The Commemorate Canada program, managed by the Government of Canada, provides funding for projects that honor and celebrate significant national milestones, historical events, and influential figures. Its goal is to enhance awareness, appreciation, and understanding of Canada’s rich history, values, culture, and heritage. By offering financial support, the program helps community organizations, educational institutions, and other groups create meaningful commemorative initiatives. A key focus of the program each year is to celebrate significant anniversaries that highlight pivotal moments in Canada’s history.
Our Approach
To celebrate milestone anniversaries highlighted by Commemorate Canada, The Walrus Lab created the Canadian Time Machine podcast and its French counterpart, Voyages dans l’histoire canadienne, with each episode spotlighting a significant anniversary in Canadian history.
What we did
The team conducts in-depth research into Canadian history, drawing from primary sources, historical records, and expert interviews to ensure accuracy and authenticity.
Each episode is carefully crafted to present historical events in a dynamic and accessible way, making complex topics engaging and easy to follow for a wide audience.
We employ professional sound engineering, including music and archival audio, to create an immersive and atmospheric listening experience that enhances the storytelling.
All episodes are transcribed in both English and French, and can be accessed on a dedicated page of The Walrus website.
Results
The first season of the podcast was released in 2022, followed by season two in 2024.
The podcast has a 4.4/5 rating on Apple Podcasts.
Canadian Time Machine has achieved remarkable success, ranking no. 2 in the history podcasts category and no. 34 overall on Apple Podcasts charts in Canada.
Canadian Time Machine was featured on the “We are Loving” and “New & Noteworthy” sections of Apple Podcasts.
There was a 38x increase in downloads and a 786 percent increase in subscribers from season one to season two.
Episodes of Canadian Time Machine have been featured on many other top Canadian history podcasts, including The Secret Life of Canada, Canadian History Ehx, and Curious Canadian History.
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Hey, thank you for reading!
Before you go, did you know that The Walrus is a registered charity? We rely on donations and support from readers like you to keep our journalism independent and freely available online.
If you’d like to ensure we continue creating stories that matter to you, with a level of accuracy you can trust, please consider becoming a supporter of The Walrus. I know it’s tough out there with inflation and rising costs, but good journalism affects us as well, so I don’t ask this lightly.
Will you join us in keeping independent journalism free and available to all?
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Enjoying The Walrus? Thoughtful writing like this has a home because of readers like you.
Recently, my story, titled “AI Is a False God,” appeared on the cover of The Walrus. It was the type of piece that could have found a home only in The Walrus. As Canadian media continues to face some of the most serious challenges in recent decades, venues for thoughtful, well-researched long-form writing have all but disappeared.
As public discourse is often short-circuited and distorted by the incentives of social media, the need for smart, informed media is clearer than ever. That’s why supporting independent media is so important. A donation to The Walrus ensures that thewalrus.ca can continue to be a freely accessible place that Canadians can turn to in order to make sense of fraught moments—one that offers stories like mine which dig deeper to provide the context and complexity so often missing from contemporary discussions.