The Big Book of Canadian Trivia

1. Brian Mulroney: No prime minister has altered the political landscape as much as Mulroney, whose government negotiated a free trade agreement with the United States, implemented the Goods and Services Tax, and, according to some, revived support for the Parti Québécois. For his efforts, not to mention years of scandals and party patronage, the boy from Baie-Comeau has been called the most loathed Canadian politician of the 20th century.

2. Alan Eagleson: In 1998, the former hockey lawyer and player agent pleaded guilty to fraud and theft charges, was fined $1 million, and was thrown in jail for swindling players and stealing disability insurance money and Canada Cup money that was intended for the players’ pension fund. He was later stripped of his Order of Canada medal, disbarred by the Law Society of Upper Canada, and booted out of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame. He also resigned from the Hockey Hall of Fame.

3. Ernst Zundel: The Holocaust denier and advocate of Jewish conspiracies was repeatedly accused, over a period of more than 20 years, of violating Canada’s hate laws and, in the process, incurred the wrath of many Canadians. He left Canada for the United States in 2000 but was detained and deported back to Canada in 2003. Here he was detained for a further two years before being deported to Germany, where he was tried in the state court of Mannheim on charges of incitement for Holocaust denial dating back to the 1990s. He was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to a maximum term of five years in prison.

4. Harold Ballard: People, especially long-suffering Toronto Maple Leaf fans, were never happy with the direction Ballard took the team in the 1970s and 1980s. “Pal Hal,” as he was known, added insult to injury in 1972 when he was convicted on 47 charges of fraud and theft involving $205,000 in Maple Leaf Gardens’ funds.

5. Ben Johnson: Canadians were elated after Johnson won the gold medal for the100 metres in the 1988 Olympics. But the cheers faded quickly after drug screening showed the Toronto athlete had tested positive for steroids. He was stripped of the gold and his actions led to an inquiry into drugs and sport in Canada that has had world-wide ramifications. He is most recently remembered for making light of his indiscretion by appearing in an ad campaign for Cheetah energy drink, stating in it, “I cheetah all the time!”

6. Conrad Black: The media mogul was convicted in July 2007 for defrauding shareholders of his Hollinger International newspaper empire out of millions of dollars. He was sentenced to six and a half years in prison in December 2007 for his conviction on three counts of fraud and one count of obstruction of justice (Associated Press, December 10, 2007).

1. Ronald Turpin: The last prisoner to die by hanging in Canada. Turpin robbed a Toronto restaurant in February, 1962. When he was pulled over by police officer Frederick Nash for a broken taillight, Turpin pulled out a .32 calibre handgun and shot Nash in the chest. He tried to escape in Nash’s cruiser but was quickly apprehended. He was tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to die by hanging. At12:02 a.m. on December 11, 1962, Turpin was hanged along with another prisoner, Arthur Lucas, at Toronto’s Don Jail. When he heard that he and Lucas would likely be the last prisoners hanged in Canada, Turpin apparently said, “Some consolation.”

2. Richard Blass: An infamous Canadian gangster and a multiple murderer. Born in Montreal, he was nicknamed Le Chat, French for “The Cat”, so nicknamed because of his luck in evading death after surviving at least three assassination attempts, a police shootout, and escaping from custody twice.

3. Evelyn Dick: The murder trials of Evelyn Dick remain the most sensationalized events in Canadian crime history. Dick was born in Beamsville, Ontario. She was arrested for murder after local children in Hamilton, Ontario, found the torso of her missing estranged husband, John Dick. His head and limbs had been sawed from his body and evidence that they had been burned in the furnace of her home later surfaced.

Crime BITE!

1880: In one of the most notorious murders in Canadian history, five members of the Donnelly family were massacred in Biddulph Township, near Lucan, Ontario. No one was convicted.

4. Clifford Olson: Canadians were outraged by the sex slayings of at least 11 Vancouver area children, for which he was charged in 1981, and many felt his life sentence on several counts of first degree murder wasn’t sufficient punishment. His conviction once again raised the issue among Canadians of reinstituting the death penalty. He has come up for parole twice, once in 1997 and again in 2006. Both times he was denied.

5 & 6. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The duo responsible for the murders of Leslie Mahaffy, Kristen French, and Karla’s sister, Tammy, between 1990 and 1992 were tried in one of the most notorious murder cases in Canadian history. Even the books written about the case and a movie depicting the murders have come under attack for being sensationalistic and not sensitive enough to the victims’ plight. Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment while Homolka received two 12-year sentences to run concurrently. She became eligible for parole in 2001. To many people’s horror, she was released from prison on July 4, 2005. In 2007 she gave birth to a baby boy, and in 2008 reportedly left Canada for the Antilles in the West Indies so her child could lead a “more normal life.” Bernardo remains in prison and, although he will become eligible for parole in 2010 under the “faint hope” clause, it is unlikely that he will be released as he has been declared a dangerous offender.

