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The Walrus
The Walrus
The Walrus Lab

Pens, Pixels, and Protections: A Century of Canadian Copyright

La Loi canadienne sur le droit d’auteur, adoptée en 1924, a jeté les bases d’un siècle de protection de la créativité au Canada. Mais 100 ans plus tard, cette législation est-elle encore adaptée aux réalités d’aujourd’hui? Comment une loi vieille d’un siècle peut-elle répondre aux défis posés par des innovations comme l’intelligence artificielle? Cet épisode explore l’histoire fascinante de cette loi, son évolution et les défis urgents qu’elle doit relever face aux technologies modernes. L’auteure canadienne Heather O’Neill exprime ses préoccupations concernant la réappropriation de son œuvre par l’IA sans son consentement et réfléchit au lien indissociable entre l’art et son créateur. Myra Tawfik, professeure à l’Université de Windsor et experte en droit d’auteur, nous plonge dans le passé tout en tentant d’imaginer l’avenir du droit d’auteur pour les créateurs canadiens.

Listen to the episode:


Angela Misri – Today, we’re travelling back 100 years to a pivotal moment in Canadian creative history. We often forget about the Canadian Copyright Act. Every line of the books on your bookshelf, every character you watch on television, are all protected by copyright. It’s something that shapes our daily lives in ways we hardly notice. Guarding the rights of creators and ensuring that the music, words and images we love are respected and fairly compensated.

Welcome to Season Three of Canadian Time Machine, the podcast that dives into the key moments that have shaped our country. This podcast receives funding from the Government of Canada and is produced by the Walrus Lab. I’m Angela Misri.

This episode marks the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Copyright Act. At its core, copyright is all about giving creators the power to control how their work is used and shared. It means a songwriter’s melody or an author’s words can’t be copied or sold without permission. At least that was the idea back in 1924. As the act celebrates its centennial, copyright’s role in Canadian culture and creativity is perhaps more urgent than ever.

Just imagine, in today’s world, artificial intelligence can learn from an author’s entire body of work without their permission, payment, or even acknowledgment. It’s an issue authors are grappling with firsthand as their words are harvested by AI raising questions the lawmakers of 1924 could never have anticipated.

Heather O’Neill – AI cannot create art, so although it is stealing, I can’t believe it will ever be able to create a substantial novel. Because for me, the art and the artist are inseparable.

Angela Misri – That’s Heather O’Neill, Canadian author and poet. Her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won Canada Reads in 2007. And in 2024, she came full circle, winning Canada Reads again. This time, as a champion for Catherine Leroux’s The Future. She’s the only person to win as both a writer and as a contender.

Heather O’Neill – And art, especially novels, they have their relevance out of the context they’re written in, the lived experience of the author, who speaks for a certain community. Like, you know, when you see, like modernism and then statues and they have the marks of the sculpture, like, I love writing that has the marks of an author all over it and their particular flaws. So I think we love art because it’s from other humans, and I don’t think we as humans will ever be able to accept art from AI.

Angela Misri – Heather has been publishing books for almost 20 years, so she knows better than most how much the landscape has changed for writers and creators in Canada.

Heather O’Neill – It’s happening on the level of the youth and people not engaging with words and writing, and they’re all losing those skills. You know, there were so many, like letter writing, we did so much writing back in the day. When you find people’s diaries and journals and the idea of writing as a meditative practice or a way to explore your own ideas, or just to record things to pass on to your grandchildren. Like all that sort of disappearing because AI now is saying, like, “We will take over the writing.” And it’s kind of going in little corners, and I mean, the novel is always kind of, in literature that, once it was created, sort of the centerpiece of what the idea of literature is. So I feel like that, AI almost cannot touch. I mean, someone could use it, put their name on it, but I mean, why would you want to do that? I could never find any satisfaction in that.

Angela Misri – As far as Heather knows, most if not all of her novels are being used to train I completely without her consent. How does she know that? Well, a database released by The Atlantic in 2023 lets anyone search to see if their works are on the list—183,000 books that have been used without permission to train generative AI systems by companies like OpenAI, Meta, Bloomberg and way too many others.

Heather O’Neill – There was a sort of rumble and grumble about it, of authors finding out when the names had been released. And then I didn’t plug my name in because I didn’t want to know. But then someone from The Walrus was like, do you know your books were used? And I was like, “Oh no,” because when I think about AI, I just think about that overarching, the man, the war machine, this kind of body that eats everything.

