1814: George-Étienne Cartier is born in Lower Canada.
1848: Samuel Benfield Steele is born in Upper Canada.
1864: Cartier plays a pivotal role at first in the Charlottetown Conference, then in the Quebec Conference, at which the deal that leads to Confederation is hammered out.
1866: Battle of Ridgeway: Irish-American radicals (the Fenians) are defeated on Canadian soil.
1867: The British North America Act is passed in London, and the Dominion of Canada is established. Sir John A. Macdonald is sworn in as prime minister.
1869: Canada purchases all the Hudson’s Bay Company territory; the Métis, led by Louis Riel, begin the Red River Rebellion.
1870: Métis rights are recognized and Manitoba becomes a province, but Riel is forced to flee.
1871: Emily Carr is born in British Columbia, which joins Confederation this year.
1873: Sam Steele joins the newly formed North West Mounted Police, created to keep order in the West.
Prince Edward Island joins Confederation.
George-Étienne Cartier dies in England.
1875: The Supreme Court of Canada is established in Ottawa.
1876: The Toronto Women’s Literary Club is founded to advance women’s education and is soon campaigning for votes for women.
1877: Ottawa takes over the last big section of prairie land when the local Indigenous people sign Treaty 7.
1879: McGill University students play the first organized hockey game with a flat puck.
1880: Britain transfers the Arctic, which it claims to own, to Canada.
The Canadian Pacific Railway recruits thousands of underpaid Chinese labourers.
1884: International Standard Time, advocated by Sir Sandford Fleming, is adopted.
1885: The Northwest Rebellion ends with the Battle of Batoche. Louis Riel is hanged in Regina.
The CPR is completed when the Last Spike is driven at Craigellachie, British Columbia.
1891: Sir John A. Macdonald dies in Ottawa.
1893: Governor General Lord Stanley donates the Stanley Cup as a hockey trophy.
1894: Harold Innis is born in Ontario.
1896: The Klondike Gold Rush begins when gold is discovered in the Yukon.
Wilfrid Laurier becomes Canada’s first French-Canadian prime minister.
1899: The first contingent of Canadian volunteers set off to fight alongside the British in the Boer War, Canada’s first foreign war. Nearly nine thousand Canadians would see combat in South Africa.
1902: The first symphony orchestra in Canada is established in Quebec City.
1904: Early-maturing Marquis wheat, developed by Charles Saunders, turns the prairies into “the breadbasket of the empire.”
Tommy Douglas is born in Scotland.
1905: Saskatchewan and Alberta join Confederation; sponsored by Ottawa, European immigrants flood west to farm the prairies.
1906: Roald Amundsen reaches Alaska, after sailing the entire Northwest Passage.
1907: Tom Longboat from the Six Nations Reserve wins the Boston Marathon.
1908: Lucy Maud Montgomery publishes Anne of Green Gables.
1909: First manned flight in the British Empire takes place at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, thanks to Alexander Graham Bell.
1910: The Royal Canadian Navy is formed.
1914: In Vancouver Harbour, the Komagata Maru is refused permission to disembark almost all its 376 East Indian passengers.
Canada is automatically drawn into conflict with Germany when Britain declares war.
1915: Battle of Ypres: Canadian forces face a gas attack.
John McCrae writes “In Flanders Fields.”
1916: Women win the vote in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
The National Research Council is established to promote scientific and industrial research.
1917: Five demonstrators are killed during anti-conscription riots in Quebec City.
At the Battle of Vimy Ridge, more than ten thousand Canadians are killed or wounded.
Ottawa introduces income tax as a “temporary” measure.
The National Hockey League is founded in Montreal.
Canadians are victorious at the Battle of Passchendaele, but there are more than fifteen thousand casualties.
The Halifax Explosion kills sixteen hundred people, injures nine thousand, and devastates the city.
1918: Women win the right to vote in federal elections.
An armistice to end the First World War goes into effect on November 11.
1919: Samuel Benfield Steele dies in England.
Winnipeg is brought to a standstill by a general strike.
1920: The Group of Seven holds its first art show in Toronto.
Canada joins the new League of Nations.
1921: Agnes Macphail becomes the first woman to sit in the House of Commons.
1923: Banting, Best, Macleod, and Collip share the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin.
Foster Hewitt makes the first hockey broadcast.
Bertha Wrenham Wilson is born in Scotland.
1926: Armand Bombardier of Quebec develops the snowmobile.
1927: The first coast-to-coast radio broadcast celebrates Canada’s sixtieth birthday.
An old-age pension of twenty dollars a month is granted to a limited number of Canadians seventy years or older.
Emily Carr’s paintings are included in the National Gallery of Canada exhibition of West Coast art.
1929: The British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council declares that women are legally “persons” and therefore eligible to sit in the Senate.
The Great Depression begins.
1930: Harold Innis publishes The Fur Trade in Canada.
1931: The Statute of Westminster grants Canada full legislative authority in both domestic and foreign affairs.
1934: The birth of the Dionne quintuplets attracts international attention.
The Bank of Canada is established.
