Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - Canada vs. USA: Toronto Mike'd Podcast Episode 1698

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

In this 1698th episode of Toronto Mike'd, Mike chats with historian Adam Bunch about the ongoing history of Canada vs. USA from a uniquely Toronto perspective. Toronto Mike'd is proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, Palma Pasta, Ridley Funeral Home, Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball, Yes We Are Open, Nick Ainis and RecycleMyElectronics.ca. If you would like to support the show, we do have partner opportunities available. Please email Toronto Mike at [e-mail]

Welcome to episode 1698 of Toronto Miked, proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, a fiercely independent craft brewery who believes in supporting communities, good times and brewing amazing beer. Order online for free local home delivery in the GTA. Palma Pasta, enjoy taste of fresh, homemade Italian pasta and entrees. From Palma Pasta in Mississauga and Oakville. Yes we are open!

An award winning podcast from Monaris. Hosted by FOTM Al Greggo. Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball. Christie Pitts has the best baseball in the city outside the dome. The Leafs play at 2pm Sunday. Recycle My Electronics.ca. Committing to our planet's future means properly recycling our electronics of the past. Building Toronto Skyline.

A podcast and book from Nick Aynes. Sponsored by Fusion Corp Construction Management, Inc. and Ridley Funeral Home, pillars of the community since 1921. Joining me today, returning to Toronto, Mike, to discuss the ongoing history of Canada versus USA from a uniquely Toronto perspective, it's Adam Bunch. Welcome back, Adam.

Thanks so much for having me back. Delighted to be here. People loved your first appearance. It was one year ago. Do you look back at your debut with fondness, Adam Bunch? Yeah, of course. It was a lot of fun. Got to share a lot of stories that I absolutely love sharing

and heard very nice things about it. So I'm glad people enjoyed it. Okay. So I'm going to remind people right now that it was episode 1480. It was May 2024. And here's what I wrote at the time, Adam. I wrote Mike chats with award winning storyteller. I'm pausing to have you remind us what awards have you won Adam? Oh that big ones governor generals award for popular media the history award the pure burden award, which was Yeah, you know a year and a half ago now These are big deals though governor general award. These are like very like esteemed Awards you're winning. These are no laughing matters. Like.

It was very nice and very imposter syndrome about it, but got to go to Ottawa, have like a week there and meet people who are getting awards from all over the country. Lots of them just, you know, like elementary school, high school teachers who don't get a lot of support, but are deeply dedicated to the history of our country and their communities doing incredible,

inspiring things with kids. It was a really wonderful experience to get to you. Okay. So that was the, uh, why I was able to call you award winning storyteller. Uh, we talked about Toronto's fascinating history. We talked about your Canadiana documentary

series, the Toronto dreams project. And this is interesting because we talked about the Festival of Bizarre, and we talked for about 90 minutes that day in May 2024. But this is exciting. Before we dive into the ongoing history of Canada versus the United States, the Festival of Bizarre is back, Adam?

Festival of Bizarre Toronto history. Oh yeah, you know what, I'm sorry. Gotta get the full title in there. The Festival of Bizarre Toronto history. Oh yeah. And you know what? I'm sorry. Yeah. I got to get the full title in there. The Festival of Bizarre Toronto history. Diving into sort of the strangest, weirdest stories from our city's past. It's coming up. It's going to be the first week of June this year, so seven days, every weekday night is an

online panel or interview talking about these weird stories. And then on the weekend we head out for walking tours all weekend long. So we're doing everything from a bizarre tour of Mount Pleasant Cemetery to secrets of Forest Hill, talking about Canada's strangest prime minister

during the week. We're going to talk about, I think some of the stuff we're going to touch on today too about Canada, US relations. So yeah, always a fun week filled with weird stories that I think have that weird hook in them, but also have a lot to teach us about the history of the city and the place we call home. And what week exactly reminded me of the dates?

It's going to be June 2nd to 8th. Okay. You're coming at the right time because we're talking on a May 23rd and it sounds like early June, we get, you the Festival of Bizarre Toronto history and people can go to am i right bizarretoronto.com that's it so everybody pause the episode go to bizarretoronto.com to learn more and be a part of this and I just want to off the top shout out your fantastic sub stack I think this is just amazing it's's called, well, the address is

torontohistory.substack.com. How often do you publish there? It's usually about every week or two. I used to call it the Toronto history weekly, but I was failing to live up to the titles. Don't false advertise. No bullshit on this program. It's the Toronto time traveler now, uh, goes out,

yeah, every week or two, I usually share one big story that I've written from the city's past, but it's also got local heritage news, event listings, and sort of hopefully a one-stop shop where you can keep up with the city's history. Okay. And because, you know, you've been on once before and hopefully maybe we make this an

annual occurrence, like where you drop by to pick up, because not only do I get great Adam Bunch for and hopefully maybe we make this an annual occurrence where you drop by to pick up because not only do I get great Adam Bunch Toronto history stories which we're going to dive into but you can also collect your fresh craft beer from Great Lakes Brewery. You're taking some home with you Adam but you want to crack one open right now? Here we go. Okay so three, two, okay Irish crickets there. Now you have a premium lager. I have the Sunnyside Session IPA.

Cheers to you. Cheers. We could probably do an episode on Sunnyside. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Let me bring in. Well, bring in the brewery and we'll do like a collab or something because yeah, I mean, I bike by it every day, the Sunnyside. And now that I'm kayaking, uh, since I last saw you, I got a kayak and I've, I, I've been visiting, you

know, sunny side from the other side, you know, from the, uh, from Lake Ontario side. And I would totally like do an episode on it. There's a book from a couple of years ago now, I think by Dale Barber called undressed Toronto, which looks a lot at some weird stories of its own about our old anti nudity laws and how restrictive things were about what bathing suits you could wear. It also kind of doubles the history of sunny side of the beach there and how

they kind of really consciously turned it into the place it is today as somewhere you can hang out on the sand or go to the bathing pavilion. Fascinating stuff. Oh, it's funny. Earlier today, I recorded a podcast with Nick Eienes. He's a proud sponsor of this show, so much love to Nick Eienes and his fine podcast,

Building Toronto Skyline. And we were talking to Tim, who's from the Waterfront BIA, and he was talking about, he just did a bike ride on the Toronto Islands there, and he was telling me the, I wanna get it right. Maybe you know and you can correct me, but the longest rainbow path or something to this effect by the nude beach there? Yeah, the Friends of Hanlands have been doing a lot to try to raise awareness of the LGBTQ

plus history of Hanlands Point, which is really the first big place that people started getting to hang out. And the islands have played a big role, I think in the city's history, for being a place that is a little further removed from the rest, where you can start testing boundaries. So people have been hanging out there. It's the roots of Toronto pride are out there.

So they've got the world's longest rainbow path now that leads you up to the Clothing Optional Beach. Very cool. You know, I'm still lobbying for my, uh, some kind of a bridge where I can bike to the Island. That's a big thing. They were debating at city council just the other day, yesterday, the day before the idea of maybe building a bridge across the Eastern gap, which actually

yeah, poor Lance to a ward's Island or whatever. And it used to be that you could just walk that way. The islands weren't islands until the 1850s. It was a peninsula connected right there until there were a bunch of big storms combined with construction companies going out there to dig up Stan sand to use on their products, uh, or projects that ended up sort of blowing through thanks to those storms, that eastern gap. So it would in some ways just be sort of restoring things

to the way they were a couple hundred years ago. I'll keep my fingers crossed. This will be discussed soon with Ed Keenan. Every quarter I bug him like, where's my bridge? You know, he's just the messenger, so he has no power. But you, my friend, I need to clarify something. Firstly, the Sunnys side session IPA is delicious. And, uh, so when I'm thinking out loud to you

about this sunny side episode, uh, Jeremy Hopkins, J-Ho is on the live stream and he reminds me J-Ho has suggested the sunny side episode already. So Adam, if you don't get it and it goes to J-Ho that's because J-Ho is the official Toronto historian of the Toronto Mike podcast. But, uh, you know, he does wonderful work. You know, he does wonderful work. Uh,

he's told me he's cracked a beer with you in his time. So, uh, shadow. And much love to, uh, Manfred from elephants and stars who he's on blue sky. He follows me on blue sky. And I was just messaging that you're making your return and Manfred's like return. Like how did I miss the first one so I linked him over he listened he loved it he's on the live stream right now so this is for you Manfred from elephants and stars some cheers and just to get this out of the way because we're going to cook with gas and we're going to do a good solid 60 minutes of Toronto history here with

