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29 Articles

Dear MACLEAN’S

DEFYING DEVELOPERS I am so proud of Chuck Fipke for fighting hard to protect his small piece of paradise from greedy developers (“Kelowna showdown,” March 2022). Despite being surrounded by massive condos, Mr. Fipke stays in his home, where he remembers what a beautiful natural paradise Kelowna, B.C., used to be. He is doing what so many others should have done: stay on their land to protect the natural landscape, wildlife habitat and stunning views of the shoreline. The money offered by developers is tempting, but what good will money do when our lives are deprived of the very things that sustain us? I am in a similar situation, where my childhood home in Prince Edward County, Ont., was once a hidden gem, with many wild spaces that allowed nature…

OPENINGS April. Narcisse Snake Dens. At the Narcisse Snake Dens in Narcisse, Man., what might best be described as Indiana Jones’s worst nightmare unfolds every spring. The dens are home to tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes: largely harmless dark-green serpents decorated with streaks of yellow and red. The metre-long snakes live in limestone pits around the town, north of Winnipeg, in an area protected by the provincial government. Conservation efforts over the past 20 years have allowed snake populations to flourish, and Narcisse’s natural caverns and wetlands make for a garter snake’s dream ecosystem, chock-full of amphibians and small mammals to eat. The snakes hide in the pits over the winter, sheltered from the elements, and emerge during the spring in droves, often appearing as writhing balls of…

A case for the Maud squad

One day in the early 1950s, Van Davis Odell pulled off Highway 1 in Marshalltown, N.S., to make what would prove a fortuitous purchase. The Manhattan businesswoman was driving around with two friends in search of crafts and antiques, and was attracted by a black sign on the side of a small, white shack that read “Paintings for sale.” Inside, a woman with gnarled hands and a sweet manner showed the women paintings of cheery and charming scenes: rows of kittens, pairs of long-lashed oxen and horse-drawn sleighs winding through the countryside. The artist was Maud Lewis, now regarded as one of Canada’s greatest folk painters. But on this day, Odell paid a mere $5 each for several pieces and drove them 10 minutes down the road to the cottage…

A case for the Maud squad

Seventy-four per cent of Canadians now live in big cities, and downtown cores across the country saw some of its fastest population growth between 2016 and 2021: CORE TRENDS A pandemic exodus to farms and oceanside properties slowed the rise of urban Canada; downtown Montreal and Vancouver had slight population declines over the 12-month period starting July 1, 2020. But even COVID-19 didn’t reverse cities’ overall long-term growth. Source: Statistics Canada…

Gary Trent Jr. on the unexpected scoring streak that won him a place in Raptors history

IT WAS CRAZY. We had five games in eight days. I knew of the record, but I didn’t know the magnitude. The Heat were No. 1 in the East at the time, and we’re fighting for a playoff spot. We’re trying to prove we’re not pushovers. We’re ready as a play-off team. I remember at one point there were only 100 fans in Scotiabank Arena [due to COVID restrictions]—and they were cheering my name. My dad was in attendance. He came to Toronto to watch us. I know he loves to see all the hard work pay off. He’s pretty quiet in the stands for the most part, but I always give him eye contact. I’ll come talk to him at half-time and he’ll tell me something I need to…

Gary Trent Jr. on the unexpected scoring streak that won him a place in Raptors history

It’s a wonderful meta-life

I FOUR TECHNOLOGICAL overlords get it right, the future will be beautiful. Picture a young man living in a home as lovely as any he can imagine; the furnishings are modern and his windows overlook scenes of tropical waterfalls and the ocean perpetually at sunset. Every item he could wish to collect lines the walls of this space, and he can indulge every passion. He can call his friends to join him any time, and every movie, artwork, video game, television show or book ever produced is instantly available. He needs to leave this space, this metaverse, only to sleep or eat or tend to other unavoidable physical needs. But when he removes his futuristic Oculus headset, he is suddenly reintegrated into a very different—physical—reality. In the “real” world, he…

