territory of Polar Bear Provincial Park (accessible only by air), there’s a small population of polar bears. Seals, walruses, and beluga whales can sometimes be spotted off the northern coasts.
Archaeologists have found evidence of human settlement in Ontario dating back more than 10,000 years. In the north, early aboriginal people hunted and fished, while farther south, they were the region’s first farmers. The province’s name, Ontario, comes from an Iroquoian word that’s loosely translated as “sparkling water.”
The first Europeans to explore Ontario arrived in the early 1600s. French explorer Étienne Brulé sailed along the St. Lawrence River and into Lake Ontario in 1610, while his countryman Samuel de Champlain followed in 1615, after overseeing the construction of a fort at what is now Quebec City. British explorer Henry Hudson claimed the Northern Ontario region that now bears his name—Hudson Bay—for Britain in 1611.
A group of French Jesuit missionaries began constructing a community near present-day Midland in 1639, establishing the first European settlement in Ontario. Their mission was to bring Christianity to the indigenous Wendat people, whom they called the “Huron.” You can visit a re-created version of this settlement, where the Jesuits worked with the Huron for 10 years. It’s now known as Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons.
In 1670 the Hudson’s Bay Company was established, and the British monarch granted the company exclusive trading rights to the land around Hudson Bay. Over the next 100 years, the fur trade flourished across Northern Ontario and the rest of Canada’s far north. Aboriginal hunters sold furs to the Hudson’s Bay Company in exchange for knives, kettles, and what became the company’s signature wool blankets.
Both France and Britain staked claims to territory in present-day North America during the 1600s and 1700s, and battles broke out as the two countries fought over these territorial claims.
During the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), while many conflicts took place in what is now Quebec and Eastern Canada, others were waged in what is now Ontario, along Lake Ontario and in the Niagara region. In 1759 the British defeated the French in Quebec City, during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which turned the tide of the war. The Canadian territories became part of the British Empire.
Over the subsequent decades, the British found that their vast colony was difficult to govern. In 1791, the British Parliament passed the Constitutional Act, which divided the territory in two. The region encompassing present-day Ontario became Upper Canada, and what is now Quebec became Lower Canada.
Upper Canada’s first capital was the town of Newark, now called Niagara-on-the-Lake. In 1793, the capital was moved farther north, away from the volatile American border, to the settlement of York, which eventually grew to become the city of Toronto.
In the late 1700s, a wave of immigration to Upper Canada came from south of the border. The 13 British colonies south of Canada declared their independence from Britain, launching the American Revolutionary War, which resulted in the creation of the United States. After the war, many Loyalists—Americans who remained loyal to the British Crown—found that they were no longer welcome in the new United States.
The Loyalists came north to the still-British colony of Upper Canada, where many received land grants from the British government. Many of the early settlers to Eastern Ontario, along the Thousand Islands, in Kingston, in Prince Edward County, and in what is now the Rideau Canal region, were Loyalists, who kept British traditions alive in their new colony.
Tensions between Britain and France flared up again in the early 1800s. The British navy eventually set up a blockade, preventing French ships from reaching the Americas and stopping American ships heading for Europe. In North America, where Britain and the United States still had an uneasy relationship in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the shipping blockade became one more significant source of conflict. In 1812, the United States attacked the closest outpost of the British Empire: Canada.
Many battles during the War of 1812, which lasted until 1815, were fought on Ontario soil, in the regions bordering the United States: the Niagara Peninsula, Toronto, the Windsor-Detroit area, and along the St. Lawrence River in Eastern Ontario. The Americans burned the legislative buildings in Toronto; the British in turn attacked Washington DC and set the White House aflame.
The British and American governments eventually negotiated a settlement, and the war officially ended with the Treaty of Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814, and ratified February 16, 1815.
After the War of 1812, Canadians were concerned that the St. Lawrence River—a vital shipping channel between Montreal and the Great Lakes—could be vulnerable to another U.S. attack, since the Americans controlled the river’s southern banks. In 1826, British lieutenant colonel John By arrived on the site of what is now Ottawa and made plans for a new town—christened Bytown—and for a canal that would run south to Lake Ontario through a series of connected lakes, rivers, and waterways. The canal, which opened in 1832, became the Rideau Canal.
