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CINDY BLACKSTOCK · LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON WAUBGESHIG RICE · ALICIA ELLIOTT · TENILLE CAMPBELL Grief, anger and action over hundreds of unmarked graves P.24

CANADA’S MAGAZINE · AUGUST 2021

The enemy within The military justice system is broken.

Fixing it may be the only way out of the Forces’ spiralling crisis.

BY MARIE-DANIELLE SMITH P.16

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With her powerful push off and impressive turns, Canada’s best butterfly swimmer Maggie Mac Neil heads to the Tokyo Olympics p.34

AUGUST 2021 • VOLUME 134 • NUMBER 7

National

International

ON THE COVER: The battle for justice: The Canadian military’s

Stateless: People with no country to call home have been

system for righting internal wrongs is badly in need of an overhaul ... 16

abandoned by a fractured and distracted international community.... 58

Listen: Five Indigenous voices share their grief and anger over

residential schools and children buried in unmarked graves.............. 24

Education

The road ahead: The Assembly of First Nations’ Perry Bellegarde

reflects on a decade of change as he steps down as national chief ....... 32

Crypto-legitimacy: Digital currencies land on MBA curricula.......... 63

Maggie Mac Neil: Talent, power and a ticket to the Olympics........... 34

Go for gold: Turning Olympic ambition into business success .......... 66

Who deserves forgiveness?: The families of the Humboldt Broncos

killed in 2018 are being asked to answer that impossible question ..... 38

Society

They Were Loved: A Cameroonian Montrealer. A lifelong piano

teacher. An Inuit mother of five who’d already survived a plane crash.

Our series on Canadians who have been lost to COVID-19 ................ 48 Scapegoat: A New Brunswick doctor was wrongly accused of causing a COVID-19 outbreak; policing and politics fanned the flames ............ 50

Still ahead of his time: Prince’s prescient new posthumous album .. 70 Ryan Reynolds: An interview with the forever Canadian celeb ......... 73 Architecture: A post-COVID Venice Biennale imagines the future.... 75

Getting to herd immunity: What works—and what doesn’t—when

Speedrunners: The highly specialized gamers who are setting

trying to convince the vaccine-hesitant to get the shot ...................... 54

speed records for completing games like Super Mario Bros. 3............. 78

4

AUGUST 2021

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCY LU. COVER: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY UNA JANICIJEVIC AND DREW MAYNARD

5 The Editorial | 6 Letters | 8 National Notes Artful manhole covers hit Montreal’s streets; a B.C.-based Scot who’s battling Big Whisky to brand his spirit with his own last name; last stop for Actinolite, Ont.’s Log Cabin Restaurant; Guelph, Ont., closes the door on fairy magic 80 Quiz | 82 Before You Go Arvin Joaquin sends love and gratitude to his Lola in the Philippines

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The real black mark

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After her face appeared on the cover of a 1998 issue of Maclean’s with the headline “Rape in the military,” Dawn McIlmoyle remembers a severe backlash. “I got told that I was the worst thing to happen to the Canadian military,” she says today, describing the aftermath of an investigative feature that detailed the prevalence of sexual assault in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), “and a black mark on Canadian society.”

The institutional instinct at the time was to sideline whistleblowers and gloss over a badly damaged image, rather than support victims or address the root causes of the abuse.

Though politicians promised action, they under-delivered, and the problem persisted.

Six years ago, an explosive report from former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps again highlighted a pervasive culture of sexual misconduct in the military. Leaders announced action plans at press conferences. Politicians reacted loudly.

But the long-standing systemic failures that normalized abuse still remained. Now, a third reckoning is at hand, brought on by the investigation of senior leaders for untested allegations.

A proud institution is again besmirched in the public eye. And the same obsession with appearances is undermining an opportunity to muster the political will to put people first.

Years of this pattern of behaviour have taken a toll. In 2019, only 38.5 per cent of surveyed military members agreed with the statement “I have confidence in the leadership of the CAF.” Senior military leaders should be held to account for a worsening breakdown of trust. But the country’s political leadership bears perhaps greater responsibility.

Equipped with countless reports and recommendations, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan should, after six years on the job, have a handle on what needs fixing, and what his subordinates can do better. Yet, rather than admit to failings or table legislation in a probable election year, Sajjan reacted to recent events by launching another fact-finding mission.

The buck ultimately stops with Justin Trudeau. But he, too, has a political calculus—one

that may not emphasize those in uniform.

The defence minister is a decorated veteran and was, for all his missteps, a star candidate for the job. How would it look if Trudeau added him to the diverse and growing list of ministers who’ve either been fired or voluntarily decided to bow out of the inner circle? Meanwhile, how sincerely can Trudeau demand accountability for sexual misconduct in the Forces when his 2018 response to a historical groping allegation was that “people experience things differently”?

If the goal is to push for radical improvements in how military personnel are treated, opposition politicians haven’t proven any less cynical. They seized upon an inappropriate golf game and shamed the “old boys’ club” without suggesting how to dismantle it.

They devoted hours and hours of committee hearings to cross-examining Liberals about an allegation against the former chief of defence staff that the accuser reportedly wanted kept private—all the while paying lip service to the notion that complainants should be in control of whether their allegations are investigated.

They censured Sajjan in Parliament without offering legislative fixes of their own, and without threatening a noconfidence vote in a minority Parliament.

In their haste to score political points, they missed opportunities to grill the minister on why his department has, for two years, delayed the implementation of a military victims’ bill of rights. Or why successive governments have done little to fix a badly broken military grievance system. Or what role Canada could play in the world to actualize our troops’ raison d’être as a force for good. Our soldiers deserve answers to those questions.

The worst thing that could happen to the Canadian Armed Forces today is for the same pattern to repeat itself. For promises to be made, and ignored, and political careers to be prioritized. For people at the heart of it—those who have and would risk their lives for this country—to be neglected. If anyone deserves a “black mark,” it’s those who would let it happen again.

Military leaders should be held to account, but politicians bear perhaps greater responsibility

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

5

LETTERS Tory disarray

‘An “education catastrophe”?

What utter nonsense! The 13 years kids spend in our education system are a huge waste of time amid what should be the best part of their lives.’

C.J. Jennissen, Sherwood Park, Alta.

Vax supply

Returning artifacts The timing of “When it’s time to give back” (Culture, July 2021) was in sync with my own time to give back. A few weeks ago, I visited the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, where there are wonderful Indigenous cultural artifacts on display. When I got to the cedar baskets, I suddenly thought, “I have to give mine back.” I knew at that moment they didn’t belong in the museum, but to the people who made them. My great-grandparents came to B.C. from Scotland in 1900 and had a farm. They sometimes traded produce for baskets, and several were passed to the next generation. Among my generation, there are nine baskets to return; fortunately, my brother knows where they came from as our grandmother told him. A repatriation ceremony is being planned and it 6

verse who have the right to make those decisions that a legislator may not be comfortable making.” What is most disconcerting are her final thoughts about past Supreme Court decisions that likely stretched the intent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms beyond what its framers envisioned. “We have time on our side,” she told journalist Paul Wells. “And history. Time will tell us whether it turned out to be the right decision or not for the public.

And if it wasn’t, another court will change it. Or the government will change it.” Little solace for those whose livelihoods were jettisoned by delusory activism rather than clear-headed common law.

John Challinor II, Milton, Ont.

feels so great, as a family, to send the baskets home. When so much has been taken from First Peoples in Canada, it is only right to give a little back.

Laura Jones, New Westminster, B.C.

Pricey houses A suggestion to help curb the outrageous bidding on market homes for primary residences (“Nowhere to buy,” Real Estate, June 2021) would be to tax the amount that exceeds the “assessed value” at 100 percent capital gains. The amount up to the assessed value would still be tax-free and make the listed price meaningless . . . which it currently is. This might force governments to calculate a more realistic assessed value, which in turn would provide a fair point-of-sale for a listed property.

G. Deering, Port Coquitlam, B.C.

Judging a judge I read the article about retired Supreme Court of Canada justice Rosalie Silberman Abella with interest (“Rosie Abella said she’d answer questions when she turned 75,” Supreme Court, July 2021).

There is much to like about her as a Canadian, as a woman and, especially, as a human being.

However, it is clear that Madam Abella needed much more time in the cut and thrust of the court system as a working lawyer before her appointment as a judge at just 29 years of age. Her understanding of the fact that parliamentary supremacy in Canada is a constitutional principle is underdeveloped, to say the least. The courts are the mechanism that upholds the rule of law established by Parliament and not, as she stated, “the people in the democratic uni-

AUGUST 2021

I am disappointed in Scott Gilmore’s choices in the June issue (“The partisan polemic,” Politics, June 2021). In an article that was supposed to be nonpartisan, Gilmore decided to repeat Erin O’Toole’s nonsensical claim that the federal government has not procured as many doses of COVID-19 vaccines as it ought to have. A non-partisan article would have acknowledged that the WHO is correct in pointing out that Canada has a disproportionate share of the global vaccine supply. In a world where vaccination rates are limited by the number of available vaccine doses, every vaccine dose we get today is one that a poorer country will not get until later. This is not merely a moral failing on the part of Canada. The rise of variants of concern, which vaccines may provide less protection against, is directly connected to how many people get infected with COVID19. The vaccine dose I will receive next week would have provided

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LIZ SULLIVAN AND DREW MAYNARD

Kudos to Marie-Danielle Smith for her piece on the federal Conservative Party (“The shaky blue tent,” Politics, July 2021). The summary reminded me of a political editorial cartoon from 1967 when the party went into dis array over challenging then-leader John Diefenbaker. The cartoon showed a wagon train circling in defence, guns blazing. The caption read: “When the wagon train of the Conservative Party is under attack, they circle and fire inwards.” With all the innuendos and disagreements that Smith refers to, it seems this is happening again. What the party needs to do is get off the bandwagon of getting rid of the Trudeau Liberals and instead work at developing some good policies and programs.