Angela Misri – Heather says the discovery felt like being robbed, not just of her words, but of her life experiences and struggles that shaped them.

Heather O’Neill – When I developed my writing style, I had sort of created it starting when I was a little, rejected street child, and designing this voice that would somehow prove that I had meaning and give me some place in the world. So, you know, I just crafted that every day until finally I was able to put it into Lullabies for Little Criminals. It was such a little book made out of suffering, but delight. And seeking a door out of an impenetrable sort of experience. But then that AI would go and take this and just find the methodology behind it, and then be able to replicate it as something they could sell to other people. The first reaction is to be just insulted as though I had been robbed. But then the sort of larger picture, it just seemed like it was not respecting literature and what literature does, and almost trying to break it apart.

Angela Misri – Heather isn’t alone in this feeling. As an author and a journalist, I feel it too. Creators all over the world are having to reckon with this new force that doesn’t yet have any laws or boundaries to stop it from harvesting their lifelong work and whittling it down to a formula that still gets it wrong, according to Heather.

Heather O’Neill – When I heard my books were being used, then I was like, Well, then can I ask AI to write my next one? “AI, could you write the next Heather O’Neill novel?”

And it’s like, it’s not going to work. I tried it with a sample to see if it could write a Heather O’Neill little story, and it was just all wrong. And it didn’t get the sort of, it didn’t know how to stage an image the way I do. And staging an image is so much about human intuition and just knowing, if I imagine an image like this, the reader will find it provocative and strange and kind of surreal, even though it’s realistic. And AI couldn’t figure it out. So even though they had trained on all the structures of my sentences, they couldn’t actually figure out what I was doing. So I was like, ha ha!

Angela Misri – We tried too. When we asked OpenAI to write a short story in the style of Heather O’Neill, it churned out something called The Carousel of Quiet Things. But like so much, I created text. Something about it just seems off. Any fan of Heather’s writing would know pretty quickly that it wasn’t, in fact, written by her.

Heather O’Neill – You could never read a novel once you know it’s written by AI because it lacks any meaning. And for the same way, you can never love an AI because AI doesn’t love you back now. In the future, AI, I’m sure, will come out and argue this. And you know, maybe I’ll still be around or who knows, who knows when that sort of speeding up process will happen. And maybe in ten years, for those statements, I will be on trial for crimes against the artificial intelligent androids.

Angela Misri – Speaking of the future, Heather predicts that the presence and threat of AI will lead to even more human creativity and eccentricity.

Heather O’Neill – When the camera was invented, first painters were like, “Oh, what will be our purpose when the camera captures accuracy and verisimilitude so much easier?” But then artists just started breaking it down and making modernism and cubism and all sorts of abstraction. And I feel like that is a potential for writing now, too. I think it would be fun, or just all sorts of art. I feel like we just need to be more present in the art world now. We just need more theatre and strange things. Like, art needs to come alive and find itself almost in places where AI and the computers can’t find us.

Angela Misri – And hopefully the future will also bring new layers of protection for creators like Heather within Canadian copyright law. Right now, the framework doesn’t even exist to hold these companies accountable. A 2023 CBC article on this very issue hinted that the Writers’ Union of Canada was considering launching a class action lawsuit, but Heather says that’s no longer something they’re pursuing.

Heather O’Neill – They were trying to put together a case, but then they emailed me and said they were dropping it. I don’t know exactly why, but I would imagine it’s because it’s impossible to go to court against people who have infinite funding.

Angela Misri – And while I might threaten creator rights, income, licensing and ownership, Heather believes it cannot threaten and will never replace the human experience.

Heather O’Neill – That’s the fun of writing when you’re young, and that sort of torturous part. When you work and you work and you work, and you finally find your own voice and just like, “Oh, that’s what I want this to sound like!” It’s just human, that it makes you fulfilled as a writer. We’re still human. And even though writing seems like an incredibly solitary act that we do with our computers, we actually need other human beings, other humans, you know, to read our things, to to get feedback, to join writers groups, to have each other edit one another’s text, or make your little zines and publications. It needs to be done in the real world.