During the same period, entrepreneur William Hamilton Merritt proposed the idea of a canal across the Niagara Peninsula to provide a passage for ships traveling between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. The Niagara River connected the two lakes, but a significant natural feature prevented the river from becoming a shipping route: the unnavigable Niagara Falls. Construction began on the Welland Canal, which included a series of locks to help ships “climb the mountain”—the Niagara Escarpment—between the two lakes. The canal opened in 1829.
Settlers in Ontario were also looking to improve shipping routes across the central sections of the province. In 1833, the first lock was built on what would eventually become the Trent-Severn Waterway, connecting Lake Ontario with Georgian Bay.
Upper and Lower Canada, which had been split in 1791, were joined again in 1840 as the Province of Canada. Toronto had been the capital of predominantly British Upper Canada, while Quebec City was the capital of francophone Lower Canada. However, when the two provinces were united, neither would accept the other’s capital as the seat of government. As a compromise, the city of Kingston became the first capital of the Province of Canada. But the political wrangling continued, and two years later, the capital was moved to Montreal. In the meantime, the frontier outpost of Bytown that Lieutenant Colonel John By had settled in the 1830s had become the city of Ottawa. By 1857, when the legislature still hadn’t been able to agree on a permanent home for the Canadian capital, they referred the problem to the British monarch, Queen Victoria. The queen and her advisers unexpectedly chose the comparatively remote outpost of Ottawa.
Situated between English Upper Canada and French Lower Canada, Ottawa had a relatively central location. But another important factor was that other potential capitals—Toronto, Kingston, and Montreal—were extremely close to Canada’s boundary with the United States. Ottawa, in contrast, was at a safer distance from the American border. Since 1857, Ottawa has been the nation’s capital.
In the mid-1800s, thousands of enslaved African Americans fled from the United States to freedom in Canada. Following what was known as the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses and churches that gave shelter to the refugees, the vast majority of those slaves crossed into Canada into what is now Southwestern Ontario. Many remained in the region, with significant settlements in Windsor, Sandwich, Amherstburg, Chatham, Dresden, and Buxton, and many of their descendants live here today.
The Province of Canada was split once again in the 1860s, creating the new provinces of Quebec and Ontario. But this time, these provinces joined with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to establish a new nation: the Dominion of Canada. The British Parliament passed the British North America Act in 1867, which officially created this fledgling country, joining these four original provinces in confederation on July 1, 1867. Kingston lawyer and politician John A. Macdonald became the first prime minister of the new nation of Canada. Today, Canadians celebrate Confederation on July 1, Canada Day. The country marked its 150th birthday in 2017.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Ontario began the transition from a primarily agricultural province to a more industrial one. In 1903, a huge silver vein was discovered in Northern Ontario, near the town of Cobalt, launching the mining industry in this region. In Southwestern Ontario, the industry was automobiles; the year after Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, the company set up a manufacturing plant across the river from Detroit, in the Ontario city of Windsor.
During this same era, tourism became important to the Ontario economy. Railroads and steamships ferried visitors to lakeside resorts in the Muskoka region, the Kawarthas, the Thousand Islands, and Niagara Falls. The falls also became a source of hydroelectric power, beginning in 1906.
The province’s industrial development continued throughout the 20th century, during and after both World Wars, and into the 1950s and 1960s. The Toronto subway—Canada’s first—opened in 1954, and the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway (Hwy. 401), which crosses the province from Windsor to the Quebec border, opened in 1968.
More recently, an Ontario company helped usher in the smartphone era when the Waterloo-based outfit formerly known as Research in Motion introduced the BlackBerry. The province now claims to be the second-largest information technology region in North America (after California); Toronto, Ottawa, and Kitchener-Waterloo are all major high-tech industry hubs.
