1914 in Canada
overview of Canada-related events during the year of 1914
Events from the year 1914 in Canada.
Incumbents
Crown
Monarch – George V
Federal government
Governor General – Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn
Prime Minister – Robert Borden
Chief Justice – Charles Fitzpatrick (Quebec)
Parliament – 12th
Provincial governments
Lieutenant governors
Lieutenant Governor of Alberta – George H. V. Bulyea
Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia – Thomas Wilson Paterson (until December 5) then Francis Stillman Barnard
Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba – Douglas Colin Cameron
Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick – Josiah Wood
Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia – James Drummond McGregor
Lieutenant Governor of Ontario – John Morison Gibson (until September 26) then John Strathearn Hendrie
Lieutenant Governor of Prince Edward Island – Benjamin Rogers
Lieutenant Governor of Quebec – François Langelier
Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan – George W. Brown
Premiers
Premier of Alberta – Arthur Sifton
Premier of British Columbia – Richard McBride
Premier of Manitoba – Rodmond Roblin
Premier of New Brunswick – James Kidd Flemming (until December 17) then George Johnson Clarke
Premier of Nova Scotia – George Henry Murray
Premier of Ontario – James Whitney (until September 25) then William Hearst (from October 2)
Premier of Prince Edward Island – John Alexander Mathieson
Premier of Quebec – Lomer Gouin
Premier of Saskatchewan – Thomas Walter Scott
Territorial governments
Commissioners
Commissioner of Yukon – George Black
Gold Commissioner of Yukon – George P. MacKenzie
Commissioner of Northwest Territories – Frederick D. White
Events
January to June
March 19 – The Royal Ontario Museum opens
April 11 – Canadian Margaret C. MacDonald is appointed Matron-in-Chief of the Canadian Nursing service band and becomes the first woman in the British Empire to reach the rank of major.
May 14 – First major discovery of oil in western Canada at Turner Valley
May 20 – The Niagara Falls peace conference begins. Representatives from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the United States met for diplomatic negotiations in order to avoid war between the United States and Mexico
May 23 – The Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship which sailed from Japan to British Columbia carrying 376 passengers, is turned back from Canada under authority of exclusion laws prohibiting Asian immigrants. Most of the passengers returned to India.
May 29 – Ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland sinks in Gulf of St. Lawrence; 1,024 lives lost.
June 19 – The Hillcrest mine disaster in Alberta kills 189 of 235, the worst mining disaster in Canadian history
June 29 – 1914 Ontario election: Sir James Whitney's Conservatives win a fourth consecutive majority
July to December
August 4 – World War I: United Kingdom declares war on Germany, meaning Canada, as a member of the British Empire, is in a state of war.
August 14 – Canada's War Measures Act is passed suspending some civil rights in Canada during a crisis.
September 9 – World War I: The creation of the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade, the first fully mechanized unit in the British Army
September 25 – James Whitney, Premier of Ontario, dies in office
October 1 – Edward VII Monument (Montreal) unveiled
October 2 – William Hearst becomes Premier of Ontario
October 3 – World War I: 33,000 Canadian troops depart for Europe, the largest force to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean at the time.
“1914 in Canada” enters the record as overview of Canada-related events during the year of 1914. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Canada, overview and Canada-related can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2811175. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1914.
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This entry incorporates text from “1914 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.