7. Robert William “Willie” Pickton: This pig farmer and serial killer from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was convicted in 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women. He was also charged in the deaths of an additional 20 women, many of them prostitutes and drug users from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. As of December 11, 2007, he was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 25 years — the longest sentence available under Canadian law.

During the trial’s first day, January 22, 2007, the Crown stated he confessed to 49 murders to an undercover police officer posing as a cell mate. The Crown reported that Pickton told the officer that he wanted to kill another woman to make it an even 50, and that he was caught because he was “sloppy.”

8. Marc Lépine: Born Gamil Gharbi, Lépine was a 25-year-old man from Montreal, Quebec, who murdered 14 women and wounded 10 other women and four men at the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, in what is known as “the Montreal Massacre.” He then turned the gun on himself.

9. David Shearing: The 23-year-old murdered a family of six while they were camping in Wells Gray Park in a remote area of British Columbia in August of 1982 — Bob and Jackie Johnson and their two girls, aged 11 and 13, along with Jackie’s retired parents, George and Edith Bentley.

Shearing pleaded guilty to six counts of murder and was sentenced to six concurrent terms of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 25 years. He came up for parole in 2007 and was denied release.

10. James Roszco: Shot four members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dead at his farm in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, northwest of Edmonton, on March 3, 2005. Roszko shot and killed RCMP constables Peter Schiemann, Anthony Gordon, Lionide Johnston, and Brock Myrol as the officers were executing a property seizure on his farm. It was the worst tragedy to befall the Mounties in nearly 100 years.

11. Roch “Moses” Thériault: The charismatic Quebecer established a commune near Burnt River, Ontario, in 1987. Between 1977 and 1989 he held sway over as many as 12 adults and 26 children. He used all of the nine women as concubines, and probably fathered most of the children in the group. He was arrested for assault in 1989, and convicted of murder in 1993. During his reign, Thériault mutilated several members. He once used a meat cleaver to chop off the hand and part of the arm of one of his concubines. He also removed eight of her teeth. Thériault was accused of castrating a two-year-old boy, as well as one adult man. His major crime was to kill Solange Boilard, his legal wife, by disembowelment while trying to perform surgery on her. He is serving a life sentence and was denied parole in 2002.

On April 5, 2004, the polls opened for Canadians to nominate their choice for the man or woman they felt was the best Canadian in history. They were asked to vote again when the top 10 were revealed. Here are the results of that poll in order of votes received:

6. Lester Bowles Pearson (prime minister, former United Nations General Assembly president, Nobel Peace Prize laureate)

9. Alexander Graham Bell (Scottish-born scientist, inventor, founder of the Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company)

On April 12, 1980, Terry Fox left St. John’s, Newfoundland, and began running along the Trans-Canada Highway en route to Canada’s west coast. The Winnipeg native’s goal was to raise money to fight the cancer that had taken his right leg.

Along the way, he captivated the imaginations of thousands of Canadians before learning on December 22, 1980, that terminal cancer had returned. Fox died on June 28, 1981. By the time his run was cancelled, he had covered 5,373 kilometres or the equivalent of 143 marathons.

Across Canada, Terry Fox Runs held every September keep the memories of Fox alive as does millions of dollars raised by The Terry Fox Foundation to fight the killer disease.

Other bits of memorabilia also keep Terry’s legacy in the minds of Canadians, says his brother Darrell, who was involved in the run and is national director of the foundation.

The artificial leg, the tattered white sock he wore on that leg, a pair of his running shorts and one of the 26 pairs of shoes he wore during the run, as well as many gifts he received along the way are on display at the Terry Fox Library in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Terry’s hometown.

Most of the memorabilia that Terry received while on the road or that was forwarded to his father Rolly and mother Betty, is on display or in storage at the British Columbia Sports Hall of Fame in Vancouver. His parents have other more personal belongings, such as Terry’s journal.

The home at 3337 Morrill Street in Port Coquitlam where Terry spent his formative years was sold. The van used to accompany Terry on his run, its whereabouts unknown for 28 years, has now resurfaced and, on May 22, 2008, was unveiled at a ceremony in the lobby at Ford of Canada in Oakville. The 1980 Ford Ecoline van had been painstakingly restored to the condition it was in when it served as Terry’s home and support vehicle during his brave journey.