Adam bunch I'm going to give you right off the top, I'm gonna give you a large frozen lasagna from Palma Pasta. Did you get one last time, Adam? I did, and it was very good. Okay, it's still very good, that's the good news for you. In my freezer right now, delivered this morning, actually, just because you were coming over,

and you're going there, and again, people should go to palmapasta.com to see the menu and locations. They're in Mississauga and Oakville and you can order online as well. Delicious, authentic Italian food. And last time you were here, I remember, I think I had this idea of you doing something with Toronto Maple Leafs baseball at Christie Pits. You did and you gave me this book which I dove through, filled with, yeah, fascinating details from the history of the team and some wild stats, which was one of my favourite things about it.

Looking up what like Rob Doocy, after he left the Jays. Oh, I think you mean Rob Butler. Rob Butler, sorry. That's okay. They're both great Jays. Just tearing up the league, which is wonderful to see. Revealed on Toronto Mike earlier this month, I

had a chat with Rob Butler and he revealed that the previous owner of the Toronto May Beliefs the longtime owner Didn't want anybody hitting 500 and he was suppressing stats So Rob just like he's like the whistleblower now now this gentleman is no longer with us Shout out to Ridley funeral home,. But he, Rob Butler, is blowing the whistle on the fact he had a stretch where he went, I don't know, 12 for 13 or 13 for 14, and he says his average came down. So Rob's just pointing out the fact that he may have had a higher batting average and his stats were

being suppressed. What do you think of that? I mean that's scandalous, right? We have a big one here. You want in on this? When you see what they are, it's unbelievable that he was actually doing better than that because he just crushed it. And his brother, Rich, did just as well. I'm just angling this a little bit. Perfect. Okay. But I do have another book for you from Toronto Maple Leafs baseball.

They play at Christie Pitts. You may have a friend who wants a copy or a neighbor or whatever. So enjoy that Adam. Absolutely. And I shouted out Ridley Funeral Home when I talked about Jack there and they have sent over a measuring tape for you. I know you're a big Toronto history guy. I believe Ridley Funeral Home is the last and I believe for Toronto, speaking of Toronto proper, I believe Ridley Funeral Home is the last funeral home where the family that owns it lives on the premises. Wow. It is. I wrote the Toronto book of the dead. So our changing attitudes toward death is something that endlessly fascinates me and the idea that, you know,

they used to mostly be these family owned businesses before the big corporations took over and things have changed a lot, even when it comes to the way we die. So the Toronto Book of the Dead, I'm glad you brought it up because I wanted to say that's available, but also the Toronto Book of Love. Yeah, so they both tell the history of the city from before it was founded to today, the Book of

the Dead through stories about murders, duels, executions, the Book of Love, it's all romance and heartbreak and scandals. Uh, and yeah, it's nice to see how these stories can kind of add up to a whole history of the city. Okay. Uh, and recycle my electronics dot CA all listeners know by now. I talk about it every time.

What an amazing service. If you have old cables, old electronics, old devices, and you need them, you don't, you need to get rid of them. You don't throw them to get rid of them You don't throw them in the garbage because the chemicals end up in our landfill you go to recycle my electronics dot CA You put in your postal code and you could find out where to properly recycle where to drop off your Electronics and cables to be properly recycled. I think I gave you that tip last time Have you Adam because we're gonna go to the founding of Toronto, we're going to go way back. But before we do that, have you ever been to Regina, Saskatchewan?

I have briefly while we're filming Canadian, my documentary series, all Canadian history stuff on YouTube. We don't have an episode about Regina, but we did a bunch of stuff in Saskatchewan, some of which we still have to release. And so we're flying in and out of Regina and got to spend a bit of an afternoon there once. So please remind me, oh, remind me about this documentary series and like where you can see it, where it's at. I'm trying to remember this. You're so prolific.

Like you can't track all things Adam Bunch. I am a little too busy. Canadiéna though, you know, my co-creators, Kyle Kuko and Ashley Brooke, who are wonderfully talented filmmakers. And I, uh, have traveled all over the country. We've got a few seasons out. They're all on YouTube. All you have to do is search Canadian there. Uh, and we've just traveled the country looking for the most sort of incredible

stories we can find. And then they are also incredible animators and editors. So we put them all up on YouTube, we get grants and have Patreon subscribers and stuff. So it's all totally free to watch. Everything from, yeah, the love triangle that helped bring down Quebec in the 1700s up to the Cold War starting in Ottawa.

We traveled from Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia with the wild horses all the way to the Klondike and then Yukon stuff. It's been a wonderful, wonderful experience. I look forward to your upcoming episode on the Gong from Change of Heart Smile. Okay. So those who know, if you know, you know, and if you don't know, you're not listening close enough.

Okay. So I brought up Regina just to shout out Al Gregor from Monaris because he went to Regina. He visited Jim Baton, the founder of the So I brought up Regina just to shout out Al Grego from Monaris because he went to Regina He visited Jim Baton the founder and owner of tumblers pizza in Regina Jim shared his story his journey from making pizza boxes at the age of 14 to building a pizza empire That sells Regina style pizza in over 140 locations across Saskatchewan. If you're curious what is Regina style pizza, you need to listen to the latest

episode of Yes We Are Open. Season 8 episodes are dropping now. You'll hear the story behind the unique name Tumblr's Pizza. You'll hear the secret formula for their incredible sauce and the challenges that they faced along the way. Adam, when I, uh, this is particularly true during these first few months of 2025, but whenever I would hear the president of the United States, reference Canada as the 51st state, like I can tell you now, I would get so angry. Like I was offended. First of all, like it's insulting to me, but it would royally piss me

off, like to a point where I was like, how do I get a collective of people like me who are going to join some kind of insurgency in case the commander in chief of the world's largest military ever decided to invade to make this the 51st date, it's never going to happen peacefully. Like it just ticked me off and I have had this like sentiment of like Canadian protectionism somehow where it's like I need to protect this fiercely independent sovereign nation from the United States. Like how do you feel as a historian when you hear the president of the United States. Like how do you feel as a historian when you hear the

President of the United States refer to Canada as the 51st state? Yeah, not very happy about it myself. You can join me in the insurgency, Adam. They are strange days where you find yourself thinking things you have never thought before, but that certainly Canadians have thought before. We've had friendship with the United States to a remarkable degree in recent decades, the last century or so, but our earlier days,

it's very much an antagonistic relationship. And it's definitely not the first time the United States has looked north and wondered about annexing, thrown around insults and threats like that. So it's something that many generations of Canadians and Torontonians are very familiar with. Well, that's why you're here. You're the man with give us some perspective.

You're the Toronto historian that's here to talk about sort of the ongoing history of Canada versus the United States. Maybe we begin. Tell us about, you know, go take us back to the founding of Toronto. Yeah, it's sort of baked right into the foundations of our city that we were really specifically set up to be not American. The big dividing moment between the history of our two countries is the American Revolution when those 13 American colonies joined the war of independence and the five to the north

didn't, stayed loyal to the British, ended up eventually becoming Canadian provinces. At the end of that war, you had tons of Americans who had stayed loyal to the British even though they lived in those 13 colonies. So you ended up with tons of refugees, all these loyal British subjects who were no longer welcome to live in the new United States. Were sometimes being driven out of their homes, burned down, attacked out on picnics.

