On September 1st, 1972, patrons of Montreal’s Blue Bird Café and the Wagon Wheel, the country and western bar above the café, were celebrating the end of another summer. In the main entrance to the Wagon Wheel, however, 3 young men, drunk and upset over being refused entry to the bar began a fire on the staircase. With one exit now blocked by fire, victims sought out other means of escape. However, conflicting city regulations had left the Wagon Wheel with too few fire exits. This left only two escape routes, through the kitchen onto a foldaway fire escape, and through the window in the ladies washroom onto a car parked below. Due to these errors in judgement, 37 people were unable to escape the fire and smoke that night. Fire escape regulations have since been standardised to prevent another disaster of this magnitude.

On July 5th, 1970, Air Canada’s Flight 621 from Montreal to Los Angeles, called the “Champagne Flight” due to its typical fun-loving, holiday crowd, was set to make a scheduled stop in Toronto when disaster struck. A minor misunderstanding in the cockpit over landing procedures caused the first officer to deploy the ground spoilers manually while in the air. The planed nosed downwards and struck the runway briefly before lifting off again. The captain managed to pull the damaged plane around for another attempt at landing, but as he did so the plane began to disintegrate in the air while an explosion blew off the right wing, killing all 100 passengers and 6 crewmembers on board.