Canada has a three-tiered governmental structure, with federal, provincial (or territorial), and municipal governments. The federal government, headquartered in Ottawa, is responsible for foreign policy, national defense, immigration, and other national issues. The provincial governments handle health care, education, policing, and the highways, among other things. Local issues, such as zoning, city policing and firefighting, snow removal, garbage, and recycling, are the municipal governments’ purview.
Retaining its roots as a British Commonwealth country, Canada is a constitutional monarchy. The country’s head of state is officially the monarch of the United Kingdom. That means that the Queen of England is also the Queen of Canada. Although Canada has preserved many of its British influences and traditions, including the summer Changing the Guard ceremony in Ottawa, the monarch’s role in Canada is largely symbolic, and it’s Canada’s prime minister who is the country’s chief executive.
The queen’s official representative in Canada as head of state is the governor general. This, too, is largely a ceremonial role. The governor general functions something like a governmental ambassador, officiating at ceremonies, bestowing awards, and opening and closing Parliament sessions. With the prime minister’s advice, the queen appoints the governor general for a five-year term.
Parliament is the national legislature, which has two bodies: the elected 338-member House of Commons and the appointed 105-member Senate. The governmental structure at the provincial level parallels that of the federal government. The head of each provincial government is the premier, a position analogous to a U.S. state governor. Each province and territory has its own legislature. Toronto is Ontario’s provincial capital; the Legislative Assembly building is in Toronto’s Queen’s Park.
In Ontario’s early days, the region’s economy was based on its natural resources, including timber, fur, and minerals. Logging, trapping, and mining are still important components of Northern Ontario’s economy. In cities like Sudbury and Timmins, mines dominate the skyline, and across the north, you’ll share the highways with massive logging trucks.
Southern Ontario was formerly agricultural, and while you’ll see plenty of farms, orchards, and vineyards, the province’s southern sector is now heavily industrial. Manufacturing, particularly in the automotive, pharmaceutical, and aerospace sectors, has been a foundation of Ontario’s economy for many years. The province produces more than half of all manufactured goods that are exported from Canada.
As in many other countries, the service industries have become more and more important in Ontario, now accounting for more than 75 percent of the province’s economy. Toronto is Canada’s financial capital; not only is Canada’s major equities market, the Toronto Stock Exchange, based here, but so are the headquarters of scores of banks and financial services companies.
High technology has become a major Ontario business, too. Greater Toronto, the Kitchener-Waterloo region, and Ottawa are major centers for software and hardware development, telecommunications, and biotechnology. Toronto is a hub for Canada’s communications industries as well, including TV and film production, broadcasting, publishing, performing arts, design, and advertising.
With more than 30 colleges and universities, education is a significant component of Ontario’s economy. Canada’s largest university—the University of Toronto—is in Ontario. Other major Ontario universities include York University, Ryerson University, and the Ontario College of Art and Design, all based in Toronto; McMaster University in Hamilton; the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo; the University of Western Ontario in London; the University of Windsor; Carleton University and the University of Ottawa in the nation’s capital; and Queen’s University in Kingston.
Like many heavily industrialized regions, Ontario has its environmental challenges. Along the lakeshores, particularly sections of Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and Lake Huron, you’ll still see power plants and other reminders of the province’s industrial heritage—some still active, some long abandoned. In northern towns like Sudbury and Timmins, where mining remains an important part of the local economy, barren rocky pits mar parts of the landscape, and smoke can darken the skies. Similarly, the logging industry has cut wide swaths across Ontario’s north.
Another industrial legacy, unfortunately, is water pollution. The Great Lakes can be plagued with poor water quality, although significant efforts have been made in recent years to clean up the lakes and make them again fit for recreation. Many beaches now have a Blue Flag program in place, where a blue flag identifies areas that are clean and safe for swimming.
As Ontario’s cities continue to grow, urban sprawl, increasing traffic, and worsening air quality are challenges to address. These issues are most acute in Toronto, the province’s largest metropolitan area, and in the Golden Horseshoe, the suburban ring around metropolitan Toronto. But Ontario is continuing to promote alternatives to car travel, with increasing options for train, bus, and ferry travel across the province.
