Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2017 i Zoomer Magazine

July 1, 1867 Canada enters Confederation, and Sir John A. Macdonald, 52, becomes our first prime minister Hockey, beer and Tim Hortons coffee to follow. 1879 Three years after missing a train, Sandford Fleming, 52, proposes his idea for standard time zones, leading to worldwide standard time Though some still refuse to employ Fleming’s standard time, including India, China and the guy who said he’d be over to install your cable between nine and five today. 1880 Quebec’s Marie-Louise Meilleur, is born and lives to become Canada’s oldest person ever at 117 She was born when Macdonald was PM and died when Mulroney held office, and she had 12 kids, 85 grandchildren, 80 great-grandchildren, 57 great-great-grandchildren and four great-great-great-grandchildren. 1901 Before Céline sang forTitanic, Emma honoured the grandmother of Europe…

I was living in Yorkville in 1967, the so-called Summer of Love. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were singing at the Penny Farthing or The Riverboat, and a promising young writer named Margaret Atwood read her poems in the dingy, candle-lit Bohemian Embassy. Coffeehouses were a whole new thing in the city. The streets milled with young people, and the Grab Bag convenience store where I bought my milk sold rolling papers and hash pipes on the side. As the Bob Dylan song went, “There was music in the cafes at night/and revolution in the air.” The hippie movement – it was more anarchic than organized– had migrated up from northern California and San Francisco, where the tall, narrow Victorian houses that lined the rundown streets of Haight-Ashbury became the…

What’s that point called?” We’re on the water just off Victoria, and Mark Salter, our tour guide and a member of the Songhees First Nation, has blanked on the name of a little piece of the topography we’re motoring past. “Finlayson,” says Brett Soberg, naturalist, co-owner of Eagle Wing Tours, and the white guy who’s steering the boat. “Right,” says Salter, getting back into the groove. “I was going to say Pemberton. I knew it was named for one of the settlers.” Even for those who don’t think of Canada in colonial terms, Victoria is pretty darn settled. I went to high school here, and the number of white people with home counties accents who had never been to the U.K. was higher than you might have thought reasonable. The…

aN UNFAMILIAR UNEASE dogged me one long-ago summer at a farm on the plains between Regina and Moose Jaw, Sask. I was there to work with horses, but the enormity of the sky and the vastness of the prairie – the limitlessness of it all – seemed oddly oppressive. But I watched rainstorms sweep across the faraway horizon while western meadowlarks sang from fence posts and a breeze carried the scent of wild roses. Brilliant crimson sunsets blazed most evenings and some nights I’d stumble on the way to the barn, so enthralled was I with the dark canopy above, alight with more stars than I’d ever imagined. I quickly fell forever in love with the Prairies. Some claim you can see your dog running away for three days in…

Best stock: Enbridge Inc. We have many great companies in Canada including the big banks, utilities like Fortis, the railroads and our energy companies. Choosing one was not easy. I picked Enbridge on the basis of historical performance, low downside risk and the prospects for the future. Based in Calgary, Enbridge operates the world’s longest crude oil and liquids transportation system and is Canada’s largest natural gas distribution firm. Also, Enbridge is stepping up its activity in the renewable power sector including wind farms, solar, and geothermal energy. Recently, it completed a merger with Spectra Energy of Houston that created North America’s largest energy infrastructure company. The share price has moved steadily higher over the past 20 years. In 1997, it was less than $10 a share; at the time…

THE WRITER RUDY WIEBE once said, “Only the stories we tell each other can create us as a true Canadian people.” Through these following fragments – a minuscule sampling, let it be said – some of our country’s talented fiction writers capture its history (the good and the bad), its landscape, its passions, its diversity and, yes, even its weather, creating a mosaic of this beautiful and complicated country. What a land. What power these rivers were already yielding, far beyond her sight. Even a map of this country – lines arranged in an arbitrary way on a long rectangular piece of paper – stirs the imagination beyond imagination, she thought, looking at the map, as other lines differently arranged in relation to each other have not the power to…

It was a so-so party in a chi-chi Brooklyn loft with limp nibblies and a severely limited open bar. Nursing a tepid Diet Coke, I scanned the crowd, planning an early getaway. To kill some time, I tracked strangers’ faces around the room, skittered past a set of bemused grey eyes, paused, went back to the bemused grey eyes. They resided in the face of a decidedly voluptuous woman. And she was smiling. At me. Which was ... uncustomary. I have never been mistaken for Ryan Gosling, plus I am ... of mature vintage. Comely young women don’t go out of their way to come-hither me with their lips. Or with anything else. “You local?” she purred. How to explain in a few urbane, well-chosen words that you come from…

