Keene resident and historian John Jennings is one of 47 people who have been appointed to the Order of Ontario for 2019 and 2020.
Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell announced the appointments to the province’s highest honour on Friday (January 1). The Order of Ontario honours individuals whose exceptional achievements have left a lasting legacy in the province.
“One of Canada’s foremost historians of canoe history, Dr. John Jennings was a central figure in the creation and development of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough — now a nationally recognized Canadian institution, which educates Canadians about the contribution of the canoe — a national iconic symbol,” reads a media release announcing the appointments. “Dr. Jennings book, The Canoe: A Living Tradition is regarded as a seminal contribution to the field.”
Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Jennings moved to Peterborough and began teaching history at Trent University in Peterborough in 1976, where he was introduced to canoeing.
“I started becoming fascinated with the canoe and took my first canoe trips when I came to Trent and got involved with a small group of faculty who were passionate canoeists,” he said in a 1999 interview with Jim Barber published in Trent magazine.
That group of Trent professors eventually turned into a committee (and then a board of trustees) that worked to fulfill the dream of University of Toronto professor Kirk Wipper to create a national canoe museum (Wipper had collected more than 600 canoes). The committee’s original idea in 1982 was to establish the museum on Trent’s main campus, but that plan was shelved.
“We officially acquired the collection from Professor Wipper in 1995, but up until that time we stored canoes in barns around the Peterborough area,” Jennings said in his Trent magazine interview. “We realized that a permanent site was needed.”
In 1990, the city of Peterborough and the Otonabee Region Conservation Authority offered the board four acres of land on the Trent Severn Waterway, near Beavermead Park, as a site for the museum. (Ironically, this is now going to be the location of the museum’s new facility after the museum abandoned the site beside the Peterborough Life Lock due to chemical contamination of the soil).
Despite fundraising for buildings on the site, the board was no closer to constructing the new museum. Then, Outboard Marine Corporation, which has closed its factory in Peterborough in 1990, offered the board all of its property and buildings on Monaghan Road.
The Canadian Canoe Museum was established at the Monaghan Road location in 1997. The following year, Jennings was featured in a New York Times story about the new museum.
“The canoe is really the closest thing Canada has to a national symbol,” Jennings said in that story.
Here’s the full list of appointees to the Order of Ontario:
2020 Appointees to the Order of Ontario
- Daniel Allen
- Joseph Raymond Buncic
- Michael DeGasperis
- Raymond Desjardins
- Ernest Eves
- Hershell Ezrin
- Carlo Fidani
- Karen Goldenberg
- Michael D. Harris
- Ellis Jacob
- Jing Jiang
- Shana Kelley
- André Lapierre
- Dale Lastman
- André M. Levesque
- Peter Liu
- Hazel McCallion
- Arden McGregor
- Janet McKelvy
- George McLean
- Hon. Rosemary Moodie
- Hon. Robert. W. Runciman
- Marilyn Sonley
- Ahmad Reza Tabrizi
- Hon. Karen Weiler
2019 Appointees to the Order of Ontario
- Melanie Adrian
- Roland “Roly” Armitage
- Allan Carswell
- Helen Ching-Kircher
- John Colangeli
- Nancy Coldham
- Sean Conway
- Clare Copeland
- Barbara Croall
- Lisa Farano
- Geoff Fernie
- Allan Fox
- John Freund
- Susan Hay
- John Jennings
- Marlys Koschinsky
- James W. Leech
- Audrey Loeb
- Dani Reiss
- Janis Rotman
- Linda Silver Dranoff
- Joan Sutton Straus
The Lieutenant Governor will bestow the honour upon the newest appointees during an investiture ceremony at Queen’s Park, at a point in time in the future, when Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health deems gatherings possible once again in the province.
