Who We Are

The Empire Club Foundation was set up over 50 years ago to help widen the reach of the Empire Club, Canada’s most respected and well-known speaker’s podium, and distribute the content of its speeches and events to educational organizations across Canada.

By gaining access to the content presented at the Club, secondary and post-secondary students become better prepared to take their places as informed citizens and make strong decisions in the realm of public policy. This resource is also a valuable source of original content for researchers, journalists and all Canadians interested in accessing information that had had little coverage to date outside of the Empire Club.

What We Do

The Foundation promotes and distributes the Club’s historical and recent speeches to educational organizations and keeps the archives of the Empire Club up to date and easy to consult. This digital library goes all the way back to the Club’s origins in 1903 and includes a robust search feature to facilitate research by students, teachers, and anyone wanting to know more about any topic covered in the many thousands of speeches contained in these archives.

Speeches from recent years are also available through video and audio recordings. As speakers addressing the Club tend to be experts in their fields, these make an ideal pedagogical tool for teachers and professors to delve into the exploration of a topic.

Two years ago, in addition to promoting this digital library to educational facilities across Canada, the Empire Club Foundation produced Teacher's Guides for two of the Club’s events and offered these guides to schools, colleges and universities. This was a highly successful first-time initiative and was used by several educational facilities either while the events were live, or by streaming the archived events to students, while using the Teacher’s Guide. Following that, the Foundation began producing Newsletters which tie current events to historical speeches at the Club. For both of these initiatives the result was the same…young Canadians who normally would not be aware of Empire Club content, were enriched by viewing an event live or post-event through our digital library, and by engaging in a curated discussion about that topic with their teacher and other students.

Teachers and professors find this primary source material elevates the discussion in academic settings.

When you donate to the Empire Club Foundation, you are essentially allowing the content generated by the Empire Club to be seen, discussed and debated by young Canadians and researchers.