To launch Living and Learning in Retirement’s 50th year, organizers have invited Ted Barris to speak to members for 10 consecutive Fridays during the winter of 2024 at Glendon College’s Centre for Excellence. His series, “Missing in Action: Untold Stories of Canadians’ Participation in Historic Moments” features famous periods of world history, in which Canadians played vital roles.

Lecture No. 1, “How the West was won!” In the 1860s, the fathers of a Canadian Confederation attempted to cobble together four disparate territories in the eastern half of British North America, the rest of what would eventually become the Canadian West sat apparently untamed and available. How did a Canadian “manifest destiny” prevent takeover by the Americans, incursion by the Fenians and exclusion by the Hudson’s Bay Company? By the arrival of steamboats, that’s how. From 1859-1900 steamboats ruled what would become the Canadian West.

Ted Barris has published 20 non-fiction books, half of them wartime histories. His book, The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, won the 2014 Libris Award as Best Non-Fiction Book in Canada. His book, Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany, received the 2018 NORAD Trophy from the RCAF Association. And his book, Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire, was long-listed for the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction in Canada. In December 2022, Ted Barris was appointed Member of the Order of Canada.