Regina is the provincial capital of Saskatchewan, Canada and was incorporated as a city on June 19, 1903. Regina was proclaimed the capital on May 23, 1906 by the first provincial government led by Premier Walter Scott.
Regina (pronounced /ɹəˈdʒaɪ.nə/) is located at 50°26′N 104°37′W / 50.433°N 104.617°W. Regina's elevation is 577 metres (1,893 ft) above mean sea level.
Template:Canada CP 2001 Regina's metropolitan area population was 199,000 as of 2005 with a growth rate of 0.4%. This may be missleading because the supposed "Regina Metropolitan Area" includes widely spread distant towns, such as Lumsden, Balgonie, White City, Pense, and other communities, and rural population.
Climate
Regina has a relatively dry climate with cold winters and hot summers. Precipitation is heaviest from June through August with June being the wettest month at 75 mm (3 in). Annual precipitation is 390 mm (15 in) with December, January and March having the most snowfall (60% of the total). Outside of the normal winter months, snowfall is not uncommon in May or September. The average daily temperature for the year is 2.8°C. The lowest temperature ever recorded was -50°C (-58°F) on January 1, 1885 while the highest recorded temperature was 43.3°C on July 5, 1937.
Demographics
Age Structure
- 0-14 years: 20%
- 15-64 years: 67.5%
- 65 years and over: 12.5%
Racial Diversity
- Caucasian: 85.7%
- Aboriginal: 8.7%
- Chinese: 1.3%
- Other: 4.3%
Religious Groups
- Protestant: 41.5%
- Catholic: 32.3%
- No religion: 19.0%
- Christian Orthodox: 1.8%
- Other Christian: 2.9%
- Other religion: 2.5%
Top Ten Ethnic Groups
- German 60,580
- English 48,830
- Canadian 46,860
- Scottish 37,275
- Irish 30,350
- Ukrainian 23,220
- French 19,265
- Aboriginal 11,945
- Polish 11,035
- Norwegian 9,635
History
Founding and NWT headquarters
Regina was founded in 1882 when the Canadian Pacific Railway constructed a transcontinental railroad line through the region. The Dominion Lands Act encouraged homesteaders to come to the area where they could purchase 160 acres (647,000 m²) of land for $10. The city was originally known as the "Pile of Bones", because of the large amounts of buffalo bones in the area.
The hamlet of Pile of Bones was renamed in 1882 as Regina (Latin for queen) by Princess Louise, the wife of Canada's Governor General, in honour of her mother Queen Victoria, the British monarch at the time. Reginans commonly refer to Regina as the "Queen City". (Alternative names considered for the town were "Leopold" (for a son of Queen Victoria), "Wascana" and "Assiniboia", the latter two being Cree words.)
Because of its ___location on the new transcontinental railroad, Regina was chosen in 1883 as the new capital of the Northwest Territories, replacing Battleford. Regina remained the territorial capital until 1905 when Saskatchewan became a province.
On December 1, 1883, Regina was officially declared a town. The town's first mayor, David Scott, was elected on January 10, 1884.
In one of the sombre notes of the city's history, Louis Riel was brought to Regina after his troops were defeated by government forces in the North-West Rebellion in the spring of 1885. Riel was found guilty of treason and hanged on November 16, 1885. The trial was re-enacted each summer by local actors in the Trial of Louis Riel for many years. This play, based on the writings of author John Coulter, was not presented in 2004, but was revived for 2005.
From 1892 to 1920, Regina was the headquarters of the North West Mounted Police, and it is now headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Northwest Region and home of the RCMP Training Academy. An RCMP National Heritage Centre is scheduled to open in 2007.
Regina grew slowly for the first 20 years of its existence. With a population of more than 3,000, Regina was incorporated as a city on June 19, 1903, with Jacob W. Smith serving as the first mayor.
Saskatchewan provincial capital
After Saskatchewan became a province on September 1, 1905, Regina was officially decreed the capital on May 23, 1906. In 1908 the first city hall was completed on the current site of the federal government building in downtown Regina while work commenced on constructing the province's legislative buildings beside Wascana Lake.
The years between 1903 and 1913 saw the city grow tenfold. Not only was the federal government's immigration policy finally hitting its stride and attracting large numbers of settlers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from the British Isles, from eastern Canada and the U.S., but adjustments to railway tariffs made the city more attractive as a distribution centre for farm machinery and other supplies needed by the settlers. The population growth set off a frenzied building boom that gave the city many handsome public and private buildings that are still standing. These include its two main hospitals, the Canada Life Building, Regina College (which became the University of Regina), Holy Rosary Cathedral, Knox-Metropolitan United Church, First Baptist Church (although the then-Metropolitan Methodist Church and Knox Presbyterian Church as well as First Baptist) were destroyed in the 1912 "Regina Cyclone" and rebuilt) and the stately provincial Legislative Building.
