This conversation popped back when I read that Edward Rogers’ secret plot to remove his CEO, Joe Natale, was foiled when Edward’s candidate for the job accidentally “butt-called” Natale, who overheard the entire conversation about the planned coup.
On Fogo Island, off the north coast of Newfoundland, there are seven seasons in the year, not four. Late October marks the end of Berry Season, when Fogoers spend their days “scooping up handfuls of blueberries, raspberries, marsh berries, and partridgeberries.” But fear not, winter does come – and with a vengeance.
Meanwhile, back here in Ontario, here are some ways to while away your autumn days.……
There are two health-care systems in Canada. Not just the public and private ones. But the Toronto system and the…well, let’s call it The Rest of Canada system.
If you happen to live in the Greater Toronto Area, the 6.2 million of you are luckier than the other 31.8 million Canadians who don’t.
Got cancer? Get treated at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, one of the Top 10 oncology centres in the world.
Heart disease? The Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, one of the top heart hospitals in the world.
If you’re a sick child, or their parent, take them to Sick Kids, the best children’s hospital anywhere.
Need physical rehab? There’s the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute whose research arm is also the best in the world.
We now know that systemic racism is largely unconscious because it’s baked into our culture. It took the remains of hundreds of Indigenous and Inuit children to make Canada understand its own systemic racism, and in the US, the death of George Floyd changed how we view race by reminding us of so many other Black men and women who have died at the hands of police.
But these deaths, by craven indifference in the case of Canada’s children, and by craven involvement in the case of America’s Black people, also exemplify the power of systemic denial.
Autumn officially landed three weeks ago on September 22.
But September was one of the two bonus months (along with May) we were blessed to call summer this year in Ontario.
But if you feel sad because our five-month-long summer is now officially gone, spare a thought for those people who are starting to feel SAD. They have Seasonal Affective Disorder. As this Mayo clinic paper notes, SAD doesn’t make people sadder in the dead of winter. Their depression starts in the Fall, i.e. now. So, in this, Year Two of the pandemic, when 70% of Torontonians say we are anxious, think about who you’ll talk to about being seasonally sad.
But before you do, here are this weekend’s tidbits:
A decade ago, after my open-heart surgery, I was feeling depressed. This happens a lot to people who’ve had their hearts cracked open, fixed and sewn back up. But why depression? As one eminent cardiologist said: “Your heart has endured a gross insult.” Of course I denied it. I remember standing outside the supermarket at …
Toronto regularly makes it onto the lists of the world’s great cities (as in ‘great to live in’). But the world’s safest cities? I doubt that, if by “safe” you mean resilience around the pandemic, in addition to things like personal security, clean air and water, traffic, modern infrastructure, and digital life.
But, as often happens, I am wrong. Last week, the Economist Intelligence Unit released its 2021 Safe Cities Index. It ranked 60 cities across 76 safety indicators. Toronto not only finished in the Top 5, it is Number 2, next only to Copenhagen.
This got me thinking that maybe Torontonians suffer from a kind of reverse NIMBY, i.e. we think we’re dreadful until we compare ourselves to places we envy, only to discover they’re worse. Like Churchill’s definition of democracy as the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Which is as different for Humpty Dumpty as hearing “Have a great Fall” is for you. So now that the leaves are really turning and a chill is officially in the air, best to go down these little rabbit-holes before heading outdoors into the waning light.
I was checking my Instagram feed one night three years ago when I scrolled past this post: “Where has my beautiful love gone? It’s been a mere week and the pain feels like it’s lasted a millennia.”
These were the first words of a friend announcing that her husband had died suddenly. His death shocked me no less than the announcement of it on social media. I was slow in viewing Instagram as the place to reveal great tragedies as well as luscious dinners and stunning sunsets.
Whistleblowers don’t use whistles anymore. They rarely pass manila envelopes.
Today, revealing secrets is done online, whether that’s ransomware which can make your private medical records public, or bank records sent to investigative journalists, the juiciest of all being from offshore banks whose very purpose is to never be revealed.
It was a good week for Canadians: we got our two Michaels back and we got a day to remember that we can change history and not let history change us by forgetting how badly Canada’s Indigenous citizens were treated, and still are.
Hostage books take up a tiny speck in the vast universe of books published each year.
The stories themselves may be harrowing, but their half-lives are short, as the news cycle moves on and another terror grips our gaze.
That said, Canadians seem to be punching above our weight, mainly because our hostages are mainly from the media, like Amanda Lindhout, or they’re diplomats, like Robert Fowler,
But maybe it’s also because we’re Canadians; we travel internationally much more than Americans do (63% vs. 40%), and we think our Canadian passport somehow protects us from being scooped up on the street.
Not any more.