Just beating up on the governing party is not going to do it.

Rod McLeod, Regina

more protection for my family in the arm of a high-risk individual in a global hot spot.

Christine Rogalsky, Waterloo, Ont.

the impenetrability of the housing market because it doesn’t affect them.

David Moffat, Ottawa

Are the kids all right?

In response to the letter lauding Greater Vancouver, the fact that it rains almost every day for nine months of the year, never gets hot in summer and even a shack 95 km from the city costs over a million dollars may have been factors that kept it off the list. Just sayin’.

Maureen Stetina, Vancouver

It takes perseverance to eke out a premise in Sarmishta Subramanian’s overly long piece (“The lost year,” Education, July 2021). In simple terms, I guess it is that our kids are going to suffer horribly all of their lives because they’re missing a few months of school. An “education catastrophe”? What utter nonsense! The 13-plus years kids spend in our education system are a huge waste of time amid what should be the best part of their lives. Sadly, all it does is turn children into cabbages. The only thing that needs to be taught in school is some basic arithmetic, as well as life and language skills.

Those things can be covered in six months. No one seems to want to change the system because parents rely on this terribly expensive baby-sitting service. Subramanian’s premise that people will lose earning power all their lives after missing some school is unsubstantiated. The wealth one accumulates has very little to do with when you start earning—ask any doctor. But it has everything to do with how skilfully you manage the money you do earn. And, sadly, those skills are also not taught during those 13-plus years.

C.J. Jennissen, Sherwood Park, Alta.

Where to live Seriously, how did Bruce Jamieson’s letter make it to print (“Best communities,” Letters, July 2021)?

As if one could simply discount the cost of housing when determining a top-50 list of best places to live in Canada. His arrogance shines in the last two sentences: “How uninformed. The locals laughed.” I suspect all the panel’s judges have been to Vancouver enough times (it takes only one visit, provided it isn’t raining) to have a firm handle on the city’s aesthetics. They would hardly be uninformed. The laughing locals are of his ilk, unaffected by

but angry words railing at Them won’t work. Surely Palmater can advocate for solutions that require input from both Them and Us. Bill LeGrow, Coquitlam, B.C.

Pandemic failure After 18 months of a global pandemic (“The race against the mutations,” Science, July 2021), it is easy to judge the mistakes and successes of our political leaders. However, one glaring fact has continued to haunt me from

Good Point Your tributes put a face to some of the more than 25,000 Canadians who have died of COVID-19 (“They Were Loved,” Coronavirus, July 2021).

My concern is with all the people who didn’t receive proper care because of the pandemic.

My brother, diagnosed with dementia, was kept in a Nova Scotia hospital and did not get to a long-term care home until nine months later.

My sister, who was suffering from kidney disease, was kept on a stretcher in a hospital in N.L. for six days and eventually succumbed to kidney failure. My disabled brother was misdiagnosed with an eye infection and was nearly blind when my sister got him to a specialist. No one in health care or government will ever be held accountable for such people. If COVID19 has taught us one thing in Canada, it is “survival of the fittest.”

Anna Penney, St. John’s, N.L.

Health-care racism Joyce Echaquan’s treatment and death at a Quebec hospital was a tragic and preventable event (“What Joyce Echaquan knew,” Health Care, July 2021). But Pamela Palmater’s column was not helpful. I understand the anguish (I’m an old white male, so perhaps not), but a problem this longstanding and entrenched cannot be resolved by the perpetrators acting alone, as she suggests when she writes: “That’s on them, not us.” There is no magic solution,

day one: our leaders didn’t close our borders and stop the transmission of the virus. They did make some tough decisions with mandatory masks, public spacing, closure of some businesses, etc., but that didn’t stop the second and third waves. Canadians and others continued to travel the globe, bringing the virus home to loved ones and neighbours.

Worse, they continued to travel in Canada, spreading the virus everywhere, even the far North.

When reports began surfacing of

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

more dangerous variants in the United Kingdom, South America and other places, our leaders didn’t ban travel there either. Travellers brought the variants here, and the rest is history. A complete lockdown and travel ban would have allowed Canadians to have some normalcy in life over the past year and a half. Instead, we lost loved ones, our economy lost billions and our leaders spent billions that will never be recovered.

Tony Rapino, Thunder Bay, Ont.

Climate cataclysm Almost everywhere it is the same (“More is too much,” Climate Change, June 2021). Political leaders agree to or promote the destruction of our life supports for short-term gain for government and corporate coffers in the name of jobs and standards of living now.

Instead they should be standing up to corporations and providing employment in mitigating and adaptive strategies by regulation and more progressive taxation. If we do not start this soon, our civilization will collapse, as has repeatedly happened on more local scales throughout history. But this time, climate change and ecosystem collapse will be so widespread that most of us may starve, broil or drown, while some in a few areas will freeze to death. Politicians are too scared and lazy to do anything other than make promises they cannot keep, because they value their jobs more than other people’s grandchildren.

Glynne Evans, Saanich, B.C. Why don’t you have a major section on the environment? I had to find it as a subheading in the society section. What the heck? Get with the times and start reporting more on environmental issues in Canada. Be more relevant to Canadians.

Chantal LeBlanc, Ottawa We welcome readers to submit letters to either letters@macleans.ca or to Maclean’s, 15 Benton Road, Toronto, M6M 3G2. Please supply your name, address and daytime telephone number. Letters should be fewer than 300 words, and may be edited for space, style and clarity.

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N AT I O N A L N O T E S

There are two versions of this story.

The straightforward one is that Montreal recently unveiled a new design for the city’s manhole covers, transforming that most utilitarian and (literally) overlooked element of the urban landscape into something that resembles a heraldic shield that might have adorned the vaults of a medieval cathedral.

The old cover “was really boring,” says

BY SHANNON PROUDFOOT ·

QUEBEC

Judging a city by its covers Montreal is one town that knows the difference between beauty and a hole in the ground 8

AUGUST 2021

Sylvain Ouellet, a city councillor and vicechair of the city’s executive committee. “It was mainly made for a utilitarian perspective, so there was absolutely no design. The beauty was not there.”

The new one features stylized, intertwined botanical elements that nod to the city’s history and flag: a fleur-de-lys representing the French, a rose for the English, a Scottish thistle, an Irish shamrock and a white pine for the local Indigenous communities, all designed by artist Luc Melanson. It is genuinely beautiful—imbued with meaning, at once spare and intricate.

The idea originated in the lead-up to the city’s 375th anniversary celebration in 2017, Ouellet says, sparked in part by the example of other cities such as Cologne, Germany, and Boston that have paid attention to the aesthetics of their utility covers. The idea was to mark Montreal’s anniversary by designing

Which brings us to the more existential version of this story, in which one of these hefty cast iron discs becomes a postcard from another era, or a reminder to live less like grown-ups and more like toddlers.

“If you were a time traveller back from 1875 into today—to that very spot—the streets look different, all the buildings hadn’t been there before. The trees, if they’re still left, they’re much bigger,” says Daniel Fireside, a self-declared—with tongue firmly in cheek— manhole cover influencer. “The one thing that would be familiar would be this manhole cover. It’s this time capsule.”

Five years ago, he was meandering around his Somerville, Mass., neighbourhood when his toddler suddenly pointed at the ground and declared, “ABC.” Fireside looked down and saw an iron grate inscribed with a G, which he figured indicated a gas line; then his son pointed to another nearby grate with

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHLOË ELLINGSON

(left) Montreal’s new design; (above) a worker installs a manhole cover in the city’s Old Port

something that would become a visible legacy in the city, but nothing was ready in time for that milestone.

Rather, the new covers began to pop up across Montreal last year, but the city didn’t officially introduce the new one until early June 2021. It cost $25,000 to develop the design and $12,000 to create the foundry mould, though after those start-up costs, the new covers will cost the same as the old ones: $300 each. The plan is to gradually install them across Montreal when it’s time for replacement or new roads are built.

“Manhole covers, their life expectancy is so long, we want to have a more classic design that is timeless,” Ouellet says.

different lettering. “With that sort of little kid’s eye, where everything around you is new and interesting if you take a close enough look, I started realizing there was great variation in these objects I’d walked by millions of times and never noticed,” he says.

Five thousand photos and countless hours of research later—plus an online community built around his Twitter and Instagram handles @IronCovers—Fireside is the guy you call if you want to talk about manhole cover design, or why beautiful things that wave to us from the past or reach into the future matter. (“As I tell my mother, there are worse ways to get famous for photos on the internet,” he says.)

He’s found a handful of covers in his homeMACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

town that contain mistakes—a backwards 3, or three nails substituted for a missing N—and he loves the long-ago humanity they suggest: someone rushing to get an order out the door thinking no one will notice, and along he comes 100 years later to do just that.