So the whole reason Toronto's here is that the British decided to set up a new colony, basically for those loyalist refugees. They'd recently conquered New France, they decided to split their now colony of Quebec in two. Half of it that was already mostly settled became the province of Quebec. The other half, very much still home to indigenous people, hadn't been settled much yet.

And so the British decided this indigenous land would be a good place to send a lot of these loyalist refugees. So the whole province of upper Canada, what's now Ontario was meant to be this home for these refugees in Toronto was set up to be its capital. The founder of the city, this British soldier who had fought against the

Americans in the revolution wrote really openly about his plan for this Capitol. He thought he'd call it Georgina back then, but his Toronto today would be very British, very anti-American and sort of a counter example to the United States that he wanted it to be so awesome in such a British way that the Americans just on the other side of the lake, they'd get jealous and beg to be let back into the British empire.

We would kick so much ass, it would undo the American Revolution. Wow, like this is the perspective I'm looking for. Like, so just going back to the founding of this very city, you know, that it's, it was essentially a home for refugees from the American revolution. The loyalists, I guess we call them the British loyalists. And I love this idea that you speak of that Toronto was going to be so awesome. Americans on the other side of the lake would be jealous and they'd be like, please

let us back into the British Empire. They said he didn't want anything built here ever that wasn't with that goal in mind, that we needed to be this alternative. And a lot of the stuff he did right off the bat was set up a British institutions and also prepare in case the Americans did invade. That he was scared that any moment the American warships would appear over the horizon.

The first thing he started building was Fort York. He was living basically in a tent down by the water, frightened that this war would break out. And any moment he's building military roads and forging alliances with the First Nations, all because he knows the old grudges of the American Revolution haven't been settled. The British are hoping the revolution will still fail. The Americans are hoping these other Canadian colonies are gonna join the US.

They'd invaded during the revolution even. And so one of the big fears of Toronto's earliest settlers in the late 1700s, early 1800s, is that the Americans are gonna invade, which is what does happen just like 20 years later. So part of my ignorance, when is Fort York opened, essentially as a fort? Like when is that?

The construction starts the first day the first British soldiers arrive. Simcoe sends them across the lake from the temporary capital at what's now Niagara on the lake. They start chopping down trees at the mouth of what becomes known as Garrison Creek to build Fort York right from the very beginning,

which is the summer of 1793, the first thing that goes up. Okay, I was just a kid back then. Okay, so Fort York, I think of it, oh, I saw a great tragically hip concert there once. That's my generation's memory of Fort York. But now this is a good segue to bring us to the War of 1812. And let me just speak as a guy who went to school in Toronto.

You know, I paid attention during Canadian history. I was quite enamored by the stories we learned. But I feel like the lessons on war 1812, that was like peak highlight Canadian history when I was in primary school, the 1812 stories. Here's this big dramatic stuff, the kind of stuff that I think people often don't realize or don't think we have these really dramatic tales,

but like wars have been fought in our city. War of 1812, the Americans, yeah, decide to try to settle these old scores. Many of them think that people here are gonna welcome them as liberators, believe it or not, the first time really in American history. That happens. In part because so many people who were living here had been American farmers who moved across the border cause the British were handing out free land. Thomas Jefferson says very famously that he thinks it's just going to be a mere matter of

marching that all the Americans have to do is show up and everybody from here to Quebec City will just be happy to be Americans. People have been making fun of him for ever since, but he had reason to believe it too, because it wasn't clear what would happen. Then the war's opening days, Isaac Brock, the big British general and Chief Decombsie,

the Shoney leader, had to Detroit and trick the Americans there into surrendering without a fight and then fight a big battle at Niagara, the Battle of Queenston Heights where Brock is killed. Right. You can see his jacket is in the war museum in Ottawa that's knows the bullet hole in it. and then fight a big battle at Niagara, the battle of Queenston Heights where Brock is killed. Right. You can see his jacket is in the war museum in Ottawa that's knows the bullet hole in it. And it means the Americans lose that battle too.

They get pushed back across the border. The first year ends without them taking a single inch of Canadian territory after thinking it was going to be easy. So when spring comes, they're desperate for an easy victory. There are elections coming up too that they're worried about losing. So they decide that our city would make a pretty easy target because it's still just the tiny little muddy town of York. So they show up one April day, start bombarding Fort York and landing

around where the exhibition grounds are now. First Nations warriors are the first ones to meet them there. They spend the morning fighting their way through the woods. One of the, I think, most chilling things in Toronto history is the Americans are playing Yankee Doodle. So there are soldiers dying in those woods, having to hear Yankee Doodle as their final breaths are taken. By the end of the morning, they fought their way through the woods.

They're just waiting for Fort York to surrender, but the British General has ordered that the big grand magazine, filled with tons of gunpowder, tens of thousands of cannonballs and musketballs get blown up so that the Americans can't take it for themselves, which unleashes one of the biggest explosions anyone's ever seen in the continent's history at this point kills a bunch of Americans which makes them super angry as the articles of surrender are negotiated and they kind of drag their feet signing them too so they end up spending the next six days occupying what's now Toronto and terrorizing everyone who lives here burning down property looting just making a run of the place famously burned down the parliament buildings and

the governor's house at Fort York which will later lead the British to burn down the White House and the Capitol building in Washington in retaliation and it helps kind of unleash an ever more brutal cycle of violence both sides sides come out of the Battle of York, the one that happened in our city, feeling like the other side committed atrocities. And so it's revenge upon revenge and the whole war gets more and more horrifying from there. And a lot of people point to it as one of the first kernels of a unique Canadian identity too.

At the beginning of the war, it wasn't entirely clear what would happen and whether we were a really different people or not, but it's hard to think of yourselves as being family and the same nation when the opposite sides coming and killing your family and burning down your farm. So it helps lead to the spark of a Canadian identity. And the fact that people weren't sure what that would mean. And many aren't even entirely sure today,

but the one thing we knew for sure is that Canadians were not American. Number one on my list of what does it mean to be Canadian? Number one on my list is we're not American. And I got chills you telling that story about the Battle of York, because of course Canada's birthday is 1867, Toronto's is 1834. Am I right with that number? It's the date of incorporation.

Incorporation, right, right. It's founded in 1793. Right, but you, muddy York. So it was called York and this battle of York and how that violence fosters this new national Canadian identity. It's like, you can pinpoint when Canada becomes a country right there.

Yeah, there are all these moments like that on the road to confederation. When confederation happens, it's kind of the end of this process or a big mark along the road. You know, it's not till 1980 till we get, oh Canada is the national anthem and the constitutions in the 1980s.

But it is a process that had already started long before confederation and the war of 1812 was one of the big ones. No, okay, so that 1980 fact, which I know of from like history books. But you see, I have no conscious memory of a time before we were singing Oh Canada every morning in school like were Canadians singing Oh Canada before 1980? Like, when does that become the norm?

It's got a bizarre history, actually. It was the first episode of Canadian that we ever did was the history of Canada, because it is so strange. It starts in the 1800s as a Quebec nationalist anthem for Quebec's own culture. And over time there's a slow evolution. There's a Canadian, sorry, and Canadian Anglophone

translation that people in the rest of Canada start singing. there's a slow evolution. There's a Canadian, sorry, a Canadian anglophone translation that people in the rest of Canada start singing. And for a long time, there are a bunch of sort of competing anthems. There's Oh Canada, sung both for like Jean Baptiste Day, Saint Jean Baptiste Day in Quebec, but also for royal visits in the Anglosphere. But there's also Maple Leaf Forever Forever written by a Torontonian.

