Maclean's July 2022

CALL AND RESPONSE I read Maclean’s piece about the plight of paramedics in Canada with interest (“Distress Call,” May 2022). I’m a paramedic from North Vancouver. I spent most of my career with BC Emergency Health Services, working in the Lower Mainland. I became a paramedic because I was passionate about helping others. Then, in 2009, I responded to a tragic call that involved a two-year-old girl. I remember driving home after that shift trying to process what had just happened. I had a two-year-old son of my own at the time. I was diagnosed with PTSD, and I struggled with flashbacks and nightmares. I self-medicated, abusing alcohol and drugs. It was difficult to find the right help due to barriers and stigmas that exist within a first-responder organization. This…

IN NOVEMBER OF 2020, Patricia Gauthier walked away from her post as head of vaccine business at pharmaceutical giant GSK to become the general manager—and first employee—of Moderna Canada, a subsidiary of a decade-old U.S. biotech company that had yet to bring a product to market. Gauthier, a Quebec-born lawyer who lives in Etobicoke, in Toronto’s west end, had no office, co-workers or blueprint for the task ahead: overseeing the Canadian approval of a new kind of vaccine, then bringing millions of doses into the country at lightning speed. Eighteen months on, nearly 30 million doses of Moderna’s Spikevax have been distributed in Canada. In April, the company laid a big bet on this country, announcing plans to open a facility in Quebec by the end of 2024 to manufacture…

I HAVE A VERY LONG HISTORY WITH MALLS. Before embarking on a 30-year career in retail design, I actually worked in sales and visual merchandising for 12 years at Eaton’s in Toronto—a long-dead Canadian department store. Have you ever seen the show Superstore? That was pretty much me; I just had better taste. Since then, I’ve worked on projects for national banks, big-box chains and luxury brands, like Canada Goose and Holt Renfrew. You could say retail is very much a part of my personal fabric. I love the act of shopping, but I’ve come to hate the shopping centres themselves. I’ve always believed the retail experience should be less throwaway and more meaningful than it is. There’s a real opportunity for malls to evolve away from formulaic collections of…

The buyers: Sarah Grant, a 40-year-old home-organization entrepreneur; John Grant, a 38-year-old software engineer; and sons Jack, who’s seven, and Charlie, who’s nine. The budget: $2.3 million The backstory: The Grants’ former home in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood had lots of character. The semi-detached century home—purchased for $750,000 in 2015—had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, stained-glass windows and original wood floors. What it didn’t have was space: the kitchen was small, and brothers Jack and Charlie dutifully shared a single bedroom. Things got even tighter when John began working from home during the pandemic. He took over Sarah’s office, which only deepened his long-held desire for larger living quarters. “Each of us needed more quiet space,” John says. He got in the habit of sending real estate listings to Sarah, who—despite her…

IT TOOK A FOOTBALL injury for Shaedon Sharpe to get serious about basketball. Sharpe, who grew up in London, Ontario, spent years juggling both sports—until he broke his leg playing running back the summer before high school. “That made up my mind,” he says. Plus, he jokes, playing football in frigid weather isn’t all that fun. Four years later, Sharpe—who’s six foot six and plays point guard—is one of the most talked-about young talents in this month’s NBA draft class. In May, Sports Illustrated ranked him the number-five overall prospect, thanks to a combination of his towering height, explosive offensive game and, as of this spring, a vertical jump that exceeds Michael Jordan’s record-setting leap by an inch. Sharpe’s journey from basketball amateur to draft darling wasn’t a given. He…

WHEN BRITISH ARCHITECT DOMINIC BETTISON visited Toronto for the first time in 2013, he saw a whole lot of Mies: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, that is. The mid-century master’s rectangular glass-and-steel designs have held an outsized influence over the city’s skyline for generations. The banking district—which is home to Mies van der Rohe’s black TD Centre towers—is no exception. Bettison had a different exterior aesthetic in mind when his London-based firm, WilkinsonEyre, was tapped to design CIBC’s new downtown headquarters in 2013. “I wanted to create something that reflected the environment around it in a dynamic way,” Bettison says. Among the imposing, featureless facades is now a lighter, more expressive effort: CIBC Square. When it’s finished in 2024, the complex will feature two towers—50 and 49 storeys, respectively—and more…