WHITEHORSE IS NOT a town you’d want to travel to. It’s like a tiny Dubai of the north: there’s more stuff than anywhere else in the neighbourhood but not enough to warrant a trip in if you’re coming from any farther afield than, say, The Nisga’a Nation. But the Yukon is not about cities. It’s about everything else. Luckily, everything else starts pretty close to the outskirts of this city that started life as a pit stop on the way to Dawson City. Depending on how Into the Wild you’re feeling, the options are as endless as the skies up here. Hiking, hunting and fishing are all feasible, or you could take a threeday cruise up the Yukon River from Minto to Dawson. But you may want to start with…

STAND IN FRONT of practically any exhibit at the Fashioning Expo 67 show at the McCord in Montreal and just try to resist the jolt of electric Kool-Aid energy that leaps from these clothes directly into your Canadian soul. Eleanor Ellis’s paper dress, Michel Robichaud’s gossamer creations the mayor’s wife Marie- Claire Drapeau wore to meet people like Princess Grace or any one of the pavilion hostess dresses – from Indians of Canada Pavilion hostess Kanien’kehá:ka Diane Diabo’s kicky little orange and earth-tone number to the green cape with two huge white polka dots worn by the hostesses of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Pavilion – are nothing less than distillations in fabric of the very essence of Expo 67 and the Montreal moment it represented. In the show’s most…

It’s taken years to become who you are today, and looking and feeling your best may involve a different routine with new products. Celebrate your age and check-out the online savings on your favourite or soon-to-be favourite Wellness products. Metamucil Orange Smooth Powder Promote digestive and heart health with the #1 doctor recommended* fibre supplement. *Among recommendations in an AlphaImpactRx 2016 (Bulk Fibre category). To ensure this product is right for you, always read and follow the label. YOUR DIET: A STRONG START For a healthy breakfast choice, integrate vitamin-rich fruits and grains. Have fresh strawberries, berries and oranges on hand for a zesty shock to the taste buds in the morning. Add a spoonful of berries or fresh granola on top of Greek yogurt. Swap out sugared cereals for…

WE LIVE in an era where much of our banking, spending, and lifestyle habits are digitally captured for use by corporate marketing firms. While data harvesting goes on at a bewildering pace (often without our knowledge), Canada’s public health-care system lags far behind. While it’s the one place where data collection would be hugely beneficial: much of our health information is inaccessible, locked away on doctors’ computers or locked away in hospital databases. It’s often said that your local grocery store has better electronic records of you than does the health system. Government efforts to install an electronic health record system have, for the most part, failed. “Much has been spent on the chase, but tangible results are in short supply,” says CARP President Moses Znaimer. As health is a…

SINCE BEGINNING this journey of bringing Syrian refugees to my hometown of Guelph, Ont., the question I’ve been asked repeatedly is “Why?” Why choose to help this cause and not others? Why choose to go to all the trouble? Why choose to give so much time and money to people I’ve never met? I didn’t know this was going to be a big thing. To me, it was just a math problem: how much do I need, how much do I give away. Well, Guelph has a population of 131,000 people, so for me to bring in 50 families, that is just doing my part. I figured that it would cost $1.5 million. I had the means and opportunity to help so I did. Obviously, we are formed over our…

MAKING CANADIAN HISTORY IN THE INDUSTRY CanniMed is unique in that it created the industry in which it’s now a leader. Canada’s first medical cannabis program was introduced in 2001 with the Marijuana Medical Access Regulations, which allowed approved patients to purchase cannabis directly from Health Canada. Prairie Plant Systems, a division of CanniMed Therapeutics Inc., was the sole supplier to Health Canada and remained the only company to legally grow medical cannabis in Canada until March 2014. When the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) were passed in 2013, patients could legally purchase cannabis only from a licensed producer. CanniMed was the first producer to be licensed by Health Canada. In 2016 the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR) replaced the MMPR and allowed licensed producers…

