Interactive timeline · 8,600 BCE to 2026
Mi'kma'ki, Acadie and a harbour province: 10,600 years in 46 moments.
46 moments7 eras68 sourcesAbout ↓
8,600 BCE – 1604
The ancestors of the Mi'kmaq lived throughout the region for more than 10,000 years before European fishers arrived.
Not long after the glaciers retreated, people camped near present-day Debert in Colchester County, leaving stone tools that radiocarbon dating places at about 10,600 years old. Found by blueberry pickers in 1948 and excavated in 1963 and 1964, it is the oldest known archaeological site in Nova Scotia and the most northeasterly Palaeo-Indian site yet discovered. Nearby Belmont sites found in 1989 held more than 700 similar artifacts.
By about 1520 European fishers were setting up shore camps in the region to dry-cure cod, and in the 1520s the Mi'kmaq began trading furs with them. The Portuguese explorer João Álvares Fagundes is believed to have founded a short-lived fishing colony, probably on Cape Breton, in the early 1520s.
1605 – 1712
French settlers founded Port-Royal with Mi'kmaw allies, while England and Scotland pressed rival claims.
After a disastrous winter on Saint Croix Island, Pierre Dugua de Mons and Samuel de Champlain moved their colony across the Bay of Fundy to a sheltered site near present-day Annapolis Royal, where the Mi'kmaq welcomed them. About 12 of 45 men died the first winter. In 1606–07 Champlain's Order of Good Cheer kept up morale, and Mi'kmaw chiefs Membertou and Messamouet were frequent guests.
Membertou, the Mi'kmaw leader who had befriended the French at Port-Royal, was baptized a Catholic on June 24, 1610. Mi'kmaw tradition holds that a concordat between the Mi'kmaq Grand Council and the Pope was made the same year, beginning a lasting Catholic tradition among the Mi'kmaq.
In July 1613 Samuel Argall, sailing from the English colony of Virginia, attacked and destroyed Port-Royal. The Biencourt family kept a French presence in the region, and after 1623 Charles de Saint-Étienne de La Tour led the colony and its fur trade.
In 1621 King James I granted Sir William Alexander a charter for a colony called Nova Scotia, Latin for New Scotland, over land France claimed as Acadie. Scottish settlers held a colony from 1629 until 1632, when the territory was returned to France by treaty. Control of the region changed hands several more times over the next 80 years.
British and New England forces besieged and captured Port-Royal, the capital of Acadie, in 1710 and renamed it Annapolis Royal. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France gave up peninsular Nova Scotia but kept Île Royale (Cape Breton) and Île Saint-Jean.
1713 – 1763
Britain and France fought over Louisbourg and Halifax, signed treaties with the Mi'kmaq, and deported the Acadians.
Beginning with the Treaty of 1725, Britain signed a series of Peace and Friendship Treaties with the Mi'kmaq, Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) and Passamaquoddy, renewed in 1749, 1752 and 1760–61. They aimed to end fighting and secure alliances; unlike later treaties elsewhere, they did not involve surrendering land or resources. They are protected by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.
France founded Louisbourg on Île Royale in 1713 and built one of North America's largest fortified towns there, its walls rising mainly between 1720 and 1740. New England colonial troops backed by a Royal Navy squadron captured it on June 16, 1745. The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle returned it to France.
Colonel Edward Cornwallis arrived at Chebucto Bay, known to the Mi'kmaq as Kjipuktuk, on June 21, 1749, as governor; 2,576 settlers had sailed with him from England. He founded Halifax as a fortified capital and naval base to counter Louisbourg, and the capital moved there from Annapolis Royal. Fighting with the Mi'kmaq soon followed.
After Mi'kmaw attacks on the new settlers in August 1749, Cornwallis offered ten guineas for every Mi'kmaw person taken or killed. The Board of Trade in London warned him against the policy, but he kept it in place.
⚖️ Established fact
Established factThe bounty is documented in the colonial record and described in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography's entry on Cornwallis, which notes that the Board of Trade cautioned him against it.
On July 28, 1755, Governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council decided to deport Acadians who refused an unconditional oath of allegiance, and troops began rounding them up in August. About 2,200 people were removed from the Minas Basin area around Grand-Pré, and nearly 6,000 from Nova Scotia that year. By 1764 about 11,500 of an estimated 14,100 Acadians had been deported, and about 5,000 died of disease, hunger or shipwreck; their farms were later granted to New England Planters.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedA royal proclamation made by order in council on December 6, 2003, acknowledged that the Crown, governing Nova Scotia, decided on July 28, 1755, to deport the Acadians, and the suffering that followed; it designated July 28 each year as a Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval. It states that it does not create legal or financial liability for the Crown.
