Canada Day Trivia
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47 free Canada Day trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Canada Day trivia quiz covers the holiday from its 1867 roots to the modern July 1 celebrations: the three colonies that joined at Confederation, the decades when the day was called Dominion Day, the five-minute vote that renamed it in 1982, and the Parliament Hill noon show with its Snowbirds flyover. It also takes in the symbols that get waved around every July 1 — the Maple Leaf flag, "O Canada" and the Order of Canada — plus the provinces and territories that joined later. The early questions suit a family barbecue or a classroom; the later ones dig into Confederation conferences, the Red Ensign and the years when big national celebrations were few and far between. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing, so you can settle arguments with confidence.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which monarch was on the throne when Canada came into being on July 1, 1867?
Victoria
Victoria had been queen for 30 years. A decade earlier she had been asked to settle the squabble over a capital, and her officials made sure the choice was Ottawa.
Q 02In 1867 the Province of Canada became Quebec and which province?
Ontario
Ontario and Quebec had been yoked together as one colony since 1841. Splitting it meant that three colonies went into Confederation and four provinces came out.
Q 03Which act patriated the constitution and ended the British Parliament's power to make laws for Canada?
Canada Act, 1982
The Canada Act, 1982 was passed in London at Canada's request and carried the new Constitution Act, proclaimed at a rainy ceremony in Ottawa that April. Quebec's premier refused to sign on.
Q 04Which Canadian team traditionally plays at home on Canada Day in red jerseys instead of its usual colours?
Toronto Blue Jays
The Toronto Blue Jays swap blue for red each July 1. Since the Montreal Expos left for Washington in 2004 they have been the only big-league baseball club in Canada, so the whole country claims them.
Q 05In which province did a newspaper mark July 1, 1867, with a mock death notice for the old colony?
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia's Morning Chronicle announced the death of "the free and enlightened Province", and protesters in Halifax burned the premier in effigy. That year the province's voters sent anti-Confederates to 18 of its 19 seats in Ottawa.
Q 06Dominion Day became a holiday in 1879 under which prime minister?
John A. Macdonald
John A. Macdonald had won back office the year before. A first bill to make July 1 a holiday was withdrawn in 1869 after MPs objected, and the one that passed came from a British Columbia senator.
Q 07Which prime minister had the government start organizing Dominion Day events in 1958?
John Diefenbaker
John Diefenbaker hoped a yearly show would renew pride in Canada's British heritage. The first one, on Parliament Hill, featured a 21-gun salute and the trooping of the colour.
Q 08Which cabinet minister, the first woman in a federal cabinet, organized the first official Dominion Day show in 1958?
Ellen Fairclough
Ellen Fairclough, a chartered accountant from Hamilton, had joined the cabinet a year earlier. She went on to run the immigration department, where she rewrote the rules to make them less racially exclusive.
Q 09Who cut Canada's giant centennial cake on Parliament Hill in 1967?
Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II did the honours. Another centennial guest fared worse: three weeks later Charles de Gaulle cried "Vive le Québec libre" in Montreal, drew an official rebuke and went home early.
Q 10Which royal couple joined the Canada Day crowds on Parliament Hill in 2011?
Prince William and Catherine
Prince William and Catherine had married two months earlier and were on their first tour together. Organizers reported record-breaking crowds on the Hill that day.
Q 11The On-to-Ottawa Trek of jobless men ended in a Dominion Day riot in 1935 in which city?
Regina
Regina was where the trekkers, who had ridden freight trains from Vancouver to protest conditions in relief camps, were stopped on the prime minister's orders. When police moved in on their July 1 rally, a riot left two people dead.
Q 12Dominion Day was renamed Canada Day in 1982, during which prime minister's final term?
Pierre Trudeau
Pierre Trudeau was in office, yet the change was not his government's doing. It came from a Liberal backbencher's private bill, which slipped through a nearly empty Commons that July.
Q 13The first July 1 officially called Canada Day, in 1983, was also the birthday of which visiting royal?
Princess Diana
Q 21Which Quebec tradition, set on July 1 by a 1970s law, keeps Montrealers busy on Canada Day?
Moving Day
Moving Day used to fall on May 1, when most leases ended. Quebec shifted it to July 1 so that children would not have to change schools before the year was over.
Q 22Which WWI battle began on July 1, 1916, a date one future province marks as Memorial Day?
