Algonquin College Speaker Series Presents . . .

The Algonquin College Speaker Series at the Pembroke Waterfront Campus has been attracting some of Canada’s most interesting speakers for more than 25 years. To register for any of our Speaker Series events please register online using the Eventbrite links below. This series is funded in part by the Government of Canada’s new Horizons for Seniors program.

The Tragic Story of the Empress of Ireland-Canada’s Worst Ship Wreck Disaster

Join Historian David Saint-Pierre on Thursday, June 13 at 7 p.m. as he shares the tragic story of the Canadian Pacific Railway steamship line’s RMS Empress of Ireland. The Empress sank in only 14 minutes, on May 29 1914, a few kilometers downriver from Rimouski, Quebec, after a collision with the Norwegian collier SS Storstad, in a fog. More than a thousand people drowned, most of them passengers, making the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, by far the worst maritime disaster in Canada.

Past Events

Watch our speaker series with Jamie Bramburger on the 1942 Almonte train wreck. Based on his book, Sudden Impact-The Almonte Train Wreck of 1942, Jamie presents the tragic stories of the crash which killed 38 people and injured more than 150 others when a troop train slammed into the back of a Local passenger train on December 27, 1942.

Watch our speaker series with investigative journalist Julian Sher on the Steven Truscott case. In 1959, Truscott was only 14 years old when he was charged and convicted in the murder of a 12-year old classmate, Lynne Harper, at the Clinton Air Force Base in Southern Ontario. He spent ten years behind bars and then lived under an assumed name until he was acquitted of the crime in 2007 when the Ontario Court of Appeal called his call a “miscarriage of justice.”