It’s a wonderful meta-life

EACH WINTER, Nicolas Martin and his father, Marco, snowshoe to a publicly owned forest near the Restigouche River, about 300 km north of Fredericton, where the snowdrifts are as tall as they are. They stop at each mature sugar maple to drill holes—some 30,000 in all—into which they tap nozzles called spiles. These connect to tubes that flow sap to the boiling room when spring arrives, and the team lights their evaporator to boil the sap for maple syrup. In January, a group of maple syrup producers, including the Martins, marched through Saint-Quentin, the heart of New Brunswick syrup country, calling on their government to lease them more of the sugar bush. One syrup producer, Denis Côté, told a newspaper, “They’re clear-cutting everything.” In Quebec last summer, meanwhile, syrup makers…

‘OK, see you’: the Toronto location where the now-iconic Kim’s Convenience series was filmed is up for sale It wasn’t always called Kim’s Convenience. When the Korean owners purchased the Toronto corner lot in 1987—living in the three-bedroom apartment upstairs while running the store below—it was called Mimi’s Variety. Then, in the mid-2010s, a CBC location manager came along and wanted their storefront for an upcoming comedy series—and the street corner soon became a selfie hot spot. After five seasons on air—the show was cancelled last year—the days of Kim’s Convenience (the store) are likely numbered. The location has great redevelopment potential, says realtor Greg Stavros, and the name alone has helped generate international buying interest. “The owners have come to the road now where they want to retire—and take…

SEEING GREEN Energy prices are on the rise: not great news if you’re filling up your car, but a relief to Canada’s oil and gas industry. Even more encouraging news: Canada’s top oil sands CEOs are discussing how to bring greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. SILVER LININGS Plunging hospitalization numbers suggest Canada has come out the other side of the Omicron wave. New research offers some hope for the future too: scientists are using a supercomputer to identify new viruses that could pose a future threat. And in B.C., researchers have developed a coating for materials that can kill COVID-19. CANCON RULES Canadians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell won applause for their stand against Spotify. In other music news: the University of New Brunswick is featured in…

Kirsten Hillman talks with Marie-Danielle Smith about meeting with presidents, combating U.S. protectionism and the possible return of Donald Trump Kirsten Hillman was appointed Canada’s ambassador to the United States during a strikingly different time. It was March 2020. Donald Trump was still the U.S. president, and we were only two weeks into the coronavirus pandemic as declared by the World Health Organization. Two years later, Hillman is cultivating relationships with a very different administration under Joe Biden, and though a path out of the pandemic is still top of mind, new cross-border trade irritants and global threats have emerged. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You’ve been in Washington for a long time, including pre-pandemic, under the Trump administration. How have things changed since Biden became…

HILLMAN’S LIBRARY

Talking to Canadians, by Rick Mercer “I’m a huge fan of Rick’s and the book brought back so many memories, not just of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, but of other iconic experiences of our generation, like his hilarious portrayal of the Canada Fitness Awards Program.” Twilight of Democracy, by Anne Applebaum “Applebaum explores events in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere to explain how autocrats take hold, and how democracies decline.” A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools “This abridged version of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada should be read by every Canadian.”…

HILLMAN’S LIBRARY

BUILD BACK BLUNDER

IT’S TRUE THAT, for a lot of people, the sight of the hot tub was hard to take. At some point during the first week of the Siege of Ottawa, the little plaza across Wellington Street from Parliament’s Centre Block took on some of the atmosphere of a carnival, complete with an inflatable hot tub. With guys in it. Steam rising from hot water. Nearby, a newly built wooden shed served as a community kitchen for the Freedom Convoy protesters. Also, there were bouncy castles. And a concert stage. Not everyone in Ottawa felt the party mood. The Freedom Convoy rode into Canada’s fourth-largest city at the end of January on a stack of threats, some more subtle than others, to Canada’s civil order and to people who had the…

