Canada’s Beginnings
Canada joined the Red Cross with Britain in 1865 and the first time the red cross on white background emblem was used in Canada was at the Northwest Rebellion in March 1885. Dr. George Ryerson, surgeon to the Tenth Royals militia regiment in Toronto, was dispatched to Batoche, in present-day Saskatchewan; there he marked his wagon in order to set it apart from the others in the traveling party. In his memoirs, he recounts how he, “had a spring wagon drawn by two horses in which we carried the medical supplies. To distinguish it from an ordinary transport I made a flag of factory cotton and sewed on it a Geneva red cross made from pieces of turkey red which I got from the ammunition column. This was the first red cross flown in Canada.”
His experiences on the prairie turned Ryerson into an advocate for a better equipped medical corps in Canada and a close follower of the works of the British Red Cross Society. In 1896, he held talks with the secretary and president of the British Red Cross Society about creating a branch of the society in Canada. On 16 October 1896, the Canadian Red Cross Society was founded with Ryerson as chairman and many prominent Canadians as officers including physician and politician Sir Fredrick Borden, lawyer and politician, Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, and Col. John Bayne Maclean, founder of Maclean’s magazine. This was the first overseas branch of the British Red Cross Society; its first action was the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898, raising funds to aid the casualties on both sides of the battle.
The Canadian Red Cross Society’s mission statement reads, “Improving the lives of vulnerable people by mobilizing the power of humanity in Canada and around the world.” Accordingly, it has been involved in many activities, including providing aid in areas of conflict and war, natural disasters such as earthquakes and storms, public health programs, projects to help improve the lives of Indigenous people, and countless acts of assistance to people who have lost homes to fire, flood, or severe weather in communities across Canada and around the world.
References
Porter, McKenzie. To All Men: the Story of the Canadian Red Cross. McClelland and Steward, 1960.