“I feel this weird connection to these craftspeople who were anonymously toiling away in these foundries and imbued these objects with artistic flourishes,” he says. “Whoever these people were are long gone, but we’re all benefiting.”

The change to Fireside’s daily experience of his world suggests a different way we could all be, and how more thoughtfully designed cities could help. It’s what any yoga instructor or therapist would tell you about learning to be in the moment: be fully present and take in where you are, rather than bypassing that place and time to get where you’re going.

But it is the sheer longevity of manhole covers—it’s not uncommon for them to stay in place for a century or more—that lends them a sort of immortal quality. “There is this trend of cities realizing that it’s worth investing in these objects that will probably last longer in their existing form than any other thing they’re going to create in the public space,” Fireside says.

Which is exactly what Montreal was aiming for in celebrating its big birthday. Inevitably, when Ouellet announced the new design on his councillor Facebook page, a few people asked why the city didn’t spend that money filling potholes. “What I responded to them is, ‘Well, it costs exactly the same thing to create an ugly manhole or a beautiful manhole,’ ” he says. “ ‘So personally, I chose a beautiful one.’ ”

BRITISH COLUMBIA

It’s his name, for peat’s sake Graeme Macaloney’s introduction to the spirits industry took place back in his native Scotland when, as a highschooler, he got a summer job bottling at the Black & White Scotch whisky factory in the town of Stepps, outside Glasgow.

He immediately wanted to learn everything he could about the “water of life,” as the Scots call it, studying biochemical engineering and fermentation in university, getting a bachelor’s, a master’s and finally a Ph.D.

BY A ARON HUTCHINS ·

9

National Notes

Macaloney wound up overqualified for most whisky jobs, but he found a good fallback, working for pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Eli Lilly in the U.K., before moving to Alberta and transitioning into biotech.

As the decades went by, though, he never forgot his teenage dream of making and selling his own whisky. So he put together a business plan, moved to Victoria, and in 2016 launched his own brewery and distillery: Macaloney’s Caledonian Distillery and Twa Dogs Brewery.

With a team of Scottish-born experts at his side, Macaloney was soon taking home top prizes at the World Whiskies Awards, including “World’s Best New Make” and “Best Canadian Single Cask Single Malt” in 2020.

Then, less than a year later, the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) filed a lawsuit against Macaloney’s distillery, alleging his B.C.-based distillery was illegally branding its whisky as though it were Scotch, with his use of words like “island,” “Caledonian” and even his surname, “Macaloney.”

“Can’t use Macaloney? Really?” the whiskymaker marvels. “That’s my bloody name.”

The SWA is known and feared for the lengths it goes to protect its share of the multi-billiondollar global whisky industry, often using geographic indication (GI) protections recognized in laws like Canada’s Trademarks Act. GIs identify products where a reputation for quality is linked to a particular region or country; they’re the reason a bottle of Champagne can only come from a particular part of France.

The rest are just sparkling wines.

10

In a statement sent to Maclean’s, the association said its frequent actions to prevent the use of Scottish indications of origin on other whiskies are “vital to protecting Scotland’s national drink and to ensuring that consumers across the world are clear about whether or not they are buying whisky that is produced in Scotland.”

Over the decades, the SWA’s list of offending words has expanded. It has taken court action against, among many others, a Japanese company using the word “tartan”; a proposed Indian whisky named Scotia Imperial; and a distillery in Germany over the use of the word “glen” in the branding of its single malt, Glen Buchenbach. “Sometimes it will be very subtle indeed,” the SWA’s former director of legal affairs, Magnus Cormack, acknowledged in a 2015 BBC interview. “It may just be the use of an English-language brand name in a country where English is not the main language spoken.

In those countries, people assume that a whisky labelled in English must be a Scotch whisky.”

Some small distillers have tried to protect themselves by providing more information on their labelling. But this too can rouse Big Scotch.

When a Virginia distillery blended one of its own single malts with a malt sourced from the Highlands of Scotland, the company was upfront about the product, describing it as “whisky from Scotland, married with Virginia whisky.” They called it their “VirginiaHighland whisky.”

But the Scotch Whisky Association sued, claiming the labelling was “false, misleading AUGUST 2021

and deceptive.” The use of the word “highland,” they argued, implied the product was Scotch; and they complained that the distillery had spelled “whiskey” without an “e,” unlike most American whiskies. (The two sides came to an “amicable resolution,” according to both parties, and the U.S. company dropped the term “Virginia-Highland whisky.”)

“With these smaller firms, they basically say, ‘You know what? We’re going to inundate you with legal costs,’ ” says Lauchlin Maclean, president of Glenora Distillers, based in Mabou, N.S. (The SWA says it “never takes legal proceedings lightly” and is always open to quicker resolutions that “protect both the Scotch whisky trade and consumers.”) He still hasn’t recouped the costs of his legal battle against the SWA in the early 2000s.

It was portrayed as a David-versus-Goliath affair: a tiny Maritime distillery versus the mammoth SWA, warring over the word “glen” in a whisky called “Glen Breton.” “We came upon the name ‘Glen Breton’ very honestly: we’re in the glen, and we’re in Cape Breton,” says Maclean. “It wasn’t anything nefarious.

It was Marketing 101.”

The distillery stood its ground against the SWA, which contended the word “glen”— Gaelic for “valley”—would deceive customers. The legal costs piled up for nine years until the Federal Court of Appeal ruled in Glenora’s favour and, in 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear an appeal.

To celebrate, Glenora unveiled a whisky called “Battle of the Glen.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY LIBBY OLIVER

Macaloney launched his own distillery in Victoria in 2016 and was soon winning top awards—but then the Scotch Whiskey Association filed suit

National Notes

Macaloney took note of the Glenora story before labelling whiskies like his award-winning Glenloy Canadian Island Single Malt Whisky.

But it hasn’t spared him a legal battle. The SWA objected to the use of the terms “island whisky” and “glenloy.”

Macaloney notes that his distillery is on Vancouver Island, a map of which is on the carton packaging. What’s more, he says, there are plenty of islands outside of Scotland. As for “glenloy,” he thought the SWA had already lost that fight over “glen” in Nova Scotia.

To hear Macaloney, you’d think he had an open-and-shut case. But as a legal battle ensues over whether he can name his whisky company after himself, he’s learning a hard truth: if things in his industry were ever black and white, those days are long gone.

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Greyhound’s resting place

all the potential of the postwar economy, that the buses started coming.

From the first day Colonial Coach Lines pulled over in 1947, through the Voyageur years and into the Greyhound era of the late ’90s, this much-loved joint—or much-hated, in more recent times, if you were cranky from the cramped bus seats and dissatisfied with plastic-wrapped baked goods—was a reliable place to stretch your legs and buy a candy bar.

But three years ago, Greyhound ceased using the Log Cabin Restaurant as a rest stop.

Almost two years ago, as business subsequently dwindled, its owner-operators of almost 30 years retired. Then, citing pandemic losses, Greyhound announced in May it was shutting down its services in Canada altogether.

And this once-bustling rest stop sits empty.

The longer it does, the more it looks like a relic of a bygone era.

In 1932, when a new stretch of Highway 7 was paved between Kaladar and Actinolite, Merritt Price, a retired United Church minister, saw an opportunity. Price bought up an old Lutheran church and used its logs to start building what would become a landmark along the route. His sons, Bruce and Bud, opened

a restaurant in the new log cabin—and welcomed its first bear—in 1933.

“The original log cabin was very attractive,” says Evan Morton, curator of the nearby Tweed Heritage Centre. “Their dining room was highly acclaimed.” It wasn’t just a restaurant, but a kind of motel, too. The Prices would welcome weary travellers to stay overnight in several smaller, rudimentary cabins on the property.

The bears, Morton is at pains to emphasize, were rescued cubs that would have otherwise been killed in the wild. In the Price brothers’ care, in cages adjacent to the restaurant, they lived longer-than-average lives. The first, Teddy, lived to be 31. Two others, Buster and Bandy, were captured in 1950; they died in 1974 and 1978, respectively. “They enjoyed Coke and Pepsi and chocolate bars and ice cream,” Morton says. “But Bud Price always made sure they had a balanced diet.”

In 1950, a few years after the buses started coming, the brothers had the restaurant torn down and built a sturdier structure in its place.

But in name, it remained the Log Cabin.

After more than 50 years in the Price family, the property changed hands in the mid-’80s.

In the restaurant’s heyday, Supertest gas flowed from the pumps, hamburgers cost a quarter and homemade ice cream—made from 50 per cent milk, 50 per cent separated cream—was five cents a cone. Giving the resident caged bear bottles of Coke to guzzle? Now that was just priceless.

The Price brothers’ log cabin in Actinolite, Ont., was such a natural stopping point between Toronto and Ottawa that “Halfway House” was written on its placemats. It was during those heady days after the Second World War, when a place like this symbolized (clockwise from top left) Buster and Bandy; Lee in the ’90s; the original log cabin in the late ’40s

COURTESY OF THE TWEED AND AREA HERITAGE CENTRE; COURTESY OF SUNG HWAN LEE

BY MARIE-DANIELLE SMITH ·

National Notes

The Lees, now in their 70s, decided it was time to retire in 2018 after Greyhound buses began bypassing Actinolite and the Log Cabin Restaurant

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In the ’90s, Actinolite still saw lots of traffic from charter buses, along with the Voyageurs-cum-Greyhounds, Lee says. But year by year, he says, fewer and fewer charter buses would pull in. In 2018, Greyhound switched to “express” trips along the 401 and 416 because of “a decline in ridership along the local route,” according to Greyhound Lines, Inc., which still operates in the United States.

