1965 in Canada
overview of Canada-related events during the year of 1965
Events from the year 1965 in Canada.
Incumbents
Crown
Monarch – Elizabeth II
Federal government
Governor General – Georges Vanier
Prime Minister – Lester B. Pearson
Chief Justice – Robert Taschereau (Quebec)
Parliament – 26th (until September 8) then 27th (from December 9)
Provincial governments
Lieutenant governors
Lieutenant Governor of Alberta – John Percy Page
Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia – George Pearkes
Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba – Errick Willis (until November 1) then Richard Spink Bowles
Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick – Joseph Leonard O'Brien (until June 9) then John B. McNair
Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland – Fabian O'Dea
Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia – Henry Poole MacKeen
Lieutenant Governor of Ontario – William Earl Rowe
Lieutenant Governor of Prince Edward Island – Willibald Joseph MacDonald
Lieutenant Governor of Quebec – Paul Comtois
Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan – Robert Hanbidge
Premiers
Premier of Alberta – Ernest Manning
Premier of British Columbia – W.A.C. Bennett
Premier of Manitoba – Dufferin Roblin
Premier of New Brunswick – Louis Robichaud
Premier of Newfoundland – Joey Smallwood
Premier of Nova Scotia – Robert Stanfield
Premier of Ontario – John Robarts
Premier of Prince Edward Island – Walter Shaw
Premier of Quebec – Jean Lesage
Premier of Saskatchewan – Ross Thatcher
Territorial governments
Commissioners
Commissioner of Yukon – Gordon Robertson Cameron
Commissioner of Northwest Territories – Bent Gestur Sivertz
Events
January 1 – Trans-Canada Airlines is renamed Air Canada.
January 9 – The Hope Slide, the largest landslide ever recorded in Canada, kills four.
January 16 – The Canada-United States Automotive Agreement is signed
January 28 – The Queen issues a royal proclamation, effective February 15, making the Maple Leaf flag the National Flag of Canada.
February 15 – Canada adopts the maple leaf for the national flag.
March 2 – Lucien Rivard escapes from a Montreal area jail
March 7 – Canadian Roman Catholic churches celebrate mass in the vernacular for the first time due to the reforms of Vatican II
March 20 – Peter Lougheed is elected leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party
April 2 – Lester Pearson gives a speech at Temple University in the United States that calls for a stop to the bombing of North Vietnam, infuriating President Lyndon Johnson
May 16 – Cross Country Checkup debuts on radio
June 7 – Navy, army, and air force commands are replaced by six functional commands
July 8 – A crash of Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 21 in British Columbia kills 52.
September 9 – The Fowler Report is released. It advocates creation of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)
September 13 – The new Toronto City Hall is opened.
November 8 – Federal election: Lester Pearson's Liberals win a second consecutive minority
November 9 – A failure at an Ontario power station causes the 1965 Blackout that stretches from Florida to Chicago and all of southern Ontario.
November 29 – Alouette 2 is launched.
“1965 in Canada” enters the record as overview of Canada-related events during the year of 1965. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Canada, overview and Canada-related can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2812371. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “1965 in Canada” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.