Singing superstar Shania Twain and the late Saskatchewan curler Sandra Schmirler are among the notable Canadians who will be celebrated with postage stamps in 2014. Stamps will also be issued to mark 100-years of the Komagata Maru and RMS Empress.
To coincide with the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, a series of stamps will be issued in February commemorating notable Canadian athletes.
They include Schmirler, who skipped Canada to the first gold medal in women’s curling at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. She died of cancer in 2000.
Another stamp will honour freestyle-skiing pioneer Sarah Burke of Barrie, Ont., who died in a training accident in Utah in 2012.
Figure skater Barbara Ann Scott of Ottawa, who won an Olympic gold medal in 1948 and who died last year, will also be so honoured.
And several country music stars will be feted by Canada Post in a series to be issued in July — including Twain, Tommy Hunter, k.d. lang, Renee Martel and Hank Snow.
Another stamp will highlight the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship carrying 376 people from India which was refused landing rights in Vancouver in May 1914.
In addition, there will be one to mark the 100th anniversary of Canada’s worst peacetime maritime tragedy, also in May 1914. Just over 1,000 people died when the RMS Empress of Ireland sank in the St. Lawrence River, near Rimouski, Que., after colliding with a Norwegian vessel.
Other new stamps will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Royal Ontario Museum, the 75th anniversary of the National Film Board, the return of the CFL to Ottawa and the UNESCO World Heritage Site series.
Canada Post’s Black History series will add two stamps in 2014 to recognize two neighbourhoods with significant links to black history — Africville in Halifax and Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver.