Speaker Series Video Room

Some of our Speaker Series presentations are videotaped. If you have not attended a previous Speaker Series presentation, watching one of our events will give you a flavour of what to expect at an upcoming presentation. From former Governor General David Johnston to his Honour, Murray Sinclair who led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, our presentations cater to all audiences. Our speaker series offers both in person and virtual presentations.

Julian Sher: The Steven Truscott Case

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.”

Ry Moran: Canada’s Residential School Tragedy

Ry Moran is the founding Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. He spent several years working with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission where he was directly involved in the collection and recording of more than 7,000 survivor stories of victims of Canada’s residential schools. His presentation was a challenge to all Canadians to embrace truth and reconciliation and to honour the victims of residential schools.

David Shoalts: Hockey Fight in Canada

In late 2013, Rogers rocked the Canadian television sports landscape when it paid $5.2 billion to secure the national television rights to the National Hockey League for the next 12 years. The amount of money paid was stunning and the agreement became the biggest corporate backroom sports story in Canadian history. At Canada’s national public broadcaster, the repercussions of the CBC losing its most successful TV program was a crushing blow, one that was met with shock and anger by the company’s rank-and-file employees. The deal also led to the ouster of popular Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, replaced by George Stroumboulopoulos, a move that failed miserably.

In his new book, veteran Globe and Mail sports journalist, David Shoalts, reveals what happened in the backrooms that led to the most fascinating power play in the history of Canadian sports television.

Jamie Bramburger: Canada’s Hockey Town. How Pembroke Earned the Title!

Based on the book, Go Kings Go! A Century of Pembroke Lumber Kings Hockey.

125 years ago on December 28, 1893, Pembroke played its first hockey game. That first team travelled to Ottawa and was thumped 13-1 by the Ottawa Amateur Athletic Club, but the lopsided loss did nothing to quell interest in this new sport which was played on the frozen Ottawa, Muskrat and Indian Rivers which weaved their way through the community. By 1905, the Mackay Street Arena became Pembroke’s first indoor hockey rink. It enabled Pembroke’s three Hall of Famers, Frank Nighbor, Hughie Lehman and Harry Cameron to get their start. It was also the first place where Roy Giesebrecht showed off his hockey talent on his road to the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings.

By 1951, the community had completed an extraordinary fundraising effort to build the Pembroke Memorial Centre, a tribute to Pembroke’s war dead from the First and Second World Wars, and later the Korean War. Over more than a century, Pembroke has produced many exceptional senior and junior hockey teams that competed for the Allen, Memorial and Centennial Cups, but it took until 2011 for the city to finally win a national championship when Sheldon Keefe’s Lumber Kings won the RBC Cup, the top prize in tier two junior hockey in Canada. This speaker series will tell the stories of the players, personalities and politics that have made Pembroke, “Hockey Town Canada.”

Jamie Bramburger has been a life-long fan of the Pembroke Lumber Kings. For the past thirty years, he has been the play-by-play voice of the team on cable television. In the spring of 2017, Jamie began researching the team’s history, uncovering a treasure chest of stories about the people and teams that earned Pembroke the title of Hockey Town Canada. Jamie combed through hundreds of newspaper clippings and interviewed dozens of people who have been part of Pembroke’s rich hockey history. His findings resulted in him writing his first book, entitled, “Go Kings Go!” The book will be released in the fall of 2018 and will be the basis for his talk.

Ed Arnold: The Flying Bandit

For three years in the 1980’s, Canada’s most notorious bank robber was living a double life in Pembroke. Gilbert Galvan, an escaped convict from the United States, had taken on an alias and told his new family that he was a security analyst, requiring him to travel frequently to destinations across Canada. Galvin would fly with Pembroke’s regional airline, Pem Air, before transferring to other flights on his way to other Canadian cities where he would rob 59 banks and jewelry stores, heists totaling $2.3-million. Galvan would eventually be caught, arrested at the Pembroke Airport, and sentenced in a Pembroke courtroom to 20 years behind bars. Now, the journalist who broke the story of Canada’s Flying Bandit and co-authored a book on the subject, Ed Arnold, shares the story of one of Canada’s most daring armed robbers. Arnold interviewed Galvan following his sentencing and visited him at Millhaven Penitentiary, forming the basis for a book collaboration with author Bob Knuckle on one of Canada’s most riveting true crime stories.

The Almonte Train Wreck

On December 27, 1942 the Ottawa Valley experienced one of its worst disasters. While stopped at the Almonte train station, a passenger train, known as the Pembroke Local, was struck by a “Troop Train” carrying soldiers. The accident killed 36 people and injured more than 200 more, many of them from Ottawa Valley communities. An inquest into the accident determined there were many factors that contributed to the crash, including poor visibility as a result of a snow and sleet storm. Learn more about this important piece of local history through a partnership with the North Lanark Museum. The presentation will include pictures and video from survivors of the crash as they tell their story of that fateful night.