BUILD BACK BLUNDER

THE BELLOWING HONKS of freedom nearly drowned out Pierre Poilievre’s voice as he stood on a frigid overpass in late January, cheering the truck convoy on its way to lay siege to downtown Ottawa. Wearing a Canada Goose parka and aviator sunglasses, with his normally shellacked sidepart blustered into an unrecognizable tuft by the wind, he grinned into a video camera. Poilievre rhymed off an expansive array of grievances he said the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protesters were battling, in addition to vaccine mandates: high grocery prices, small businesses in peril, depressed and isolated teenagers, a political and media elite that ignores anyone they don’t like. Poilievre, a long-time Conservative MP, wore a pair of puffy, red-and-white maple leaf mittens that gave him a soft cartoon quality weirdly at odds with…

Gambling with house MONEY

IN MAY 2021, Molly Fleming and her brother Matthew leaped into southern Ontario’s pandemic-fuelled real estate frenzy, buying a postwar bungalow in Hamilton they intended to use as an investment property. First-time homebuyers both, they paid above the $500,000 asking price for the modest property. A couple of months after they took possession, their new upstairs tenant called to complain about a musty smell wafting from the closet. Molly went to investigate, and soon spotted other worrying issues they hadn’t noticed on their only walk-through before they bid: a water stain on the living room ceiling; a shower window with a rotting wooden frame. They called in a professional mould inspector, who confirmed the bad news. “There was a lot of mould,” Matthew says. “It was significantly worse than we thought.…

Gambling with house MONEY

WHAT SARAH POLLEY WANTS YOU TO KNOW

I grew up in Montreal in the ’80s, without cable TV. My dad and I did everything we could to occasionally pick up the PBS channel from Vermont. This involved a small Brechtian production. We put piles of old Yellow Pages on the radiator to lower and raise the television to a spot where the reception was clearer. Then there was a whole to-do with the antennae, which often involved sticking it out the window and using masking tape to hold it in place. Sometimes it would find a lucky spot where it could sit for a week or two. No one dared touch it. The rest of the time we watched CBC television. And those shows were part of who we were. The first time we saw Sarah Polley…

WHAT SARAH POLLEY WANTS YOU TO KNOW

In October 2021, Robert Munsch spoke publicly for the first time about his dementia diagnosis. Munsch, the 76-year-old author of nearly 100 children’s books, told the CBC he was no longer able to write, drive or ride a bicycle. He had stopped visiting kids at their schools, something he’d done throughout his career, all across North America. What he did still have, he said, were his stories. “The stories will be the last thing to go,” he told Shelagh Rogers. Many of those stories were inspired by children Munsch met on his travels and through correspondence with readers. A picture of a little girl in a hot-air balloon drawn by a reader who longed to escape the everyday monotony of her family’s Chinese restaurant was the spark for Where Is…

ZARQA NAWAZ’S LEAP OF FAITH

THINGS WERE GOING great for Zarqa Nawaz. Little Mosque on the Prairie, the trailblazing CBC series she created and the first Muslim-centric sitcom on western TV, was a hit for six seasons, airing its finale in 2012. Two years later, her light-hearted memoir, Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, was released to critical acclaim, cementing her reputation as one of Canada’s most beloved comedians. Then Zarqa Nawaz’s phone stopped ringing as much it used to. For almost a decade, she lived through a period of professional uncertainty that felt like a test of faith. She chipped away at a provocative satirical novel—a comedic spin on ISIS, and America’s policy in the Middle East—but had trouble selling it to publishers, who were concerned about its risky subject matter. She tried…

ZARQA NAWAZ’S LEAP OF FAITH

RISING UP TO PAY THEIR DUES

THE SCENE There’s a profound sense of pride as the porters gather and walk to work in uniform. The camera tracks through their neighbourhood, pausing on a porter named Glenford, played by co-creator Arnold Pinnock, as he drops knowledge on the corner. “Glenford is a man of wisdom,” says Morais, and a fiscal wizard. “Undoubtedly, he’s telling the newspaper seller how to take a penny and make a few more off of it.” His foot is perched on his shine kit, a standard piece of equipment for porters at the time. THE SET Winnipeg played itself in the show, and it also stands in for Montreal’s St. Antoine neighbourhood (then known as the “Harlem of the North”), as well as Chicago and Detroit. “People were living in these buildings while…