Not long after, Lee says, “it was time to retire.”

The Lees, now in their early 70s, live in Toronto. They’re trying to sell the Log Cabin property, but as of this writing it had been on the market for a while, listed for $1 million.

Lee thinks prospective buyers aren’t seeing the potential of the great location, at the nexus of Highway 7 and Highway 37, which leads down to the 401.

There is plenty of vehicle traffic: the shortest route from Ottawa to Toronto still takes you past Actinolite. But if Merritt Price expected an economic boom all those years ago, it never quite took.

“If you travel along there, you’ll see a lot of closed motels and restaurants. Between Perth and Actinolite, there were many people who tried different ventures and they just didn’t seem to succeed,” Morton says. “I often think of Highway 7 as a highway of broken dreams.”

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The Lees still visit Actinolite sometimes and stay in the Log Cabin Restaurant’s upstairs apartment. They consider it a cottage—it’s nice to go there, Lee says, and “enjoy the quiet.”

Driving along this part of the highway today, that quiet is hard to miss.

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No fairytale ending It was treated as a stealth operation. Adrian Ferrazzutti would put a small cordless drill in his backpack, along with a box of screws. Then he and his kids would hike around Guelph, Ont., looking to install “fairy doors.” When they reached the perfect tree—one with arches at the roots—he’d pull out a miniature door they’d made in their family woodshop and, when no one was watching, mount it over one of the cavities at the base of the tree to create a “fairy house,” running screws through the door’s tiny hinges.

“It was like changing a car’s wheels in an

BY AARON HUTCHINS ·

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY C.Y. LAM

Sung Hwan Lee and his wife, Monica, bought it not long after, in 1992.

The Lees, who had immigrated to Canada from South Korea, enjoyed connecting with all different kinds of customers, some of whom would regale them with stories about the bears that drank Coke. For a long time, members of the Price family still lived across the street. They’d get together with the Lees for dinner sometimes, Lee says, and show them old menus—the ones where hamburgers were listed for 25 cents.

The Lees lived in an apartment on the second floor of the restaurant. They’d rise early enough to open it before the first bus arrived for a stopover around 9 a.m.; in the evening, sometimes they’d stay up as late as 2 a.m. to offer a hot beverage to travellers held up by the occasional snowstorm.

At its peak, the restaurant served some 100,000 customers a year, Lee estimates.

Many were college or university students on shoestring budgets, who’d schlep back and forth on the Greyhound to visit their families. “We offered lots of free meals to students,” Lee says. Sometimes they would come back and repay the kindness. Once, Lee says, a girl came up to him and paid her bill 10 years after the fact.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENDAN GEORGE KO

IndyCar race,” Ferrazzutti says. “Do it as fast as possible, get back on your feet and keep walking. The whole thing of this is no one’s supposed to know who’s doing it.”

Ferrazzutti wasn’t the first person in town to make fairy doors, which have sprung up in parks across cities big and small in Canada and abroad. But as a professional woodworker, he definitely upped the game when he started five years ago. He even started making tiny fairy furniture to go behind the doors—chairs, beds and staircases that lent the feel of a true home. “You’re overhearing people walking down the trail and discovering them, and the giggles that would come out of the kids’ mouths put a smile on your face,” he says. “It was addictive.”

While Ferrazzutti installed only a handful of doors each year, Guelph has seen a fairy housing boom along its walking trails and in parks, especially since the pandemic. Parents found that the prospect of discovering or installing the things spurred their kids to get outside. Teachers jumped in, creating a magical area for kindergarten students in Marksam Park’s “Friendly Folk Forest,” where stunning fairy doors several feet tall are fitted perfectly to nooks in tree bases.

Then, amid the heartwarming stories of magic coming to town, the city of Guelph implored locals to stop. While many residents delighted in the whimsy, the city was receiving an increase in complaints about how the doors were overtaking, even ruining, the landscape in parks and natural areas. “We needed to press pause,” says Dave Beaton, Guelph’s program manager for forestry and sustainable landscapes. “Trees are under increasing stress with climate change and invasive species. We want to reduce the impact on our stressed trees.”

Along the Eramosa River Trail, for example, fairy doors started appearing in greater numbers a few years ago; more recently, new ones seemed to show up every week. Some are artsy and cute, while others appear old and faded—a small piece of painted wood with a child’s name written on it and screwed into a tree. Says Beaton: “The magic has worn off.

It looks more like litter.”

But when the city put out a gently worded social media post in early May warning that the drilling can leave trees vulnerable to disease and pests, the message didn’t work like magic. While many applauded the effort to protect nature, others pointed out the lost joy for young children—especially during a year when parents craved ideas to get their kids outside and engaged. How much damage, they asked, can a couple of screws really do?

A young Guelphite stops to investigate a fairy door in Marksam Park’s ‘Friendly Folk Forest’

Many suggested acidly that, if the city cared about keeping its trails pristine, it should kick resources into ridding them of dog poop.

Beaton is unmoved. “The fairy doors are not our number one issue,” he responds. “We can deal with other more substantial issues at the same time. But that was something we felt we needed to address.” The city won’t be removing any of the fairy doors, he adds, because doing so could leave gaping holes that might prove even worse for the trees’ health. Instead, the city is appealing to people’s better judgment: “The city is certainly not anti-fairy.

We just want to protect the magic of nature.”

Guelph is not the first city to take a stance against the proliferation of the mythical creatures’ homes. Last year in B.C., the Regional District of Central Okanagan removed all the popular fairy doors popping up in Kelowna’s Rose Valley Regional Park, saying they conMACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

travened a bylaw against damaging natural features in parks. Years ago, the English town of Crewkerne opted to close down Wayford Woods temporarily in order to remove all the fairy doors that had overrun the area. Critics chided the town for “evicting fairies.”

Ferrazzutti has long known fairy doors were not welcomed by everyone in Guelph. Some of his past installations didn’t last a month before he’d find their hinges twisted and tiny doors pulled apart. The first one he built with his daughter—a tiny, red masterpiece with little sticks across the window—lasted three years before getting ripped away.

“It’s like a little knife in the heart when you see how violently they’ve been taken off.

You’re thinking, what is wrong with people?”

Ferrazzutti reflects. “But that person must be saying, ‘What’s wrong with the people who put these fairy doors up?’ ” 13

The Big Picture

In touch, at long last Pamela Libralesso’s 15-yearold son is cheerful, social and “brightens any room,” she says.

J. is non-verbal, has an intellectual disability and communicates mostly by touch (his family asked that we not use his full name). He is usually glued to his father’s hip and loves swimming in their Barrie, Ont., pool.

But for half of 2020, he was beyond reach. In March, his group home stopped allowing visitors due to COVID-19.

For months, Libralesso went back and forth with provincial officials, public health authorities and Empower Simcoe, which owns the home. Despite repeated assurances that Ontario’s visitation rules could be broadly interpreted, allowing exceptions for families in their situation, J. wasn’t permitted close contact with his parents until guidelines shifted in late August.

To prevent another separation, Libralesso brought a case to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. In March, they won.

“Human rights protections do not go away in a pandemic,” the adjudicator wrote, finding J. was discriminated against and awarding $10,000 in damages. (Empower Simcoe says it is committed to health, safety and human rights.

It has filed for judicial review.)

“It took a while for us to get him back,” Libralesso says, after their reunion. J. couldn’t understand pandemics or lockdowns, and seemed deeply sad. But with time, he bounced back. Right into the pool. MARIE-DANIELLE SMITH PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTA IWANEK

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MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

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JUSTICE

THE WAR INSIDE THE MILITARY

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA MINZHULINA

Fixing its badly broken justice system is now the most important mission facing the beleaguered Forces

By Marie-Danielle Smith It had been four months since the end of an investigation into a man she alleges was sexually harassing her. No charges had been laid.

It had been three months since she saw an email announcing the man’s departure from the unit, because “events have transpired” that made it impossible for him to stay.

It had been less than two months since the report of former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps, which decried the military’s underlying sexualized culture and hostile work environment, was released.

Now, at the beginning of May 2015, she was being offered an apology by a senior leader of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).

The current military member, whose identity Maclean’s agreed to protect, was summoned to a meeting with Michael Rouleau, who was in charge of the Canadian Special Forces. She sat alone in a chair across from Rouleau and his second-in-command, she says, and Rouleau delivered an apology for the outcome of the investigation.

After the apology, she says he asked her if she thought the harassment she experienced was part of a systemic problem. She said yes, and started to cry. Then, she says, he seemed to argue the point, and spoke of his high regard for his own officers. “It was the old, ‘Are you sure? It’s not our guys,’ ” she says.

“By the time I was done, it was like, ‘Did you just try to convince me I was wrong? Because I’m not wrong.’ ” Maclean’s has viewed documentation that corroborates the events leading up to the meeting, as well as its scheduling. Rouleau declined to respond to the member’s characterization of their conversation. He “has no comment on this matter,” according to a

statement from National Defence spokesman Daniel Le Bouthillier, because “it would be inappropriate to comment on case specifics as it pertains to individuals’ privacy.”

In response to the military member’s allegations, Le Bouthillier added: “It is clear that sexual misconduct has no place in the Canadian Armed Forces. We recognize that there is a gap between our desired culture and the reality for many Defence team members. To close this gap and root out the harmful attitudes that have enabled misconduct, we must pursue real cultural change.”