On May 25, 2008, the van started out from St. John’s, Newfoundland, for a cross-Canadian tour to raise funds for cancer research. It was to end in Victoria on September 14, to coincide with the start of the annual Terry Fox Run.

Since its inception the Terry Fox Foundation has raised more than $400 million for cancer research.

In the summer of 1960, Roger Woodward was at the centre of what the history books have recorded as the “Niagara Falls miracle.”

On the afternoon of July 9, the seven-year-old Niagara Falls, New York youngster and his 17-year-old sister Deanne were enjoying their first-ever boat ride in an aluminum fishing boat piloted on the Niagara River by family friend Jim Honeycutt.

While cruising above Canada’s Horseshoe Falls the 12-foot craft’s 7.5-horsepower outboard motor hit a rock, sheared its cotter pin, and lost power. As it was swept toward the falls, it capsized, tossing Honeycutt and the Woodward children into the frothing waters.

Roger was wearing nothing but a swimsuit and a lifejacket as he floated toward the brink of the falls, which drop 162 feet into a pile of rocks. His sister managed to slip into a life jacket before the boat flipped.

John Hayes and John Quattrochi, both tourists, pulled Deanne out of the water 20 feet from the top of the of Canadian falls but Roger was not so lucky. He went over the edge into an area strewn with boulders.

Miraculously, he escaped with nothing more than minor cuts and bruises, suffered when he landed at the bottom, and a concussion, which happened before he went over the brink.

“One minute I was looking over the gorge, then I was floating in a cloud, I couldn’t see anything. I could not discern up or down or where I was,” he told us in an interview several years ago. “What I remember next is a severe throbbing in my head, likely from the concussion, which happened in the rapids or when I fell out of the boat…I had surrendered to the fact that I was going to die; then through the mist I saw the Maid of the Mist.”

“There were not a whole lot of places to land but by the grace of God, I landed in a pool of water. Had I even grazed one rock on the way down it would have shattered every bone in my body.”

The 55-pound boy was pulled from the river by the crew of a Maid of the Mist tour boat, which luckily was cruising nearby with a load of tourists who were snapping photographs of the falls. Roger immediately asked about the whereabouts of his sister, and then requested a glass of water.

“I had probably drank half the Niagara River, but I was pretty thirsty,” he said.

Back on shore, he was taken to the Greater Niagara General Hospital in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where he remained for three days for treatment of his injuries.

Deanne, with only a cut hand, was treated at a hospital in Niagara Falls, New York, where she learned of her brother’s fate. The body of Honeycutt, who also went over the falls, was found in the river four days later. He was not wearing a life jacket.

When the world learned that Woodward had become the first person to go over the falls unprotected, the media descended on the boy and his family. Newspapers took his picture. Movie producers wanted his story.

“The story became famous,” he recalled. “It was a time when the daredevil thing and going over the falls was pretty amazing and here you had two kids from a blue collar family who ended up in a horrific accident and a man was killed…the fact that we lived when many others had died going over the falls was quite amazing.”

In 1962, the Woodward family moved to Florida, in part to escape the prying eyes of the media. The parents never talked about the incident with Roger and Deanne. In Florida, Roger met and married his high school sweetheart, Susan. After college he joined the Navy and later worked for a business and office products company in Atlanta for 13 years before a career change took the family to Michigan where he worked in the telecom industry for 17 years.

In 1996, the Woodwards and their three sons moved to Huntsville, Alabama, a city of 350,000 people 90 minutes southwest of Atlanta where Roger was working in real estate. In 2006, Deanne was living in Lakeland, Florida.

Roger Woodward has returned to Niagara Falls, Ontario several times since the accident.

On the 25th anniversary in 1985 he and all of those involved in the mishap, including Deanne, were given a key to the city and a portrait of the falls.

Five years later, he spoke to the congregation at Glengate Alliance Church in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The audience was silent as Woodward, 37-years-old at the time, told how Honeycutt’s boat was caught in the fast flowing current and dragged toward the edge of the falls.

In 1994 Woodward and Deanne returned to the city to retell their story on a half-hour Canadian television special. Joining Roger and his sister were the two men, in their eighties at the time, who rescued Deanne before she went over the falls.

Colourful Fact!

The incident at the Horseshoe Falls was not Roger Woodward’s only brush with death. In his junior year of high school in 1970, a tractor-trailer ran a red light and broadsided his motorcycle. He landed on a set of railroad tracks, escaping with only a broken finger on his left hand. In the fall of 1994, while on a nighttime boat trip across Lake Huron with his 9-year-old son, Jonathan, the pair became disoriented in a fog bank. Their boat was narrowly missed by a freighter. The boating incident “was the single most frightening experience since Niagara Falls,” said Woodward.

