Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i Maclean's

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…

Co-founder, Osheaga Festival MONTREAL After a two-year hiatus, Montreal’s Osheaga Festival takes over Parc Jean-Drapeau from July 29 to 31. This week, co-founder Nick Farkas loaded up on plenty of coffee and doughnuts. He also dove into festival prep, buying show-stopping string lights to decorate the golf cart he uses to tour the packed park grounds. Monday I finally bought a new pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses ($505). My old ones had gotten so bloody scratched up that wearing them was like looking into a glazed nightmare. I headed to my optician, Alain Assedo in Westmount, and was like, “Help, I can’t see!” Tuesday I picked up some potting soil ($9) for the eggplants and tomatoes in my vegetable garden. I grew a 25-foot tomato plant two summers ago. My…

What was the state of the Muskoka market in early 2020? Prices were increasing by about 15 per cent a year, and multiple offers were an anomaly. My brokerage was getting ready for the Spring Cottage Life Show—which is like the Super Bowl of cottage-country real estate—before it was cancelled in mid-March. I joked to my team that we might have to host the odd bake sale to make it through the year. Then the exact opposite happened. How so? Once the provincial ban on short-term rentals lifted in June of 2020, our vacation-property company, Muskoka District Rentals, had a huge uptick in business. We sold all of our summer inventory—110 properties—in three weeks. It usually takes us six months to do that. We also saw a huge increase in…

WHEN ANGELA MACDONALD self-published Juliette & John: The Perfect Recipe in 2014, she marketed the cookbook as a delightful slice of culturally diverse Cape Breton. Angela was inspired by the culinary traditions of her Lebanese and Italian grandparents (the titular Juliette and John) as well as her Irish husband, weaving her recipes into an eclectic collection that includes both tabbouleh and Cape Breton Irish chowder. In her author photo, Angela has olive skin and long dark hair, and wears a fitted long-sleeve black shirt and large pearl earrings. She has the perky confidence of someone who was popular in high school. The book, she says in the forward, is meant to demystify gourmet cooking. “If you take the recipe and break it down into parts, you will see that the…

WHEN ORVILLE PECK first appeared on the country music scene in 2018, he wore a Zorro-esque mask, hid his mouth behind a tassel fringe and clad himself in fetishistic leather. His debut single, Big Sky, a moody, ethereal track with gauzy guitar drenched in reverb, sounded like it could have been ripped from the Twin Peaks soundtrack. It certainly didn’t fit in with the beer-guzzling pop-country of the Nashville machine. And it was about a boy. “Fell in love with a rider / Dirt king, black crown,” Peck sang in the first verse, inviting listeners into his lonely Western universe. “Six months on a knucklehead hog / I like him best when he’s not around.” Peck was unlike any other act in country music. He was openly gay yet adamantly…

A COUPLE OF YEARS before the pandemic, Chip Zdarsky had a funny idea for a Comic-Con panel: a PowerPoint presentation about why he should be the next writer for Batman, rife with asinine ideas and terrible credentials like “I’m very strong” and “I’ve never shied away from punching clowns.” It was classic Chip Zdarsky, the alter ego of Canadian comic book writer and illustrator Steve Murray, who once described his alternate identity as “an idiot who doesn’t know what [he’s] doing.” It was Zdarsky who launched a world tour that began and ended after one night in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario; who had a months-long virtual friendship with the Facebook account of an Applebee’s restaurant in Barrie, Ontario; who held a one-man comic convention, dubbed Zdarscon, on the sidewalk across…

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…

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…

Created for FOR FAMILY DOCTORS PASSIONATE about delivering quality medical care and maintaining a healthy work/life balance, running a successful practice—while managing the countless administrative tasks that divert their time and energy from patients—can be difficult. Not at Sault Ste. Marie’s award-winning Group Health Centre (GHC). “We feel there’s a link between physician well-being and better patient outcomes,” says Dr. Jodie Stewart, a family doctor on GHC’s Board of Directors and the CEO of the Algoma District Medical Group. “We have a dedicated staff assisting physicians with onboarding, retirement planning, practice transitions, schedule development, dues payments and many other aspects of professional life. At the GHC, physicians are not bogged down by trying to run a business, they’re devoting all of their time to what matters most: the patient.” The…

The Market: In-the-know Calgarians have long braved the mountainous three-hour trek to holiday in Invermere, British Columbia, a town of 4,000 people that borders the Rockies. Its charming downtown strip, skiing and golfing amenities, and proximity to the warm-bodied Lake Windermere have made it a favourite among young families. Recently, Invermere has absorbed new vacation-property owners as part of a broader trend of baby boomers retiring into the Columbia Valley. Invermere’s inventory was once considered affordable by B.C. standards, but the whopping 88 per cent spike in prices from 2020 to 2021 has been anything but relaxing for prospective buyers. ‘Small towns in B.C. were just taking off’ Dena: Brad and I have been lucky to own several vacation homes. We used to winter in Scottsdale in Arizona and owned…

The Market: On a good traffic day, residents of the Greater Toronto Area can make it to tree-studded Kawartha Lakes in under two hours. Its proximity to urban centres and abundance of waterfront views have made the 3,000-square-kilometre region an especially good bet for young workers keen to clack away on their laptops dockside—and visit the city on summer weekends. From 2020 to 2021, average cottage prices for landlocked properties soared by 48 per cent, while waterfront properties have pulled in just under $900,000. According to realtors, these days, buyers are asking fewer questions about the fishing—and more about the Wi-Fi. ‘I quickly learned that any property I liked, everybody liked’ Angela: I live in Houston, Texas, but I’ve remained close with my college girlfriends, many of whom are still…