Here there's God Save the King and God Save the Queen are kind of the central de facto anthems, pretty much up until 1980 and there are all these competitions over it and it's actually Pierre Trudeau who's maybe looking to score some points against Quebec separatists himself at the time, who decides to take this old French Canadian anthem, Oh Canada, and turn it into our national anthem. Honestly, fascinating. There's a comment on the live stream. So live.TorontoMike.com is where the real heads go to watch these recordings. Elephants and Stars points out that the chapter on the War of 1812 in your book,

your Book of the Dead is amazing. He puts an exclamation mark on that. So I gotta say, the Book of the Dead, I got some catching up to do on Adam Bunchig. You're very prolific and you do a lot of great work. On that note of great work, Jeremy Hopkins points out that you're going to be leading some walking tours at Doors Open Toronto this very weekend. Yeah, and some of them probably relate to some of these themes too. So the festival this year, the theme is play. So I'm going to be doing Toronto sports history tours all weekend, all free. You can just register through the city's Doors Open website and sort of look at the history of the city through these sports stories, lots of which are about our relationship to the United States too.

First international game ever played between two countries as a cricket match between the province of Canada, as it was back then in the United States. All started by a prank when some Torontonians tricked an American cricket club into making what back then was an incredibly hard journey in like the 1800s to Toronto to play a cricket match here.

And then it turned out the whole thing was a fake. So the Torontonians trying to be good hosts, organized a game here and then traveled down to. Where did this game take place? Right at the corner of King and Simcoe, which is where upper Canada college used to be, which is where lots of our big sporting moments happened. Stories too, we'll talk about Ned Hanlon, famous rower, having a match race against

an American, which had hundreds of thousands of people, I think literally come down to the waterfront to, to watch lots of, yeah, big dramatic stories that I think have a lot to teach us about the city. So that'll be this weekend. All right. Thanks, Che Ho for the tip. Absolutely. So before we leave the war. All right, thanks, Che Ho for the tip. Absolutely. So before we leave the war of 1812, it's also fascinating.

So that's the battle of York we were talking about, but you were referring here to, and I'm gonna mispronounce it, the Battle of Assisi? There's a bloody Assisi. The bloodiest Assisi, okay. And not, no, you know, the juvenile instinct I have is to call it ass size, but no, that would be incorrect. It would be.

But so we used to have big court cases where it was hard to travel around, you'd have a bunch of court cases at the same time of the year, and those are Assises. And the most notorious one ever is during the War of 1812. And there are some Canadians who decided to switch sides during the war of 1812. And there are some Canadians who decided to switch sides during the war. One of the most famous is this Torontonian,

he was our sheriff for a while, Joseph Wilcox, who had been incredibly loyal, was fighting at the Battle of Queenston Heights, was helping forge relationships with First Nations during the war, but was also upset with what he thought was kind of, uh, authorities overreach. They were getting rid of habeas corpus, you know, the 1812 version sort of of martial law and those abuses got to the point, especially after the battle of

York, after this cycle of violence was getting more and more brutal, but he decided he'd had his last straw switched to the American side, formed something called the Company of Canadian Volunteers, which was a unit in the American military. And while he ended up dying at the siege of Fort Erie, a lot of these other Canadian traders were captured and put on trial at the Bloody Assis, which was held in Ancaster, featured lots of prominent, big early Torontonians,

a big legal and lawyers, judges from here, part of these court cases. And there were eight of these Canadians who were convicted of treason, hanged. And then they decided that wasn't punishment enough, which has to be one of the grisliest moments in Canadian history. They decided to chop off their heads and put them on poles to parade them

around villages and towns in Upper Canada, in Ontario as a warning to other Canadians and sort of a triumph over these traitors. So that's, yeah, that's how passionate these feelings between us and the United States. That's some Game of Thrones shit right there, Adam. I had to double, triple check that one because it's so unbelievable.

These traders, so these are Canadians who fought for the Americans, and then I guess they were convicted of treason. So yeah, after you hang them and they're dead, you chop off their heads, you stick their heads on spikes and you, it's a warning to others. This is what happens. Can we still do this in 2025?

I'm not sure. There's no longer. I know some people in Alberta that need this warning song. I think it's an example of how passionate people were feeling even in those kind of early days of a national feeling. And a lot of the people living here were those American refugees, right?

These loyalists, lots of them had fought during the American Revolution. To them, these American ideas and American style democracy was a matter of life and death. Toronto was also founded the same summer that the French Revolution was at its bloodiest height. So a lot of them, this idea of living somewhere more democratic at the time, where we had really strict limits in our colonial British system was something that to them, you know, the guillotine meant people like them losing their heads.

The American revolution had meant them being driven out of their home. So they are pretty worked up when a Canadian switches sides. I'm worked up right now, Adam. Okay, I don't know if I'm gonna be chopping any heads off, but I can feel my heart rate increasing here. So the bloodiest seas, that's in 1812. So let's fast forward just a little bit here. Let's talk about the Patriot War.

So this is another big violent flash point in Toronto's history. Our first mayor, William Lane MacKenzie, he believes in those ideas of more democracy, but he's up against this sort of Tory elite clique that runs things, the family compact, who very much are, they're the guys doing the bloody asses. MacKenzie tries to have a rebellion to overthrow their rule and replace them with a more sort of American style Canadian democracy. It fails, it gets crushed pretty quickly, but he tries to keep it going.

He takes over an island in the Niagara River and gets a lot of American support to try to keep the rebellion going that leads to a big international incident. The Canadian authorities and the British head down to the island and bombard it and head across the border and burn an American ship. That's been bringing supplies to the island and set it on fire and then leave it

to drift over Niagara falls, uh, which is an attack on American soil and Americans killed in it. Nearly leads to big international tensions is really very tense. And a lot of Americans end up joining sort of the vestiges of the Canadian Revolution, and that's the Patriot Wars. For the next year, there are all these border skirmishes, battles all along sort of the Great Lakes

and sort of the Western St. Lawrence, as Americans hope to try to liberate Canadians once again, and the whole thing eventually fizzles. But it's another big moment of these cross-border tensions that have been going on most of our history, even if they haven't been recently. Wow, now this is of course the 1837 rebellion we're talking about, William Lyon Mackenzie.

By the way, I remember in primary school in the Canadian history classes, as exciting as 1812 was the rebellion of 1837. Another, uh, highlight. It is a big dramatic events that you might not realize were happening. You know, Canadian history is boring, but you're here to prove that the, you know, you and J ho and all the, uh, the great, uh, storytellers keeping, uh, the flame burning that the Canadian history is not boring.

It's, uh. It's exciting. No, it's got heads on spikes and poor skirmishes. Game of Thrones has nothing on Canadian history here. So that's the William Lyon Mackenzie, the big 1837 rebellion. And we still like you mentioned the cross border raids and there's international tension. And let's fast forward just a little bit to the annexation manifesto.

Yeah, this is one that comes in the wake of the family compact losing all of these battles. In the wake of the rebellion, all the most radical reformers, the most pro-democracy people who believed in violent revolution, they're gone. They've either been exiled, sent off to penal colonies in Australia, or escaped and now have to live in the United States,

or they've been killed or hanged. So it's the moderate reformers who take up the cause of Canadian democracy, of big reform, and they're the ones who eventually get it. We talked last year about Robert Baldwin, who's this weirdo and champion of responsible government who eventually gets it. We get the system we have today and the family compact, those hardcore Tories are wildly upset. They burn the parliament buildings down in Montreal

the day that happens. And some of them later that year release the annexation manifesto, which is one of the rare moments in Canadian history where you get it going the other direction, a bit like you might see from some people these days, where they ask to be annexed by the United States. Oh, enough about Kevin O'Leary. It's mostly back then, Tory merchants, business guys in Montreal,

some of them really big, famous names. John Abbott will become prime minister one day, you've got a couple of Molson brothers, heirs to the brewing fortune, you've got McGill is on there, some other really big ones too, Cornelius Krieghoff, a big famous painter, all signed this annexation manifesto saying,

things are getting out of hand. We're getting too democratic. And the British had also repealed the tariff laws that gave us sort of a benefit when trading within the empire. So the economy was suffering. And they decide maybe it's better to be American, but the pushback is immediate. Slow down, Adam. I'm getting my Great Lakes beer here, I'm listening closely, please tell me that we push back. Yeah, so within days there's a big meeting in Toronto.

