Teasers

Darlene and Tiffany left Boston at 6:00 p.m., changed flights in Toronto, and boarded the three-hour flight to St. John’s. To calm her nervousness, Darlene took out her mother’s family tree printout. She had close to memorized it over the last week, but now confusion was setting in.

“Grandma’s grandparents, that would make them your what?”

“My great-great-grandparents,” Tiffany said quietly.

“So, according to Grandma’s research and this DNA Strands website, a Mary Rourke was born in John’s Pond and got married there in her twenties to a Peter Nolan, also from John’s Pond.”

She pulled out a map and pointed to the red “X” marked on the island of Newfoundland. Tiffany nodded.

“The Nolans were both doctors. Mary went to university in Boston. Aunt Ammie was born there, too.”

“Okay,” Tiffany said as she stifled a yawn. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

“Tiffany Emma Carter,” Darlene said. “Pay attention.”

“I get it, lots of Boston connections. And whatever the relationship, I’ll call her Aunt Ammie without the air quotes.” Tiffany stuffed her hands in her hoodie’s pocket and grinned as her fingers moved beneath the fabric. Darlene squeezed them through the pouch and smiled. “Besides, what could be so interesting about any of them? I mean, beyond great-great-almost-a-hundred-and-one-year-oldaunt-slash-cousin interesting?”

Darlene shook her head and laughed. “I’m sure Aunt Ammie will remember lots of stories. Mary died sometime in the 1950s or ’60s.”

“Grandma certainly had lots of questions,” Tiffany observed.

“Grandma’s ‘evidence,’” Darlene said as she air-quoted.

At the bottom of the last sheet, Darlene tapped the capitalized word JOURNALS, which was followed by a red circled “Mary and Peter.”

—Excerpted from The Stolen Ones by Ida Linehan Young. © by Ida Linehan Young. Published by Flanker Press. flankerpress.com

You would never think that I would be a sex worker. This goes to show that too many people out there already know a sex worker and have no idea, because we’re just regular people, the same as everyone else. We all have hopes and dreams, and goals—all of us. We have good days and bad days in our jobs, just like everyone else. Sexual harassment and rape can happen in any workplace, not just ours. We bleed the same blood.” –Anonymous

“We should be making sure that sex workers are ok, and being taken care of, and just as safe as everyone else, and have the same human rights that we’re entitled to that get taken away. People need to know that it’s the oldest profession in the world and it’s not going to go away ... We all have different stories and different experiences and if you would listen to that, you would understand more maybe why people are doing the things they’re doing.” –Lydia, “Our Rights Get Stripped Away”

—Excerpted from Rock Paper Sex Volume II: Trigger Warning, by Kerri Cull. © by Kerri Cull. Published by Breakwater Books. breakwaterbooks.com

Tsunamis can do more damage than the earthquakes that trigger them, but we know more about the land under our feet than the floor under the waves. The data discrepancy between land and sea is especially concerning right along the coast. The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station on the New Brunswick side of the Bay of Fundy is a good example. In a licence-renewal hearing in 2017, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission considered all sorts of hazards that could conceivably cause trouble at Canada’s only nuclear plant on an ocean coastline, from meteor strikes to plane crashes to dam failures. Earthquake and tsunami hazards were also taken into account. A moderate earthquake, estimated as magnitude 5.9, shook St. Stephen, centred about ninety kilometres down the coast and at the border with Maine, in 1904. The nuclear facility is built only fourteen metres above the Bay of Fundy, which, as any New Brunswicker worth their salt will tell you, has the world’s highest tides. NB Power, the electric utility that owns Point Lepreau, insists the plant can endure a large earthquake and is high enough to withstand a tsunami. Nuclear critics are skeptical: fourteen metres is roughly the same height as the tsunami wave that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant. NB Power argues the Bay of Fundy is more protected than the open coast, because Nova Scotia and Sable Island will act as natural breakwaters and protect the bay from a tsunami’s worst effects. But Ronald Babin, a Université de Moncton social scientist and nuclear critic, notes that Japanese nuclear officials believed Fukushima was safe, too.

—Excerpted from On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake by Gregor Craigie. © by Gregor Craigie. Published by Goose Lane Editions. gooselane.com

How can it be that, after having spent almost $13 billion on energy security, the provincial government must now seek revenue from another source, or assistance from the federal government to subsidize electrical rates and protect citizens from the Frankenstein-like creation of its own Crown agency?

Considered on their own, the many distinct problems that have beleaguered the dam might each be attributed to local accidents of mismanagement, cost overrun, “optimism bias,” or even corruption and crime. But taken together, the logistics and means which brought Muskrat Falls to life fit the profile of an increasingly familiar kind of crisis, visible across Canada and around the world today, where public means of providing vital services and infrastructural security—that is, access to heat, water, food, energy, shelter—are changed into collateral for risky, speculative enterprises, with often disastrous results. The Chalillo Dam built in Belize by Newfoundland’s Fortis Inc., The Irish Water Corporation, the airport in Freetown Sierra Leone, the Site C Dam in British Columbia, and the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka are all recent projects that, like Muskrat Falls, promised to reinvigorate failing public infrastructure through new forms of investment finance. Instead, each has arguably diminished the public benefit of these utilities because, as with Muskrat Falls, the mechanisms and means that guarantee profit for global investment houses and international construction firms directly undermine long-term public health and the infrastructural security of citizens.

—Excerpted from “Introduction: How a Public Utility Became a Predatory Formation” by Stephen Crocker in Muskrat Falls: How a Mega Dam Became a Predatory Formation, edited by Stephen Crocker and Lisa Moore. © Stephen Crocker. Published by Memorial University Press. memorialuniversitypress.ca

One evening in early March 1936 a very frustrated Sir John Hope Simpson sat down at his writing desk in the little office next to his bedroom in the Newfoundland Hotel and wrote a letter to his son, Ian. In it, he vented about his job as Commissioner of Natural Resources in the recently organized Commission of Government. Sworn in on 16 February 1934, it was comprised of six Britishappointed Commissioners — three from the United Kingdom, and three from Newfoundland — with the Governor acting as chairman. The Commission of Government aimed to resolve Newfoundland’s immediate fiscal crisis and to bring the economy out of the Great Depression, following the relinquishment of self-rule in 1933. As Commissioner of Natural Resources, Hope Simpson — a seasoned British administrator with over 20 years’ experience in the Indian Civil Service — was charged with governing and modernizing Newfoundland’s key resource industries: fishing, pulp and paper production, and mining. This was a daunting task that demanded a gruelling work schedule, a real intellectual and physical challenge, especially for someone on the verge of retirement. “I am tired frequently,” he wrote, “...I almost said ‘generally,’ and that would be true at the end of the day.”

In his letter to Ian, Hope Simpson complained that Newfoundlanders refused to acknowledge that living conditions in Newfoundland would continue to be deplorable until circumstances improved in the country’s primary industry: the export of salted and dried cod to Southern Europe and Latin America.

—Excerpted from Fishing Measures: A Critique of Desk-bound Reason, by Daniel Banoub. © Daniel Banoub. Published by Memorial University Press. memorialuniversitypress.ca

Excerpted from Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care by Susan MacLeod. © Susan MacLeod. Published by Conundrum Press. conundrumpress.com