150 Little Known Canadian Facts #11

We have reached our halfway point of 150 little known Canadian facts. This country is large and its facts—little known or otherwise—are many. It’s been an interesting and fascinating journey so far, and we hope you’ll continue to stay with us as we present the next half of what makes up Canada and Canadians.

69. Canadians participate in some pretty extreme sports, and as Canada is known for its cold winters, it’s no wonder some of these athletes have made use of this season in their next level of “extreme.”

• Ice diving at 1,000 Islands in the St. Lawrence Seaway is one of the best fresh-water wreck diving spots on the planet. It’s also the first in the world to use an airboat to get divers to the site, which is the only craft that can go over water and ice. This area of the St. Lawrence has six villages and three hamlets that were intentionally flooded on July 1, 1958, to make way for larger freighters to sail further along the river. Divers will find an old canal system, hydro-electric station and sidewalks alongside the numerous shipwrecks.
• Heli-Skiing is credited to an Austrian mountain guide who first tried it in British Columbia in 1965. However, some books have photos taken in the late 1950s of skiers being dropped by helicopters onto untouched snowy peaks in either Alaska, Wyoming or Utah. While this may be true, but it wasn’t until Hans Gmoser did it in BC that the sport took to new heights.
• Ice sailing is a fairly new extreme sport that’s slowly gaining popularity. The boat is similar to a luge sled but you have a sail attached and the sled is just a skinny, aerodynamic hull. Your head is about a foot off the ice, you’re on your back and you can reach speeds around 100 km/hr. Most ice sailing occurs in the Great Lakes area and every year there is the DN Ice Sailing Championships, which Canada has hosted 13 times.

70.  In the 1930s, three pediatricians at the Hospital for Sick Children developed a precooked cereal for children, which helped treat and prevent rickets. This cereal is called Pablum. Drs. Frederick Tisdall, Theodore Drake and Alan Brown put minerals and five out of six known vitamins that children needed for healthy growth, and helped millions of children worldwide, yet wouldn’t cause constipation or diarrhea. One of these vitamins is vitamin D. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Dr. Charles Scriver at the Montréal Children’s Hospital linked vitamin D deficiency to rickets. Thanks to this discovery, Dr. Scriver successfully lobbied to have milk fortified with vitamin D.

71. Canada is a bilingual country, but only one province is officially bilingual: New Brunswick. The Official Languages Act doesn’t apply to provincial and municipal governments or to private businesses. New Brunswick is officially bilingual because the Charter of Rights and Freedoms recognizes that English and French are the official languages, and it states that both Anglophone and Francophone communities in New Brunswick are equal in status, rights and privileges. This means that if you want to be served in French at any government institution such as a hospital or a police station in New Brunswick, you have the right.

72. NAV Canada is this country’s Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP). It is the world’s first fully privatized civil air navigation provider, and it was established in 1996. It manages 12 million aircraft flying annually and watches an area over 18 million square kms—the world’s second largest ANSP in traffic volume. This area goes from the Pacific West coast to the East Coast of Newfoundland and to the centre of the North Atlantic. NAV Canada has one of the best safety records in IFR-to-IFR reduction losses (IFR means instrument flight rules). Services provided by NAV Canada are air traffic control, airport advisory, and flight and aeronautical information.

73. Canada’s Indigenous peoples have strong oral storytelling traditions stretching back thousands of years. Canada’s literary (written) storytelling tradition is much younger. The first Canadian published works were non-fiction accounts of travel and adventure written by European explorers such as Sir Alexander Mackenzie. The first Canadian novel was written in 1769 by a British resident of Quebec named Frances Brooke. Brooke’s novel was called History of Emily Montague, and tells the story of a blossoming romance in the heart of snowy Quebec. The first Canadian publisher surfaced 20 years later in 1789. The Nova Scotia Magazine, as it was known, published poetry and short stories in addition to news and editorials.

74. It is common knowledge that Canada was first colonized by French and English settlers. What is less commonly known, is that the Moroccans almost joined in these colonization efforts. In the later half of the sixteenth century, Morocco enjoyed strong political, military and economic alliances with both England and France, and Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur saw it as an inevitability that the Moroccan people would join their European allies in settling the New World. Unfortunately for Morocco, al-Mansur died before his colonization plans could be enacted, and his successor had no interest in North America.

75. It was the Americans who first visited the moon, but they couldn’t have gotten there without Canadian efforts. Ontario-born Owen Maynard was the chief engineer who designed Apollo’s famous lunar lander, and Canadian astronaut Bruce Aikenhead was responsible for training the landing team. In fact, there were 32 Canadian engineers and scientists working for NASA, helping to turn the dream of visiting the moon into a reality.

76. Canada’s first brewery opened in 1647 in Sillery, Quebec. It was operated by Jesuit priests and mainly served the missionaries themselves. While this was the first brewery, the history of brewing in Canada actually predates European settlement. Many indigenous cultures have a long history of fermenting pine needles and creating what Europeans would later call “spruce beer.” Though only lightly alcoholic, spruce beer was a necessity during the winter months, as it was one of the only steady sources of vitamin C.