Not all the subjects lend themselves to an easy interview, and since we don’t have psychic powers we had no way of reaching the many famous Canadians who have died. But we were curious as to where their last resting place is, and we thought you would be too.

Pierre Berton, who died in 2004, was one of Canada’s best known and beloved writers. In addition to his many books on Canada, Berton was also a one time managing editor of Maclean’s magazine, a TV host, and a regular panellist on CBC’s Front Page Challenge. Berton was cremated and his ashes scattered in Kleinburg, Ontario, where he had lived for many years.

Charles Best, the co-discoverer of insulin was born in West Pembroke, Maine, of Canadian parents. While studying medicine at the University of Toronto, he came to meet and become the assistant to Sir Frederick Banting in 1921, who was working on ways to extract insulin. Their work in finding a treatment for diabetes was possibly the most famous Canadian scientific discovery in this country’s history. Banting shared half of the credit and monies from his Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with Best, who died in 1978. He’s buried, as is Banting, in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.

Best known for the title roles in television’s Perry Mason and Ironside, Raymond Burr, a British Columbia native, also acted in more than 80 movies. A long-time Hollywood icon, Burr died in 1993 and is buried in Fraserview Cemetery, New Westminster, British Columbia.

Known as the father of Medicare and most recently chosen the greatest Canadian, Tommy Douglas died in 1986. Originally from Scotland, Douglas came to Canada in 1910 and settled with his family in Saskatchewan. He helped found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which later evolved into the NDP. Douglas is buried in Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa.

Glenn Gould, whose piano playing brilliance brought him acclaim from around the world, was born in 1932. He made his professional debut just 14 years later and went on to delight audiences in the United States, Europe, and the U.S.S.R. He left performing to focus on studio recordings. He died in 1982 and is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.

Tim Horton is probably better known today for the doughnut chain that bears his name than for his prowess as a stellar NHL defenceman from 1950 to 1974 when he died in a car crash. But the launch of his famous doughnut business is perhaps his greatest legacy. Horton is buried in York Cemetery in Toronto.

His 1957 hit “Swinging Shepherd Blues” brought jazz musician Moe Koffman his greatest fame, but he was a fixture in jazz circles for decades recording a range of styles. Koffman died in 2001 and is buried in Pardes Shalom Cemetery in Richmond Hill, Ontario.

Considered one of the greatest Canadian novelists of all time, Margaret Laurence was born in Neepawa, Manitoba in 1926. She studied English in Winnipeg and went on to pen several books that made her reputation including The Stone Angel and The Diviners. She died in 1987 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery in her home town of Neepawa.

Marshall McLuhan, influential thinker, professor, and philosopher gained acclaim in the 1960s with his “the medium is the message” tome. Born in 1911, this influential figure wrote several books and received several awards for his work. He died in 1980 and is buried in Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Thornhill, Ontario.

Lester B. Pearson gained fame not only as prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1967 but also received the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to resolve the Suez Crisis. He died in 1972 and is buried in McClaren Cemetery in Wakefield, Quebec.

Mary Pickford, silent film star and “America’s Sweetheart,” was born Gladys Smith in 1892 in Toronto. Pickford started acting as a child and began her film career in 1909. She became the best known and well-loved star of the silent era, but also made sound films, winning an Academy Award as Best Actress in 1929. She was also a founding member of United Artists, along with her then-husband Douglas Fairbanks. She died in 1979 and is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

The man who inspired the formation of the Group of Seven is still revered today for his landscape paintings. Tom Thomson is arguably one of Canada’s most famous and revered artists. He drowned while canoeing in northern Ontario in 1917, a death still regarded as suspicious by many. Thomson is buried in Leith United Church Cemetery in Leith, Ontario.

Mystery surrounds the death of Tom Thomson. He died while on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park.

Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster were long Canada’s most beloved television comedians. The duo performed together for some 50 years, most notably on their many CBC specials and in dozens of appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Wayne died in 1990 while Shuster passed on in 2002. Both are buried in Holy Blossom Cemetery in Toronto.

1. Name the Ottawa photographer who gained worldwide fame with his portraits of such well-known figures as Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, and Albert Einstein.

2. Of these three explorers, who first reached what is now Canada — Samuel de Champlain, John Cabot, or Jacques Cartier?

7. In May 1877, this great Sioux chief crossed into Canada with hundreds of his people and thousands of horses seeking a safe haven from the Americans after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Name him.

9. About 125 libraries were built in Canada from 1901 to 1923 because of grants from a wealthy American. Who was it?

10. True or false? Canadian cartoonist Lynn Johnston, known for her strip For Better or Worse, began her career illustrating medical journals.