TODAY IN HISTORY: B.C. buys its own Navy
In 1870, the Red Cross Society was founded in Britain.
In 1892, English medical missionary Wilfred Grenfell arrived in Labrador. For 42 years he laboured among the fisherfolk, helping build hospitals and orphanages as well as churches.
In 1914, Canada automatically entered the First World War when Britain declared war on Germany after the Germans invaded Belgium.
In 1914, British Columbia acquired its own navy for a few days when the government of Premier Richard McBride paid $1.5 million to a Seattle shipyard for two submarines. The submarines were intended to protect Vancouver and Victoria from German cruisers in the Pacific Ocean. On Aug. 7, the federal government took over the submarines for the British admiralty.
In 1922, Bell Telephone suspended service for one minute during Alexander Graham Bell’s funeral in Baddeck, N.S. The inventor of the telephone had died two days earlier at age 75.
In 1936, Toronto runner Phil Edwards became the first Canadian to win five Olympic medals. Edwards added the 800-metre bronze in Berlin to his three bronzes in 1932 – in the 800, 1,500 and 4x400 relay – and his 1928 bronze in the same relay.
In 1944, Nazi police raided the secret annex of a house in Amsterdam and arrested eight people, including 14-year-old Anne Frank. Anne’s diary gained international fame after her death in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In 1952, fire broke out in the library of Parliament. Thousands of books were damaged by water that was used to douse the fire. The building was not officially reopened until 1956.
In 1960, the Commons approved the Canadian Bill of Rights. It guaranteed freedom of speech, religion and the press — provisions eventually enshrined in the constitution’s Charter of Rights in 1982.
In 1998, the Nisga’a First Nation signed a historic treaty with the federal and B.C. governments. The treaty gave them exclusive rights to resources in the 2,000-square kilometre area along the Nass River in B.C., a cash settlement and a self-designed system of government.
In 2014, a massive tailings pond breach at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley Mine in central B.C. sent 10 million cubic metres of water and 4.5 million cubic metres of toxic silt into Polley Lake and Quesnel Lake. It prompted a week-long ban on drinking or bathing in water from surrounding lakes and rivers.