In June, Rouleau stepped down as vice chief of the defence staff after he played a round of golf with retired chief of the defence staff Jonathan Vance. As of the time of writing, Vance is still under investigation by military police over an alleged inappropriate consensual relationship with a subordinate and, according to reporting by Global News, an email to another person that is claimed to be inappropriate.

In a resignation letter, Rouleau, to whom the head of the military police reports, said: “I understand how such an activity could lead some to perceive a potential conflict of interest and controversy.”

Though he is still with the Forces, Rouleau’s resignation followed a series of other exits by senior military leaders. Vance’s successor, Art McDonald, was in the job for a little over a month before coming under investigation for unspecified allegations in February. The head of the Special Forces, Peter Dawe, was put on leave after CBC News reported in May that he had given a sentencing judge a positive character reference about a soldier found guilty of sexual assault. The same month, Dany Fortin was shuffled out as the MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

head of Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout when the military announced he was under investigation for an undisclosed allegation of misconduct that was referred to civilian police; he has sued the government for a lack of “procedural fairness.”

Meanwhile, one of the most senior women in the Forces, Eleanor Taylor, resigned, saying publicly that she was “disgusted” by the allegations against the highest in command.

For the current military member who sat with Rouleau in 2015, it’s not a matter of whether his golf game with Vance, who has denied any wrongdoing, was right or wrong.

It’s a matter of symbolism. It was an act that seemed to raise the spectre of interference, and seemed to put proof to her impression that Rouleau and other leaders weren’t taking the idea of systemic issues all that seriously.

“You’re my leader. And I’m expected to be a leader right now, and I’m trying to be the best leader and set the best examples for my guys,” the military member says. “But who’s setting my example?”

The Canadian Armed Forces, as an institution, has a necessarily coercive culture. Leaders must have a high degree of authority and control over their subordinates in order for the military to be effective when it is called into action. But the checks and balances meant to stifle the ugly side of that coercion—an instinct to demonstrate power with subjugation, humiliation and harm—are deficient.

More than a dozen current and former military members tell Maclean’s of a deep distrust in the institutions that are supposed to bolster them, and of a belief that bad actors within the system will protect perpetrators 17

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and ostracize or punish complainants. All believe in the potential of the Forces, and that good men and women serve in its ranks. But few are optimistic about senior leadership’s willingness to tackle the cultural and systemic problems that undermine their efforts.

A recent report from former Supreme Court justice Morris Fish found that even if a majority of actors that interact with the military justice system acquit themselves honourably—from military police to lawyers to prosecutors to judges—there are myriad actual and perceived gaps in their independence from the chain of command. Too many safeguards hinge on the personal integrity of the senior officers in charge, the report found. Too little power is afforded to oversight bodies that would either legitimize or countermand decisions.

And a grievance system that would ostensibly provide redress to military members who are wronged is in disrepair.

“The justification for a separate system of military justice is the need of the Armed Forces to maintain discipline, efficiency and morale,” Fish told Maclean’s in an interview. “The lack, or the perceived lack, of the independence of its principal actors, judges, prosecutors, defence counsel and police actors has the opposite effect.”

The judge advocate general, Geneviève Bernatchez, “welcomes Justice Fish’s important, timely and comprehensive report that provides practical approaches towards implementing his wide-ranging recommendations,” a statement from the military says. “Many of those recommendations are specifically aimed at ensuring the military justice system and its main actors are not only fair and impartial, but also that they are perceived to be fair and impartial. Both considerations are important to enhancing confidence in the military justice system, which is why we are working diligently on a plan to implement those recommendations.”

Nothing—except maybe a pending election—is stopping the federal Liberals and their much-maligned defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, from legislating major changes that could shore up confidence in the system.

They even have a road map. Fish made 107 recommendations in total, from the creation of a permanent, independent military court, to the strengthening of oversight bodies, to the civilianization of military judges, to the reforming of the grievance system. Sajjan has accepted all of them in principle. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but says in a statement that he will accept, too, the findings of yet another report on misconduct from former Supreme Court 18

justice Louise Arbour. The CAF, too, has signalled its support for Arbour’s review, and says it will report to the parliamentary defence committee on the implementation of Fish’s recommendations twice annually, starting this fall.

With the Canadian military facing a worsening crisis of leadership, its legacy of sexual misconduct being litigated in the public and Sajjan’s own career hanging in the balance, the conditions seem ripe for change. But we’ve been through the same cycle over and over again. Horror stories are reported. Inquiries are held. Promises are made. And not a lot changes. What makes us think this time will be any different?

In 1979, a former military member who asked that Maclean’s not use his name says he was pulled into a bathroom and sodomized with the handle of a toilet plunger, some six months after he started basic training in British Columbia. He reported the attack, he says, but the army’s only response was to

We’ve been through the cycle over and over.

Horror stories are reported. Inquiries are held. Promises are made. convince him to quit and go home. “I was apparently expected to just ‘get over it,’ and if I couldn’t, then the system had no use for me,” he says. His wife confirms it wasn’t until the mid-’90s, about a decade after they were married, that he started talking to her about what happened. He only began seeking serious help last year, he says. “It took me that long to finally rise above the toxic masculinity that says men aren’t victims of sexual assault or, if they are, it’s only because they were too weak to prevent it.”

Victoria Jonas joined the military reserves in 1982, at age 19, and says she experienced routine harassment. On an exercise one snowy weekend, a supervisor who had been sexually harassing her for weeks made her, among other things, march back and forth for sentry duty from midnight to 8 a.m. with no winter gear. It was the final straw. When she gave her notice, she told a supervisor what had been happening. She says she’s never forgotten what he said to her: “You think you are better than everyone here.” A friend to whom she recounted the events at the time AUGUST 2021

remembers how demoralizing an experience the military had proven to be for Jonas. “On top of being sexually harassed by a lot of these guys, a lot of them were also in turn telling her that she wasn’t good enough, and this and that. She couldn’t take it anymore, and she just said, ‘I’m leaving.’ ” In July 1984, 17-year-old Christina Perry, who’d been a proud Air Cadet since age 12, joined the air reserves to train as a musician in Ottawa. An instructor began harassing her from day one, Perry says, and repeatedly sexually assaulted her over the course of the summer. “I felt completely isolated and vulnerable,” she says, adding that no one else seemed to disapprove of or notice what was going on. “I did not know who was safe to speak to, so I remained silent.” A boyfriend with whom Perry shared the details not long after, who has now known her for almost 40 years, says he remembers how distraught she was: “There’s no doubt in my mind that it was a major life-changing event for her.”

In response to these allegations, the military said in a statement: “In order to protect those who protect Canada, we must always ensure that we make every effort possible to maintain a truly welcoming and inclusive organization. Simply put, there is no room in the Canadian Armed Forces for any type of misconduct. While that was as true in our past as it is today, we recognize that efforts to date—while well-intentioned—have not delivered the results that the Canadian Armed Forces needs, and its people deserve. This is why we are taking concrete steps to refocus and intensify our efforts to eradicate all forms of improper conduct, discrimination, biases, harmful stereotypes and systemic barriers across National Defence. In short, culture change within the Canadian Armed Forces is required.”

People who served in the Canadian Armed Forces during the ’70s and ’80s say they were well aware of how prevalent and pernicious military sexual misconduct was. It caused many of them to abandon their dreams of military service. But it was a series of articles in Maclean’s that first brought widespread national attention to the issue.

That first cover story—“Rape in the military”—was released in May 1998 even as the military was reeling from a different scandal altogether. The Somalia commission had investigated abuses by the CAF’s Canadian Airborne Regiment during a UN mission in 1992 and 1993, including the torture and killing of a Somali teenager. In a report released in July 1997, it had found evidence of a major institutional cover-up.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA MINZHULINA AND DREW MAYNARD

In response to both scandals, the thenLiberal government legislated major changes to the military justice system, creating new actors including an ombudsman and the Military Police Complaints Commission. The 1998 bill remains the system’s most recent major overhaul.

Military lawyer Michel Drapeau points to two big problems in the bill that still reverberate today. First, it took sexual assault off the list of civilian criminal offences that are off-limits to military prosecutors (leaving only murder, manslaughter and child abduction). Looking at ongoing problems with sexual misconduct, Drapeau says: “The mistake was made then.”

The second error was in ignoring the Somalia commission’s advice to create a powerful inspector general role, which Drapeau says could have reported directly to Parliament.

The commission recommended such a person “focus on systemic problems within the military justice system,” and investigate complaints from anyone about just about anything: abuses of authority, racial harassment, failures to investigate misconduct. It’s exactly the sort of thing that witnesses have been pleading for in parliamentary committee hearings more than 20 years later.

Like so many before her, Amy Graham had been warned early that reporting sexual assault would be a military career-ender. In 2010, six years into that career, a superior officer twice made unwanted advances on her, kissing her face and trying to grab her breasts at a hotel in Cyprus on their way back from a deployment to Afghanistan. She pushed him away, but he only stopped after she threatened to call military police. She quit the Forces not long after without immediately reporting the incident.

In 2014, a L’Actualité article detailed another woman’s story of sexual assault and laid out an estimate that some 1,780 sexual assaults were likely occurring every year in the Canadian military. That’s when then-chief of the defence staff Tom Lawson asked former justice Deschamps to review the issue of sexual misconduct. Inexplicably, she was given a mandate that explicitly barred her from looking at the military justice system or its court decisions.

