Maclean's September 2022

I am very lucky to have a wonderful family doctor. She’s smart and thorough. She takes my concerns seriously and calls me in the evening with test results if she knows I’m worried. She treats my husband and children, too. She’s watched our kids grow up and knows a lot about our lives. When my mother-in-law moved from Halifax to Toronto six years ago, my doctor squeezed her into her practice. My mother-in-law’s friends in Halifax, Calgary and Victoria couldn’t believe how quickly she landed a doctor. Some of them have been struggling to find a practice to take them on for several years. These days, bragging about your awesome family doctor is a little unseemly. It’s like telling people you have a newborn who sleeps through the night or…

PUBLIC DEFENDER Shannon Proudfoot’s profile of Defence Minister Anita Anand (“The Fixer,” July 2022) had a polarizing effect on readers. Some think she’s the future of the Liberal party: I can’t stand Trudeau or his cabinet, but Anand is one of the bright spots in cabinet. She’s one of the few adults. Mister_Kurtz on Reddit I disagree with her ideologically on many, many points, but there’s no denying her competence and skill. It’s difficult to fathom the fact that she only became an MP less than three years ago, when she’s already overseen two of the most notable crises we’ve faced in a long time: the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. And while she has received rightful criticisms for decisions in both cases, the end result—i.e. our current COVID…

MOSHE SAFDIE IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S most iconic and inventive living architects, with projects that include Montreal’s famed Habitat 67 housing complex and the prismatic Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. Safdie has a luminous legacy in the form of his buildings and, at 84, he now also has a memoir: If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture, which is out in October. Safdie’s life story is studded with personal tragedy—like losing his second child, Dan, to SIDS—and moments of levity: one night, security guards caught Safdie and his then-wife Nina noisily dismantling a much-loathed public sculpture on the Habitat grounds. But If Walls Could Speak is primarily a professional memoir, an account of the complex politics involved in any major building project, and an expression of…

IN LATE MAY, Health Canada approved a three-year pilot project in British Columbia that will effectively decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs, like opioids, MDMA, methamphetamines and cocaine, in the hopes of curbing overdose-related deaths. The program takes a more compassionate approach to addiction than the punitive one favoured by governments in the past. This decision makes me feel hopeful much in the same way as I did four years ago, just before cannabis was legalized. Back then, the Trudeau government said it intended to adopt a similar public-health approach to the drug. I thought, This is a wonderful opportunity to undo all the harms that have been caused by criminalization. But when I got around to reading through the Cannabis Act, I was disappointed to see that…

The buyer: Adele Doucet, a 29-year-old veterinarian. The budget: $200,000 The backstory: Doucet grew up in Memramcook, New Brunswick, a small but scenic Acadian village southeast of Moncton. In 2015, she moved out of province to attend the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown. Doucet’s father, Daniel, a real estate appraiser, offered to put money toward a down payment to purchase property for Adele’s four-year stint in Prince Edward Island. “He was like, ‘You’ll make money in the end. You might as well build up your credit,’” she says. The process was daunting for the younger Doucet—then a first-time buyer—but the father-daughter duo eventually snapped up a four-bedroom detached home close to campus for $160,000. They rented two of its spare rooms to other veterinary students for $500 a month, which…

JESSIA’S RISE TO FAME is a classic Cinderella story—with a modern, TikTokky twist. Last year was a particularly rough time for the Vancouver-based vocalist. She’d lost her serving job—and all of her music gigs—due to COVID. “I was eating up all my savings just to survive,” she says. Jessia was sitting in her car the day she recorded the video clip that would launch her into viral territory. “Maybe I’m not pretty, maybe I’m just fun, ’cause I got a belly, and I got a bum,” she sang, pounding out a beat on the steering wheel. Within hours, the clip had surpassed a million views on TikTok. “I thought there was a glitch in the system,” she recalls. For Jessia, who is set to play Rifflandia Music Festival in Victoria…