Charlotte Gray: The Promise of Canada

This country has reinvented itself with every generation since Confederation, and it has evolved from a fearful and awkward collection of colonies into one of the wealthiest and sturdiest countries in the world. As we celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, Charlotte will explore the great achievements in our history while acknowledging the darker shadows of the past. She will investigate the contradictions and conundrums through the stories of people who made a difference. How did Canadians discover a particular gift for compromise? Why did it take so long to develop a distinctive literature? How did a daunting landscape become one of Canada’s greatest assets? Charlotte’s approach is a provocative contrast to the kind of history found in text books. As one of her readers put it, “I feel like I’m meeting my country for the first time.”

Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best-known writers, and author of ten acclaimed books of literary non-fiction. Born in Sheffield, England, and educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she began her writing career in England as a magazine editor and newspaper columnist. After coming to Canada in 1979, she worked as a political commentator, book reviewer and magazine columnist before she turned to biography and popular history.

Roy MacSkimming: Cold War; Re-Live the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union

On September 28, 1972, Paul Henderson of the Toronto Maple Leafs scored one of the most memorable goals in Canadian hockey history. Henderson’s tally late in the third period of game eight of the Summit Series gave Canada a 6-5 win in the deciding game in a series that captivated hockey fans around the world. The matchup of the world’s two hockey powers was about much more than what took place on the ice. It was a highly symbolic confrontation between hostile political systems at the height of tensions between the West and the Soviet Bloc. Join author Roy MacSkimming as he tells the story from his book, Cold War, on Thursday, September 28, 2017, exactly 45 years after Henderson sent Canada into a frenzy. The evening will include video highlights of some of the most memorable moments in the series and a question and answer session with Mr. MacSkimming.

Roy grew up in Ottawa and attended the University of Toronto. Poetry written in his student years appeared in literary magazines, the collection Shoot Low Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (co-authored with William Hawkins), and the Contact Press anthology New Wave Canada. After four years as a trade editor with Toronto book publisher Clarke-Irwin, Roy started New Press in 1969 with fellow writers James Bacque and Dave Godfrey. New Press led a Canadian publishing renaissance in the 1970s, co-founding the Association of Canadian Publishers, which lobbied successfully for government policies to strengthen the publishing industry.

Merilyn Simonds: Stories from Canada’s Most Notorious and Historic Prison

In 1987, Merilyn Simonds discovered a cache of letters in her attic, written to a 17-year-old girl in the village of Portsmouth from a convict in Kingston Penitentiary—a young man from Renfrew, Ontario, who was part of a gang of petty thieves who terrorized the Ottawa Valley in the early years of the last century. Intrigued by the clandestine relationship of Phyllis Halliday and Josie Cleroux and by the forbidden world of Canada’s oldest and most notorious prison, Simonds spent the next 8 years researching and writing the story that became The Convict Lover, an international bestseller and inspiration for two Canadian stage plays. Join Merilyn Simonds on the 30th anniversary of the discovery of this unique correspondence for an inside look at Kingston Penitentiary in the year leading up to Canada’s first prison riot.

Sean Conway: The Colour and Character of the Ottawa Valley Political Tradition

Having spent 28 years in Ontario’s Legislative Assembly and now long retired from active politics, Sean Conway explores the themes of colour and independence, of Valley speech-making, of how local political battles sometimes led to unexpectedly important results, of how the Scots, Irish, French, German, and Polish communities affected often very close races, races that sometimes turned on the very sensitive issues of language and religion. A great Canadian historian once said that history is the record of the encounter between of character and circumstance.

Tricia Logan: Revising and Re-imagining Canada’s History; Reconciliation and Canada’s 150

Tricia Logan is the Education and Outreach Coordinator at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Tricia is originally from Kakabeka Falls, ON. Recently, Tricia completed her PhD entitled ‘Indian Residential Schools, Settler Colonialism and Their Narratives in Canadian History’ in History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Tricia’s research interest and writing originate from her work with survivors of residential schools and involvement with language revitalization.

Steve Paikin: Ontario politics and the founding of the College System

Steve Paikin is arguably the most informed journalist when it comes to Ontario politics. The long-time host of TVO’s popular public affairs program, “The Agenda,” has had his finger on the pulse of everything that happens at Queens Park for more than two decades. After writing several successful books about Ontario’s political leaders, Paikin has now released “Bill Davis-Nation Builder, and Not so Bland After All.” Davis was a long-time Premier of the province and among his many notable accomplishments is the establishment of Ontario’s Community College system. Paikin is highly engaging and considered one of the best interviewers of our time.

Alan Hustak’s Titanic! Canadian Stories from the Ill-fated Ocean Liner

Alan Hustak, Author & Titanic Researcher speaks about Canada’s connection to the disaster on the 104th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.