Past meets present in the 2019 Heritage Minute marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day/Historica Canada

For more than three decades, Historica Canada‘s Heritage Minutes have been bringing Canadian history to life. There are now more than 100 Minutes in the iconic series of 60-second tributes to Canadians who changed history, from Agnes Macphail to Viola Desmond, Rocket Richard to Terry Fox, Oscar Peterson to Archie MacNaughton (above, and below) and dozens more. Fortunately for Policy readers, Historica Canada President Anthony Wilson-Smith, a former editor of Maclean’s, is also a Policy contributing writer. Wilson-Smith began filing great, first-person pieces on Heritage Minute location shoots in June, 2023.

Here are all the pieces from our series on The Making of the Minutes:

The Heritage Minutes on pioneering World War I artist Mary Riter Hamilton (above), and Edwin Baker (release date TBA) — the World War I veteran who lost his vision to a sniper’s bullet and returned home to co-found the Canadian National Institute for the Blind — presented a logistical and budgetary advantage. “Both Baker and Hamilton fit within our working rule for the Minutes that they be devoted to people or events that in some way helped shape life in the country in which we live today,” writes Wilson-Smith in his August preview piece. “That they both made their mark on Canada’s history from the First World War battlefields of Europe meant that this time, it made sense for us to shoot two minutes in one location.” Here’s The Making of Two Minutes: Dramatizing the Lives of Two Visionary Canadians.

The Heritage Minute honouring the service and sacrifice of Major Archie MacNaughton, the re-enlisted World War I veteran who was among the 359 Canadians killed on D-Day, first aired in 2019 to mark the 75th anniversary of the tide-turning Allied invasion. But when we assembled our commemorative series marking the D-Day 80th anniversary in 2024, Wilson-Smith filed a wonderful piece reminding us, again, to never forget. Here’s Archie MacNaughton’s D-Day: How One Soldier Came to Personify Sacrifice.

“Even with an early-morning mist dulling the glow from the overhead lights, Greg Kwong figured he knew what to expect when he and his son, Brendan, strode onto the football field at Calgary’s Macron Centre one morning last November, ” begins Wilson-Smith’s April 2024 Making of a Minute piece on the story of Norman Kwong, Canada’s first professional football player of Chinese heritage. “Hey, Dad,” Greg said to actor Patrick Kwok-Choon, who was playing his father in the Heritage Minute. The two hugged. ‘It was,’ an emotional Greg Kwong later recalled, ‘surreal’.” Here’s The Making of a Minute: Norman Kwong’s Field of Dreams.

To recreate the feeling of the baseball diamonds where Mary Bonnie Baker made her name during and after World War II in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Wilson-Smith and the Heritage Minutes cast and crew chose Ogema, Saskatchewan. Combining his journalist’s love of story and Historica Canada president’s love of history, Wilson-Smith filed a dispatch on both the Baker Minute and the story of Ogema. From our summer 2023 Dispatches issue, here’s A Small Saskatchewan Town’s Heritage Minute Close-Up.

And, from our Canada 150 anniversary issue in 2017: When the Heritage Minutes débuted, it seemed so un-Canadian to be dramatizing much less glorifying our own relatively brief story that they were greeted with a sort of awed cognitive dissonance followed by gleeful parody. Now, they are as much a part of Canadian culture as hockey, Tim Hortons and beer. To mark the country’s 150th birthday, Wilson-Smith filed the must-read Canada at 150: Minute by Minute.

Many thanks to Anthony Wilson-Smith and the entire team at Historica Canada.

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