In 1927, for the first time, a full-on nationwide simultaneous Canada Day celebration was held. Fredericton’s Daily Mail newspaper summed up the jubilant mood with the whole front page saying, in massive letters: “Sixty Years of Progress!”
Saint John got all dressed up for the occasion, with “electrical displays” on buildings, and the ships in the Harbour “bedecked with flags in the rainbow style.”
“Flags [were] hanging from every window of the Admiral Beatty Hotel,” boasted local newspapers, while King, Prince William, and Charlotte Streets were “gaily bedecked in red, white, and blue.” (This of course was a reference to the colours of the Union Jack, not the American flag.)
The Mayor of Saint John was a little too swept up in the excitement as he spoke to a crowd of 4000 enthusiastic citizens. He veered wildly off-script from his prepared remarks, instead offering his own bold predictions for the future.
He declared that he would take the opportunity of Canada’s 60th birthday to offer his predictions of what it would look like on its hundredth.
The Mayor stated confidently that by 1967 the population of Canada would surpass one hundred million people and that Saint John would be bigger than Baltimore and Boston.
Meanwhile, in Bathurst, civic leaders who had expected hundreds of attendees for their celebrations, which was a series of horse races, were startled by the arrival of thousands of visitors who flooded the town.
Moncton also reported unexpectedly large numbers of people who came into the city to watch their large parade of floats representing the nation’s history.
While most NB cities hosted their boisterous celebrants in stride, Fredericton found itself completely overwhelmed by the shocking numbers of visitors who came to celebrate in the capital. The Daily Mail sputtered “Where all these people came from was a puzzle.”
“They came by auto, carriage and train,” wailed the newspaper. “It is not an exaggeration to say that never before in its history has Fredericton harboured so many strangers within its gates.”
Though well-behaved, the number of visitors was “far greater than expected by even the most optimistic” and the newspaper complained that the guests ate and drank quite literally everything in Fredericton — every single restaurant in the city ran out of food and drinks!
Even American newspapers stumbled over themselves to lavish hyperbolic praise for the occasion. The Boston Evening Times called New Brunswick “the land of romance,” declaring that “The Saint John River is the Rhine of America” and “The Baie de Chaleur area [is] the Riviera of New Brunswick.”
Despite the flood of unexpected visitors that day, the mood was exuberant. The war was over, the economy was booming, wages were up and exciting new and newly affordable technologies like refrigerators, stoves, cars, electric lights, and indoor plumbing were making life much easier than ever before.
It was almost certainly a new technology which had attracted so many visitors to Fredericton that day.
Under the guidance of its visionary tourism coordinator Doug Black, Fredericton had set up a series of loudspeakers throughout the city which would be playing live from Ottawa the the country’s official national celebrations.
For much of its early history, Canada Day (or Dominion Day, as it was called at the time) festivities were very much local events. Often they were celebrated at a municipal level, and certainly nothing as ambitious as a full country-wide celebration had been attempted before.
That day though, for the first time, Canada was attempting its first-ever national simultaneous celebration, broadcasting the events in Ottawa to radios, live, from coast to coast.
Canadians had been remarkably enthusiastic early adopters of the radio, and by 1927 they owned the second most radios per capita in the entire world.
Even that statistic doesn’t do the Canadian radio frenzy of the 1920s justice though, because many people simply built their own radios. Newspapers offered helpful articles on how to build a do-it-yourself-radio for under $3. Suddenly the most isolated lumberjack, fur trapper, and farmer could be in contact with the nation’s big urban centres.
But of course, it’s way more fun to take in an event with thousands of other people, which is why people flocked to Fredericton to listen to the booming outdoor loudspeakers instead of listening from the comfort of home.
While the weather was perfect balmy weather in the Maritimes, with the sun coming out just as the broadcast began, in Ottawa, it was by all accounts “tropical,” which was a polite way of saying grotesquely humid and sunny.
As 75,000 people flocked to the nation’s capital, many reports of injuries due to heat flooded in, despite efforts to bring in umbrellas and provide shade.
The festivities marked the first ever time that a nationwide simultaneous live radio broadcast was made across Canada. Speeches were heard from coast to coast of Prime Minister King, and Opposition Leader Gutherie.
Their speeches offered what the Telegraph-Journal called “a graphic picture of the intensity of the appeal to the patriotism of Canadians from coast to coast and in every city, town, village and schoolhouse.”
The politicians were promptly blown away by “a most impressive read” of a poem by actress Margaret Anglin.
Anglin had quite the remarkable Canadian pedigree: her brother was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; her father was the Speaker of Parliament, and most importantly of all, she herself had quite literally been born inside of Parliament.
In honour of her having been born inside Parliament, Anglin had been bestowed the special title “Daughter of Confederation” for the day’s events.
She read a poem written by a man she described as “one of Canada’s most eminent poets,” Fredericton’s own Bliss Carman.
The Winnipeg Tribune wrote “It was the supreme moment of the day when in majestic diction the poem’s concluding words rang out”:
“The Din of Nations on the march Resounds,
We wait the voice
That shall in the quietude and peace
proclaim the mightier choice–
This region of the brotherhood wherein
The man-god may rejoice.”