Nova Scotia's Legislative Assembly first met in 1758, making it the first representative government in what is now Canada.
British forces besieged Louisbourg for about six weeks before the French surrendered on July 26, 1758, opening the way to Quebec. British engineers began demolishing the fortifications in 1760. Canada began a partial reconstruction of the town in 1961, now the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site.
About 8,000 settlers from New England, known as Planters, moved to Nova Scotia between 1759 and 1768, many to the dyked marshlands the Acadians had farmed around the Minas Basin. Acadians were allowed to return to Nova Scotia from 1764 but found their old lands resettled, and many moved to other parts of the province.
After France's defeat, Mi'kmaw communities signed Peace and Friendship Treaties with the British in 1760 and 1761, and a 'Burying the Hatchet' ceremony in Halifax in 1761 marked the end of warfare. The Supreme Court of Canada has since recognized treaty rights in the 1760 treaties.
1764 – 1866
New England Planters, Black and white Loyalists and Scottish Highlanders arrived, and Nova Scotia won responsible government.
The ship Hector landed 169 settlers from the Scottish Highlands at Pictou in 1773, one of the early ships in a long wave of Highland Scottish migration to the province.
Black Loyalists, who had escaped slavery by joining British lines during the American Revolution, founded Birchtown near Shelburne in 1783, with Stephen Blucke as the first settler. It became the largest free settlement of people of African descent in North America in the 18th century.
In July 1784, rioting white Loyalists in Shelburne attacked free Black residents, who fled to Birchtown for safety; among them was the Baptist preacher David George.
About 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick left Halifax in 1792 for the new colony of Sierra Leone, where they founded Freetown. About 600 came from the Birchtown and Digby areas alone.
Newspaper publisher Joseph Howe was charged with criminal libel for printing a letter accusing Halifax magistrates and police of overcharging the public. Defending himself, he persuaded the jury to acquit him and declared the press of Nova Scotia free. The case launched his political career.
After an election victory by Reformers, with Joseph Howe as their driving force, Nova Scotia became the first British colony to achieve responsible government in early 1848, with a cabinet answerable to the elected assembly. James Boyle Uniacke headed the new administration, with Howe as provincial secretary.
1867 – 1945
An unwilling founding province built coal and steel towns, endured the Halifax Explosion and served as a wartime port.
Nova Scotia's legislature endorsed union in 1866 without an election, and the province became one of Canada's four founding provinces on July 1, 1867. In the first elections that September, anti-Confederates led by Joseph Howe won all but one federal seat and all but two provincial seats. Howe's repeal mission to London in 1868 failed, and in January 1869 he accepted 'better terms' from Ottawa and joined the federal cabinet.
Coal mining began at Springhill in 1873. In 1891 a coal-dust explosion and fire killed 125 people in the mines, the worst mining disaster in Canada to that time. Springhill would suffer two more major disasters in the 1950s.
Dominion Iron and Steel opened a steel mill in Sydney in 1901, using Cape Breton coal, and the city became an industrial centre. Runoff from the mill's coke ovens poured into the Muggah Creek estuary for decades, creating what became known as the Sydney Tar Ponds.
At 9:04 a.m. on December 6, 1917, the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc, burning after a collision with the Norwegian ship Imo in the Narrows, exploded with a force of about 2.9 kilotons of TNT. About 2,000 people were killed (1,782 victims are confirmed by name) and about 9,000 injured; a blizzard struck the next day. The Mi'kmaw settlement at Turtle Grove in Dartmouth was obliterated, and Africville was badly damaged but received little relief money.
💡 Fun fact
Did you know? Halifax still sends Boston a Christmas tree each year to thank Massachusetts for its relief effort.
During a long 1925 strike against the British Empire Steel Corporation, miners took over the power plant serving New Waterford. When company police retook it on June 11, hundreds of miners marched in protest; police fired more than 300 shots, and miner William Davis, 38, was killed. Mining communities still mark June 11 as Davis Day, made official in 2008 as William Davis Miners' Memorial Day.
The only residential school in the Maritimes opened at Shubenacadie in 1930 and closed in 1967. Funded by the federal government, it was run by the Archdiocese of Halifax and later the Oblates, and staffed by the Sisters of Charity; Mi'kmaw and Wolastoqey children came from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Quebec. More than 1,000 children are estimated to have attended; survivors described hunger, overcrowding, physical and sexual abuse, and punishment for speaking Mi'kmaq.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedA class action filed by survivors in 1997 led to the national residential schools settlement. The federal government announced the school's designation as a National Historic Site on September 1, 2020, and plaques were unveiled on September 30, 2021.
