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This site allows me to provide background information to the articles published on my Substack Beyond Brant and Brock. Read my Substack: Get informed about the origins of Canada: head over to glennjlea.substack.com. My Substack provides well-researched articles that document in a chronological order how Europeans “discovered” the New World in the 15th Century through to the founding of Canada in the 19th Century. I also attempt to describe the impact on the Indigenous tribes these incursions by Europeans into their territories (as much as documentary evidence exists to assess it). ...

I wrote a little poem called The Canon during my university days. A Canon typically defines the acceptable, standard set of literature for a specific genre. English Literature in academia has an accepted list of stories, poems and plays which an English Lit student must read to understand Western culture and civilization. As required by my professors, I used my dog-eared Norton Anthology of English Literature to analyze Shakespeare, Milton, Woodsworth, Shelly, Faulkner, and a hundred other famous writers in the Anglo-Saxon world. ...

I’ve been told that Canadians are excellent writers. If there ever was an overstatement this certainly is one of them. Yet Canada has produced some world renowned authors. Think Margaret Atwood, Nobel prize winning Alice Munroe, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mordecai Richler, Yann Martel, Leonard Cohen, Northrop Frye and Malcolm Gladwell, to name a few. So, what is it about Canada that produces good writers? Could it be something about Canada’s long winters? Yet, lots of Canadians spend cold winter days - and nights - doing anything but writing. They are outdoors enjoying the frigid weather or skating on an ice rink shooting hockey pucks into frozen nets. They aren’t curled up in an armchair or sitting at a desk writing the next great novel. So we can’t entirely blame the weather. ...

“The singular achievement of this new expedition was not so much that it met most of its objectives, but that it did so in the face of many strong reasons to abandon the voyage entirely. If this untypical commitment and cohesion was an occasion for praise, a great part was due to Frobisher himself.” With 800 tons of ore loaded onto 15 ships, Martin Frobisher had completed his third and final voyage to the Arctic. The Northwest Passage was never found nor was the Queen’s colony established. But through three extraordinary exertions of human strength, Frobisher and his men were the first to make inroads into Canada’s Arctic and introduced to the English the Inuit peoples and their culture. ...