Flashback: Election nights in Canada 1958-2000
See what election night coverage looked like on CBC-TV for more than 40 years
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Political figures
Puppeteer Noreen Young, who created the program Under the Umbrella Tree for CBC-TV, has died. "Some of her earliest work was with another CBC puppet show, Hi Diddle Day, which aired from 1968 to 1976," said an obituary from CBC News.
In 1969, CBC's Take 30 visited Young and her puppets in Ottawa and saw how she animated them for the program, and host Ed Reid noticed puppets that were likenesses of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Progressive Conservative Leader Robert Stanfield. (According to the CBC-TV catalogue, her puppets appeared in satirical political sketches on a network news show for youth in the late 1970s.)
Young also created puppets that included an old shoe and a knapsack for the 1974–75 fitness series The Fit Stop. "On one program, for example, the knapsack complained that it did not get enough exercise because people did not walk any more," said the Queen's University Directory of CBC Television Series.
A hero for these times
"At a time when issues of Canadian cultural identity and the question of 'what makes us Canadian?' are front and centre in the wake of American tariff and annexation threats, Captain Canuck feels like a superhero for the moment," writes Chris Dart for CBC Arts. It seems Captain Canuck is ready for a comeback.
CBC's What's New profiled the character and his creator, Richard Comely, shortly after Captain Canuck's 1975 debut. Host Harry Mannis described him as "the saviour of the Dominion" while the camera showed Comely at his desk.
"Captain Canuck's mission in life is to save our natural resources from the dastardly bad guys who'd like to destroy all our beaver dams, cut down all the maple trees, even turn out the northern lights," said Mannis.
Getting results
Viewers could see the results of Monday's federal election on a CBC News Canada Votes election night special on CBC-TV, according to a "where to watch" guide from CBC News. There was more coverage on other platforms as well.
From 1958, when a future politician was a special guest, to 2000, when host Peter Mansbridge praised "great work from all our reporters," here's a montage of 40-plus years of CBC-TV's election night coverage in under three minutes.
In it, a disembodied hand passes a sheet of paper to host Norman DePoe on the election night set in 1968, and the broadcast takes full advantage of colour TV technology in 1972. Graphics that CBC created in 1978 (when everybody expected an election call that never came) get reused for races in 1979 and 1980.
Don't lose that number
The Canadian Press reported last week that the Toronto region "is expected to run out of new phone numbers by next year." In 2001, when Southern Ontario got new area codes, the CBC's Darrow MacIntyre said new "gizmos" like cellphones, fax machines and pagers had driven a demand for more phone numbers.
Recession repression
Earlier this month, the Bank of Canada presented a possible scenario in which the Canadian economy "goes into a significant recession," said the news service Thomson Reuters. The word "recession" was briefly taboo for Canada's finance minister in 1990. On CBC's The National, host Alison Smith said he wouldn't even say it.
Border issues
Steve Paikin may be familiar to viewers across the country as the moderator of the English-language election debate on April 17. (In Ontario, he's the host of the TVO current affairs program The Agenda, which he announced last week he is leaving after 19 seasons, according to CBC News. Back in 1990, as a CBC News reporter, he found out why cross-border shopping was a problem for Canadian retailers.
Forever 27
"I'm going to be a Blue Jay forever," slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said recently after signing a lucrative deal with the team, according to CBC Sports. His player number is 27 — the same number his father, Vladimir Sr., wore for the Montreal Expos.
