Under a 17-metre domed ceiling, experience a remarkable journey through one thousand years of Canada’s social history. The Canada Hall has been developed in two sections. The first focuses on the Atlantic region, Quebec and Ontario from A.D. 1000 to 1885. The second covers Western and Northern Canada from 1885 to the present.

The first section of the Canada Hall includes reconstructed scenes of early European activity: a Norse landing in Newfoundland in A.D. 1000, as well as the interior of a Basque ship and a whaling station — both dating from about A.D. 1560. An Acadian exhibit, a New France farmhouse and public square, an inn, a hospital, a shoemaker’s house and a cooper’s house all illustrate life in New France from 1600 to 1760. A voyageur camp, a Conestoga wagon, a lumber camp shanty and a Métis campsite represent expanding frontiers from 1680 to 1860. For the period between 1760 and 1885, visitors are conducted through British military quarters, a shipyard and a main street in late nineteenth-century Ontario.

The second section of the Canada Hall showcases the West and the North in historical settings that span the years 1885 to 2000. Displays currently include a turn-of-the-century railway station and railway yard, a Saskatchewan grain elevator, a Ukrainian church that was moved here from Alberta, scenes from the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, a Chinese hand laundry and a 1920s Alberta oil derrick. When completed, this section will illustrate urban development in the early industrial era (1890–1940). It will include a West Coast fisheries scene and a reconstruction of Yellowknife's Wildcat Cafe, which provides a venue for stories from the North, past and present.

Virtual exhibition