The Irish in Canada Podcast

Who was the most important Irish person in Canadian history?  Or perhaps the most frustrating?  In today’s episode, Jane makes a case for Sir Guy Carleton as a serious contender for both titles.  Born to an Ulster Protestant military family, Carleton was perhaps an unlikely defender of Catholicism and French-Canadian civil rights, but his unyielding support for the Quebec Act of 1774 laid a blueprint for modern Canadian identity that still can be felt 250 years later.  And just wait until you hear about his love life! 

In the summer of 1847, over 100,000 refugees from the Great Irish Famine poured into Canada, making their way up the St Lawrence River to Grosse Île, Québec, Montréal, and Toronto.  Others arrived at Partridge Island, the quarantine station just outside the harbour of Saint John, New Brunswick.  This is the story of two Irish Canadians — one in Toronto, and the other in Saint John — who tried to help as best they could, with tragic results.

When the Brock Monument exploded at Queenston Heights on 17 April 1840, the colonial authorities quickly decided upon the identity of the guilty culprit: the notorious Irishman, Benjamin Lett.  A follower of William Lyon Mackenzie, Ben Lett unleashed a campaign of terror and violence in the years following the failed 1837 Upper Canadian Rebellion.  To some, he was a Robin Hood figure, “the Rob Roy of Upper Canada” who continually evaded capture; to others, he was a dangerous rebel who needed to be stopped.

To end our second season, Jane is revealing some of her exclusive research from the Gender, Migration & Madness Project: the mystery surrounding the death of Mary Boyd.  Mary was an Irish Quebecer who found work as a young maid in a Toronto doctor’s household in 1868.  But the circumstances surrounding her suicide only a few months later caused a major scandal in the city about sex, virginity, pregnancy, medical experimentation, mental illness, and the immense power men had over women’s bodies.

NB – This episode contains graphic discussions of mental illness, sexual assault, and suicide.  Listener discretion is advised.

Few people in Canadian history have created more division than Louis Riel.  At the time of his death in 1885, he had been found guilty of high treason, but even the jury who condemned him agreed that something else in Riel’s past was why he was killed: the execution of Thomas Scott.  Who was Thomas Scott?  Why was he executed in Winnipeg during the Red River Resistance, and why did Riel feel fifteen years later that he was going to be hanged because of an Irishman?

NB – This episode contains explicit language