In honour of wins by Mark Carney and the Sudbury Five …

As you probably heard by now, Canada recently had a major election, and Mark Carney – who ascended to the Prime Ministership after Justin Trudeau stepped down – won a full term as the country’s leader. Basically, he rallied the country with a campaign that was part “elbows up” and part “we’re not America’s 51st state.” And it worked.

As you may not have heard, the Basketball Super League just finished up its 2025 championship, and the Sudbury (Ont.) Five claimed their first league title, defeating the Windsor (Ont.) Express in a heart-stopping best-of-five series. The Five are now the BSL champions, and trust me, at this point in time, no one is thinking of INCO on a Sudbury Saturday Night. 😀

But if you’re wondering … gee, what does Canada have for itself? Ski slopes? Poutine? Nickelback?

Oh, have I got a treat for you.

For years, Canada created a series of “Heritage Minutes,” bite-sized history lessons about the great and wonderful moments in True North culture. And watching them is actually rather fascinating. For example …

Here’s a Canadian Heritage Minute about the 1965 battle to design the national Canadian flag, and all the different variations and proposals before we actually achieved the simple maple leaf banner.

Here’s a Canadian Heritage Minute where several Canadian doctors discovered and perfected the use of insulin as a treatment for diabetes.

Did you know that everybody’s favorite children’s literature bear that wasn’t named Paddington also has Canadian roots? Now you do.

Oh, and up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s – yeah, Superman may be from the planet Krypton, but part of his legacy came from Toronto.

And it seems fitting that a Canadian basketball team won the Basketball Super League championship … seeing as basketball was actually invented by a Canadian.

Hey, wait a second, isn’t that Dan Aykroyd in a Canadian Heritage Minute clip about the invention of Canada’s first supersonic jet plane? Why, yes it is!

Not all the Heritage Minutes feature stories of triumph and invention. Many of the stories also feature stories of courage, such as the story of Vincent Coleman, a telegraph dispatcher who saved lives – at the cost of his own – during the 1917 Halifax port explosion.

Or the courage of Jackie Robinson, who before he broke baseball’s major league color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, broke the colour barrier in 1946 as a member of the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal.

A courageous moment as well from soul singer Jackie Shane, who became the first transgendered singer to have a major hit on Canadian radio stations with her song “Any Other Way.”

There are hundreds of these Canadian Heritage Minutes on YouTube, and they are a fascinating deep dive into Canada’s wide-ranging history and its influence around the world.

And I’m kinda good with that.