Toronto ends up sort of leading the charge against it and people in Ontario especially seem to be horrified. There's a big meeting that brings together old bitter rivals. So you've got people from the family compact, the Tories meeting with big reformers like George Brown, having a meeting to figure out how to put down this annexation movement. They send a petition around Toronto that's signed by hundreds of names within hours and soon thousands. They agree to keep meeting every day down at the courthouse on King Street back then, and sort of try to

make it clear that there's an overwhelming opposition to this idea, which eventually works. It seems like people in the States and in Britain are open to this, but pretty quickly there's so many Canadians against it. So many people signing the petition here, more people signed a petition in Montreal against it than ever signed the manifesto in the first place. And so it's a moment where some people sort of open the door to it and immediately get slammed shut. Well, here's another opportunity

while you enjoy your premium logger there from Great Lakes Brewery to shout out your Substack, which the address is torontohistory.substack.com, but this is called the Toronto Time Traveler. And earlier this year, you wrote a piece on Toronto versus the annexation manifesto. And I will tell you, I have no memories. And maybe I was a sick, maybe that was the week I had, uh, I had

chickenpox for a week. Maybe that was the week, but I have no memories of the annexation manifesto being taught in primary school. And I was paying pretty close attention to history. And it's a relatively deep cut. And in a lot of ways it doesn't fit in with the stories we tell about our own history. And it was, you know, I thought maybe earlier this year, suddenly this sort of strange story that doesn't fit in suddenly has more

relevance than it feels like it did for a while. Wow. Okay. so people subscribe. What are you waiting for there? All right, so again, for those who aren't, we're doing a timeline here and we're kind of going in chronological order that the annexation manifesto, this is in the 1840s. Yes, that's 1849, which same year we get

responsible government, our system today. So just within months, the manifesto comes out. Now I would love for you to share with us the story of the underground railroad. Well, this, yeah, all sort of, there are a bunch of stories sort of around the American civil war and the lead up to it. And the underground railroad's a big one. And in Toronto, we had our own history of slavery. It was not abolished here entirely until the 1830s.

And even before it was abolished, some people had started escaping slavery in the United States to come here. Because if they could come here, even though slavery was still legal here, they would be free. The Blackburns were one of the big ones. They managed to escape.

I don't think we, no, I was gonna say, I don't think we talk about this very often in our own personal Toronto history of slavery. We don't talk about that very often in school either. No, I think the Underground Railroad's the story we prefer to tell ourselves. It just reminds people that these you know, these history books, sometimes they have a narrative,

and sometimes parts of your history don't necessarily support that narrative, and maybe they get left on the cutting room floor. It was an amazing historian, Natasha Henry-Dixon, who's got a new book that will come out. She's been doing all this research into the history of slavery here in an upper Canada. She even has stories, she tells about someone like Jarvis,

Jarvis Street is named after, was a slave holder. One of the people he enslaved back before they came to Toronto even escaped slavery in Canada under Jarvis to the United States, the opposite direction from what you expect. I didn't see any heritage minutes about that one. No, it's not a story that's told very often at all. And again, it was until 1834, it's abolished all across the British Empire.

It had been sort of being slowly gradually phased out here before that. And it does make at that point, Toronto becomes a big stop at the end of the Underground Railroad. The Blackburns, the first famous couple, Thornton and Lucy, who escape slavery in Kentucky, go to Detroit where they're found, thrown in jail, and can be sent back into slavery. So their allies manage to break them out of jail, get them across the border into Windsor, and it's a moment the Canadian authorities, the British governor really thinks for quite a while and decides that once you get here, you're free.

And so they come to Toronto, set up shop here. They open the city's first cab company. They call it the city's carriage painted red and yellow that makes them enough money to help them start buying up properties and offering them at lower rents to other freedom seekers who are following in their footsteps. When we got our first public transit agency,

when the TTC is born, they say that they even look back to this old carriage, the cab, as the inspiration for their branding. So that the reason we ride a red rocket today is because the Blackburn's carriage was red and yellow back in the middle of the 1800s. And- The middle of the 1800s, isn't that when they started

work on the Eglinton Crosstown alert? I think it was a little earlier than that, wasn't it? Sorry for interrupting that. Once in a while, the joke pops in my head and I have no restraint, I apologize. And so they and others like them and white allies too, help make Toronto kind of a big hub for abolition. Though there are plenty of racists here, it does make Toronto this really important stop at the end of the Underground Railroad and a big hub for people here working

to try to end slavery in the United States, which sort of helps set the scene for our city's relationship to the American Civil States, which sort of helps set the scene for our city's relationship to the American Civil War, which is a big one. So you mentioned Jarvis, and I actually have a son named Jarvis. So shout out to 11 year old Jarvis, but you mentioned Jarvis was a slave owner, the gentleman that Jarvis Street is named for.

And I'm just curious your thoughts just in passing here as we cruise around here is like, you know, there's, you know, Dundas square is no longer known as Dundas square. I think the subway, the station's going to be called TMU station. If I have that info, right. But like, how do you feel about, you know, things we have in our city named for slave owners, et cetera? Yeah, I'm surprised we're not starting with someone like Jarvis.

But I think it's part of a process that's been going on throughout the city's history. Things get renamed all the time. When Simcoe showed up, he started erasing indigenous names wherever he went, naming stuff after his dad and after rivers he knew from back home in England. Dundas wasn't even all entirely called Dundas. It's been cobbled together from a ton of different

streets whose names were erased. So I can think renaming is sort of a continual process in a city. Dundas is someone who didn't really have any connection to Toronto at all. So in a lot of ways, the renaming, uh, feels like an exciting opportunity to me as someone who loves the history of our city and learning more about

it, that when you can remove a name that has nothing to do with the city, you have an opportunity to then name it something that does reflect the history of the city. And the debate has gotten people talking about it in ways they haven't before. Imagine it's something that will continue throughout the history of our city as we learn more and reassess,

and new things are built and new generations come. So I think it's all really interesting to talk about and learn about and to think about what you would name things. So that the Yonge Dundas Square, now it's Sankofa Square. But what I found interesting is, because I do many, in fact, I'm gonna be there later today

But I do many a walk in the junction and that was known as Parkdale High Park Electoral District and I may butcher the pronunciations but Taya are cone I probably butchered the hell out of that actually but T. AI AI AI KO Apostrophe N is now a fish part of the official name. Like, so there's, there's constant change. The only constant I suppose is change and that they're adding back a lot of the indigenous names. Yeah.

That one pronounced that name by the way. I need to. Spelling changes the way I've usually heard it said as a tag on KJ or G is, um, different spelling, different times. And a lot of it's from deep history when there were even more spelling. So you can see it's the name of Assenica Village, one of the Haudenosaunee nations.

It was right around where Bobby Point is today, that neighborhood. Another slave holder there actually, James Bobby. So a huge important part of the city's history, it's part of why Toronto was here, is that Teagong was here before built on this ancient indigenous portage route, the Toronto Carrying Place Trail,

which is how our city gets its name, that linked Lake Ontario with what Simcoe renamed Lake Simcoe in honor of his dad and then would get you to the upper Great Lakes. So it ended up becoming the shortcut from the lower to upper Great Lakes that indigenous people took for countless generations. And then the first big French explorers,

missionaries, fur traders started traveling up at two. So it's this huge part of the city's history. So nice to see it reflected in that name change. And congrats to you for reminding people it's Bobby point, because I used to live in that area near Jane and Dundas and everyone called it baby point. Yeah.

So grew up going to Humbercrest right there. So it was a name I very much. So P.K. Subban went to Humbercrest. You probably know this. Very much. Yeah, very much my neck of the woods. My oldest two kids went to Humbercrest and then

they went to Humberside. Oh yeah. My mom went to Humberside. There you go. And my ex, my ex wife went to Humbercrest and then they went to Humberside. Oh yeah, my mom went to Humberside. There you go. And my ex, my ex-wife went to Humberside. So, and shout out to, I was at Great Lakes Brewery for a recording yesterday. Uh, and they had a gentleman from Granite Brewery there and we did it at the brewery here. And, uh, that's basically where their chief brewer, Mike Lackey, he met the, uh, the owner,

uh, at Humber side, like they own the Humber side with people like Jeff Merrick, for example. There you go. Shout out to Humber side collegiate. Okay. And of course, Sophia Yershkovich is dad, Mr. J who I believe was a very popular math teacher at Humber side for many, many, many years. And this is all the ongoing history of FOTMs and their connections to, to Humperside. Okay, so the Underground Railroad, excellent. Now you mentioned the Civil War.

