Take out a map of Canada and you will be surprised how many of its queens are from the middle of nowhere. The winners have come from dozens of small towns and cities, as Miss Canada really was a rural phenomenon. City girls never lined up in droves to win the crown, except in its novelty early days. This was especially true in the later years of the pageant, where small-town girls dominated the stage. Urban centers like Quebec City and Ottawa were unable to field contestants, and were soon replaced by strange and exotic towns like Winkler, Valleyfield and North Battleford. (Although it is fair to note that in the very early days, when the pageant was still a preliminary-free affair, some contestants came from places so obscure, most government officials were likely unaware that the cities lay in their ridings. Most notable are the reps from the Saskatchewan hamlets of Delisle, Wadena and Kincaid in the 1950s.)
Looking at the nation as a whole, British Columbia is well represented. with three winners from Victoria (including the vamp who reigned for almost two years), two from Vancouver, one from Kelowna, and two others who won as Miss Interior of B.C. Alberta has bragging rights as the beauty capital of the Prairies, boasting three winners from Edmonton and two from Calgary. Only once has a breadbasket beauty from Saskatchewan copped the title: She was a Prince Albert native representing Saskatoon in 1976.
Two Miss Manitobas have won the title, with a Miss Winnipeg once snagging the crown, giving the Pan American Games host province an uneven three queens. Quebec has produced three champions from the metro Montréal area, with a fourth teary-eyed victor who won as Miss Laurentians.
One girl each from Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick have bagged the crown, with two winners from Nova Scotia rounding out the Atlantic region. Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories finished as perennial pageant duds, though a St. John’s girl did win the rival Miss Dominion of Canada contest in 1964. If your heart lies in the Territories, however, no need to lose all your dignity: A girl from Whitehorse who fled Edmonton with her boyfriend, presumably not to hit it big in the Klondike, won the crown as Miss Yukon in 1955.
Ontario has bragging rights for having produced the most Miss Canada winners. This might have something to do with the fact that for the first several years before organized preliminaries were commonplace, often more than 90 percent of the contestants came from Ontario. (Ontario also has one-third of Canada’s population.) In 1951, every single girl hailed from the Toronto or Hamilton areas, and a year later, a lone entry from Vancouver was the only non-Ontarian in the bunch. It made for some interesting public relations maneuvers for pageant organizers, especially since the winner’s true title at the time, "Miss Somewhere in the Middle of Southern Ontario Representing Canada," wouldn’t fit on a sash.
Four national queens hail from Toronto. A fifth is from Newtonbrook, a hamlet four miles north of the city, and another West Coast native lived in Toronto for just two months before winning the title. The most successful pageant mecca, outside of Toronto, is London, which boasts three winners, one of whom, Karen Baldwin from 1982, went on to become the only Canadian to win Miss Universe. She remains the only Canuck to have won a major international beauty contest. Reinforcing the idea of Miss Canada as a maiden of the soil, girls from Courtland, Agincourt and Cornwall have all won the title, yet the trendy, strip mall-loving cities of Windsor, Ottawa-Hull, Niagara Falls, St. Catherine’s, Thunder Bay and Kitchener-Waterloo have each had their moment in the sun. And we cannot forget that one winner from Burlington — as to which category she fits in, we will let the Canadians in the crowd draw their own conclusion.
