Daniel Francis

Reading the National Narrative

March 2016

March 20, 2016

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Many years ago when my father retired from his private medical practice he removed from the walls of his office a set of photographic prints depicting the early days of Vancouver. He dispersed the prints among his four children and I displayed mine on the walls of different homes as I moved about the country until I either grew tired of...

March 14, 2016

Douglas Todd had a thoughtful piece in the Vancouver Sun this weekend about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's musings on national identity.

In an article in The New York Times Magazine last December, Mr. Trudeau opined that Canadians share certain values but not...

March 5, 2016

I note that yesterday, March 4, was Margaret Trudeau's wedding anniversary. It was 45 years ago that she and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau tied the knot at a quiet ceremony at a church in North Vancouver.

Does this qualify as a "remember where you were" moment for Canadians? I know it does for me. On the evening of March 4, 1971, I was in the press box of the hockey arena in Medicine Hat, Alberta. One of the perks of working at the local newspaper, for which I was writing editorials...

March 4, 2016

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Here is a nice photograph that came my way today. It is from the collection of the North Vancouver Museum & Archives (#749) and shows Streetcar #32 on Lonsdale Avenue outside the Municipal Hall at First Street in about 1910.

Streetcars came to North Vancouver on Labour Day, 1906, when the BC Electric Railway Company opened a line...