During the Second World War, Halifax was a key staging point for convoys carrying troops and supplies across the Atlantic to Britain.
1946 – 1999
Civil rights cases, the destruction of Africville, a wrongful conviction and mine and air disasters shaped the late 20th century.
Black businesswoman Viola Desmond refused to leave a main-floor seat at the segregated Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow and was forcibly removed. She was convicted of tax evasion over the one-cent difference in ticket price, and her 1947 appeal failed. The Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Colored People backed her case, now seen as a landmark of Canada's civil rights movement.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedIn April 2010, Lieutenant Governor Mayann Francis granted Desmond a posthumous free pardon, the first in Canada, and the province apologized. In 2018 she became the first Canadian-born woman to appear alone on a Canadian banknote, the $10 bill.
A coal-dust explosion in Springhill's No. 4 mine killed 39 men in 1956. On October 23, 1958, an underground 'bump', a sudden shift of rock, collapsed sections of the No. 2 mine and killed 75 men; The Syndicate Mine is now the Springhill Miners' Museum.
Africville was a Black community on the shore of Bedford Basin. In the 1960s the City of Halifax relocated nearly 100 families and demolished the community, including the Seaview United Baptist Church, razed at night in 1969, to make way for the A. Murray MacKay Bridge and other harbour development. Former residents and their descendants campaigned for decades for redress.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedOn February 24, 2010, Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly apologized on behalf of Halifax Regional Municipality. The settlement included $3 million and 2.5 acres of land to rebuild the church as a museum; the federal government contributed $250,000. No compensation was paid to individual families.
The Nova Scotia government expropriated the Sydney mill in 1967 and renamed it the Sydney Steel Corporation (SYSCO). Production ended in 2000, leaving about 500,000 tonnes of contaminated sediment in the Tar Ponds and a local cancer rate reported as 45 per cent above the provincial average.
Donald Marshall Jr., a 17-year-old Mi'kmaw from Membertou, was convicted in 1971 of murdering Sandy Seale in Sydney and spent 11 years in prison. The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal acquitted him in 1983 after a witness said he saw another man stab Seale. His case changed Canadian rules requiring prosecutors to disclose evidence to the defence.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedA royal commission reported in 1989 that the justice system had failed Marshall, calling his conviction a serious and fundamental error, and a 1990 commission raised his compensation to a lifetime pension worth about $1.5 million.
At about 5:18 a.m. on May 9, 1992, a methane explosion set off a coal-dust blast in the Westray mine at Plymouth, which had reached coal only in April 1991. All 26 men underground died; 15 bodies were recovered and 11 remain sealed in the mine. Criminal charges against the owner, Curragh Resources, and two managers were stayed, and no one was convicted.
⚖️ Established fact
Established factThe Westray Mine Public Inquiry under Justice K. Peter Richard described the disaster as a story of incompetence, mismanagement, deceit and cover-up that should not have happened. Parliament responded with Bill C-45, the 'Westray law', in force March 31, 2004, which made organizations criminally liable for the acts of their representatives.
Swissair Flight 111, flying from New York to Geneva, crashed into the Atlantic about 8 kilometres off Peggys Cove on September 2, 1998, killing all 229 people aboard. The Transportation Safety Board found in 2003 that an in-flight fire spread through flammable materials in the aircraft and that flammability standards were inadequate.
Charged over catching and selling eels, Donald Marshall Jr. argued that the 1760–61 treaties protected his right to fish. In R. v. Marshall in 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed, recognizing a treaty right of the Mi'kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy to fish, hunt and gather for a moderate livelihood, and acquitted him.
2000 – today
Apologies, treaty fisheries, a mass shooting and a public inquiry, and record storms, fires and floods.
After more than two decades of failed plans, Canada and Nova Scotia announced a 10-year, $400-million cleanup of the Tar Ponds in May 2004, choosing in 2007 to solidify the contaminated sediment with cement. The work was completed in 2013 with the opening of Open Hearth Park on the former steel plant site.
Former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, an orphanage for Black children in Dartmouth, reported decades of physical, sexual and emotional abuse and neglect. Premier Stephen McNeil apologized on behalf of the province on October 10, 2014, a month after a $29-million settlement with former residents was finalized. A restorative public inquiry followed and delivered its final report, Journey to Light, in 2019.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedPremier Stephen McNeil formally apologized to former residents on October 10, 2014; the province finalized a $29-million settlement and created a restorative inquiry, which reported in November 2019.