Ontario is Canada’s most populous province, home to more than 14 million people, or roughly 40 percent of Canadians. Most of Ontario’s population lives in the cities, with over six million concentrated in the Greater Toronto region.
Canada’s government actively encourages immigration as a way to counterbalance the country’s declining birthrate and provide workers for the nation’s growing economy. Due to these immigration policies, which began in earnest in the 1970s, Canada’s largest cities have become among the most multicultural on the planet. Half of all immigrants to Canada settle in Ontario.
Toronto, in particular, is a city of immigrants. Roughly half of the metropolitan area’s residents were born outside Canada, and tens of thousands of new immigrants move to the city every year. While the majority of Toronto’s early settlers were of British origin, Torontonians now come from all over the globe. In the 2016 census, 51.5 percent of Toronto residents identified as a member of a visible minority community, and in some suburban cities in Greater Toronto, that percentage is even higher, from 60 percent in Richmond Hill to more than 75 percent in Markham. South Asian, Chinese, Black, and Filipino people are Toronto’s largest visible minority groups.
After English and French, Chinese is the most widely spoken language in Ontario. Ontario also has significant Punjabi-, Urdu-, Italian-, Persian-, and German-speaking populations.
Christianity is the major religion in Canada. More than 40 percent of Canadians are Roman Catholic, and about one-quarter are Protestant; in Ontario, Protestants are the predominant religious group, with Roman Catholics a close second. Recent census figures indicate that more than 15 percent of Canadians claim no religious affiliation at all.
Although only about 1 percent of Canada’s population, or roughly 350,000 people, is Jewish, Canada has the fourth-largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel, the United States, and France. More than half of Canada’s Jews live in Toronto.
Canada’s largest non-Christian religious group is Muslim, representing about 2 percent of the population nationwide. In Ontario, Muslim communities are concentrated in the large urban areas of Toronto and Ottawa.
Ever since European explorers first landed on Canada’s shores, the country was settled by both English- and French-speaking colonists. While many people assume that Quebec is Canada’s only French-speaking region, Ontario, in particular, had a large francophone population during colonial times. Even as late as the mid-1800s, more than half of Ontario’s population were native French speakers.
Today, English is the first language throughout most of the province of Ontario, and there’s no need to brush up on your bonjour and merci to travel here. However, because the province shares a long border with francophone Quebec, French is widely spoken throughout the region, and Ontario’s francophone community is the largest in Canada outside Quebec. Roughly 500,000 Ontario residents, or just under 5 percent of the population, speak French as their first language. More than 60 percent of Ontario’s francophones live in the province’s eastern and northeastern regions.
Ottawa has a particularly large francophone and bilingual community. In fact, as the capital of bilingual Canada, Ottawa is itself a bilingual city, closer in linguistic mindset—and physical proximity—to Montreal than to Toronto. The Ottawa metropolitan area spans two provinces, Ontario and Quebec. The city of Ottawa is on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, but on the opposite riverbank is the community of Gatineau in French-speaking Quebec. Residents easily go back and forth across the bridges between the two provinces, many living on one side and working on the other. Reflecting this linguistic diversity, nearly half the population of the Ottawa region is fully bilingual. The government operates in both languages, as do many businesses.
Across the province, Ontario’s francophone community continues to grow through immigration, as French-speaking immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe have settled here. Today, about 10 percent of Ontario’s francophones are members of a visible racial minority.
Canada has three officially recognized aboriginal groups: the First Nations, the Inuit, and the Métis. First Nations is the modern term for indigenous people who are neither Inuit nor Métis. The Inuit people live primarily in Canada’s far north, while the Métis—descendants of French settlers and their First Nations spouses—have historically settled in the prairies and the west.
Canada’s aboriginal peoples—totaling just over one million people—make up about 4 percent of the nation’s population. Roughly one-quarter of Canada’s aboriginal people, most of whom fall under the “First Nations” designation, live in Ontario.
