Insulin, basketball and the song “Hallelujah” all came from Canadians, and the most famous people from Canada include Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for isolating insulin; James Naismith, who invented basketball in 1891; Leonard Cohen, who wrote “Hallelujah”; Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale; Wayne Gretzky, the NHL’s all-time leader in points and assists; Céline Dion, the best-selling Canadian recording artist; and Terry Fox, whose one-legged run across the country in 1980 has raised more than C$1 billion for cancer research. The list below takes one field at a time, from the laboratory to Parliament Hill, with the people who define each.
Frederick Banting, Donna Strickland and Geoffrey Hinton: Canada’s Nobel scientists
Frederick Banting (1891–1941) was born in a farmhouse near Alliston, Ontario. Working at the University of Toronto in the laboratory of the Scottish physiologist John Macleod, he and his student Charles Best isolated insulin, turning type 1 diabetes from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Banting and Macleod received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Banting, then 32, is still the youngest winner in that category, and he split his prize money with Best.
Donna Strickland (born 1959), from Guelph, Ontario, shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics with her former doctoral supervisor Gérard Mourou (the other half went to Arthur Ashkin) for chirped pulse amplification, a way of producing ultra-short, high-intensity laser pulses. She was only the third woman to win the physics prize, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963, and teaches at the University of Waterloo. Geoffrey Hinton (born 1947) was born in Wimbledon, England, and is British-Canadian; he has been affiliated with the University of Toronto since 1987, apart from three years at University College London from 1998 to 2001. His work on artificial neural networks earned the 2018 Turing Award and a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro on the page
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) was born in New London, Prince Edward Island, and raised by her grandparents in nearby Cavendish after her mother died. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), about an orphan sent by mistake to a brother and sister who wanted a boy, was an immediate success and made the island a literary destination. She went on to publish 20 novels and more than a thousand stories and poems.
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) was born in Ottawa, the daughter of an entomologist, and spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec. Since 1961 she has published 18 novels and 18 books of poetry. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is the best known; she has won the Booker Prize twice, for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and, jointly with Bernardine Evaristo, for its sequel The Testaments in 2019. Alice Munro (1931–2024), born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario, set most of her stories in the small towns of southwestern Ontario. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General’s Award, and in 2013 she became the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a “master of the contemporary short story”.
Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell as songwriters
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Westmount, an English-speaking enclave of Montreal, and published poetry and novels before he recorded a note. He was in his thirties when his first album appeared in 1967. “Hallelujah”, his most famous song, was released on his seventh album, Various Positions, in 1984. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alberta, and grew up in Saskatchewan. She sang in small nightclubs in Saskatoon and across western Canada, then in Toronto, before moving to the United States and touring there from 1965. “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock” came out in 1970, and her 1971 album Blue reached number three on Rolling Stone’s 2020 list of the greatest albums of all time. She has won 11 Grammy Awards.
Céline Dion and Drake at the top of the charts
Céline Dion (born 1968), the youngest of 14 children in Charlemagne, Quebec, was a French-language star as a teenager before winning the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest, oddly, for Switzerland, with “Ne partez pas sans moi”. English-language albums followed, and “My Heart Will Go On”, the theme from Titanic (1997), became one of the best-selling singles ever. With more than 200 million records sold, she is the best-selling Canadian artist and the best-selling French-language artist of all time.
Drake (born 1986), Aubrey Drake Graham, grew up in Toronto and first became known as the actor playing Jimmy Brooks in the television drama Degrassi: The Next Generation. His debut album, Thank Me Later (2010), went straight to number one in the United States. He has 14 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and 15 number-one albums, both records for a male solo artist, and serves as global ambassador of the Toronto Raptors basketball team. Toronto, home to Drake, Banting’s laboratory and Hinton’s department, is profiled in our guide to the largest cities in Canada.
Mary Pickford and James Cameron in Hollywood
Two of the most powerful figures in American film history were born in Ontario. Mary Pickford (1892–1979), born Gladys Smith on University Avenue in Toronto, was known as “America’s Sweetheart” in the silent era and became Hollywood’s first millionaire by 1916. In 1919 she co-founded the studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith; in 1927 she was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; and she won its second-ever Best Actress award for Coquette (1929).
James Cameron (born 1954) was born in Kapuskasing, northern Ontario, and moved with his family from Chippawa, near Niagara Falls, to California at 17. He wrote, directed and co-edited Titanic (1997), winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing, and three of his films, Titanic, Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), are among the five highest-grossing films ever made. He also holds New Zealand citizenship.
Wayne Gretzky and the NHL record book
Wayne Gretzky (born 1961) learned to skate on a rink his father flooded in the backyard of the family house in Brantford, Ontario; by the age of ten he had scored 378 goals in a single minor-hockey season. In 20 NHL seasons from 1979 to 1999, with Edmonton, Los Angeles, St. Louis and the New York Rangers, he became the league’s leading career point scorer and has more assists than any other player has total points. He is the only player to score more than 200 points in a season, which he did four times, and he led the Edmonton Oilers to four Stanley Cups. When he retired he held 61 NHL records. Hockey’s status as a national sport, alongside lacrosse, is explained in our guide to the national sport of Canada.
James Naismith’s basketball and Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope
James Naismith (1861–1939) was born in Almonte, Ontario, to Scottish parents and taught physical education at McGill University in Montreal before moving to the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. There, in 1891, he invented basketball as an indoor winter game. He later founded the basketball programme at the University of Kansas and lived to see the sport played at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
Terry Fox (1958–1981), born in Winnipeg and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, lost his right leg to bone cancer in 1977. In April 1980 he set off from St. John’s, Newfoundland, on an artificial leg, aiming to raise a dollar from each of Canada’s 24 million people, and ran the equivalent of a marathon a day. After 143 days and 5,373 kilometres the cancer reached his lungs and he stopped outside Thunder Bay, Ontario. He died in June 1981, the youngest person ever made a Companion of the Order of Canada. The annual Terry Fox Run is now held in more than 60 countries.
John A. Macdonald, Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Viola Desmond and Kim Campbell in public life
John A. Macdonald (1815–1891) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and emigrated as a boy to Kingston in Upper Canada. He led the talks that produced Confederation on 1 July 1867 and served as the first prime minister for 19 years in total. Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for proposing the United Nations Emergency Force during the Suez Crisis; as prime minister from 1963 to 1968 he oversaw the adoption of the Maple Leaf flag. Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000), from Outremont in Montreal, patriated the constitution from Britain in 1982 and added the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Two women broke barriers of different kinds. Viola Desmond (1914–1965), a Black Nova Scotian businesswoman, refused in 1946 to leave the whites-only section of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow and was convicted over a one-cent tax difference. She received Canada’s first posthumous free pardon in 2010, and in 2018 became the first Canadian-born woman to appear alone on a regularly circulating Canadian banknote, the $10 bill. Kim Campbell (born 1947) served from June to November 1993 as Canada’s first and so far only female prime minister. Their stories run through the capital, which is described in our guide to Ottawa, the capital of Canada.