An important element in the economic development of the young city was the creation of the Warehouse District on the north side of the city's downtown Canadian Pacific Railway yards. Laced by railway spur lines and encouraged by a change in CPR freight rates that made it more attractive to ship manufactured goods westward from eastern Canada, the district led the city's rapid expansion in this period.
On June 30, 1912, a tornado, locally referred to as the "Regina Cyclone," devastated the city, killing 28, injuring hundreds and destroying more than 400 buildings. The estimated $5 million dollars in damage took more than two years to repair. Future horror film star Boris Karloff, who was in Regina at the time appearing in a play, served as a rescue worker after the disaster. The Regina Cyclone remains the deadliest tornado event in Canadian history. (Some sources state the tornado's toll was either 29 or 30.)
Growth tapered off with recession in 1913, and then the outbreak of the First World War, which saw immigration, capital and pools of workmen and building supplies dry up.
The 1920s boom and the Depression
The city was home of the first licensed airport in Canada (May, 1920) and was also the home of first licensed commercial pilot in Canada (First World War veteran Roland Groome), the first air maintenance engineer in Canada (Robert McCombie) and the first licensed aircraft in Canada (Canadian-built Curtis JN-4 (Can) G-CYAA).
Economic growth resumed postwar and switched into high gear in the late 1920s, in large part due to construction of a large General Motors auto assembly plant in the city's northeast industrial area in 1928-29. For a while, soaring wheat prices made Saskatchewan one of the richest places on Earth, in terms of per-capita income. That led to a construction boom in Regina that left the city with an architecturally distinguished generation of apartment and commercial buildings. (The oldest building in Regina still in use is the chapel at the RCMP's "Depot" Division, built in the early 1880s and later converted for religious use. Nearby Government House was built in 1891-92 as an office and residence for the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories.)
The Depression, the CCF and the Regina Riot
The Great Depression of the 1930s caused massive unemployment in western Canada.
In July 1933, a group of farmers, labour and social organizations met in Regina to form the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation or CCF. (In 1944, the CCF would go on in Saskatchewan to form North America's first socialist government and in 1961 provide Canada's first publicly funded health care system. The CCF health-care model was later adopted across all of Canada.)
As frustrations grew among the unemployed, 1,300 men boarded trains in Vancouver bound for Ottawa to demand work from the federal government. The issue came to a boiling point in Regina, where the numbers had swelled to 1,800 by the time the Prime Minister intervened and ordered the protest to be disbanded.
On the evening of July 1, 1935, a public meeting was called for in Market Square to bring the public up to date on what had happened so far. It was attended by 1500 to 2000 people, of whom only 300 were trekkers. The main body of the trekkers had decided to stay at the exhibition grounds.
Three large vans were parked on the sides of the square concealing RCMP riot squads. Regina police concealed themselves in a nearby garage. At 8:00pm a whistle was blown and the police charged from their concealment, setting off hours of hand-to-hand fighting throughout the city's centre.
The attack caught the people at the meeting by surprise, but then anger took over. They began to fight back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand.
RCMP mounted on horseback then charged into the crowd and attacked with clubs.
Driven from the Square, the battle continued in the surrounding streets for four hours.
Trekkers on the speakers' platform were arrested by a body of police in plain clothes.
The police began firing their revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together.
Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed. There was no looting, with one exception, however.
People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars.
Finally the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of trekkers were quartered.
When it was over, 120 trekkers and citizens had been arrested. One plain clothes policeman had been killed. Hundreds of local citizens and Trekkers who had been wounded by police gunfire or otherwise injured were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to hospital were also arrested.
Property damage was considerable.
The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the one in plain clothes who had been killed.
The city's exhibition grounds were surrounded by constables armed with revolvers and machine guns. The next day a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area. The Trekkers in the stadium were denied any food or water
News of the police-inspired riot made the front page in newspapers across Canada.
About midnight one of the Trek leaders telephoned Premier Gardiner who agreed to meet their delegation the next morning. The RCMP were livid when they heard of this. They took the men to the police station for interrogation but finally released them so they could see the premier.
Premier Gardiner sent a wire to Prime Minister Bennett accusing the police of "precipitating a riot" while he had been negotiating a settlement with the Trekkers. He also told the prime minister the "men should be fed where they are and sent back to camp and homes as they request" and stated his government was prepared to "undertake this work of disbanding the men." An agreement to this effect was subsequently negotiated.
Bennett was satisfied that he had smashed the Trek and taught the citizens of Regina a lesson. Gardiner was happy that he was getting rid of the strikers from Regina and the province.
The federal minister of justice made the false statement in the House of Commons on July 2 that "shots were fired by the strikers and the fire was replied to with shots from the city police."
During the long course of the trials that followed no evidence was ever produced by the Crown that strikers had ever fired any shots.
Bennett further added to the misrepresentation by stating in the House of Commons the same day that the Trek was "not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government."
Little did they know what the political repercussions of their forcible suppression of a protest movement against the relief camps would be. The Conservatives lost the October 1935 election
The Second World War
Regina was a great contributor to the Canadian war effort in both world wars. During the Second World War, young men from Regina volunteered for service, finding their way into all branches of the Canadian armed services. Raised in Saskatchewan was the Regina Rifle Regiment, an infantry unit that was one of the Allied units landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Its defence of Bretteville Farm on the night of June 7/8, 1944 has been credited by some historians with preventing a German armoured breakthrough that could have reached the vulnerable invasion beaches and caused havoc, delaying or even stopping the Allied advance into Normandy.
Named for the city was the Royal Canadian Navy corvette HMCS Regina, which sank an Italian submarine in the Mediterranean in 1943, but was itself torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Cornwall in August 1944.
Hundreds of Regina men flew for the Royal Canadian Air Force during the war. During the war, Regina was the home of three air force training facilities: No. 2 Initial Training School (which selected personnel for aircraft training; it was located in the province's Normal School or teachers college), plus No. 3 Air Observer School and No. 15 Elementary Flying Training School the latter two at the Regina airport. The war ended with Regina's population at about 65,000.
Postwar Regina
Postwar, the city adopted a de facto metropolitan form of government by annexing the independent village of North Regina, located around the Canadian National Railway yards in the city's northwest, and what was then called "the north annex" -- a motley collection of houses outside the city's northern limits along Broad Street, but within the Rural Municipality of Sherwood, which surrounds the city. In both cases, the prime motivating factor in amalgamation was the prospect of these districts getting connected to the city's water lines for drinking water and sewage. Financial aid from the provincial government eased this process.
After the war, Regina grew as a regional distribution centre for farming and rural activity. Not until the 1970s did the economy begin to shift from agri-base to industrial-based activity, although agriculture continues to dominate the economy of the city and province. In 1971, Jack Walker, a former RCAF bomber pilot, real estate developer and city alderman, took control of the industrial development of the city and began to diversify the local economy by encouraging light industrial business. In 1973 Deere & Co International selected Regina as the western distribution centre for all John Deere equipment. This vote of confidence in the young city combined with the expansion of the Consumers' Co-operative Refinery and the development of the Inter-Provincial Steel Co. (Ipsco) plant began to lessen the city's dependence on agriculture-related employment. Today Regina's economy is quite diversified in a strong financial and telecommunications sector as well.
Transportation
The city's public transit agency, Regina Transit, operates a fleet of buses with access to the city centre from most areas of the city. Regina can be reached by several highways:
- Trans-Canada Highway, from the west and east sides
- Highway 6 from the north and south. The US border is 160 km south on highway 6.
- Highway 11 from the north/northwest. Saskatoon is 250 km NNW.
- Highway 33 from the southeast.
- Highway 46 from the northeast
Regina is serviced by a Ring Road that loops around the city's east side (the west side of the loop is formed by the Lewvan Drive freeway). Plans call for another perimeter highway to eventually encircle the city farther out.[1]
Regina International Airport on the west side of the city has four gates which handles flights to major centres in Canada as well as daily flights to/from Minneapolis via Northwest Airlines.
Education
The University of Regina located in the southeast corner of the city has over 12,500 students as of the 2002-2003 academic year. It developed out of the Methodist-founded (but disaffiliated in the 1930s) Regina College which became the Regina Campus of the University of Saskatchewan in 1965 and was granted autonomy in 1974. Campion College (which is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church) and Luther College (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada), also church-affiliated junior colleges, now have federated college status in the university as does the First Nations University which grew out of the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College. Western Christian College is a small Christian college which recently relocated to Regina, taking over the former premises of the Canadian Bible College, which had been unable to obtain accreditation for its courses in Saskatchewan and moved to Calgary. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police national training academy -- formerly the headquarters of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police before the Force became a national body with its headquarters transferred to Ottawa -- is on the western perimeter of the city beyond Government House.