So there's, I know there's tons of cross border tensions during the American Civil War. Yeah, there's so much that we're gonna do one of the nights of the festival, a bizarre Toronto history about it, because a lot of it is strange stuff you wouldn't expect. And we've got a whole two part episode of a Canadian documentary series about it too.

We've got the first part out, we've got a second part out coming sometime soon, because there are, it's this huge American historical event, but Canadians are wrapped up in the whole thing right from the beginning. There's not a battle in the American Civil War that a Canadian's not fighting in, despite the fact that Canada's officially neutral because the whole British Empire is, it's illegal for Canadians to fight, but thousands and thousands of them do anyway. Many of them black Americans who had come north on the Underground Railroad,

who as soon as the union started accepting black recruits signed up and went to join the fight against slavery. Local Torontonians too, Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott, who's the first black Canadian to graduate from medical school, which she does here in Toronto. As soon as they start accepting black recruits, he heads south, is running the hospital at a refugee camp in Washington, DC, becomes friends with Abraham Lincoln. It's actually there in part on the night he dies and Lincoln's widow gives him one of Lincoln's favorite shawls as a keepsake, a memento of their friendship,

this Torontonian right at the heart of these big American events. And maybe strangest of all is the number of people in Toronto, which is a big antislavery town, who end up supporting the South and become supporters of the Confederacy. So there's this big hotel downtown, the Queens Hotel, which is where the Royal York stands now,

that gets entirely booked up by Confederates. You have a lot of Confederate refugees, but also soldiers who've escaped Northern prisons and come to Toronto that end up using our city as a base to launch operations against the North. It's happening all over the Canadian colonies, Montreal, Halifax, St. John. Do you have Confederate agents working against the North?

They even send a Confederate spymaster here, headquarters at the Queen's Hotel and in Montreal with a million dollar budget and this mandate to sow chaos who starts leveraging Canadian support for the South, which there's a disturbing amount of, to help the war effort there. There's this guy in Toronto, George Dennison III, who's from an old slave holding family himself.

There's stuff named after them here too. They're part of what's now Kensington Market, so you'll see their name around there. He starts using his house, Rusholme, which there's also a street named after, as sort of a safe house for Confederate agents. His wife is sewing secret messages into the lining of clothing. He's buying ships to give to the Confederates a safe house for Confederate agents. His wife is sewing secret messages

into the lining of clothing. He's buying ships to give to the Confederates to try to launch attacks across the Great Lakes. He becomes a city counselor and is the only city council member here in Aldermen, really who votes against the motion to express sympathy when Lincoln's killed and ends up going on to become one of the most prolific judges in our city's history.

Becomes a police magistrate who hears maybe more cases than anyone else in Canadian or Toronto history all the way up to the 1920s, tens of thousands of them all kind of based on his gut, he says, all prejudice decisions from a guy who was literally a Confederate secret agent working in Toronto. Shocking, shocking. They even at one point, some of the Queens Hotel's

Confederates head south on a mission to fire bomb New York City, which they do. They set off flames and have like Molotov cocktail kind of stuff, Greek fire going off at various locations around New York, doesn't really take off. They don't put them in particularly strategic locations, but there are literal attacks being launched against the United States from Canadian soil, from Toronto. And it's part of what leads again to furthering tensions that there are times

Canadians are scared the Americans are going to invade during the Civil War as soon as it's after, part because we're seen to be a little too pro-South and part because the Americans say, like, if we lose the South, we can just take Canada instead. And there's a bunch of Americans with guns and you know what I mean? They've all been fighting a war. They're all trained. They all have weapons. Right.

They need something to invade. And some of them even do. So we spent a lot of the war preparing in case the Americans invade. There's lots of talk about it. American newspapers saying, let's do it. At the end of the war, some Americans decided it is a good idea and come up with another,

one of the most bizarre sort of stories in Canadian history where these Irish American revolutionaries, the Fenians, launched what become known as the Fenian Raids, where they decide that if they can invade us and take over at least a bit of Canadian territory, maybe then they can trade it back to Britain in return for Irish independence. Wow.

Or at least start a war between the British Empire and the United States that might help that cause too. Okay, so I know enough to be dangerous. I know Canada's gonna become a country in 1867. And I know what years the American Civil War take place. So it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to connect these dots at these, these Phenian raids. And I do remember learning about the Phenian raids in primary school as well. And that was always an exciting part of the lesson

as well. But I mean, you know, when you, nothing unites a people like a common enemy, we're feeling that right now. Yeah. And it's the same in a lot of ways in the 1860s. It's a huge psychological moment for Canadians. These raids are happening over a lot of the country. There's a big invasion over at Niagara, the oldest monument in Toronto. The first monument we ever erect is in memory of U of T students who

fought against the Finians. It's still there on the U of T side of Queens Park Circle, on the grounds of Queens Park, basically. Boy, did I spend a lot of time in that park. Okay, I gotta go check this out. But I mean, please continue. It helps push toward confederation. Then all these Canadian colonies

are still separate colonies, all with their own independent relationship to Britain. But this is when the idea of confederation really starts gaining steam. Well, we got a common enemy, right? These, uh, these Fenian raids and, uh, you know, you, you eloquently talk about the, the, the, the, the cross border tensions

that happened at the end of the civil war. Yeah. That's going to directly lead to Canadian confederation. Yeah. It's absolutely part of what pushes them to start having the meetings and start thinking that maybe we need to unite so that we can present a more united front.

Right. Now I do want to shout out one more time. I'll probably do the end as well, but I do want to direct people again. It's bizarretoronto.com. So if you missed the first, if you're like Manfred and you missed the first appearance by Adam Bunch, and this is your first time maybe hearing Adam Bunch, you're like, I am very interested in the festival of Bizarre Toronto history,

which is coming up in early June. And the website for all information on that is bizarretoronto.com. And you mentioned that you cover, the Civil War is covered, is gonna be covered during the festival. And we look forward to the episode of your Canadian documentary series as well.

One thing I will tell you, Adam, that I'm learning now for the first time, unless I learned it and forgot I learned it, which is, uh, possible, but the fire bombing of New York City during the civil war, I didn't know. Toronto Confederates were fire bombing at New York city during the civil war. That's wild.

Yeah. It's unbelievable. Isn't it? Like people talk about it in New York a bit. It's something people up here rarely talk about. So I'm very excited during the festival. I'm gonna have John Boyko who wrote a whole book about Canadians in the Civil War, which is where I learned about it and get to interview him and maybe learn some more weird stuff. Okay. You're kicking ass and taking names here, Adam.