Angela Misri – Historically, Canadian copyright law hasn’t exactly moved quickly. The first major revisions to the Copyright Act weren’t made until 1988, more than 60 years after it was enacted. So today, with technology moving at lightning speed, it’s no surprise that copyright law doesn’t fully address the use of creators’ content for training AI algorithms.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s that our laws have evolved in response to our evolution as Canadians. When the Copyright Act was first enacted in 1924, we were just stepping out of the shadow of British rule and learning who we were as a nation. Copyright law was a crucial step in that process, fostering a uniquely Canadian creative industry where homegrown authors, musicians and artists could thrive.

So in 1924, when the publishing industry was the media industry, how did copyright laws shape the origins of Canadian culture? Who got to control Canadian creators, and how did those 100 year old decisions affect the way we still create and publish our prized creations?

To understand where we are today, we need to start at the beginning, and that’s where our next guest comes in. Professor Myra Tawfik is a distinguished university professor at the University of Windsor and the author of For the Encouragement of Learning: The Origins of Canadian Copyright Law. She’s a leading expert in copyright law whose research has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada. And she’ll recount the lost history behind the Canadian Copyright Act for us. Hi, Myra.

Myra Tawfik – Good morning.

Angela Misri – So bring us back to 1924. What was the media industry like pre-copyright law, and why was the Copyright Act such a hot topic not just for creators but for all Canadians?

Myra Tawfik – Well, that’s a very big question. But first let me say that sort of the prehistory of copyright actually dates a century before 1924. Starting in 1824, actually at the time these were British provinces, Quebec, Ontario, etc., before Confederation. And so by the time we reached 1924, that first hundred years, there was already a history of copyright in British North America, and then later in 1867, after Confederation. But what was significant about 1924, and why sort of now we’re in the 100th year of that era, is that we made a dramatic shift from the way we had been looking at copyright in the 19th century, to bringing it into an entirely different system in the 20th century.

So just to give you a bit of detail, in the 19th century, Canada—so the colonies and then the early provinces and then the country—followed the American model of copyright. So we were very closely aligned with what was the developing world at the time, which was North America. And then in 1924, you know, we were still a British colony. We adopted the British approach to copyright. So and by that, I mean, we took the text of the British Copyright Act as ours, whereas before we had, as I said, largely aligned ourselves with American thinking on copyright, which was somewhat different. So in a sense it was a new copyright act. It was a new era in Canadian copyright law.

But let me take back your question about the media. So part of the issue, and why we changed our position basically in the early 20th century in 1924, was because two factors started to sort of emerge towards the end of the 19th century, particularly printers and publishers. So, the publishing industry, that was the mass media at the time. I mean, you know, in a sense, copyright originated because of the printing press.

All they were able to do because of British laws, they were only able to print works by Canadian authors that wanted to print in Canada.
Okay.

Any other works, you know, works of British authors or works of American authors or whatever, they couldn’t reprint. They were blocked from doing so because of the politics between the British and the Americans, and because of the fact that we were a colony and subject to British laws. I mean, it was complicated, but the upshot was that our publishing industry couldn’t grow because the market was very small. I mean, very few Canadian authors at the time, whether it was, you know, authors of fiction or primarily authors of educational material, which was really sort of the most of the publishing at the time. And so in order for publishers to start to sort of for that industry to grow, they needed more work. I mean, they needed more content to produce, and they weren’t able to do so.

So towards the end of the 19th century, there were some very strong lobby groups representing publishers’ interests. That started to go before Parliament to say, you know, you’ve got to do something because if we can’t grow our industry, Canadian voices won’t be heard. You know, we’re not financially sustainable. And of course, that’s the sort of the same issues that have arisen or continue to arise in Canada over the centuries. This idea that it’s very hard to sustain our cultural industries. So they went before Parliament. At the same time, Canadian authors, groups, we started to develop more professional authors, and authors’ groups started to come before Parliament to say, you need to offer us more protection because, you know, the international situation is such that our works don’t get published. We don’t have a wide audience. We’re getting copied. Our works are being pirated elsewhere. And, copyright is fundamentally what they were saying, is a right of authors, of creators.

So these two lobby groups got sort of together at the end of the 19th century to lobby parliament. And the result was the 1924 Copyright Act, which tried to advance an author’s rights or creator’s rights idea of copyright, which was what was happening in Europe at the time, while at the same time trying to preserve some of the interests of publishers.