RISING UP TO PAY THEIR DUES

FOLLOWING A HUTCH

BRIAN DOUCETTE’S YARD was strewn with old tables and wagon wheels for a Saturday morning garage sale in the summer of 2017 when an older couple pulled up to his red Victorian home near the coastal town of Shelburne, N.S. The couple showed Doucette a piece of paper with a photograph of a 1930s dark-stained oak hutch. Would he be interested in buying it? “Sure,” said the antique buff, who is now 54. He needed furniture for his newly purchased farmhouse. Two days later, Doucette paid the couple $350 and loaded the heavy, marble-topped cabinet onto the back of his black F150. The New York couple said they’d received it as a wedding gift in 1975. Their friend had bought it from a family friend who was an antique dealer,…

FOLLOWING A HUTCH

DANNY HUSSEY and Bridget Thompson opened Central Art Garage in Ottawa in 2012, when they met and became a couple. Both are artists; he was working in a framing shop, where he’d organize the odd exhibition. “She felt like we could be doing better,” Hussey says. They got a sweet deal on a garage in a residential neighbourhood near Ottawa’s tiny Chinatown, next door to Nick’s Service Centre (“We Feature Valvoline”). The landlord liked the contrast—art next to auto parts—so their rent has never gone up. They told themselves this could be their studio space. They could run art exhibitions. Picture framing would help them make ends meet. That would have been that, except Hussey and Thompson began indulging a serious interest in contemporary Indigenous art. It’s never been their…

THE CULTURAL SPURN

WHAT IS WRONG with the working class? That question has been furiously debated among left-leaning intellectuals since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Many of them think workers have consistently voted against their own material interests and even—as in the case of anti-mask and anti-vax protests—their own safety. The question has been asked with increasing urgency in the 21st century as the migration of anti-elite populism from its original home on the left side of the political spectrum to the right has accelerated, hitting a crescendo in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. and the triumph of Brexit in the U.K. The short answer usually on offer is: culture. Whether defined broadly as the entirety of a way of life (the sum of social…

THE CULTURAL SPURN

305 LOST BUILDINGS OF CANADA by Raymond Biesinger and Alex Bozikovic Goose Lane Editions, March 22 Theatres, hotels and industrial plants from St. John’s to Victoria come to life again in this engrossing work of social history by architecture critic Bozikovic and illustrator Biesinger. Fire and the mid-20th-century mania for “urban renewal” may top the list of direct causes, but a host of factors were involved, including technological revolution and changing tastes. ANIMAL PERSON: STORIES by Alexander MacLeod McClelland & Stewart, April 5 This exquisite collection includes “Lagomorph,” the moving and occasionally hilarious tale of a man alone in the world except for his family’s pet rabbit. Other gems: “Everything Underneath” and “Once Removed,” in which MacLeod explores the ways humans “parcel out” their love. THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE…

THIS NEXT ONE GOES OUT TO…

For Martha Wainwright, music has always been the family business. Daughter to Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, sister to Rufus Wainwright and niece to Anna McGarrigle—all prominent singersongwriters—Martha has her own critically acclaimed body of work. That includes the 2005 hit Bloody Mother F-cking Asshole, a song rooted in the year rebellious, 14-year old Martha lived alone with her often absent or indifferent father. Now, in one of the more aptly titled memoirs around, Stories I Might Regret Telling You (Random House Canada, March 29), Wainwright offers an unvarnished take on growing up in a dysfunctional but supremely talented family.—Brian Bethune My father got to a song I’d always thought was a bit stupid and mean-spirited, but more than that, I felt bad for its subject. It’s called I’d…