And I know I said I'd take 60 to 90 minutes and I'm gonna try to keep us to that. But we're leaving the Civil War here, of course Canadian Confederation happens, and maybe tell us the story of Victorian criminals. Oh, it's something I've been learning a lot about recently. There's a great book out about the border and the history of it too. Uh, where I first learned about what became known as Boodlers,

which were people who started realizing they could take advantage of the relationship between our two countries and how tense it was in the fact that we didn't really have a very strong extradition treaty. There were only, I think, nine crimes that were covered by it. It was mostly set up after that ship got burned during the Patriot War stuff. So it's stuff like murder and like cross border raids that are covered, not stuff like embezzlement. So these American bankers start realizing that if they rob their banks at the end of the day, take all the money with them, shut up the bank for the day, and then catch the evening train,

say from Chicago to Toronto, that can be in Canada within hours, and there's no extradition treaty to send them back. So by the time the bank opens in the morning, it's too late. They've reached our soil. And there's one big case that kind of raises awareness of this loophole. So something like 2,000 of these bootlers head across the border, and they're not the only ones either. There are all these big, like a New York City crime lords, like Marm Mandelbaum comes up here to evade the authorities

instead of showing up to her court date. She comes here, ends up moving to Hamilton where she spends the rest of her life. That explains so much. There are tons of these American criminals, some of them incredibly notorious who are passing back and forth across the border all the time. Once we get the railroads that makes it easy to do and the Canadian authorities just mostly let it happen because we don't have that extradition treaty in place. That's wild. You know, this this explains the great song, my crime Lord takes the evening

train. Right. This was a banger back in the day. I think that's the original version. People don't realize that's a cover. Okay, so Victorian criminals and this is in the 1880s that this Loophol in the extradition treaty is exploited Yeah There's a big sort of celebrity case sort of toward the beginning of that decade if I'm remembering correctly and they eventually do negotiate A new treaty to close that loophole, but for years and years you can see old Political cartoons, which is one of the places assembled across it too. Mar Mandelbaum, who's said to be,

she's this woman who's running literally a school for criminals in New York City, said to be the first real crime lord of that city, comes up here and can't be touched. So there are old political cartoons of her literally as an personification of Canada leaning across a border fence with Uncle Sam, sort of annoyed he can't get at her while other criminals wave from the background because Canadian soil is a place American authorities can't touch. All right, we need more tariff talk. Come on Adam, more tariff talk. Let's talk about the revolt of the 18.

Yeah, it is something I never thought I'd find interesting, is the history of tariffs. But suddenly it's endlessly fascinating. And I did an online course a few months ago when all this first was kicking up all about the relationship between Toronto and the US. And there was a whole lecture that was just basically sort of Victorian and Edwardian tariff stuff.

And there were pushes back and forth, McKinley in the States before he was president introduced his tariffs that Trump keeps touting as a golden age, even though it created a great depression. And we learn about this in a Ferris Bueller's day off. There's a scene where the, the doc, uh, Bueller Bueller, that guy, uh, Ben Stein, I guess was the actor. Uh, but he, he, he's basically teaching the

class about how the tariffs didn't work. You're the guy that's teaching the class. Mueller, that guy, Ben Stein, I guess was the actor, but he, he, he's basically teaching the class about how the tariffs didn't work. You're the guy who ended up assassinating McKinley was apparently in part radicalized by having suffered through it. And it was used in part by Americans. Some Americans were talking pretty openly about using that tariff policy to push Canada toward annexation and it sort of cut both ways. Sometimes the tariffs went up and people got scared the Americans were trying to annex us because they kept saying that's why they were doing it.

Sometimes the tariff would go down and people would start worrying about the same thing and Americans would start giving very similar speeches, which is what happens in this moment around the revolt of the 18, which is 1911. The Laurier, who's been prime minister at this point for 15 years, a big economic boom, largely driven by us taking over the prairies

and driving indigenous people off them, but he decides at the end of this to try to keep that growth going. He negotiates a new freer trade deal with the states. They're going to lower tariffs. And he thinks this is going to help the Canadian economy, but Canadians are afraid it's going to lead to annexation. That our two economies are going to get too wrapped up. People start giving speeches that seem weirdly prescient, where they're like, what happens in a year or five years if the United States suddenly decides unilaterally

to stop doing freer trade and brings in tariffs, we're gonna get a crunch because we're too wrapped up with their economy. It ends up taking more like a hundred and I guess 14 years, but some of these speeches in 1911 are pretty amazing to read. One of them is even from Laurier's, one of his biggest cabinet ministers,

the guy who was put in charge of colonizing the prairies, Clifford Sifton breaks with his party over it and ends up throwing his support behind the conservatives who come out against the freer trade policy and kind of they had the opposite positions that they'd have in more recent years, uh, where it's now the conservatives pushing to have tariffs in place, to maintain closer ties to the British instead.

And they get these 18 prominent Toronto liberals, most of them big business leaders, to come out against the liberals too, and sort of switch their allegiance and their support to the conservatives, which becomes known as the revolt of the 18. They release kind of a manifesto, a whole list of reasons. They think it's a bad idea.

And again, huge, like heads of railroad companies and banks and insurance companies, some of which are familiar names today, coming out against the party they traditionally supported that helps swing support the other way. And at what it's what ends Laurier's time in power is as the momentum grows, he decides to call this election. He thinks he's going to win it, but instead it's a big conservative victory.

People are partying in the streets of Toronto because they feel like they've saved Canada as a nation by having higher tariffs instead of lower ones. You know, it's probably always a good idea to be concerned and maybe even scared of annexation by the United States. It's like, tariffs lower, tariffs higher, be really vigilant. When at that time there are American politicians

giving speeches in Congress saying, this is a great policy because it's going to push Canada into being annexed by us. And the stars and stripes will fly all the way to the North Pole. And I mean, they didn't have 50 states yet, so they weren't dropping the 51 rhetoric yet. It's 51 states now, but you can go through American history and it's always a different number each time. Right, that was back in 1911. Honestly, just fascinating.

So we have a couple more to go, and then we'll kind of get to the current date. And I'll just tell you right now, Adam Bunch, I love this theme because of this time we're living in right now where there's a very real threat to our sovereignty from the United States of America, the perspective you get from looking at our history, I feel like this is invaluable. And I also feel like some people don't look at history, I don't know, beyond the 70s or 60s.

They know maybe the 60s. Oh yeah, there was an assassination in 63 and they know a bit of that. But they don't really go past that. It's important to look at the whole. And I think you help make that digestible for us, us, uh, lay people, us, uh, average Joes and chains. What is so much of, you know, the city, it didn't end up this way. Our city, our country, our traditions,

our institutions are all the result of these collective works of the generations before us. I think if you want to understand things that happened today, it helps to understand how they ended up this way in the first place. And especially something like this, that feels like such a blind side from the other side of the border. Like it feels unprecedented and then you dive in and you realize it's not unprecedented. No, that the peace and prosperity part was actually

a divergence from what had come before. Well, we had to run. We'll talk about that at the end here, because I do hope you'll educate us regarding the Phantom air raids. Yeah, this is one of my favorite weird ones too. So the First World War is a big moment in friendship between Canada and the United States.

It's when the United States finally joined the war. Well, finally is an important word there because the Lusitania or something had, I mean, it took a long time for USA to join that war. Yeah, at first they are very dead set against it. And when they do join, we're now finally fighting on the same side of a war, which today feels like something that is, you know,

the normal state of things. But back then that was revolutionary difference. We were used to worrying about them as opponents in wars. And that was really true still in the early days of the First World War before they joined it, where the United States was neutral and Canadians were looking across the border with very worried eyes,

concerned that maybe the Germans would be able to use American soil to launch attacks against us. And so in the early days of the war, there are all of these reports of people thinking that there are German air raids happening. Every time they look up and see something unusual in the sky, the days before UFOs,

during the First World War, it was that must be a German airplane, a German zeppelin come across the border to spy on us or bomb us. There's a day in Toronto in the first few months of the war where there's a strangely shaped kite flying above downtown and it stops traffic. People have to look up because they think it must be the Germans who are up to something.

And there's a night again, just a few months in where there's a big rumbling sound that people are reporting from all over the city and they're convinced that it's the sound of German airplane engines or airships that have come across the border, across the lake. The stars inundated with reports. They publish an article about it in the morning.

They think probably it was just, if you can believe it or not, there was some construction in Toronto back then. So they think it was just the construction noises, but people in Toronto were really scared the US would be used to launch attacks. And there are all sorts of reports from all over the country echoing that same fear. At one point, they even turn out all the lights in the parliament buildings and have armed guards watching the skies because there've been reports of German ships coming across the border further south. There are times when Canadians really think we're going to be under attack.