1935: A thousand unemployed men begin the On-to-Ottawa Trek to protest conditions.
1936: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is established.
1939: Canada declares war on Germany, one week after Britain does so.
Margaret Atwood is born in Ontario.
1940: Women in Quebec finally win the vote in provincial elections.
1941: The first national unemployment insurance program is established.
After the Japanese capture of Hong Kong, more than five hundred Canadians die in battle or prisoner-of-war camps.
1942: Twenty-two thousand Japanese Canadians are rounded up and interned as security risks in British Columbia.
In the disastrous Dieppe Raid on the coast of France, 907 Canadians are killed and 1,946 captured by German forces.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police ship St. Roch reaches Halifax after the first voyage west to east through the Northwest Passage.
Preston Manning is born in Alberta.
1943: Canadian forces capture Ortona, Italy, a stronghold on the Adriatic coast held by the Germans.
1944: In Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation forms the first socialist government in North America.
1945: The Second World War ends.
The Family Allowance Act grants all families a monthly sum or “baby bonus” for each child under sixteen.
Canada is a founding member of the United Nations.
Emily Carr dies in British Columbia.
Lise Bissonnette is born in Quebec.
1947: Alberta’s oil boom begins with the strike in Leduc.
1948: Figure skater Barbara Ann Scott wins an Olympic gold medal.
1949: Newfoundland (later named Newfoundland and Labrador) joins Canada as the tenth province.
1950–53: During the Korean War, 516 Canadian military personnel are killed and more than 1,200 injured, making it Canada’s third-bloodiest overseas conflict.
1951: Ottawa passes the Old Age Security Act, which gives all Canadians aged seventy and over a pension of forty dollars a month.
1952: Harold Innis dies in Ontario.
1953: The Stratford Shakespearean Festival opens in Ontario.
1955: Montrealers riot when Maurice “Rocket” Richard, top scorer with the Montreal Canadiens, is suspended.
1957: The Canada Council for the Arts is established to foster Canadian culture.
Lester B. Pearson is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in resolving the Suez Crisis.
Annette Verschuren is born in Nova Scotia.
1959: The St. Lawrence Seaway, a joint Canada–United States project, opens.
1960: Refus global initiates Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.
The vote is finally granted to Indigenous peoples.
1961: Douglas Coupland is born in Germany.
1962: The new health insurance program in Saskatchewan provokes a doctors’ strike.
1965: Canada gets its new Maple Leaf flag.
1966: The federal Medical Care Act provides universal public health care across Canada.
1967: Expo 67 in Montreal celebrates Canada’s 100th birthday and attracts more than fifty-five million visitors.
1970: Crisis in Quebec: political kidnappings prompt Ottawa to invoke the War Measures Act and suspend civil rights.
1972: Paul Henderson scores the winning goal for Canada against the Soviet Union in the first Summit Series between the two countries.
Margaret Atwood publishes Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.
Naheed Nenshi is born in Ontario.
1976: The pro-independence Parti Québécois, led by René Lévesque, forms the government in Quebec.
1978–80: Canada welcomes over fifty thousand refugees from Vietnam.
1980: Quebecers defeat “sovereignty-association” in a referendum, in favour of a renewal of Confederation.
Prompted by rising oil prices, Ottawa introduces the controversial National Energy Program.
“O Canada” is officially declared the national anthem.
1981: Forced to retire from his cross-Canada Marathon of Hope the previous year, Terry Fox dies of cancer.
1982: The Canadian Constitution comes home, with a new Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Bertha Wilson is appointed to the Supreme Court.
Shadrach Kabango is born in Kenya.
1984: Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian in space, aboard the U.S. space shuttle Challenger.
1986: Tommy Douglas dies in Ontario.
1987: The Meech Lake Accord begins the process of federal and provincial approval.
In Winnipeg, Preston Manning establishes the Reform Party.
1989: Marc Lépine kills fourteen women and injures ten women and four men in a shooting rampage at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.
1990: In Manitoba, Elijah Harper secures defeat of the Meech Lake Accord.
1992: The Charlottetown Accord is rejected in a national referendum.
Roberta Bondar becomes the first Canadian woman in space, aboard the U.S. space shuttle Discovery.
1994: The North American Free Trade Agreement links Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
1995: The second Quebec referendum on sovereignty is narrowly defeated.
1999: The new Arctic territory of Nunavut is created; it is the least populous and the largest in area of all provinces and territories. Nunavut means “our land” in Inuktitut, the Inuit language.
2000: Research in Motion, based in Waterloo, Ontario, launches its first BlackBerry smartphone.
2005: Same-sex marriage is legalized throughout Canada.
2007: Bertha Wilson dies in Ontario.
2008: In the global economic crisis, Canada’s “Big Five” banks remain stable.
2010: Canada sets a record for gold medals at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission begins hearings on residential school abuse.
2012: Idle No More marchers protest against mineral exploitation on First Nations land.
2013: Elijah Harper dies in Ontario.
Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize for literature.
2015: The Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is published.
2017: Canada celebrates its 150th birthday.