So what we did was, and I’ll get a bit technical, is we put in what they call a compulsory licensing provision in the Copyright Act. So the argument is no one wants to publish in Canada. There’s just not a big market. British authors don’t care much about the Canadian market. American authors don’t care much about the Canadian market.

Angela Misri – This doesn’t feel that different than now, actually.

Myra Tawfik – It’s not! That’s what I mean. I find that the echoes of the past are like, you know, i’s the same situation, It’s our geography. In a way, an intractable problem is just, our market is too small. And so publishers were saying, if we don’t have a sustainable sort of body of work to reprint or produce, we can’t grow. And if we can’t grow, we can’t produce Canadian content. And so the Copyright Act in 1924 included a provision that said that if Canadian authors or authors who are not members of an international treaty, basically American authors.

So let’s say for the sake of argument, if Canadian authors and American authors did not publish a Canadian edition of their books, then Canadian publishers could apply to the authorities to publish, with permission of the Canadian authorities, upon paying a royalty to the foreign copyright holder or the Canadian author who was choosing to publish in the US, for example. So it gave work to Canadian publishers, and that was a compromise solution because of that intractable problem of a small Canadian market, a very large market next door, and a lot more obviously political influence at the international level.

Angela Misri – I am not surprised that Quebec was leading the way. I am curious about that. It often seems that Quebec is leading the way in terms of protecting creator rights. I don’t know if. Is that just my sense or is that in actuality?

Myra Tawfik – I agree with you. I mean, I think it’s in actuality. I mean, obviously, you know, the concern about being flooded with English culture and English material means that Quebec has thought more closely about how to really sort of safeguard its language, its literature.

Angela Misri – Yeah.

Myra Tawfik – But interestingly enough, back in the early 1824, when it was Quebec leading the way, it wasn’t because of the rights of authors, it was actually the rights of what we call copyright users. Basically, it was to advance public education. It was to encourage learning. It was to promote a public education system by providing incentives to produce schoolbooks.

Angela Misri – Oh, interesting.

Myra Tawfik – And then you’re right. I think as time went on, the sort of copyright has always been tied, and it was similar in English Canada, for want of a better way of describing it, a two fold policy was basically to encourage education, so the publishing of didactic works, while at the same time promoting cultural identity. And so, you know, I see the echoes of that in our attempts to try and preserve through cultural industries, sort of protectionist, but I’m not using it in a negative way, but measures to protect our cultural industries sort of over the last two centuries or whatever.

Angela Misri – Yeah. And we weren’t the only ones. Like my family’s from India and the copyright laws there were very British and not very protective of Indian authors.

Myra Tawfik – No.

Angela Misri – So if you have a confidence in your culture in that it is distinct, which Quebec does, which India at the time did, it’s easier to make those arguments or easier to rally people around those arguments would be my prediction. But again, I don’t study it.

Myra Tawfik – Yeah. No, I think that’s right.

Angela Misri – So the Dominion of Canada was created in 1867. But as we’ve learned in previous episodes, Britain still held varying levels of control for years afterward. So was the Canadian Copyright Act a British idea and who were the stakeholders? So we talked a little bit about this in 1924.

Myra Tawfik – The 1924 act was actually a virtual copy of the British Copyright Act of 1911. And that Copyright Act was the result of, you know, partly the result of trying to conform to the major international treaty at the time. The UK was involved in negotiating what was called, what is still called, actually, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. And the Berne Convention had a number of standards that countries had to adhere to in order to become members. And so the 1911 UK act was the way in which the British Parliament chose to implement its Berne Convention obligations. So it signed the Berne Convention on behalf of itself and all of its colonies. It left sort of the dominions, like Canada, with some flexibility about whether to choose to sign on in our own right or withdraw from the Berne Convention. But there was a lot of political pressure for us to actually conform. And so that’s where we ended up in this debate that I was referring to before in Parliament, where some parliamentarians were saying, this is not in our best interest to join this treaty because we just don’t have the capacity to compete effectively. We need to protect our own interests, and therefore the treaty doesn’t serve our interests. And the others saying, ultimately, we want to belong to the premier kind of international treaty. We want to be part of the latest thinking on copyright. We’re a progressive, modern society. We want to be part of this club.

And so in the end, we did sign the Berne Convention in our own right. But we were astute in the sense that we negotiated a carve out for ourselves within Berne, which was this compulsory licence provision that I mentioned because the Berne Convention, you know, they wanted creators basically to have as much control over the production and dissemination of their works as possible. And a compulsory licence takes that control away because it allows for printing and publishing without the creator’s permission.

Angela Misri – And that was like on a one off, one off basis, like if you wanted this book…

Myra Tawfik – Right. Yeah.

Angela Misri – Okay. Got it. So we’ve pulled from the American copyright. We’ve pulled from the British copyright at this point, you know, how much did we divert over time from 1924 and from British and American copyright law?

Myra Tawfik – Well, it’s you know, because of the international treaty system, we are constrained. So most copyright laws around the world will look similar. And those that arose from the British copyright tradition, including the Americans, will have similar features. So it really is about sort of in a way, orientation and interpretation. You know, you’ve talked about this paradigm of copyright. You’ve got three interests at play. You’ve got creators, you’ve got industry, and then you’ve got this group of users. So, you know, in the 19th century it was students and learners. Now it’s basically a large amalgam of people for whom kind of, you know, in order to advance public policy interests, you need to have access and use copyright works without necessarily needing to obtain the creator’s permission or the copyright holders permission.

So we advanced this idea of users rights or user rights in our copyright system that places us on a spectrum more towards more permissive uses of copyright works similar to the Americans. And right now, Canada in its copyright system is more user-centric than creator-centric or publisher-centric or industry-centric. And, you know, it shifts over time depending on, kind of, the way in which new technologies emerge. And so, for example, AI is going to radically change, in my view, the approach we have to copyright because it turns the entire copyright policy and all that history, you know, sort of almost out the window in a sense. I mean, it totally upends that history.

Angela Misri – Well, yeah, everything that AI has ever been taught is almost entirely copyrighted. If you count social media as a copyright, too, right?

Myra Tawfik – Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Angela Misri – You talk a little bit about the forgotten history around Canadian copyright law. Can you explain that a little bit for us? Why is this history often overlooked and what does that mean for us today?

Myra Tawfik – Thank you for asking that question, because I spent nearly half my career looking through 19th century archives to try and discover what this lost century. And so I’ve just recently published a book on this subject where I recount those stories. But in legal education and my legal education, to think about copyright, it was always about the 1924 Act, and then everything that happened after that.

And, you know, it’s understandable because lawyers tend to focus on the law as it exists rather than, you know, the past itself that has no meaning in, in strict legal terms. But when you start to dig a little bit into the 19th century, it’s this incredibly rich story of genuine sort of, you know, as I say, the British North American colonies. So before Confederation, genuinely considering what their copyright policy was, what models they chose to look at, who the people were that were coming before the legislature asking for help. I mean, it it started with all these petitioners who were writing school books, who went to petition the legislature because they said, we can’t afford the cost of printing, and we can’t teach without having, you know, I mean, we have to provide these books to every student in the class. We can’t teach from one manuscript copy.

And so it’s an incredibly kind of richer history leading up to 1924 than we’ve ever considered. So partly you know, I mean, my book will reinstate some of that history and some of that really important period. Everything is contextual. The 1924 Act didn’t emerge out of nothing, you know, and we can situate it, as I say, in this larger context of the Berne Convention and the U.K. telling us we have to sign. Otherwise, you know, we would be this pariah nation or whatever. It emerged, for us, out of an entire century of grappling with what copyright meant to us as a British colony caught between the Americans and the British in a copyright conflict. I mean, the Americans and the British were in conflict over copyright during the 19th century. And so we were caught in that and what it meant. So, as I say, I sort of see these various echoes of that past, even in what we do, what we did in 1924 and what we continue to do today.

Angela Misri – Yeah. I mean, it sounds a lot like what we’re grappling with right now with AI in that we’re all like, “Oh my God, what is happening? What is happening?” And we’re looking at each other around the table and going, “What are you doing?” “What are you doing?”
So yeah, it’s built over time. As we heard from Heather O’Neill, Canadian creators are dealing with the lack of infrastructure to hold AI companies accountable for using published works without permission. Are modern changes to the Act coming soon? Are there lessons we can draw from the Act’s origins, as you spoke about, before 1924, to address these new challenges?

Myra Tawfik – One thing about copyright generally over the centuries, it’s a very resilient system because it’s managed to absorb all kinds of new technologies. So as I said, it originated out of the invention of the printing press. But then, of course, radio and television came along in the early 20th century and copyright adapted. Copyright adapted to the invention of computer software. It adapted to the internet.

