Catherine Cortez Masto made history on November 8, 2016, winning Nevada’s Senate seat and becoming the first Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate. The former state attorney general, recruited by retiring Harry Reid, rode strong early-voting turnout in Clark County to victory. After 227 years, the chamber finally had a seat it had never held before.
California legalized recreational cannabis in November 2016, when 57% of voters approved Proposition 64 — making the nation’s largest state, and one of the world’s biggest economies, an adult-use market. The measure built on California’s 1996 medical cannabis law and helped shift legalization from fringe idea to mainstream American policy.
In November 2016, Oregon voters elected Kate Brown governor, making her the first openly LGBT person — and first openly bisexual person — elected governor of any U.S. state. Brown had already spent decades in Oregon politics, winning the Secretary of State race in 2008. Her victory offered lasting proof that identity alone would not disqualify a candidate at the highest levels.
The California desert got a landmark blueprint in September 2016, when the federal government finalized a plan covering 10.8 million acres of public land. Eight years in the making, it carves out zones where solar, wind, and geothermal can scale up — potentially 27,000 megawatts — while permanently shielding wildlife habitat and conservation lands from development.
Massachusetts rewrote its equal pay law in the summer of 2016, updating a 1945 statute for the first time in over 70 years. The bill, signed by Governor Charlie Baker, became the first in the nation to ban employers from asking applicants about salary history. Within two years, more than a dozen states had followed its lead.
The Great Bear Rainforest agreement, signed in February 2016, protected 85% of old-growth trees across 6.4 million hectares of British Columbia’s coast — a temperate rainforest roughly the size of Ireland. Reached after nearly 20 years of negotiation, it placed 26 First Nations at the center as co-managers, embedding Indigenous authority into conservation law.
Of the six countries in the Americas where transmission of the debilitating disease was present in the 1990s, Guatemala accounted for about 41% of the 568,000 people at risk.
Ranked-choice voting went statewide for the first time in the U.S. when Maine voters approved it on Election Day 2016, passing the ballot initiative with about 52 percent support. The shift came after two governor’s races won with pluralities, including one victory at just 37 percent. A small state quietly rethinking what majority rule means.
Basic income came to Ontario in 2016, when the province launched one of North America’s most ambitious poverty experiments. About 4,000 low-income residents in Hamilton, Thunder Bay, and Lindsay received monthly payments, and early results pointed to better mental health and food security. Cut short in 2018, the pilot still reshaped how the world debates a guaranteed income floor.
High-speed internet became a basic right in Canada in December 2016, when regulators declared broadband as essential as phone or postal service. The ruling set a national target of 50 Mbps download speeds for every household and created a $750 million fund to reach rural, remote, and Indigenous communities long left behind by private providers.
