Mr. Speaker, the CBC will air in the new year a three hour celebration of hockey during an event designated as Hockey Day in Canada. The town of Windsor will serve as host community for the broadcast, which will include nine other communities across Canada.
Windsor is known as “the little town of big firsts”, including the oldest agricultural fair in North America, Canada's first independent school and Canada's oldest library. It is the home of the first giant pumpkins and the first pumpkin regatta. Most significantly, Windsor is the birthplace of hockey.
It is in the writings of internationally known author Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Windsor resident, that the first known reference to a form of ice hockey can be found. Dr. Garth Vaughan, a Windsor resident, published his extensive research verifying Windsor's claim in a book entitled
The Puck Starts Here.
In fact, in 1844 when writing about his early 1800s childhood experiences, Thomas Chandler Haliburton referred directly to the boys “racin', yelpin', hollerin' and whoopin' like mad with pleasure” playing what was then known as hurley--