
Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute. While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

Sarah, Lily, Francis and Antoine are all hard-core skiers and snowboarders, and they’re sharing a winter cottage to be as close as possible to the mountain. When Sarah invites her friend Catherine to move in with them for the winter, everyone except Lily is happy to welcome a new addition to the gang. But this new arrival quickly upsets the group dynamics and destabilizes each individual member. Our six friends will soon realize how much the upcoming ski season will be just like their many downhill runs: emotional, eventful and sometimes unbelievable.

Everyone can have a bad day now and then, but we meet Valerie on a morning that divides her life neatly into before and after. It took one inconsequential setback – a silly thing, really – to cause a slight delay in Valerie’s schedule, resulting in a regrettable distraction, causing an unfortunate incident, which leads her to the police station….. making her miss the single most important event she had on her agenda: The Meeting! That’s when the dam breaks. All that control to build the fragile framework of her life collapses instantly. Valerie gets fired, is obliged to restrain her lifestyle, and now with the shared custody of her son in question, Valerie has to review her priorities and reorganize her life.

At the heart of Victor Lessard is a troubled cop and an addictive, unpredictable mystery. The murders are strange and unsettling, the work of a deeply disturbed mind. And as Victor goes deeper into the mystery, untangling the clues, trying desperately (and in vain) to stop more murders from occurring, his own behaviour becomes more erratic.



We spend an average of five years of our lives waiting in line… what do we do with all of this time? The dramady follows two multigenerational families waiting in line… just like us, they might feel all too alone in these forced and confined moments.



Engineer Thomas Wardrope Eadie develops the Trans Canada Microwave telecommunications network.

A much-needed boost, in the form of a new factory, is promised to the residents of the tiny fishing village St. Marie-La-Mauderne, provided they can lure a doctor to take up full-time residency on the island. Inspired, the villagers devise a scheme to make Dr. Christopher Lewis a local.



Varian Fry rescues more than 2,000 artists from Nazi persecution during World War II.
