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Russia no ‘paper tiger,’ warns Norad commander

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

While China poses a “long-term, long-pacing challenge,” the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, says the current primary military threat to North America is Russia.

“Right now, what I would say from an information space and a cyber domain, [China and Russia] are certainly peer competitors,” U.S. Air Force General Glen VanHerck told the annual Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence on March 9.

“But the true threat, I think the military threat right now is Russia…because they have the kinetic capability, the nuclear capability, the power projection capability in their bombers, their submarines as well.

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Quebec City’s bloody weekend: the Easter Riot of 1917

STORY BY PAIGE GILMAR

On May 18, 1917, Prime Minister Robert Borden dropped a bombshell when he introduced the Military Service Act, a conscription law that would require all male citizens between the ages of 20 to 45 to enlist.

Little did Borden know just how severe the impact would be.

“Borden had implemented conscription because he believed the war had to be won and that Canada must play its full part,” J.L. Granatstein wrote in Maclean’s. “To achieve these ends, he almost broke the nation.”

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Gudrid the Far-Travelled an icon among Norse women

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Viking women played essential roles in war and peace, but it’s unlikely any got around as much as Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, better known as Gudrid the Far-Travelled.

Born in 10th century Iceland, Gudrid sailed into the unknown aboard rudimentary longships, crossing the North Atlantic eight times, then trekking across the European continent and back again.

She journeyed across Iceland, and to Scandanavia and North America, where she gave birth to the first European born in the New World, Snorri Thorfinnsson, nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus was credited with discovering the Americas.

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The Story behind the Canadian Navy’s “Black Tot Day”

STORY BY PAIGE GILMAR

“Yo-ho-ho and a bottle o’ rum!” goes the age-old shanty “Dead Man’s Chest.”

The iconic tune, which first appeared in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island, could surprisingly be more fact than fiction in the Royal Canadian Navy.

Before Canada’s navy was established in 1910, Britain’s Royal Navy set the trends for much of life at sea.

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The sinking of U-111 by the British anti-submarine trawler Lady Shirley

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

U-111, a Type-IXB U-boat of the 2nd Unterseebootsflottille, was a week’s sail from the French coast and the submarine pens at Lorient, France, when it took a detour.

A report had come in that a British steamer, possibly a tanker, was disabled and awaiting aid from a sea-going tugboat. U-boat headquarters, or BdU, suggested Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm Kleinschmidt put the stricken vessel out of its misery.

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Louis Riel: a Métis freedom fighter

STORY BY PAIGE GILMAR

“I fear it will all end badly,” wrote Sister Jane Slocombe of Montreal’s Grey Nuns sometime during the mid-1800s.

“I fear this poor child does not have a good head on his shoulders.”

This “poor child” was none other than Louis Riel, the Métis-born father of Manitoba and protector of Indigenous-French rights in the Prairies. Riel was instrumental in leading two Métis governments and bringing Manitoba into Confederation.

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