Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister of Canada for a decade between 1993 and 2003. He was born and raised in Shawinigan, Quebec, where a museum is dedicated to his role in integrating Canada with the wider world. Although fire department maps name the gallery space as a “temporary exhibition” space Read more
La Cité d’Énergie is the main tourist attraction in the otherwise sleepy post-industrial Shawinigan. It’s one way the town is trying to reinvent itself as its population is declining for better opportunities in larger cities. The science centre is easily distinguishable by its 115-metre-tall pylon that has been converted into Read more
The Saint-Maurice River flows from the Laurentians to meet up with the St. Lawrence at Trois-Rivières. The flow of water rushing down 444 metres from the mountains has powered Canada’s oldest industrial community between 1730 and 1883. The Forges du Saint-Maurice produced iron cannonballs, stoves, and agricultural tools for the Read more
One of several NS-Dokumentationszentrum dotted all over Germany with other notable ones in Nürnberg and Munich, it displays the history of the Third Reich and Germany’s dark Nazi past in Köln. The EL DE Haus itself was a former Gestapo headquarter with torture chambers and prison cells in the basement Read more
The paper mill at Saguenay is the oldest one in Quebec. Opened in 1896, it produced wood pulp for newspapers, like how the mill in Trois-Rivières supplied for the New York Times. The mill reached its peak in 1910 when it was renown for its high pulp quality, it closed Read more
The Naval Museum of Quebec is only open during summer and run by the local detachment of the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve. All of the stories told in the museum are of individual sailors during the Second World War. Many of the artifacts were provided by family members of veterans Read more
The Museum of Civilization was designed by Quebec architect Moshe Sadie, who also designed Habitat 67 in Montreal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebec. The only downside to the design is the lack of parking in the museum building, municipal parking lots charge by the minute. I visited Read more
Construction for the Diefenbunker started in 1959 and was completed by 1962. It was designed to house 535 personnel and equipment to function as an emergency government headquarters for 30 days in the event of a nuclear attack. The structure is four storeys deep with over 9,000 square metres of Read more
Science North is an outstanding muti-storey zoo and science museum in Sudbury. Its buildings are connected by a skywalk with natural sunlight and a tunnel that goes through a geological fault from more than a billion years ago. The fault was discovered only when the museum was being built and Read more
There’s a hill to the north of Toronto, on that hill sits North America’s largest castle – Casa Loma. It was completed in 1914 by Sir Henry Pellatt, a Canadian industrialist. The castle is now a museum showing off its 98 rooms and long corridors. There’s also an escape room Read more