THIS NEXT ONE GOES OUT TO…

IF I WERE A RICH KID

LAST FALL, Kennedy Cooper (@kennedytcooper) set alight a vehement debate when they tweeted: “‘Generational Wealth’ isn’t just inheriting a pile of money, it’s also things like whose parents are able to help you pay your first deposit on a rental, whose parents can help you out when your car stops running, whose parents can just send you food when you’re low.” Cooper’s argument drew both support and criticism as people attempted to define an idea often coloured by very personal experience. Those who agreed with Cooper leaned into the compounding effects of privilege with responses like: “Yes! Generational wealth entitles that family to stability… I don’t know many ppl that live in their family home or ever even had a family home.” Critics accused Kennedy of diluting the definition of…

IF I WERE A RICH KID

PROBLEM PUPPIES

“I’M NOT TAKING HIM IF he’s this anxious,” said a potential puppy-sitter we found on Rover, an Airbnb-style app that matches pet owners with walkers and boarders. I couldn’t blame her: our pandemic puppy had just spent 20 minutes barking at her while we tried to exchange pleasantries during our first meeting in a neighbourhood park. Any attempt she made at engaging our dog was met with a lunge and a growl. “He’s really sweet once you get to know him,” I said, laughing nervously. “Have you tried CBD oil?” she responded. Back in March 2020, when COVID first hit and so many of us were sent home to work remotely, memes with grinning dogs started circulating, proclaiming how at least the canines of the world were enjoying everyone suddenly…

PROBLEM PUPPIES

VIDEO GAMERS WHO prize the classic versions of vintage games like Frogger or Pong—complete with original colour schemes, theme music and pixellated graphics—have a problem: modern systems don’t support these games anymore. The outmoded software can sometimes be found for free on websites like Abandonia, the Classic Gaming Network (CGN) or Home of the Underdogs, along with emulators to make the games work on today’s computers or consoles. The catch? Distributing or downloading copyrighted software without permission is illegal. “It’s a grey area,” says François Lamarre (a pseudonym), a member of the collective that runs the France-based site My Abandonware. The term “abandonware” started to appear in 1996, and while it can be broadly applied to any software no longer supported or distributed by its owners, it’s mostly used in…

THE HAPPY BLUES

THINK OF THE colour blue. What do you see? The endless azure of a tropical ocean? The crisp blue sky of a frigid, sunny day? The solid navy of school and military uniforms? We correlate colours with feelings—cheery yellow, sweet pink—but blue is a contrarian. It runs the gamut from the melancholy of blues music to the serenity of the sea. Colour symbolism can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where blue represented rebirth and fertility; the first published work on colour as it relates to emotions came millennia later. In 1810, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Theory of Colours, saying about blue: “Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.” This discrepancy is being felt now as we move from the navy shades…

THE HAPPY BLUES

1 FOLK HERO “A case for the Maud squad,” p.12 Our coordinates for this story lead to a faithful replica of Maud Lewis’s house just a few kilometres from where the original stood. It was built by Murray Ross, whose aunt and uncle lived across the road from Lewis, and who vividly remembers stepping into the shingle-sided shack to meet her when he was 10 years old. Ross welcomes visitors, and even learned to paint so he could recreate the constellation of flowers, birds and butterflies the artist daubed directly onto her walls and windows. Lewis’s actual home—in its humble entirety—stands inside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. 2 LUCKY CHARM “The Moment,” p.14 Basketball star Gary Trent Jr. wows fans not only with his point totals, but…

DEAR BROTHER-IN-LAW

YOUR BROTHER, my husband, called to tell me that your plane had gone down off the coast of Panama. Your sister texted soon after, knowing my feelings would mirror hers. The two of you have been estranged for decades. You were my first boyfriend. We were young then, and it took us too long to realize that we brought out the worst in each other. When we broke up, we might never have seen each other again, except I fell in love with your brother. You warned him that I could be mean and unreasonable. You weren’t wrong; I can be. But less so with him. He brings out a better part of me. You were his best man the day we got married. You and I danced that evening, which…

DEAR BROTHER-IN-LAW

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