Ontario’s aboriginal people are divided primarily into two groups, based on their linguistic heritage. The Cree, Oji-Cree, Algonquin, Ojibwa, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Delaware, whose historical territory has spread across central and Northern Ontario, speak languages that derive from Algonquian, while the Six Nations people, who are concentrated in the southern part of the province and include the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, are Iroquoian-speaking.
Some of Ontario’s aboriginal peoples—including the Anishinaabe on Manitoulin Island, the Cree along James Bay, the Ojibwa near Peterborough in Eastern Ontario, and the Six Nations near Brantford and Hamilton—are beginning to open their communities to tourism, offering opportunities for visitors to learn about their cultures while bringing in new revenue.
As you travel around Ontario, you can’t help but see works by the Group of Seven, Canadian landscape painters who worked primarily in the 1920s and whose works have become associated with Ontario. The original members, Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley, were all based in Ontario. Although artist Tom Thomson died (under mysterious circumstances in Algonquin Provincial Park) before the group was officially formed, he worked with most of its members and is normally considered part of the group.
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa has an extensive collection of Group of Seven works, as do Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and McMichael Canadian Art Collection. In Owen Sound, there’s a small museum, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, devoted to Thomson’s work.
In the Lake Superior region, look for the “Moments of Algoma” interpretive panels (www.momentsofalgoma.ca) that highlight either an actual location where Group of Seven members painted or spots that have some connection to the artists’ experiences around northern Ontario. You’ll find these panels at the CN Railway Station in Sault Ste. Marie, Agawa Canyon, Lake Superior Provincial Park, Pukaskwa National Park, Terrace Bay, and a number of other places.
Many of Canada’s notable contemporary authors live and work in Ontario or have made the province their home. Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa in 1939, is one of Canada’s best-known novelists. She writes on themes including feminism (The Edible Woman, 1969), science fiction (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985), life in Toronto (The Robber Bride, 1993), and ancient Greece (The Penelopiad, 2005).
Another of Canada’s most notable writers, Carol Shields (1935-2003), was born in the United States but moved to Canada at age 22. She lived in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Victoria, authoring 10 novels, three collections of short fiction, three volumes of poetry, and four published plays. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries (1993). Her other books include A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982), Larry’s Party (1997), and Unless (2002).
Short-story writer and novelist Alice Munro, who was born and continues to live in Ontario, writes frequently about growing up female in the province’s rural communities in the 1940s and 1950s. Among her works are Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Who Do You Think You Are: Stories (1978), The View from Castle Rock (2006), and Dear Life (2012). Her stories also appear periodically in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her daughter Sheila Munro wrote a memoir about her mother, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro (2001).
Timothy Findley was born in Toronto and began his professional career as an actor, performing with the Stratford Festival in 1953. He later became the first playwright-in-residence at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and author of more than a dozen novels, including The Wars (1977). Sri Lankan-born novelist Michael Ondaatje has lived and worked in Ontario for many years, teaching at the University of Western Ontario, York University, and the University of Toronto. His best-known works, including The English Patient (1992), Anil’s Ghost (2000), and The Cat’s Table (2011), don’t draw on Ontario life, but one of his earlier novels, In the Skin of a Lion (1987), is set in 1930s Toronto.
With so many Ontarians hailing from abroad, it’s no surprise that many of the province’s modern writers deal with immigrant themes. Rohinton Mistry, born in India and now living in Toronto, writes about the Indian and Indian Canadian communities in novels such as A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002). Toronto novelist M. G. Vassanji also tackles immigrant themes, particularly about Indians and Africans. His books include No New Land (1991), The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall (2003), and The Assassin’s Song (2007). Another Toronto writer, Dionne Brand, born in Trinidad in 1953, considers immigrant issues in her works as well, including the 2005 novel What We All Long For.
Born in Ontario in 1959, Nino Ricci drew on his experiences as an Italian Canadian in his first novel, Lives of the Saints (1990). His subsequent books include In a Glass House (1993), Where She Has Gone (1997), Testament (2003), and The Origin of Species (2008). One of Ontario’s earliest “immigrant” writers was Susanne Moodie, who came with her husband from England in 1832 and settled in Upper Canada, in what is now Ontario. She described their experiences in her autobiographical works, Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada (1852) and the sequel, Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853).