Beginning in Portapique after assaulting his partner, a gunman wearing an RCMP-style uniform and driving a replica police cruiser shot people and set fires at 16 locations over about 13 hours on April 18–19, 2020. He killed 22 people, including RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson, before RCMP officers shot him at a gas station in Enfield. It was the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history, and police were criticized for not using the Alert Ready emergency alert system.
Citing the treaty right recognized in the 1999 Marshall decision, Sipekne'katik First Nation launched a self-regulated moderate livelihood lobster fishery in St. Marys Bay in September 2020. It led to an ongoing dispute over the self-regulated fishery and over how the treaty right should be regulated.
Fiona came ashore in eastern Nova Scotia early on September 24, 2022, with sustained winds of 165 km/h and the lowest air pressure ever recorded over land in Canada. About 80 per cent of Nova Scotia's power customers lost electricity, some for more than two weeks, and a man in Lower Prospect was swept out to sea. Insured losses across the region reached $846 million, the costliest weather event in Atlantic Canada's history.
The joint federal-provincial Mass Casualty Commission, led by Michael MacDonald, Leanne Fitch and Kim Stanton, released its final report, Turning the Tide Together, in Truro on March 30, 2023. It found many warning signs of the perpetrator's violence in earlier years and missed chances to intervene, and made 130 recommendations, more than half aimed at the RCMP.
⚖️ Established fact
Established factThe Commission found serious failures in the RCMP's response, public warnings and accountability, and called for fundamental change to RCMP oversight, processes and culture, a national review of public alerting, stronger firearms rules and a federal gender-based violence commissioner.
In late May 2023 the Tantallon fire in the Halifax area and a much larger fire in Shelburne County forced about 18,000 people from their homes. More than 200 homes and other structures were damaged or destroyed, mostly in northwest Halifax, and insured losses were estimated at $250 million. Officials called them the largest wildfires ever recorded in the province.
Between 200 and 250 millimetres of rain fell on parts of the province in about 28 hours on July 21–22, 2023, including a national record of 173 millimetres in six hours at Bedford. Four people died, including two young children; about 1,000 people were forced from their homes, and a province-wide state of emergency lasted about two and a half weeks.
In the November 26, 2024, election, Premier Tim Houston's Progressive Conservatives won 43 of 55 seats with 52.5 per cent of the vote, their first majority of the popular vote since 1984. Claudia Chender's NDP became the Official Opposition with nine seats, and the Liberals fell to two seats, the worst result in their history.
About this timeline
Nova Scotia lies within Mi'kma'ki, the homeland the Mi'kmaq have occupied since Palaeo-Indian hunters camped at Debert about 10,600 years ago. France founded Port-Royal in 1605, Britain took the peninsula in 1710, and the struggle that followed ended with the deportation of the Acadians and a wave of Planter, Loyalist, Black and Scottish settlement. A founding province of Canada, Nova Scotia built its economy on the sea, coal and steel, and its history includes the Halifax Explosion, deadly mine disasters, the destruction of Africville and the 2020 mass shooting.
9 moments on this page carry a government record note.
FAQ
Nova Scotia is Latin for 'New Scotland'. The name comes from a 1621 charter King James I granted to Sir William Alexander for a Scottish colony on land France called Acadie.
The province is part of Mi'kma'ki, the homeland of the Mi'kmaq. Palaeo-Indian hunters camped at Debert about 10,600 years ago, the oldest known archaeological site in the province.
Nova Scotia was one of the four founding provinces of Canada on July 1, 1867, although anti-Confederates won almost every seat in the elections that September.
Beginning in 1755, British colonial authorities deported Acadians who refused an unconditional oath of allegiance. By 1764 about 11,500 had been expelled and about 5,000 died. Canada designated July 28 as a day of commemoration in 2003.
About 2,000 people died and about 9,000 were injured when the munitions ship Mont-Blanc exploded in Halifax Harbour on December 6, 1917. The Halifax Explosion Remembrance Book confirms 1,782 victims by name.
Written from the sources linked on each moment: the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Parks Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, provincial and city archives, and others. Where governments acted wrongly, we say so and note whether it has been officially acknowledged, is established by the record, or is disputed. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.
Newfoundland and Labrador
Prince Edward Island
New Brunswick
Quebec
Ontario
Manitoba
Saskatchewan
Alberta
British Columbia
Northwest Territories