The Market: There’s no better evidence of Baie-Saint-Paul’s tourist clout than the opening of Club Med’s first North American mountain resort 20 minutes south of the town last December. The tiny Charlevoix destination, situated along the St. Lawrence River, is an established favourite of European cyclists, hikers and gallery-hoppers. And now Canadians are also taking notice of its affordable vacation properties. Recently, newer luxury builds have started sidling up to the area’s existing inventory, creating fierce competition for the already limited number of empty lots. As a result, the going prices for local chalets have increased by 45 per cent. ‘This would go for three times as much in Muskoka’ Fabio: Nine years ago, I took a ski trip through the Charlevoix region with three friends, and we rented this…

How did the pandemic impact your business? Joanna: It completely stopped in March of 2020. We stayed at home with our children, who are two and six, and considered getting our mortgage-broker licences. Then, around May, the market went crazy. JP: The majority of our business was in residential homes—with some commercial properties—but we started getting a lot more inquiries from our clients about vacation homes. They were mostly located in Kelowna and were interested in buying cabins and lakefront properties in the Sicamous and Shuswap areas. Normally, they would take holidays out of the country with their families, but because their trips were cancelled, they had some extra cash. How did the pandemic impact the Okanagan market? JP: Before COVID, cabins would sit on the market, and some were…

Read A SPECIAL INTEREST SECTION BY MEDIAPLANET more at healthinsight.ca According to the Canadian Cancer Society, prostate cancer is the most common cancer among Canadian men (excluding non-melanoma skin cancers) and the third leading cause of death for Canadian men with cancer.1 “While it tends to be a disease that has a higher risk as you enter your 70s and 80s, we do still see younger men, including men in their late 40s and 50s, who are diagnosed,” says Dr. Krista Noonan, a medical oncologist at the BC Cancer Agency and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. The good news is that prostate cancer is increasingly treatable, and its five-year survival rate is around 91 percent.2 But to achieve good results, shared decision-making and open dialogue between…

“Hi everyone! So today, I want to get dressed in an outfit I would wear on a first date,” says a smiling young woman on TikTok. Her makeup is impeccable and exaggerated, with heavy pink blush and pale-green eyeshadow, and her face is framed by a dark bob highlighted with iridescent blues and greens. She holds up a floor-length lace gown in aquamarine, then adds a peach negligee and two-toned tights. The accessories include a multicoloured knit balaclava, opera-length arm warmers and a neon-green tote bag. Among more than 13,000 comments, there is a recurring sentiment: “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.” It’s not a joke. Sara Camposarcone is an ambassador of kidcore, a trend defined by loud prints, bright colours, cartoon characters and zany accessories that wouldn’t…

When I first started falling and the bruises formed a map of yellows and browns on my body, I touched them and said, “this was my sway in the kitchen,” “this was when I stumbled over the chair,” “this was in the high grass outside, holding my daughter Chloe.” It took a while to realize the insidious seep of drugs prescribed by my doctor for sleep were reducing me to nothing but bone and air. I was simply following my doctor’s orders. I was in a free fall. I knew nothing about Ativan in 2010. Now I know it belongs to the family of drugs called benzodiazepines, or benzos. Those in this family include Klonopin, Valium and Xanax, among others. I didn’t know that the medical literature advised occasional use…

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…

CANADIANS call their vacation homes by many different names—cottages, chalets, cabins, camps. But they all share one thing, and that’s the promise of escape. In the last few years, however, the silent grandeur of dockside mornings and sunsets—once only interrupted by the odd speedboat or loon—has been drowned out by sights more common in the world of residential real estate: packed offer days; frantic realtors engrossed in FaceTime tours; tiny towns overtaken by firepit-crazed interlopers. For buyers, the message is quite clear: vacation’s over. According to Royal LePage’s 2022 recreational property price report, Canadians are staring down a 13 per cent jump in vacation-property prices from 2021—a slight cooling from the year before but still compounded by the massive increases since the pandemic. The national average for a single-family cottage…

IN PRESS CONFERENCES, Anita Anand presents like the law professor she was for more than two decades: crisp, careful, occasionally prone to using obscure words that her staff are not above mocking. But the minister of national defence arrives at those press conferences like an ice cream truck approaching from the next block. She is usually travelling at a purposeful scurry with a clutch of young staffers in tow, and you can track how close she is by the music blasting from the phone in her hand. In mid-April, at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the song of choice is Take My Breath by the Weeknd; before that, it was Higher Love by Kygo and Whitney Houston. The job can be heavy, and the music lightens things up. Anand has made…

REHEARSALS FOR LIVING by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Knopf Canada, June 14 In 2020, a year of pandemic lockdown and worldwide anti-racism protests, two prominent Canadian scholars and writers began exchanging letters. Together, Maynard and Simpson—the former Black, the latter Indigenous—crafted an extraordinary dialogue, exploring distinct but related cultural perspectives, shifting between emotional intimacy, acute analysis and a surprisingly hopeful outlook on the future. THE RETREAT by Elisabeth de Mariaffi HarperCollins, July 13 Former star ballet dancer Maeve Martin is ensconced in a mountain lodge arts centre when an avalanche hits, confining the guests. Maeve, who has recently left an abusive marriage, finds herself in another perilous place, as people around her begin dying mysteriously. With its echoes of Agatha Christie, relentless pacing and literary chops—de Mariaffi’s debut…