It was in this atmosphere of reckoning, similar to that in ’98, that Graham worked up the courage to call military police in 2015.

They charged the alleged assailant, Alan Chapman, with sexual assault. But she says investigators warned her he might not be punished for that crime—that “99 per cent of the time,”

the defence and prosecution worked out plea bargains on lesser charges. At a court martial sentencing hearing in 2016, Chapman pleaded guilty to an offence of “behaved in a disgraceful manner” under the militaryspecific Code of Service Discipline; he was fined $2,500 and demoted in rank.

A few days after the trial, Graham says she saw Lawson’s successor, Jonathan Vance, on TV. He was talking about Operation Honour. The mission, reduced to a joke almost immediately by many military members—it sounded like “hop on her”—was an attempt to “ensure sexual misconduct is never minimized, ignored or excused.” A Sexual Misconduct Response Centre (SMRC) was stood up MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

within the Department of National Defence to offer anonymous support to victims, which today Fish says needs strengthening. (The Liberals’ 2021 budget included, among other things, a promise to extend free legal advice to victims through the SMRC; the CAF says that will be implemented “in the coming year.”) A duty to report was spelled out that would require bystanders to report incidents, and along with it a requirement that reports be investigated—something the military has now promised to reverse.

Within the Canadian Forces National Investigative Service, a section of the military police that handles serious investigations, Sexual Offence Response Teams were established.

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chain of command, but remembers worrying about the possibility. “When you’re soldiers, this is the bottom line: we gave an oath of allegiance. It usually works fine, but when something happens at the highest levels where there could be some inadvertent interference, what do you do?”

In a 2015 master’s thesis, Draper suggested giving military police a better firewall by creating a military police services act. Others suggest wrapping the military police into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

That recent problematic golf game highlighted another potential fix. In his report, Fish recommended that the provost marshal, the head of the military police, report up to the minister, rather than to the vice chief of the defence staff; and that the vice chief of the defence staff no longer have the power to provide written instructions on specific investigations—a power that, according to the current provost marshal, Simon Trudeau, has not been used anyway.

As to what would happen with an investigation at the “highest levels,” one of the golfers offers an interesting test case.

Fish says quite categorically that justice AUGUST 2021

could not currently be carried out in an instance where the chief of defence staff were to be tried by court martial. Even if the judges themselves are taken out of the chain of command, which Fish recommends, there would be a problem with the court martial equivalent of a jury, which constitutes a five-person panel of military members. All of them would necessarily be subordinates of the accused, putting them into a conflict of interest.

To avoid all of this, of course, you could try a chief of defence staff in the civilian system. But as far as anyone knows, Vance isn’t accused of any Criminal Code offences.

Fish’s suggested solution to the problem is to allow retired generals and other highranking officials to sit on court martial panels, should the need arise. But of the 36 recommendations for which Sajjan announced implementation is “already under way,” that’s not one of them.

Asked for comment on the predicament, the military noted that Judge Advocate General Geneviève Bernatchez was one of the people who raised this issue with Fish, and characterized the report’s recommendations as “pragmatic solutions to this practical difficulty.”

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA MINZHULINA AND DREW MAYNARD

Jesse Zillman, who now works for a municipal police force in Manitoba, was on one of those teams until his retirement from the Forces in 2019. The new teams did “very little” to affect how sex crimes were investigated, he says, and people already handling similar files were simply redistributed. “They could say, ‘We made this team,’ put out a press release and take a nice photo.”

Zillman says he felt independent as a military police officer and free to push back on commanding officers, well-intentioned or not, who were eager for information about investigations. But for further independence from a “hovering” chain of command, he thinks military police should be civilianized, and the investigation and prosecution of all Criminal Code offences should be taken away from military control. He doesn’t buy the idea that the military needs to police and judge itself. “The whole point of the justice system is that it’s impartial, and when you say we need a separate one because of cultural issues, that’s nonsense to me.”

Richard Draper was a proud military police officer for 28 years. He says he doesn’t recall serious incidents of interference from the

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That original sin in 1998—the decision to allow the military to prosecute sexual assaults committed by its members, against its members—is something Morris Fish would see undone, at least until the military implements some key legislation. Not new legislation, mind you. Legislation passed two years ago.

In 2019, Bill C-77 mandated a set of victims’ rights for military justice proceedings that would bring them into better line with the civilian system. But those haven’t been put into place yet. The military says in a statement that regulations are currently being drafted to put the new protections for victims into place. As of late June, the military justice system still has jurisdiction over sexual assault cases “as we work on the implementation plan” for Fish’s recommendations.

In her study of 14 sexual assault courts martial between 2015 and 2018, law professor Elaine Craig of Dalhousie University used Amy Graham’s case to make a point about the absence of such rights. A number of mitigating factors were considered by the judge in his sentencing. Among them was the fact that the accused had “allowed the victim to have a voice at the sentencing hearing, thereby demonstrating his consideration to what she has had to go through as the result of his actions.” Victims’ statements at sentencing are a matter of course in the civilian system.

(The court also considered his guilty plea, his clear disciplinary record and his nearly 30 years of service with the CAF.) Craig noted the frequency of plea deals for Code of Service Discipline offences and wrote it “sends the message that violating the sexual integrity of a fellow member of the CAF is not a serious infraction in the Canadian military.”

In 2018, Statistics Canada reported that about 900 regular force members—1.6 per cent of all members—had experienced sexual assault over the preceding year. One in four respondents said somebody in authority found out about the incident. A similar survey planned for 2020 was delayed due to the pandemic.

The military’s Operation Honour tracking system logged 671 sexual assault incidents and 1,220 other sexual misconduct incidents reported to the chain of command from April 2016 through the end of March this year. Of 1,376 incidents documented by military police over the same time period, 2.8 per cent were determined to be “unfounded,” which the military points out is well below the national average of 11 per cent reported by Statistics Canada in 2018. Military police laid or recommended charges in 276 of the cases.

In the 2019-20 financial year, specifically, the

Sexual Misconduct Response Centre reported it had taken on 628 new cases. About two out of every five reports were concerning a sexual assault. During the same financial year, only four cases of sexual assault were prosecuted at courts martial. All four led to guilty charges.

The four military judges typically handle about 50 to 60 court martial trials a year.

From April 2020 until the time of writing, there appear to have been only four decisions on sexual assault, including two guilty verdicts and two verdicts where the accused were found guilty of a lesser charge of “disgraceful” behaviour—one was imprisoned for 60 days and the other was fined $1,900 and given three weeks’ confinement to barracks.

Another three sexual assault trials saw a stay of proceedings due to a legal drama around the independence of military judges, but the stays were overturned in June by the Court Martial Appeal Court—which, by the way, found military judges to be adequately independent.

‘I’m trying to set the best examples for my guys,’ says one member. ‘But who’s setting my example?’

Courts martial have also increasingly handled cases of sexual misconduct falling short of sexual assault. In a February 2020 decision, a military member who was accused of unwanted touching and sending inappropriate text messages, and who had been charged with assault, was found guilty on one count of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline”—a military-only charge prosecuted at courts martial so frequently (44 times in 2019-20) that Justice Fish specifically recommends its use be minimized.

The member was fined $2,000 and given a severe reprimand, which the judge argued “reflects that even minor misconduct will have serious consequences.”

In the 1980s, Sam Samplonius says she was sexually assaulted three times by fellow military members, whom she did not then report. She tucked those events away in the back of her mind over an almost 40-year career in the Forces, thinking the ’80s were “a different time.”

But it all came flooding back in 2016, when she alleges a member of the British military who was posted to Canada sexually assaulted her after a mess dinner. Equipped with modMACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

ern language around consent, she felt empowered to report the incident to city police, who investigated and charged the perpetrator with sexual assault.

The outcome of her case was the acquittal of the accused, with a judge ruling the prosecution didn’t establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Samplonius, who says the civilian system could benefit from a military liaison for cases such as hers, is now pursuing a separate civil suit against him.

Amy Graham found herself pursuing her case through the civil system, too. She is one of the named plaintiffs in the joint classaction lawsuit—alleging sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination based on sex, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation in connection with claimants’ military service or employment with the Canadian Forces— that resulted in a $900-million settlement agreement with the government in 2019. The claims period opened in 2020 and stays open until late November this year. As of the time of writing, 6,880 claims have been made, and 2,379 paid out.

About a decade ago, Colten Skibinsky was out on a training course with 50 or 60 soldiers. Their instructor had them sit in a circle and close their eyes, according to Skibinsky’s account. Then he told a story.

It was about a sniper cell in Afghanistan that hunted down al-Qaeda fighters with American troops. In 2002, one of the Canadians had broken an all-time combat record, killing a man from 2,430 metres away. But that glory was shattered by allegations that two snipers cut a finger off an enemy’s corpse.

No charges were ultimately laid.

The instructor asked the troops to raise their hands if they thought the soldier who reported the alleged incident had done the right thing, Skibinsky says. When he opened his eyes, Skibinsky says he realized he was one of four or five people with their hands up.

He alleges the instructor kicked him in the ribs from behind, then announced: “Take a good look around. These are the rats on your course, and they won’t be here after week five.”

When his fifth week in the course came, Skibinsky says he was charged with insubordination and marched into a summary trial hearing. He was kicked off the course, fined $500 and given a week of extra duties. The insubordination, he says, had been a refusal to cut his own hair with his bayonet.

Maclean’s corroborated Skibinsky’s presence on the training course at the time of his allegations. A CAF member who served alongside Skibinsky at the base did not witness the 21

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incidents he alleges first-hand, but describes an atmosphere where fellow members and superiors would openly deride, physically intimidate or socially exclude people they called “snitches.” Maclean’s agreed to protect the person’s identity because they are still serving in the Forces.

The military says in a statement that it was made aware of Skibinsky’s allegations on June 22—the date of a request for comment from Maclean’s. “We are deeply troubled by this matter and have referred the allegations to the appropriate authorities for examination and further action,” the statement says.

In the summary trial process, the accused’s commanding officer is the person who decides whether to lay charges, presides over the hearing and decides what the punishment will be.

Reforms to that process in Bill C-77, including removing detention as a punishment, still haven’t been implemented. The military says Defence Minister Sajjan has directed his department to implement the remaining provisions of the bill “as soon as possible.”

Tim Dunne, a veteran after 37 years in the Forces who writes extensively on military justice, says personal biases can come into play.

“You can get two people committing the same offence or infraction and they can work for different commanding officers, and one may just simply say, ‘Smarten up, kid.’ The other can be put in jail for 30 days.”

That’s even more so the case with administrative punishments, which are “increasingly” used and offer only a veneer of procedural fairness, says military lawyer and the CAF’s former administrative law director Rory Fowler. “Administrative measures are extremely broad. They’re really only constrained by the imagination of the person using them.” It can mean extra duties; withholding promotions; keeping people off training courses or away from postings.

A functioning grievance process could theoretically mitigate abuses of power in the summary or administrative processes. But Fish reserves his strongest language for its failings. “It’s a disgrace. It’s a broken system and members of the military who put themselves at risk to protect Canada and Canadians, who can’t unionize, can’t bargain collectively, the only form of redress they have is grievances. In the present situation, they will wait years, literally, for grievances to be decided.”

Even potential remedies for grievances are delayed. Bill C-15 mandated that members be given the option to be reinstated, should they successfully grieve their release from the military. That was seven years ago. The military says Parliament did not write in a “coming into 22

force” date for the provision, giving it “flexibility to enact the clause once all policy and other considerations have been addressed,” and that it intends to request an extension under the Statute Repeals Act to prevent the clause from automatically expiring in 2023.

The change will require regulatory and legislative amendments, the statement from National Defence says. “In the meantime, the department has other mechanisms in place which can fairly and effectively deal with the majority of cases where reinstatement is required.”

Skibinsky says he saw rampant sexual misconduct during his 10 years of service—something he thinks is a symptom of a broader culture of impunity among senior officers who allow or encourage bad behaviour.

Jennie Carignan, who was recently promoted to a new chief of professional conduct and culture role in the Forces, put it this way to a parliamentary committee: “Very quickly, bullying can be confused with leadership,

Officers rise through the ranks without feedback from peers or subordinates. Change is ‘decades overdue.’ arrogance with confidence, lying with loyalty, and so on. If there is no strict discipline in this regard, toxicity sets in and all this creates power dynamics within the hierarchy. That’s what makes things like sexual misconduct and other unprofessional behaviour happen.”

Megan MacKenzie, a professor at Simon Fraser University who studies military culture and gender integration, points out that the conversation around sexual misconduct has tended to focus on how to support victims. That’s not a bad thing, she says, but now that Operation Honour has dissolved and senior leadership is in a position to set a new course, there should be more emphasis on preventing misconduct in the first place.

Fowler, the former administrative law director, agrees. “You’re fixing a symptom of the same problem that allows people to act with impunity when it comes to sexualized behaviour, racist or hateful conduct, ostracization of any member of the Defence team,” he says.

It’s not a simple fix. Experts consulted by Maclean’s say there are myriad changes that would add independence to the military justice system and prevent bad actors from exploiting it. For one thing, there are restorative justice AUGUST 2021

approaches that could add to training on misconduct that goes beyond what one member calls “death by PowerPoint.”

Former vice chief of the defence staff Mark Norman says more careful recruitment and a better process for promoting leaders could help, too. “We need a complete overhaul of the evaluation system,” he says. Officers rise through the ranks without feedback from their peers or subordinates, he says, and a change is “decades overdue.”

This fall, the CAF says new online assessments will be added to the process for promotions to the rank of brigadier-general or commodore and above. Those recommended for the highest ranks will also be subject to feedback from subordinates and colleagues.

Changes to the promotion of lower ranks “could begin in 2022.”

Norman says he takes responsibility for being part of a leadership team that didn’t take the Deschamps report seriously enough.

Today’s crisis has parallels to the impact of the Somalia inquiry in the ’90s, he says. “We lived through that, and we saw it, and many of us were significantly impacted by it,” he says.

“This is even more problematic. You’re going to have issues around trust and confidence that will take years if not decades to rebuild.”

Major shifts are always reactionary, Hilary McCormack, who chairs the Military Police Complaints Commission, points out. Courts order changes. Or political firestorms force legislation. Though McCormack would like to see more prescience, she thinks today’s pressures might be enough. “Right now there is such a focus on these issues, on sexual misconduct in the military but also this whole issue of policing authorities in general and oversight in general. I really think this is a perfect confluence of influences to make this a priority.

I have more confidence than in the past.”

Lori Buchart, who chairs a military sexual trauma support group called It’s Not Just 700, hopes a day will come when the military’s disgrace is no longer on the front page of the newspaper, or the cover of a magazine.

“I think all of us who’ve served want to see the Canadian Forces successful.”

But Dawn McIlmoyle, who was pictured on the Maclean’s “Rape in the Military” cover in 1998, remains cautious about her optimism.

She worries about the inertia and denialism that prevented change in the late ’90s and have continued to stymie efforts over the past five years. “If you’re in those top ranks, do you not know what’s going on?” she says.

“If they say they want change and they’re sincerely apologetic for what happened to us, then why are they dragging their feet?”

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RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS

The reckoning

Cindy Blackstock, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Waubgeshig Rice, Alicia Elliott and Tenille Campbell on grief, anger and action over the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves

SCREAMING INTO SILENCE Residential school survivors knew where the children were buried because some of them had dug their graves.

They told their truths to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and gave the country a national plan in their 94 calls to action for

BY CINDY BLACKSTOCK ·

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ending the injustices facing this generation of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children, and to ensure nothing like this happens again. Some of us heard them, but what they said was too confrontational for most—so people called them “stories” and looked away. The survivors must have felt they were screaming into silence.

The buried children died afraid and alone— away from their families—in “schools” that were more akin to re-education camps, run by the Canadian government and the Christian churches from the 1830s to 1996. Many could have survived if public will had forced Ottawa to implement the life-saving reforms posited AUGUST 2021

by Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, the chief medical health officer of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1907. Bryce found that tuberculosis was ravaging the malnourished children at 20 times the rate of others, fuelled by dramatically unequal “Indian” health funding and poor health practices. As the 1907 headline of the Evening Citizen reported, there was “absolute inattention to the bare necessities of health” and the schools were “veritable hotbeds of disease.” Other newspapers wrote that the children were “dying like flies,” compelling lawyer Samuel Hume Blake to say in 1908, “In that Canada fails to obviate the

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A memorial outside Parliament Hill began after 215 unmarked graves were found at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

preventable causes of deaths, it brings itself into unpleasant nearness to manslaughter.”

Canada refused to implement Bryce’s reforms and pushed him out of the public service in 1922 for refusing to stay quiet. That same year, Bryce walked onto the premises of Ottawa bookseller James Hope & Sons with his pamphlet, “The Story of a National Crime.” More headlines followed, but then the story died—and so did the children. Bryce died in 1932 and he was erased from Canada’s history. His family says his greatest lament was that “the work did not get done.” He must have felt like he, too, was screaming into silence.

First Nations, Métis and Inuit parents often spoke up but were ignored, and many were arrested for refusing to send their kids to these death traps. While the parents were in jail, the government took the kids. Over the decades, people of all walks of life regularly peppered the federal government with reports of child abuse, neglect and death in residential schools. Canada just waited out the media storm and continued business as usual.

I was born in 1964 in northern B.C. I could have been in one of those schools, but I was spared. I remember being the only “Indian” kid in my classrooms and wondering where the other Indian kids were. The townspeople had an answer for that—Indians were too dumb to learn, were drunks and would just grow up to be on welfare.

I began to hear the truths about residential schools decades later. At first only faintly, and then with growing strength as survivors told their truths, with great pain, so they could make sure this never happened to their grandchildren. It all made sense: why so many numb the pain with alcohol and drugs, why others disappeared and died amid deafening public silence. The government’s colonial project was made possible by purposefully feeding the populace a steady diet of distractions, misinformation and stereotypes.

The Prime Minister talks about the horrors and injustices in the past tense—probably to avoid any accountability for the serious harms the government continues to foist on this generation of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children.

Canada used the Indian Act to drive kids into residential schools, and it is still in force.

The country says I am a “status Indian.” I have a card saying so, but it expired decades ago and I don’t plan on renewing it. I want no part of Canada’s racist game.

Yet I am a player in this wicked colonial game, and so are you. The Indian Act is still around despite a royal commission laying out a 20-year plan to get rid of it in 1996 and the

public service inequities that Bryce pointed out more than a century ago.