You make a great point that we kind of took it for granted for many years in recent history that of course we're on the same side as the United States, right? We're allies, like best friends, etc., etc. But you know, prior to the U.S. joining World War I, and much like with World War II, they joined it late, just like the Romain Americans, we were out there, but we were out there from the beginning, but they joined it late, but that the fact that, you know, there was very real fears and concerns here in this country that the American soil could be used by Germans to invade Canada. Like that, people were hyper sensitive and aware where kites are stopping traffic and

construction work rumbling is causing, well, it's not really paranoia if they're really after you, but thankfully Germans weren't using American soil to invade Canada back in World War One. No. And it is literally something people were losing sleep over and those tensions were, you can see you even after that, you know, both sides. Now, I feel like now we will re or we overreacting to things because of the, the, the rhetoric and the real fear we have because of this 51st state talk. Yeah, absolutely.

Many Canadians have been familiar with for a very long time. So that's world war one, of course. And then the United States do join world war one and, uh, on the good guy side here, and then please tell me about draft Dodgers. Many a great Canadian was a draft Dodger. Yeah. By the 1960s, now it's almost taken for granted that Canada and the US will be fighting on the same side of wars.

So a lot of Americans are upset that Canada's not more active in Vietnam. And it's a moment where I think in a lot of ways, we kind of try in some way to live up to the founding purpose of Toronto. I think it's something that again is likely to come up in the years to come as things seem to be getting so much worse down to the States, whether Toronto will live up to that founding sort of promise. I think a lot of Toronto's greatest moments as a city

have been when we've lived up to that part of our founding vision to be this relatively safe haven for people fleeing violence somewhere else and Sometimes it is the United States. Well, I think in the the Handmaid's Tale we see Toronto is like this Safe ground. Yeah very much rooted in that history that starts with the loyalists in the 1700s and has come up again from time to time, including a big one, of course, in the 1960s, when people don't want to be sent to a war they think is immoral or even illegal.

And so untold numbers of American war resistors start coming across the border and Toronto becomes a big hub for them. Yorkville especially becomes famous as a place that has this incredible music scene going on at the same time. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are there. They're even friends. Neil Young has a band with one of the war resistors,

Rick James. Of course, the Minerbirds. Yeah, who becomes famous for Super Freak in the 1980s. He comes across the border. His first night is when I write about in the book of the dead because it's an incredible story of him coming up and some american gis spotted him still wearing his navy uniform started beating him up in the street who was saved by members of the band who then showed him around the neighborhood uh he gave him rock and romp and ronnie hawkins the

band yeah the band the band who were used to having to fight their way through the rough and tumble taverns of Yonge Street, who come to his assistance, save him from those Americans. The cock is that, what's the HM, yeah, the 333 Yonge. Yeah, very much. They were used to brawling things, now tough Yonge Street was, and then saved Rick James.

They helped give him the name of a dead man to use as an alias since he was AWOL. And it was actually the Minerbirds that ended up sort of ending his run because they got signed by Motown, were recording their record in Detroit. He had, if I'm remembering correctly, a disagreement with their manager over some drug deals that led to the manager ratting him out to the FBI,

which is why the minor birds had to break up because he was now getting sent to jail. It's why he doesn't become famous till the 1980s. And while Neil Young ends up coming, parking a hearse on the corner of Avenue Road, asking anyone who wants to come to LA to get in, and he's opening for the birds as a member of Buffalo Springfield within weeks.

Amazing. All the pieces fit. That's amazing. So Draft Dodgers as a term, though I believe, I think it was Mark Wiseblood, FOTM Hall of Famer, who was chatting with Andy Berry, the former radio personality who hosted Metro Morning for many, many years before Matt Galloway took over. And I think Mark referred to Andy Berry as a draft Dodger. I could have this story only half right,

but Andy takes offense to the name and that he's not a draft Dodger. He's a conscientious objectors. So these, these terms, uh, these semantics matter. Yeah, I think it's one that different people have different feelings about. I have been trying to use war resistor more. that are better. Yeah, I think it's one that different people have different feelings about. I have been trying to use War Resistor more because I have that in that sense. War Resistor, that's a good one.

And there are huge numbers of them that come up. There's a, Nancy publishes a book that's like a hand guide to how to come to Canada, how to sort of make your new home here. If you are fleeing the war, there's an office set up on Spadina, lots of other famous ones too. It's how Jane Jacobs ends up here.

She doesn't want her sons being sent off to war. So when her husband gets offered a job, she accepts it and then has enormous impact. William Gibson comes, just tons of huge Canadian names. And it's an era when a lot of Canadians are going the opposite direction, looking for their music careers there, William Gibson comes, just tons of huge Canadian names. And it's an era when a lot of Canadians are going the opposite direction looking for their music careers there since we don't have enough support.

But at the same time, you're getting these war resistors coming the other way. All right, I'm gonna shout out one more war resistor who came up here in the 1960s, a great FOTM who played with such luminaries as Janis Joplin, but the great Bill King. So Bill King, an American who is now a very proud Canadian, and he came up because he's a war resistor. So many a great Canadian came up here because they were a war resistor in the 1960s.

It is, it's through our history. I like that term war resistor. I'm going to start using it. Yeah, I've fallen for it too recently as I've learned more about. Covers it all. About that. And it is, we, you go back to the beginning, literally a city set up to be a safe haven for people who didn't want to be American anymore. It's our founding purpose and a lot of the best moments in our history and a lot of the

best Torontonians ever are people who followed in those footsteps. Okay. So this is the 1960s. We talk about these war resistors who come up because mainly they didn't want to fight in the Vietnam war because they were in moral objections against the Vietnam war. Some people had a bone spurs.

I don't know if you heard about this. Okay. Somebody had a bone spurs, couldn't fight in the Vietnam war, But now for people our age, all we know is, and now I'm thinking I'm closing my eyes and I can see Brian Mulrooney and Ronald Reagan and they're singing when Irish eyes are smiling. Like literally all we know is this great friendship, a great trading partners. Everything's honky dory with Canada and the United States.

United States seem to respect us. They seem to respect our sovereignty. You know, we have a great relationship. Canadians are going to Seattle to watch the Blue Jays or they're going to Buffalo to watch the Bills. It's good times until a very, very recent history. And that's why we're doing this episode today because Donald Trump in his second term has seems to have his sights set on Canada becoming a

part of the United States of America. Yeah and it's something again that has happened before which is some consolation I'm taking from history is that we're not the first ones to face this. And even though it's probably more surprising for us, because it comes at the end of this period of deepening friendship, that it's happened over and over again. And a lot of Canadian history is one generation after another, making it clear that we're not American and we're not interested in becoming American. And we've said that repeatedly

and continue having to say it, but that that's part of our tradition, that it's something that's not new, that there are generations of people before us who have made the same stand that I guess we're being called on to make right now. And it's not always easy. There's sometimes horrible suffering involved. Sometimes they're even heads on spikes.

But it is one of the fundamental currents through Canadian history, through Toronto history. So we're not American. We are Canadian and we are something different. Adam Bunch, you hit it out of the park. Your second time at the plate here. You're two for two. Can't wait to get you back a third time.

Again, I urge everyone listening, go to bizarrertoronto.com right now. Find out about the Festival of Bizarre Toronto History. You're doing great work and Doors Open is this weekend. You're doing great work there and the Canadiana series we can all watch and your your substack. Anything else I failed to mention. You're a busy man. That's I'm sure there's more but that is wonderful. Thanks so much. That was thorough today.

Like we covered a lot of ground and there'll be a new like we'll see how things end up here but this will be like a new part of the ongoing history of Canada versus USA. Yeah new chapter for writing history. Let's hope it's good, let's hope it has a happy ending. Okay. And that brings us to the end of our 1,698th show.

Go to torontomike.com for all your Toronto Mike needs. Much love to all who made this possible. That's Great Lakes Brewery, Palm Apostah, Minaris, Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball, get your butt to Christie Pitts on Sunday 2 p.m., RecycleMyElectronics.ca, Building Toronto Skyline, and Ridley Funeral Home, see you all Monday for Toast with Rob Proust and Bob Willett. See you all then.