AwardS & SPECIAL PROGRAMs

Student Guest Program

The Canadian Club of Vancouver has been promoting Canadian identity and nurturing a sense of nationhood in a highly diverse population since its creation in 1906. Its programs are designed to educate, inform, and stimulate thought about issues of national significance.

From the outset, the Club has been closely associated with students and educational institutions. Today, its well-established student sponsorship program enables many hundreds of young people per year to meet distinguished Canadians of extraordinary accomplishment in various fields of endeavour. Through this program, the Club solicits sponsors for student places at the luncheons. Individuals, companies and organizations can and do accept to become sponsors for students, sometimes on a one-off basis, sometimes on an ongoing one.

Sponsors can choose to support students from a particular school, whether public or private, or can ask the Club office to do the selection for them. Some sponsors choose to attend the luncheons in order to host the students themselves or they make arrangements through our office for someone else to serve as table host. The sponsors’ generosity is always acknowledged in the printed program and from the podium.

Canada SOARS Awards

To instill pride of country in the next generation, the Canadian Club of Vancouver runs the Canada SOARS Awards Program. This program recognizes and rewards exemplary achievements of secondary grade 11 and 12 students and youth in the categories of Academics, Arts, and Community Service. Applicants must document their achievements and submit a written essay on a subject which is identified by the Canadian Club for each successive year. Details are usually posted in February and the deadline is usually in April. A panel of judges selects winners in each category from among several hundred applicants and also picks one for an overall Award of Excellence. Winners are invited to attend a special luncheon or reception in their honour, during which they are presented with cheques ranging in value from $200 to $750 as well as with commemorative plaques.

At the initiative of Andrew Winstanley, the Canadian Club of Vancouver created Le prix Baldwin-Lafontaine/the Baldwin-Lafontaine Award in 2003. This award is designed to honour organizations and/or individuals for their contributions to the preservation and promotion of the French language and culture in British Columbia.

Unique to our Club, the Baldwin-Lafontaine Award commemorates the alliance of two statesmen, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, which led to the establishment of Canada’s democratic system. To be eligible for this honour, nominees will have demonstrated, among other things, a commitment to bilingualism as well as undertaken projects or activities which bring together Anglophones and Francophones.

Le Prix Trudeau

Every year, the Canadian Club of Vancouver awards this monetary prize to the Grade XI winner of the Concours d’arts oratoire – category French Language Immersion Programme. The Concours d’arts oratoire is a Province-wide public-speaking contest that takes place annually –in French—at a university or college in the Lower Mainland. The Club is seeking sponsors for the Grade XI winners in the categories Le programme francophone (for native French speakers) and Core French Program.