Blacklock’s observes Canada Day with our annual Top 10 quiz.. The questions appear deceptively simple, yet few get better than 2 in 10 correct. Happy birthday!
1. What did they call the Peace Tower in World War II? (Answer: the Victory Tower)
2. What Canadian capital is named for a queen with 15 children? (Answer: Not Victoria or Regina but Charlottetown, named for the wife of King George II)
3. Only one province has ever gone bankrupt. Which one? (Answer: Alberta. In 1936 the province defaulted on two bond payments after being denied $18 million in federal aid. Alberta bonds were instantly barred from trading on the London exchange. With the treasury unable to meet its payroll, Premier William Aberhart said: “We cannot go ahead paying the heavy toll placed on us by the money barons without ultimately losing all we have.” Alberta again defaulted on a second bond issue in 1938 worth $3.25 million, and was reduced to printing its own scrip. Newfoundland also went bankrupt in 1933, but was not yet a province of Canada)
4. Since 1867 only one federal party leader has been ejected from Parliament for election fraud. Who was it? (Answer: John A. Macdonald. The Father of Confederation was stripped of his Commons seat in 1874 for bribery and ballot-stuffing in a Kingston, Ont. byelection that year. He was subsequently re-elected in 1874, by 17 votes)
5. The U.S. took 11 minutes to recognize the new State of Israel in 1948. How long did Canada take? (Answer: Seven months. Israel was founded May 14, 1948; the Department of Foreign Affairs withheld recognition till Christmas Eve)
6. Who was Canada’s first Roman Catholic prime minister? (Answer: not Wilfrid Laurier but John Thompson (1892-4), a Halifax attorney who fathered nine children and wrote the first Criminal Code. Thompson converted to marry his wife Annie and became such a devout Catholic he climbed the 400 steps to the top of St. Peter’s Dome on an 1894 visit to the Vatican, collapsed with chest pains, and died two weeks later)
7. What is the minimum time required by Parliament to pass a bill into law? (Answer: There is none. On June 17, 2015 MPs took 120 seconds to pass Bill C-61 creating a marine conservation area on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Another bill passed in 45 seconds on December 8, 2014, the Miscellaneous Statute Law Amendment Act. Both bills took slightly longer to pass the Senate. The parliamentary record for turning a bill into a law was set June 6, 1919 when a measure to deport leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike passed the Commons and Senate and was signed into law in 90 minutes flat)
8. Cabinet once passed an Order in Council forbidding children from crossing the Atlantic. Why? (Answer: U-boats. The order was enacted in 1917 after Imperial Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare. In a single month, April 1917, enemy subs destroyed 354 ships in the Atlantic)
9. Who was the first cabinet minister in Canada to be convicted and jailed while in office? (Answer: Robert Sommers, British Columbia Minister of Forestry. In 1957 Sommers was convicted of accepting furniture, carpets, vacations and unpaid “loans” from lobbyists and contractors. Sommers was sentenced to five years in federal prison, and paroled in 1961. The trial judge called Sommers a “scoundrel who befouled the political and moral atmosphere for years”)
10. Who was the first prime minister to record an album? (Answer: Arthur Meighen. In 1936 Meighen delivered a speech to the Canadian Club entitled The Greatest Englishman in History – a tribute to William Shakespeare – that was recorded on 16-inch disc. Two decades later, admirers dubbed it to vinyl and distributed copies to every college and university library in Canada)
By Staff 