The Somme
The Somme cost the British army almost 20,000 dead on its first day. At Beaumont-Hamel one regiment sent 780 men forward, and only 68 answered roll call the next morning.
Q 23What did Chinese-Canadians call July 1 after the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act?
Humiliation Day
Princess Diana turned 22 that day in Edmonton, where she and Prince Charles were guests at the World University Games. The British team held up cards spelling out "Happy Birthday Diana".
Q 14On Dominion Day 1958, engineers blew up a dam to flood a string of Ontario villages for which project?
The St. Lawrence Seaway
The St. Lawrence Seaway and its power dam drowned the "Lost Villages" and uprooted some 6,500 people. About 70,000 came to watch a promised wall of water, but the flood crept in over four days.
Q 15The federal "Celebrate Canada" festivities end on Canada Day, but which national day opens them on June 21?
National Indigenous Peoples Day
National Indigenous Peoples Day was set on the summer solstice because many First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities already celebrated on that date. Multiculturalism Day follows on June 27.
Q 16The Order of Canada, created on Dominion Day 1967, has three grades; which is the highest?
Companion
Companion ranks above Officer and Member. When the Order began it had no such ladder: there were only Companions and a Medal of Service, and the three grades came later.
Q 17Which railway linked the first coast-to-coast radio hookup on July 1, 1927?
CN
CN had built a radio network in the 1920s to entertain passengers on its trains, and it linked stations from coast to coast for the Diamond Jubilee. Sold to a federal commission in 1933, it grew into the CBC.
Q 18Which governor general, the first born in Canada, spoke on Dominion Day in the CBC's first cross-country TV broadcast?
Vincent Massey
Vincent Massey spoke from Parliament Hill in 1958 on the very day a new chain of microwave relay towers went into service, carrying live television from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific for the first time.
Q 19Which pioneering MP joins two Fathers of Confederation and a First Nations senator on the 2017 Canada 150 banknote?
Agnes Macphail
Agnes Macphail became the first woman elected to the House of Commons in 1921. She spent years there pressing for prison reform, and her campaign helped bring about a royal commission on the penal system.
Q 20Ottawa's main Canada Day show moved off Parliament Hill in 2022 to which riverside site beside the Canadian War Museum?
LeBreton Flats
LeBreton Flats, already the home of the Bluesfest music festival each July, took over because the Centre Block of Parliament was closed for years of renovation.
Humiliation Day answered a law that shut the door on almost all Chinese immigration. People wore badges reading "Remember the Humiliation" and boycotted the July 1 festivities until the act was repealed in 1947.
Q 24Which aerobatic team traditionally performs a flyover at the Parliament Hill show?
Snowbirds
The Snowbirds got their name in 1971 from a contest among elementary school children at their base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The air force team still flies from there.
Q 25Which federal department organizes the Parliament Hill Canada Day shows?
Canadian Heritage
Canadian Heritage stages the noon and evening shows and helps fund local celebrations across the country. In 2022 it had to move the main stage off the Hill because of construction on Parliament's Centre Block.
Q 26Which Quebec holiday on June 24 competes with Canada Day for attention?
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day is Quebec's Fête nationale. Rival or not, Ottawa counts it among the four national days that its Celebrate Canada fund supports, one week before July 1.
Q 27Which London square, overlooked by Canada House, has hosted a big Canada Day party for expatriates?
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square has had Canada for a neighbour since 1925, when the country's High Commission moved into the Greek Revival building on its edge, which is why the party lands there.
Q 28Which Indigenous group planned peaceful Canada Day protests in major cities in 2021?
Idle No More
Idle No More asked people to gather in orange shirts instead of celebrating, after unmarked graves were found at former residential schools. The movement was begun in late 2012 by four women from Saskatchewan.
Q 29Which former Saskatchewan premier is known as the father of the medicare plan that took effect there on July 1, 1962?
Tommy Douglas
Tommy Douglas had left for federal politics a year earlier, so his successor faced the doctors' strike that began the same day. In 2004 CBC viewers voted Douglas the Greatest Canadian.
Q 30Which 1931 British law gave Canada and the other Dominions legislative equality with Britain?
The Statute of Westminster
The Statute of Westminster put into law a 1926 declaration that Britain and its Dominions were equal in status. At Canada's own request one power stayed in London: changing the Canadian constitution.