Humorist Stephen Leacock offered up a different take on small-town Ontario life in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), which was among his 35 books of humor. His former home in Orillia, north of Barrie in central Ontario, is now a museum. Ontario-born playwright and novelist Robertson Davies set many of his novels, such as Fifth Business (1970) and What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), in his home province. Novelist Jane Urquhart, who was born in the small Northern Ontario town of Little Long Lac and now lives in the southern part of the province, considers regional themes in works such as The Stone Carvers (2001).
More recently, Ireland-born writer Emma Donoghue, who resides with her partner in London, Ontario, rocketed to fame with the novel Room (2010), which she adapted into a 2015 film starring Brie Larson, who won an Academy Award for her role. Born in Toronto in 1966, Joseph Boyden authored a controversial novel, The Orenda (2013), set in the often-violent 17th-century world of the French missionaries and indigenous Wendat people in central Ontario. Ontario-born Ojibway author Richard Wagamese (1955-2017) explored the legacy of trauma that Canada’s residential schools inflicted on generations of indigenous people, in novels like Indian Horse (2012), set in northern Ontario. A 2017 movie based on Wagamese’s novel was filmed in Sudbury and elsewhere in Ontario’s north.
Ontario has contributed many performers to the music and dance worlds. Rock-and-roll legend Neil Young hails from Toronto, as does classical pianist and composer Glenn Gould (1932-1982), where a concert hall in the Canadian Broadcasting Company building bears his name. Singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, born in Orillia, is perhaps best known for “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” his ballad about a Lake Superior shipwreck. Stratford’s hometown heartthrob is former teen pop sensation Justin Bieber; country singer Shania Twain was born in Windsor and raised in Timmins. The bands Barenaked Ladies and Tragically Hip both have Ontario roots, as do singer-songwriters Alanis Morissette, who was born in Ottawa, and Avril Lavigne, born in Belleville.
Toronto is a major center for English-language theater, with more than 90 theater venues around the metropolitan region. A number of the city’s professional repertory companies focus on Canadian plays. Toronto is also home to a theater landmark. The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres compose Canada’s only “double-decker” theater—one auditorium is stacked atop the other—and one of fewer than a dozen ever built worldwide. In Ottawa, the National Arts Centre (NAC) is the theater hub. The NAC has resident English- and French-language companies and often hosts national and international theater troupes and special events.
North America’s two largest theater festivals take place in Ontario: the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The Stratford productions, which run annually from late April through October, include works by Shakespeare and by many other classical and more contemporary playwrights. Similarly, the Shaw Festival was launched in 1962 to produce works by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw but now mounts plays by Shaw, his contemporaries, and more modern authors during its annual April-to-October season.
Toronto is often called “Hollywood North” for the number of movies made here. Among the films shot on location in Toronto are Chicago, Hairspray, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Mean Girls, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and Cinderella Man. To see what’s currently filming in the city so you can be on the lookout for the stars, check the lists that the Toronto Film and Television Office publishes on its website (www.toronto.ca/tfto).
Every September, Ontario hosts one of the industry’s major film fests: the Toronto International Film Festival. Headquartered in the distinctive glass TIFF Bell Lightbox theater building, the festival screens more than 300 movies from around the world and draws celebrities from across the globe. Though much smaller, the well-regarded Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival, in late September, highlights regional films, particularly those with connections to Canada’s northern communities.
Ontario has contributed many actors to Hollywood. Among the many film-industry notables who were born in Ontario are Dan Aykroyd (Ottawa), John Candy (Toronto), Jim Carrey (Newmarket), Ryan Gosling (London), Rachel McAdams (London), Sandra Oh (Ottawa), Catherine O’Hara (Toronto), Christopher Plummer (Toronto), and Martin Short (Hamilton). Even early film star Mary Pickford, who became known as “America’s Sweetheart,” was actually born in Toronto.