Heritage Minute

Heritage Minutes are sixty-second short films each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies. The minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of one-off heavily promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation and Canada Post. They have been produced and narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson.

While the CRB has not paid networks to air the minutes, they have made them freely available. The main attraction to running them is that the CRTC has ruled that they can each count as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

The Heritage Minutes themselves have become part of Canadian culture, being frequently parodied. The high production values and entertaining but educating content has met general acclaim and today there are over sixty of them. While popular, they have been criticized. Robert Fulford, for instance, has attacked them for their solemn pomposity.

List of Heritage Minutes

• Agnes Macphail demanding penal reform
• The development of the Avro Arrow
• Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin build interlingual cooperation
• James Naismith's invention of Basketball
• The Bluenose wins its last race
• Paul-Emile Bordua's art and the Quiet Revolution
• Joseph Casavant world renowned organ maker
• The art of Emily Carr
• Emily Murphy's quest for equal rights for women
• Étienne Parent demands equality for French and English
• The planning for Expo '67
• MP John Matheson looks at candidates for Canada's new flag
• John McCrae pens In Flanders Fields
• New France, under the leadership of governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac repels the British invasion of 1690
• Frontier College educates those away from the urban centres
• Englishman Archie Belaney becomes Grey Owl
• Vince Coleman sacrifices his own life to save a train from the Halifax Explosion
• The efforts of Louis-Joseph Papineau gives full equality of religion to Jews in Canada
• An Inuksuk is built
• Jackie Robinson joins the Montreal Royals
• Jacques Plante becomes the first NHL goalie to wear a mask in regular play
• Jennie Trout becomes Canada's first woman doctor
• John Cabot discovers the Grand Banks
• John Humphrey drafts the UN Declaration of Human Rights
• Inventor Joseph-Armand Bombardier and beginnings of his passion for engineering
• Mary Travers becomes a famed popular singer in Quebec
• Laura Secord aids the British in the War of 1812 with an overland trek to warn of an American military advance
• Thomas Eadi develops the trans-Canadian microwave network
• The rehearsal for the first performance of O Canada
• The achievements and execution of Louis Riel
• Surgeon Lucille Teasdale devotes her life to helping the poor in Africa
• Guglielmo Marconi receives the first trans-Atlantic radio signals in Newfoundland
• Female WWII pilot Marion Orr
• Marshall McLuhan coins the phrase "the medium is the message"
• Maurice Ruddick recounts the 1958 Springhill mine disaster
• The importance of Midwives in early Canada
• The town of Myrnham, Alberta forms a non-denominational hospital.
• Jacques Cartier misunderstands some Natives resulting in the name Canada
• Nat Taylor invents the multiplex
• Nellie McClung demands the right to vote in Manitoba
• Jean Nicollet becomes the first European to reach Lake Michigan, but thinks it's the Pacific
• A young Chinese-Canadian risks his life helping to build the Canadian Pacific Railway
• Quebecois families adopt Irish orphans in the 1850s while allowing them to keep their original names.
• The surprise victory of the Paris Crew, a group of unheralded Canadian rowers, at the 1867 World Championships
• Georges and Pauline Vanier and their lifetimes of achievement
• The formation of the Iroquois Confederacy
• Dr. Wilder Penfield makes important discoveries in neuroscience when a patient smells burnt toast as the initial signal for an epileptic seizure.
• Queen Victoria decides to grant Canada responsible government after the crushing of the Rebellions of 1837
• Maurice Richard scores eight goals in a single game
• Teacher Kate Henderson sways school trustees to embrace new methods, and the event is immortalized in a famous painting by R.C. Harris.
• The 1870 fire in the Saguenay
• Sir Sanford Fleming develops the system of international standard time.
• Sitting Bull seeks refuge in Canada
• Prairie settlers build a house of sod
• Sam Steele of the RCMP bars an unruly American from the Yukon despite being threatened at gunpoint
• The beginning of the Stratford Festival
• Joe Shuster creates Superman
• A First Nations family teaches early settlers how to make maple syrup
• J.S. Woodsworth convinces parliament to introduce old age pensions
• Joseph Burr Tyrrell discovers a plethora of dinosaur bones in Alberta
• An African-American escapes to Canada along the Underground Railroad
• Three men from one street in Winnipeg win the Victoria Cross in World War I
• L'Anse aux Meadows is settled by Vikings
• Canadian Mennonites devise sustainable agriculture practices that aid the Third World
• The bear of a Canadian soldier becomes the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh

See also: Hinterland Who's Who

External link

• Watch Heritage Minutes (http://www.histori.ca/minutes/)