Canada

Today is National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. With the day off comes an opportunity (and responsibility) to learn about residential schools, through which the federal government and Canadian churches separated children from their families and subjected them to abuse and neglect in loco parentis.

[R]econciliation, in the context of Indian residential schools, is similar to dealing with a situation of family violence.

Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Although the first residential schools were first established pre-Confederation, their story is shockingly and depressingly recent: residential school populations were at their highest from the 1920s to the 1960s, and some continued to operate well into my own childhood.

Highway exits in Canada are generally numbered based on the distance (in km) from the beginning of the highway. But what about before Canada went metric? Did all the exits have to be renumbered?

As it turns out, my assumption that distance-based exit numbering is not as widespread or as recent as I thought.

• Ontario and Québec have exit numbering systems that predate metrication, but only barely, so the switch wasn’t too hard.
• Newfoundland and Nova Scotia have sequential exit numbers, not distance-based ones.
• Alberta didn’t post exit numbers at all until 2004!

In the late ’60s, the government sought to adopt O Canada as the national anthem. The music and original French lyrics had passed into the public domain, but the English version was still under copyright. The government settled the rights for a dollar.

Ironically, the copyright to the English lyrics would have expired anyways by the time the National Anthem Act was finally passed in 1980.