There were 1300 men atop the protest train when it reached the deadly Spiral Tunnels of the Kicking Horse Pass. Their number would climb to more than 2,000 before the protest was derailed by political treachery.
Certain geometries of arm, leg and spine are ill-advised, uncomfortable soon enough and agony soon after.
As the train eased into the station above the milky, mineral rush of the Kicking Horse River, the ranks of men atop the freight cars gratefully unkinked knees, unlocked fingers clinging to narrow catwalks, raised rumps blistered by weathered timber during the bone-rattling ride from Golden. The hiss of steam from the slowing locomotive might have been a collective sigh of relief.
Read MoreTell a Beijing cabbie you're from Canada and, though he will know not a word of English, he will smile enthusiastically and speak two names: "Dashan", the Chinese stage name of Ottawa-born entertainer Mark Rowswell, the most beloved foreign entertainer in China, and "Bái Qiúēn." The latter is the pinyin rendering of three-Chinese characters whose sound approximates syllabically the last name of the most beloved foreign hero in China: Norman Bethune. This 12-minute narrated video, which features images from the Library and Archives Canada, encapsulates the remarkable life of the hard-headed and big-hearted Canadian surgeon. The portrait above is one of dozens of Bethune propaganda pieces commissioned during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
On August 1, 1936, Irving "Toots" Meretsky, a skinny, 24-year-old Jewish kid from Windsor, Ontario, stood in the Olympiastadion within Berlin's monumental Reichssportfeld, and looked up at the man who was the scourge of his people in Germany, a dark, furious figure with an absurd little mustache. "He looks like Charlie Chaplin," Toots thought, smiling to himself. Toots and his teammates, including another Jewish basketball legend, would go on to bring a kind of glory to Canada that has never been repeated.
