Located right across the street from the Kingston Penitentiary, Correctional Service Canada’s museum is housed inside Cedarwood, the former house of the prison warden. Entry is free. The lower level has exhibits on early forms of punishment, basically torture, for prisoners until 1969. Water boarding, locking inside a coffin, and Read more
Sharing the grounds with the Kingston General Hospital, the Museum of Health Care has the same long history as the 1830s hospital. It is the largest hospital between Toronto and Ottawa and only hospital in Canada to still be in its original building. The museum building used to be dormitories Read more
The oldest Lighthouse on Prince Edward Island is Point Prim Lighthouse built in 1845. It’s 60 feet tall and a $5 fee will let you climb up to the top. It’s 20 feet wide at the bottom by narrows to just 10 feet at the top, so extremely fat people Read more
The confederation of Canada happened in Charlottetown. In 1864, 23 representatives from the five eastern provinces excluding Newfoundland and Labrador met here to discuss forming a federal union. A competition began in the 1950s to build the Confederation Centre of the Arts and over 40 submissions were entered. In 1964, Read more
The Acadian Museum in Moncton is run by the University of Moncton. It has to be visited with forts Beauséjour and Lawrence to understand the context of the conflict between Acadian, the French, the British, and indigenous Mi’kmaq people in the mid-18th century. The experience is largely dependent on reading Read more
Charlottetown is the provincial capital of the smallest province in the confederation, Prince Edward Island, which is several times smaller than Vancouver Island. Though small, it played the biggest part in confederation by hosting the meeting that led to the confederation of Canada. In 1964, the city built a replica Read more
What’s a farm doing in the middle of Ottawa? It’s the Central Experimental Farm attached to the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum. It’s about a third petting zoo, a third agricultural science, and a third agricultural innovation. After looking at honey and bees inside the museum, visitors are treated to Read more
The International Professional Rodeo Association based in Alberta held its 2022 Canada finals in St. Tite, a small town of 3,000 in Quebec. I’ve been to the annual Festival Western de Saint Tite in 2021 when it first reopened after the pandemic. The biggest difference between the western festival and Read more
Not actually a castle in the classical European sense, but still a grand 20th-century home. Casa Loma in Toronto is the only true castle remaining in North America. The museum in the ornate Beaux-Arts home in Montreal records the life of the wealthy Dufresne family and how the rich lived Read more
Effectively the Trois-Rivières museum of industry, Boréalis is housed inside the former water treatment plant of Canadian International Paper. There used to be four paper plants in the city with the CIP being the last to close. A long long time ago, it was powered by the water that ran Read more