SUDOKU ACROSS 1 Raw egg for a hangover, some say, e.g. 5 Thumbs-up signals 9 Reply to a doubter 14 Take ___ (sustain damage) 15 Leach slowly 16 In better condition, likely 17 July 1st fireworks display, airshow, parade, etc. 20 Also, to Alain 21 Ballot choice for “un fédéraliste” 22 Not let go to waste 23 Castanet clacker’s cry 24 Birdie on the golf course 29 Nasal spray from Vicks 31 Little, by Loch Lomond 32 “Blame ___ Me” (George Ezra hit) 34 Snowbirds military org. 37 “A Doll’s House” playwright 41 Place to see William Lyon Mackenzie King 44 Pot-___ (French stew) 45 Thumbs-down votes 46 ___ No More movement 47 Troop grp. 49 Phonophobe’s fear 51 “Maybe more, maybe less” 56 180° from NNE 59 Canon model…

For proof that we Canadians are hot and always have been, I point to the seminal sex scene in the 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now. The ravenous intensity that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland bring to the act of making love burns a hole clear through the celluloid. The scene drew ire and censorship upon its release. Many speculated they were not “acting” and that the coupling was “real.” The controversy was reignited with a 2011 tellall book claiming it was. Sutherland, ever the gentleman from Saint John, N.B., dismissed the claim simply as “mendacious.” Of course, a single Canadian can’t carry the reputation for the rest of us on his handsome shoulders, but there are plenty of other exhibit A’s in the hot Canadians category. Red swimsuits will never…

In 1976, a small Swiss film destined to be a cult classic was released, called Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. The movie centred on a group of young adults in Geneva (baby boomers all) trying to deal with the lingering fallout of the French “revolution” of May 1968, a time when general strikes, student protests and the brief disappearance of President Charles de Gaulle brought much of Europe to a standstill. One of the characters, Mathilde, is pregnant, and the group collectively reflect on what the world will be like for the unborn Jonah (so-named because his expecting mother is “like a whale”) in 2000. The friends have 25 years, they figure, to help Jonah “get out of the mess.” What they’re clearly engaged in is…

tHE FIRST TIME I saw Lake Louise, it was ice. Glass, a mirror of the snow-covered crags that rose up behind it, chevron- like arrowheads that steered the eye to the pale emerald-hued surface at their feet and to the crystal blue sky above. Gliding over it was a lone skater, effortless and inspiring those who watched to lace up and join in. Soon, the quiet was broken with the sounds of blades carving over frozen water, along with the kind of pealing laughter only the joy of being in this postcard of a place could bring. Framed in a way that made it seem otherworldly, at that moment the most beautiful place on earth. And, in many a traveller’s eye, it is. The second time I saw Lake Louise,…

MY WEDDING CEREMONY took place on one of the most bitterly fought-over bits of land in Canadian history. As my soon-to-be-husband and I stood on the grounds of Fort Anne in Annapolis Royal, N.S., the past seemed to send a message: you can fight continuously and engage in protracted struggles for the upper hand and still be happy in the end. “You sure you want to get married outside?” the justice of the peace asked as we trudged up Fort Anne’s steep embankment. “It’s 20 bucks extra.” Of course I wanted to get married outside. From the top of the hill, standing above a prisoner’s dungeon (this also seemed symbolic), I could see the whole of my favourite place, where half my family history is stored. I could see the…

aVISIT FROM AN OLD friend reminded me that I chose Canada even though I was born and raised here. I chose to return here to live after starting out with a different plan. It also made me remember why. Rina Castelnuovo was in Toronto for the Canadian premiere of the documentary Muhi – Generally Temporary, which she co-directed with Tamir Elterman, at the Hot Docs Festival. Rina and I worked together at the Associated Press in Tel Aviv back in the day. I was the first female reporter they hired, and I quit my master’s degree program to take the job. Rina became the first female photographer in the bureau three months later. She had just returned to her native Israel from Italy with her small daughter after a divorce.…

IN THIS CURRENT geopolitical climate, Canada can boast yet again of its successful multicultural identity and the immigrants who have settled here and found international success. Take Indian-born Canadian-raised Monika Deol, who spent 25 years in front of the camera as a successful television host – you may remember Deol as host of the dance music television show Electric Circus from 1988 to 1996 and as a news anchor after moving from Toronto to Vancouver. Throughout her career she has acted and modelled, yet one issue continued to be a challenge – her makeup. “I did the math and I have sat in the makeup chair and had my makeup done at least 6,000 times,” she says as we chat in a penthouse of the Shangri-La Residences in Toronto. “I’m…