The Public School Board operates over 50 elementary schools and nine high schools. The Separate School Board operates over 20 elementary schools and five high schools. Luther College (Saskatchewan) is a well-known private high school in addition to being a junior college.
Nearby communities
Towns that are in close proximity to Regina include White City, Emerald Park, Balgonie, Grand Coulee, Lumsden, Regina Beach and Pilot Butte. The city of Moose Jaw is less than 80 km to the west, and Regina is 250 km south-southeast of Saskatoon (2 hour drive).
Sports teams
Sports teams of Regina include the Regina Pats of the Western Hockey League, the Regina Thunder of the Canadian Junior Football League, the Regina Red Sox of the Western Major Baseball League, the University of Regina's Regina Cougars and Regina Rams of the CIS, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the CFL. The Saskatchewan Roughriders have the distinction of being a community-owned professional sports team and hold the Canadian record for most consecutive winning seasons. The Riders have a strong and loyal fan support base. Out-of-town season ticket holders often travel 300 to 400 kilometers or more to attend home games.
Wascana Centre
Wascana Centre (established in 1962) is a 9.3 square kilometre (2,300 acre) park built around Wascana Lake. It is one of North America's largest urban parks - ahead of New York City Central Park 843 acres (3.4 km²) and Vancouver's Stanley Park 1,000 acres (4 km²). Wascana is derived from the Cree word Oscana meaning "pile of bones" in reference to the buffalo bones scattered around Wascana Creek before the area was populated by non-indigenous people.
Wascana Centre includes a Waterfowl Park that provides a refuge for geese and other birds that do not fly south for the winter. Speakers' Corner on the north shore of Wascana Lake features gas lamps from London and birch trees from Runnymede Meadow where John of England signed the Magna Carta in 1215.
Originally created by damming Wascana Creek to provide a town water supply, Wascana Lake was drained in the 1930s as part of a government relief project; 2,100 men widened and dredged the lake bed and created two islands using only hand tools and horse-drawn wagons. During the fall and winter of 2003-2004, Wascana Lake was again drained and dredged to deepen it by about 5 metres (16 ft), primarily to decrease weed growth during the summer months. The project also included the addition of a new island and general re-landscaping around the lake. The dredging was completed in mid-March 2004, just in time for the spring runoff. The lake includes several small islands: Willow Island, Spruce Island, Pine Island, Goose Island and Tern island.
Local Media
Radio Stations
- 540 AM - CBK, CBC Radio One
- 620 AM - CKRM, country music
- 980 AM - CJME, news/talk
- 88.9 FM - CKSB-1, Espace musique
- 91.3 FM - CJTR, community radio
- 92.1 FM - CHMX, adult contemporary (Lite 92 FM)
- 94.5 FM - CKCK, Jack FM
- 96.9 FM - CBK-FM, CBC Radio Two
- 97.7 FM - CBKF, La Première Chaîne
- 98.9 FM - CIZL, contemporary hit radio (Z99)
- 102.5 FM - CBKR, CBC Radio One
- 104.9 FM - CFWF, active rock (104.9 The Wolf)
Television Stations
Cable Networks
Newspapers
Famous Reginans
Notable persons who were born or grew up in Regina:
- Colin James, blues-rock musician
- Leslie Nielsen, actor
- John Vernon, actor
- Dick Assman, gas station attendant
See also
- List of mayors of Regina, Saskatchewan,
- Canadian cities
- University of Regina
- St. Paul's Cathedral (Regina)
- Holy Rosary Cathedral (Regina)
- Royal Canadian Mounted Police
- District of Assiniboia
| North: Lumsden | ||
| West: Moose Jaw | Regina | East: Pilot Butte |
| South: Weyburn |
References
External links
- Regina on WikiTravel
- City of Regina web site
- City of Regina Property Tax Search
- City of Regina Transit
- Regina Fire Department
- Wascana Centre
- Wascana Park
- Regina International Airport
Attractions
- Casino Regina - located in an old train station
- MacKenzie Art Gallery
- RCMP Museum
- Regina Downtown
- Regina Plains Museum
- Royal Saskatchewan Museum
- Saskatchewan Science Centre - includes an IMAX theatre
- Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame
- Regina's Online Business Directory