So, you know, it’s been really, really a very kind of resilient and robust system. I don’t know though, if it can adapt to AI because law is very slow to respond. So legislative initiatives, they’re coming but you know, they’re slow. But even then, where I see AI as being sort of a totally transformative technology is, one, is not so much in terms of how to deal with the fact that to train AI, you’re having to reproduce copyright works. We can deal with that. I think what it does do, though, is if you assume that eventually you can have entirely AI-generated creativity, then it entirely undermines the purpose of copyright in the first place, which is to provide incentives to human beings in a way. Like it’s an incentive-based system for human beings. It rests on this idea that, you know, if you offer an author security in the marketplace that they know for their lives, plus, now 70 years, they’re going to be able to control the way their work is being used and disseminated. And similarly, you give industry that security, you know, that they’re going to continue to write and produce and disseminate, and, you know, all of that is in the public interest.

If you take the humanity or the human out of that equation, what interest does a machine have? You know, in that sense, why do we give life plus 70, to whom? It does, I think, upend the entire policy underlying the system in the first place.

Angela Misri – But doesn’t it become like Disney? Disney is an entity that owns its stories. The humans don’t own the stories. Disney owns the stories. Wouldn’t AI become like the same thing? AI created that, and now they’re going to protect that.

Myra Tawfik – Well, we’ve always vested the copyright in effectively a human author. Even if corporation ultimately owns the copyright, the creator has always been a human being.

Angela Misri – In Disney’s case, is that true? So does Cinderella belong to a human or does it belong to Disney?

Myra Tawfik – No, it belongs to Disney. But it wasn’t created by the corporation. It was a human being, you know, it was an employee, for example.

Angela Misri – Isn’t that the AI argument, too, though? I mean, AI is the corporation in this case, and someone created that text originally, that it sucked back in. That’s the way I imagine it. If we don’t go the Terminator route, I think that AI is going to take copyright of everything.

Myra Tawfik – Well, I mean, there’s a big debate over whether it should.

Angela Misri – Yeah.

Myra Tawfik – You’re right. I mean, it’s learning from all of these other copyright works that human beings created. But let’s say out of that, it itself is generating something that is new.

Angela Misri – Quote unquote original. Yeah.

Myra Tawfik – Should that AI or should what who should own the copyright in that painting?

Angela Misri – I think the AI does. I think the business does. I think this is, like, and this is just my prediction as a creator and as someone who produces things, that this will become a competitor for me, just like any other social media, just like any other internet software, it becomes an owner of its creation. And then it argues with people as to whether it’s original.

Myra Tawfik – It becomes the owner. But is it the creator?

Angela Misri – It’s a tough one.

Myra Tawfik – Because the distinction we make in the Copyright Act is that. That the creator of the work is a human being. It could be owned by a company, it can be owned by a machine. I mean, the copyright itself can be owned by a non-human, like a corporation. And the question, it is philosophical…

Angela Misri – It is! Yeah.

Myra Tawfik – It is whether or not the same kind of rationale for giving copyright to a human being exists in relation to a machine-generated, let’s say, painting. and whether or not it doesn’t mean that that painting shouldn’t be protected. But should we give a very long period of protection, like life or 70 years? The same incentive based system may not apply when you’re talking about an original work created by a machine rather than a human being. So the ownership, it’s a different question, but it is about, we’ve always assumed that the originator of the work is a human being.

Angela Misri – That’s interesting. It’s so interesting. This was amazing. And my brain hurts. But…

Myra Tawfik – It really is. No, that’s what I mean. I think this is like, AI is utterly transformative.

Angela Misri – I completely agree.

Angela Misri – Thank you so much for this.

Myra Tawfik – Thank you.

Angela Misri – Thank you for listening to Canadian Time Machine. This podcast receives funding from the Government of Canada and is created by the Walrus Lab. This episode was produced by Jasmine Rach and edited by Nathara Jimenez. Amanda Cupido is the executive producer. For more stories about historic Canadian milestones and the English and French transcript of this episode, visit TheWalrus.ca/CanadianHeritage. There’s also a French counterpart to this podcast called Voyages dans l’histoire canadienne. So if you’re bilingual and want to listen to more, you can find that wherever you get your podcasts.

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