Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute. While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

Alice De Raey is a newly minted attorney who joins the chaotic world of criminal justice in Toronto. She's exposed to the seamier side of life, the backroom deals that make the system work accompanied by the usual eccentric characters.

Guy Luthan, a British doctor working at a hospital in New York, starts making unwelcome enquiries when the body of a man who died in his emergency room disappears. After the trail leads Luthan to the door of an eminent surgeon at the hospital, Luthan soon finds himself in extreme danger people who want the hospital's secret to remain undiscovered.

Young poker players must navigate their past along with the best players in the world to win.

Two high school girls wander off during a class trip to the White House and meet President Richard Nixon. They become the official dog walkers for Nixon's dog Checkers, and become his secret advisors during the Watergate scandal.

A wheelchair-bound young girl returns to her father's estate after ten years, and although she's told he's away, she keeps seeing his dead body on the estate.

In the season of giving, the department took his badge. Criminals took his wife. Now, one cop is taking matters into his own hands

Television movie updating Charles Dickens' story, "A Christmas Carol." Businesswoman Ebenita Scrooge treats her employees and customers poorly. She has no time for Christmas or the holiday spirit. On Christmas Eve, she is visited by the ghost of her dead partner Maude Marley and then by other spirits who remind her of her happy past and chronicle the bitterness and greed that have taken over her life. At last, she is shown her own death and funeral. No one is there to mourn her. This revelation shocks her into opening her heart and her checkbook.

Two neighboring families in Florida, one black and one white, struggle with the problems of race, poverty, prejudice, and absent fathers, as their children become friends over the course of one summer and fall.

The story of three items left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall: a pencil holder, a sheriff's badge, and an electric guitar. Each item connects the living with the dead and are left as either memorials or to heal the wounds of war.

Fanny Kemble is a famous star of the English stage, but while touring the United States, she gives up her career to marry wealthy American Pierce Butler. Moving with him from Philadelphia to his Georgia plantation, Fanny sees slavery firsthand, and her outrage leads her to help the family's slaves in open defiance of her spouse. Undaunted by the consequences, Fanny eventually writes a book that strengthens the anti-slavery movement.

A Milwaukee Women's Health Clinic becomes the battleground between pro-choice activists and right-to-life demonstrators over and Easter Sunday weekend and involves three different women, each representing different sides of the issue.

A First Amendment scholar is recruited by an attorney to sue a publishing company after a hit man commits a triple murder by allegedly following a how-to manual the book company published. They set out to put the company on trial for providing blueprints for would-be murderers. Arguing that the publisher is not protected by the First Amendment, the crusading lawyers seek monetary damages for the victims' families.

A single mother plagued by alcohol and drug addictions is sent with her children from Chicago to her ancestral home in the Mississippi Delta, to live with her uncle and aunt for the summer.

The Hayworth family lives in a Quaker territory in up-state New York. The matriarch, Emily runs the local bank. Years before, she and her family took in troubled, young Jimmy Flood to protect him from his abusive father. Though one of Emily's grown daughters, Janet feels she did not belong in the quiet, devoutly religious community and left the Quakers, Emily believed that her family ties stayed strong. Real trouble comes to the family when Jimmy Flood returns to the house after busting out of prison with the help of Digby and Lester, and he takes Emily's family hostage in exchange for $4 million. If Emily fails to secure the money in time, her entire family will lose their lives. Determined to resolve the potentially deadly conflict in a peaceful manner, Emily calls an emergency meeting of the town friends to work out a solution and save her family.

General Jacques Dextraze of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force rescues a group of hostages from Katangan rebels.