Inventors, writers, leaders, heroes and artists the test may ask about.
Canadians gave the world insulin, standard time, basketball and the snowmobile.
Bell was born in Scotland and moved to Brantford, Ontario, with his family. He developed the telephone, patented in 1876, and that year made early long-distance calls near Brantford. He later worked on aircraft and hydrofoils in Nova Scotia.
Fleming was a railway engineer who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1879 he proposed dividing the world into standard time zones, the system we still use. He also designed Canada’s first postage stamp, the Threepenny Beaver.
Naismith was born in Almonte, Ontario. As a teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, he invented basketball as an indoor game for winter, using peach baskets as the first hoops.
Fessenden was a radio pioneer from Quebec. He is credited with the first radio broadcast of voice and music, on 24 December 1906. Before that, radio could only send Morse code.
Banting and his student Charles Best discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921. Insulin made diabetes a disease people could live with. Banting won the Nobel Prize in 1923 and shared the money with Best.
Bombardier was a mechanic from Valcourt, Quebec. He built tracked vehicles that could travel over snow, and in 1959 his company launched the Ski-Doo, the first popular personal snowmobile.
Canadian authors have won the Nobel and Booker prizes and written some of the world’s best-loved books.
Johnson, also known as Tekahionwake, was a poet and performer with a Mohawk father and an English mother. She toured Canada and abroad reading her poems, such as The Song My Paddle Sings.
McCrae was a doctor and soldier from Guelph, Ontario. In 1915 he wrote the poem In Flanders Fields after a friend died in battle. The poppies in the poem became the symbol of Remembrance Day.
Montgomery grew up on Prince Edward Island. Her novel Anne of Green Gables (1908) tells of an orphan girl sent to live on a farm. It has been translated into dozens of languages.
Atwood is a novelist and poet from Ottawa. Her novel The Handmaid’s Tale became a television series. She has won the Booker Prize twice, for The Blind Assassin (2000) and The Testaments (2019).
Munro wrote short stories about life in small towns in Ontario. In 2013 she became the first Canadian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
People who built the country and its institutions.
Macdonald was a leader of Confederation and Canada’s first Prime Minister, from 1867. He pushed to build the railway to the Pacific. His record is debated today, including his government’s policies towards Indigenous peoples.
Riel was a Métis leader. He led the Red River Resistance and helped bring Manitoba into Confederation in 1870. After leading the North-West Resistance in 1885 he was tried and hanged. Many now see him as a defender of Métis rights.
Laurier was the first French Canadian Prime Minister, from 1896 to 1911. In his time millions of immigrants settled the Prairies, and Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905. His face is on the $5 note.
Macphail was a teacher from Ontario. In 1921 she became the first woman elected to the House of Commons. She campaigned for prison reform, pensions and equal pay.
Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for proposing a United Nations peacekeeping force during the Suez Crisis. As Prime Minister, from 1963 to 1968, his government introduced the maple leaf flag and the Canada Pension Plan.
Courage in war, and courage in standing up for fairness at home.
Brock was the British general who defended Upper Canada at the start of the War of 1812. He captured Detroit and was killed leading his troops at the Battle of Queenston Heights.
Tecumseh was a Shawnee leader who united several First Nations to defend their lands. He fought alongside the British in the War of 1812 and was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813.
In 1813 Secord walked about 30 km through enemy territory to warn British forces of an American attack. Her warning helped win the Battle of Beaver Dams.
Desmond was a Black businesswoman from Halifax. In 1946 she refused to leave the whites-only section of a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and was arrested. Her stand helped start the civil rights movement in Canada, and she appears on the $10 note.
Fox lost a leg to cancer. In 1980 he set out to run across Canada, the Marathon of Hope, to raise money for cancer research. He ran 5,373 km in 143 days before the cancer returned. Terry Fox Runs still take place every year.
From the music of the national anthem to painters of the wild north.
Lavallée was a composer from Quebec. In 1880 he wrote the music of O Canada, first sung in French. It became the official national anthem a hundred years later, in 1980.
Carr was a painter and writer from Victoria, British Columbia. She painted the forests of the west coast and the villages and totem poles of Indigenous peoples there.
A group of landscape painters who first exhibited together in Toronto in 1920. Their bold paintings of lakes, rocks and forests in northern Ontario became a symbol of Canadian art.
Cohen was a poet, novelist and singer from Montréal. His song Hallelujah (1984) has been recorded by hundreds of artists around the world.