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Quebec's Padlock Law
CBC's a people's history comfort and fear episode
An Act of the province of Quebec, passed on March 24, 1937 by the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis, that was intended to prevent the dissemination of communist propaganda. The Act prohibited anyone to “use or allow any person to make use of it to propagate communist or bolshevism by any means whatsoever”. -
Spies in Canada: Gouzenko Affair
Gouzenko testimony finally released
Igor Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy to Canada in Ottawa. He defected on Sep 5, 1945, with 109 documents on Soviet espionage activities in the west. This forced Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada. Gouzenko was the beginning of the Cold War for Public Opinion. -
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade
One of the first major international crises of the Cold War. Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies’ railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Allied control. Their aim was to force the western powers to allow the Soviet zone to start supplying Berlin with food and fuel, thereby giving the Soviets practical control over the entire city. -
International Alliances: NATO
The History of NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. -
"The Forgotten War" - The Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a war between the Republic of Korea (South Korea), supported by the United Nations, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), at one time supported by the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. It was primarily the result of the political division of Korea by an agreement of the victorious Allies at the conclusion of the Pacific War at the end of World War II. -
Diefenbaker, Bomarc missiles and nuclear warheads in Canada
John George Diefenbaker was the 13th Prime Minister of Canada, serving from June 21, 1957, to April 22, 1963. The Bomarc was developed by Canada after the cancellation of Avro Arrow in 1959. From 1963 to 1984, Canada fielded a total of four tactical nuclear weapons system which developed several hundred nuclear warheads. Canada withdrew three of the four nuclear-capable weapons systems by 1972. -
Vietnam War & Draft Dodgers in Canada
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. Those who practice draft evasion are sometimes pejoratively referred to as “draft dodgers”. -
UN Peacekeeping:The Suez Crisis and Pearson wins Nobel Prize
The Suez CrisisLester Pearson was a Canadian professor, historian, civil servant, statesman, diplomat, and politician, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis, which was a diplomatic and military confrontation in late 1956 between Egypt on one side, and Britain, France and Israel on the other, with the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations playing major roles in forcing Britain, France and Israel to withdraw. -
Continental Alliances: NORAD and DEW line
NORADNorth American Aerospace Defense Command is a combined organization of Canada and the United States that provides aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and defense for the two countries. The Distant Early Warning Line was a system of radar stations in the far northern Arctic region of Canada, with additional stations along the North Coast and Aleutian Islands of Alaska, in addition to the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland. It was set up to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War. -
Sputnik and Canada's space program
Launch of SputnikSputnik is a name applied to certain space craft launched under the Soviet space program. "Sputnik 1", "Sputnik 2" and "Sputnik 3" were the official Soviet names of those objects, while the remaining designations in the series were not official names, but were names applied in the West, to objects whose original Soviet names may not have been known at the time. Between 1945 and 1960, Canada undertook a number of small launcher and satellite related projects under the aegis of defence research. -
Avro Arrow and its Cancellation
CBC's "The Arrow"
The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow was a delta-winged interceptor aircraft, designed and built by Avro Canada as the culmination of a design study that began in 1953. Not long after the 1958 start of its flight test program, the development of the Arrow was abruptly and controversially halted before the project review had taken place, sparking a long political debate. The cancellation was announced on 20 February 1959. -
The Cuban Missile Crisis
On the Brink of Destruction: The Cuban Missile CrisisThe Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the Soviet Union and Cuba on one side, and the United States on the other, in October 1962. It was one of the major confrontations of the Cold War, and is generally regarded as the moment in which the Cold War came closest to turning into a nuclear conflict. It is also the first documented instance of the threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD) being discussed as a determining factor in a major international arms agreement. -
Canada-Soviet Hockey Series
USSR-Canada Summit Series
The Summit Series known at the time simply as the Canada–USSR Series, was an eight-game series of ice hockey between the Soviet Union and Canada, held in September 1972. It was the first competition between the Soviet national team and a Canadian team represented by professional players of the National Hockey League (NHL), known as Team Canada. -
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Celebration at the Berlin Wall
In 1989, a series of radical political changes occurred in the Eastern Bloc, associated with the liberalization of the Eastern Bloc's authoritarian systems and the erosion of political power in the pro-Soviet governments in nearby Poland and Hungary. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990. -
The Fall of the Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved on 26 December 1991 by declaration № 142-H of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.This declaration acknowledged the independence of the twelve republics of the Soviet Union that subsequently created the Commonwealth of Independent States. The dissolution of the world's first and largest Communist state also marked an end to the Cold War.
