The Day a City Was Born
On the morning of July 3, 1608, a French explorer named Samuel de Champlain steered his vessel around the great bend in the St. Lawrence River and came to a stop below a towering cliff of dark rock. He had been on the water for months — leaving France in April, pausing at Tadoussac where the Saguenay meets the St. Lawrence, and pushing upstream through waters that made European mariners deeply nervous. But Champlain had been here before. He knew what he was looking at.
The site offered a natural harbour, a commanding cliff from which to watch the surrounding country, and river tributaries that opened the interior. The Algonquian peoples who knew this place had a word for it — a word meaning something like where the river narrows. Champlain named his settlement after that word. He called it Québec. World Book INK
He had arrived leading thirty-two colonists on his most ambitious project yet. Champlain was not a young dreamer on his first adventure — he had already crossed the Atlantic many times, explored the Caribbean, mapped the Atlantic coastline from Acadia south past Cape Cod, and endured brutal winters that killed men around him. He understood, perhaps better than anyone in France, just how hard this country was. Encyclopedia Britannica
The first challenge was scurvy and the punishing cold, which cut down the settlers almost immediately. Of the original party, Champlain and eight others survived that first winter. Eight out of thirty-two. In the spring, fresh colonists arrived and the work continued. EBSCOEncyclopedia Britannica
What made Champlain different from other explorers of his era was his understanding that survival in this country depended on the people who already lived here. His alliances with Indigenous peoples, including the Huron-Wendat, proved essential to the survival of both the settlement and the colony. He didn’t just tolerate those alliances — he invested in them, learned from them, and honoured them across decades of administration. It was an approach that shaped the character of New France and left traces that are still visible in Quebec today. Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada
Champlain devoted his life to justifying the importance of the colony, ensuring it had the support it needed at court, and laying the foundations for its continued existence. He died in Quebec City on Christmas Day, 1635, having never stopped working on its behalf. Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Four centuries later, the city he built below that cliff is one of the most beautiful in North America — the only walled city north of Mexico, recognized by UNESCO as the cradle of French civilization in North America. Ville de Québec
A Few Fast Facts About Samuel de Champlain:
- There is no authentic portrait of Champlain that survives. The face you’ve seen on stamps and monuments is an artist’s reconstruction — no one actually knows what he looked like. The Canadian Encyclopedia
- He made somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-nine Atlantic crossings during his career — without losing a single ship. goodreads
- He may have been baptized a Protestant, raised in Brouage, a Huguenot port town — though he was certainly Catholic by the time he reached Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia
- He was a gifted cartographer who created the first accurate maps of North America’s eastern coastline, combining his own observations with detailed geographic knowledge provided by First Nations peoples. Dictionary of Canadian Biography
- Despite spending most of his adult life building New France, he never held the title of Governor — his social rank, though respectable, placed that office just out of reach under the rigid hierarchy of the French court. Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Also on This Day
Canada Gets a Central Bank — July 3, 1934
By 1934, the Great Depression had made one thing painfully clear: Canada was navigating one of the worst economic crises in history without a central bank. Prior to 1934, Canada had no central bank and fragmented control of its banking system. Prime Minister R.B. Bennett pushed for change, partly motivated by concern that Canada’s financial system was too dependent on American banks in New York, which he felt exerted dominant influence over the value of the Canadian dollar. WikipediaWikipedia
The Bank of Canada Act received royal assent on July 3, 1934. In March 1935, the Bank opened its doors — initially as a privately owned institution, with shares sold to the public. That arrangement didn’t last long. A new government, seeing the contradiction in a “public” bank owned by private shareholders, moved quickly. By 1938, the Bank became publicly owned, and has remained so ever since. Its first Governor was Graham F. Towers, a thirty-seven-year-old Canadian with extensive experience at the Royal Bank. Bank of CanadaBank of Canada
The preamble to the original Act — written to regulate credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation — has never been changed. Next time you hear the Governor of the Bank of Canada speak, that sentence from 1934 is still the legal foundation beneath every word.
The Entertainment — Summer, 1934
Since the Bank of Canada Act places us squarely in 1934, let’s spend a moment there. Canada was in the depths of the Depression, and if ever a country needed a good movie or a catchy song to take its mind off things, it was this one. Hollywood and the music business obliged.
The Top Movie: It Happened One Night
Columbia Pictures was considered a “Poverty Row” studio in the early 1930s, grinding out cheap B pictures. Nobody expected much from It Happened One Night. But Frank Capra’s screwball comedy — starring Clark Gable as a rogue newspaper reporter and Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress on a cross-country bus trip — turned out to be exactly the film Depression-era audiences needed. Escapist, funny, warm, and full of sparring dialogue, it gave people two hours away from their troubles. TCMWikipedia
At Oscar time, It Happened One Night surprised the industry by being nominated in all five major categories — and then stunned everyone by winning all five: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay. It was the first-ever sweep, a feat that wouldn’t be repeated for forty years. In theatres from Halifax to Victoria, Canadians were laughing right alongside their American neighbours. TCM
The Top Song: “The Continental” — Leo Reisman
Written by Con Conrad with lyrics by Herb Magidson, “The Continental” was introduced by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in the film The Gay Divorcee — and it became the first song ever to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It hit number one on the North American charts for two weeks, and on every dance floor from Toronto to Vancouver, couples were attempting something that passed for a continental. WikipediaRamblin’ with Roger
Honourable mention: Bing Crosby was seemingly everywhere in 1934 — “June in January,” “Love in Bloom,” “Two Cigarettes in the Dark” — and his warm, relaxed voice was the sound of the era on Canadian radio. And for those who preferred their music Canadian: Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, the London, Ontario-born bandleader who had become the most popular dance band in North America, appeared multiple times on the year’s top charts. Pop Culture MadnessMusic VF
Bill Gould