One hundred years after Bryce’s report, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations filed a human rights case against the federal government.

Canada fought the case tooth and nail, relying on legal technicalities bereft of any serious consideration of how the inequities were affecting Indigenous children being separated from their families and placed in foster care at higher rates than in residential schools, experiencing irremediable harm and, in some cases, death.

In 2016, the Human Rights Tribunal ordered Canada to immediately cease its discriminatory conduct. The government welcomed the decision and then did not comply. The tribunal has been forced to issue 19 further orders and has linked Canada’s ongoing non-compliance to the unnecessary foster placements of many kids and to the deaths of three.

The Indian Act is still around, despite a 20-year plan to end it that was devised in 1996 I used to know how much children’s caskets cost because I had to raise funds for them so often.

Canada did not kill the kids directly—it put them in situations where their deaths were far more likely. Children like Jordan River Anderson, who died in a hospital in 2005 at age five never having spent a day in a family home because Canada and Manitoba were fighting over payment for his athome care due to him being First Nations.

Or like 15-year-old Shannen Koostachin, an inspiring Cree education leader who fought her whole life for “safe and comfy schools” for First Nations students before dying in a 2010 car accident, hundreds of miles away from her family because there was no high school in her community. Then there were the seven First Nations youths found in a river in Thunder Bay, Ont., after they’d gone there for high school because Ottawa was too cheap to build one near their home communities. Not MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

every child died, of course, but others have never seen clean water come from a tap or grew up in foster care at 14 times the rate of other children due to the multi-generational residential school trauma and inequitable federal public services.

In mid-June, federal ministers who have worn orange shirts and orange ribbons held news conferences about “allowing” First Nations names on Canadian passports and, more substantively, passing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into Canadian law. I could not view those conferences because I was in Federal Court watching Canada’s lawyers try to overturn two tribunal orders requiring it to compensate First Nations children it had discriminated against (and they are still children) and to avoid paying for public services for Indigenous kids off-reserve and without Indian Act status. I also attended a news conference with survivors from St. Anne’s residential school in northeastern Ontario who wanted the federal government to drop its legal battle against them. That school actually had a homemade electric chair for punishing students.

I believe those 215 and 715 little spirits buried on the grounds of the Kamloops and Marieval residential schools came to ensure the work gets done. We need to keep talking to the elected officials about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, even if we think they are not listening, because ultimately they will all hear us in the voting booth.

Cindy Blackstock, a member of the Gitxsan First Nation, is the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and a professor at McGill University.

JUST AS OUR ANCESTORS INTENDED I was nearing the end of the mandatory 14-day isolation period for non-essential workers in Yellowknife when the news first broke of the hundreds of children’s remains found in Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Residential school survivors have told us over and over of the atrocities committed at these schools and of their friends’ and their siblings’ deaths at the hands

BY LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON ·

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of principals, teachers, nuns and priests. Thousands of Indigenous families across Canada have stories of stolen children taken to residential schools, some never to return home.

To varying degrees, we carry the pain of that violence in our daily lives, whether it comes from residential schools, industrial schools, day schools, policing, prisons, sanitariums, the child welfare system or the myriad of other institutions, policies and laws that were designed to break the connection between Indigenous families and our lands.

Stealing kids breaks families. And dispossessing peoples of their lands is a violent and deplorable business, one that Canada has yet to reckon with.

I was in Yellowknife because I was teaching at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, an Indigenous land-based, postsecondary education program in the North.

We were running a hide-tanning course during the first two weeks of June along the Wiìliìdeh River (shown on maps as the Yellowknife River) in the territory of the Yellowknives Dene First 26

Nation, under the careful watch of our health and safety coordinator Noel Cockney, whose job has become quite complicated in the pandemic. We hosted 15 students, mainly from the communities of Dettah and Ndilo, with two excellent hide-tanning experts, Elders Madeline Judas from Wekweètì and Alice Wifladt from Ndilo. Charlene Liske, Dechinta’s land and cultural resources director, created a space for learning that felt like home for the Elders, students and kids, a small community on the side of the river that everyone wanted to visit, and no one wanted to leave.

We started the camp by thanking the harvesters who had taken special care of their harvests months earlier, knowing we would be using the hides. Three hides were gifted from the Beaufort Delta, and the rest were shared by Gordie Liske, Randy Baillargeon, Kyla LeSage and Justina Black after their harvest on the barren lands in February. In groups of two, students worked through the steps of taking the hair off, fleshing, soaking the hides in caribou brains (commonly used in traditional hide AUGUST 2021

tanning), smoking and stretching. It was hard work, often continuing into the long, sun-lit evenings. Madeline and Alice were the sort of teachers I aspire to be—kind and gentle with the students, encouraging them at every step and creating a loving, learning community full of laughter, sharing and support. They made sure the students had space to create their own relationships with their hides and each other.

There were never mistakes, only, “Well now that you’ve done that, you might need to do this.” Madeline quietly repeated, “You could do this, but it’s up to you.”

Arriving the first morning, Mary Rose Sundberg, a translator and language expert, reminded us of how to live together by embodying the Dene laws. She came each day, visiting the hide tanners and speaking Wiìliìdeh to the students. Berna Martin led us in a Feed the Fire ceremony. Cooks Irene Sangris, Brenda Michel, Karen and Marilyn Colins fed us well, and a team of strong arms and hearts from Dettah cut wood, set the fish net and made sure the community was kept warm and dry in

COURTESY OF KYLA LESAGE/DECHINTA CENTRE FOR RESEARCH AND LEARNING

tents and under tarps. Our students and staff brought their children, and Justina Black and Rena Mainville led the kids through a variety of daily land-based activities. And because it was a university course, we read, we heard lectures on self-determination and colonialism, and we thought critically about why reconnecting to our lands, to our bodies, to our minds, to our spirits and to each other was crucial. Shawna McLeod, who came with her daughter, showed us her beading, quill art and gorgeous baby belt, while another artist, Karen Wright-Fraser, shared the story of the Gwich’in Traditional Caribou Clothing Project and her journey of love and family through sewing.

We were awash in Dene brilliance. Brilliance that Dene resistance made sure was passed down to the next generation. Brilliance that residential schools could not stamp out.

Most of this hide-camp community attended residential school or were raised by parents who did, and in spite of those experiences, they were together on the banks of the Wiìliìdeh, speaking their language, preparing hides, tak-

ing care of each other and passing those practices down to the next generation. Children in this camp were cherished as wonderful gifts and teachers; their laughter carried through camp, reminding us to laugh and be silly with ourselves, reminding us that joy is the fabric of Indigenous life. On the very first day, Shihka Sundberg, a Grade 1 student at Kaw Tay Whee School in Dettah, wrote, “I love you” on a sticky note and stuck it to my coffee mug.

Gwich’in student Jacey Firth-Hagen from Inuvik reflected, “I am reconnecting with my ancestors and connecting to the land, my family and my community. It is all connected and makes me feel happy!”

Hide tanning is repetitious, careful and methodical work. The many hours spent with the caribou hides meant thinking with the ones who came before us and did this same work, thinking about how we were continuing this relationship to the land, the caribou, the harvesters and, of course, reflecting on our own lives and place in the world. For those two weeks, I lived immersed in a world built MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Elders Wifladt (far left) and Judas (centre, in pink) teach students to tan a hide in a course run by the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning; (above) LeSage scrapes a moose hide

by Dene, on their land, using their own laws, ethics and politics. A world that Canada has tried very hard to destroy, a world that Canada still tries very hard to destroy.

Let the reckoning begin.

But how will Canada return land to Indigenous nations? How will Canada support us in regenerating our languages, economies and political cultures? How will Canada respect our jurisdiction and self-determination, particularly when we say no to pipelines or mines or clear-cuts? When will Canada stop demanding we extinguish our rights in land-claim agreements and instead enter into relations that affirm these rights and affirm our understandings of treaties? How much longer will Canada bolster the conditions that lead to more Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People, more children 27

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in the child-welfare system and more of our people incarcerated every year? These are important questions for Canadians.

Indigenous peoples, like the Dene on the shores of the Wiìliìdeh River, will continue to take care of each other, and we will continue to build a different future for our children by lovingly reattaching ourselves to our lands, cultures and languages, just as our ancestors intended. We will continue to build life in spite of your failed genocide.

We will continue to build Indigenous worlds out of nothing.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, academic and musician and an instructor at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning.

A DIPLOMA WITH THE WRONG NAME My reaction to the image of the fallen statue surprised me. I was stunned to see the green, metal likeness of Egerton Ryerson splattered in red paint supine on the stone sidewalk of Toronto’s Gould Street. It was a scenario I had fantasized about some two decades earlier when I walked the same street as an undergraduate student at his namesake university, gazing upon his bronze statue in revilement rather than the revelry the white authors of Canadian history afforded him.

To believe, I had to see video. So I searched Twitter and in seconds I saw the moving pictures of a cable tied around the metal sculpture’s head, pulling it to the ground. It bounced on the stone and came to a rest, and when I heard voices cheer, I exhaled. I didn’t feel elation or victory. Instead, I felt relief and, strangely, a sense of closure. I once again saw Indigenous people taking matters into their own hands to challenge and reverse the inhumane measures imposed upon them by people like Ryerson, resistance that has inspired me my entire life.

My formal educational journey began and ended at institutions named after Egerton Ryerson. I grew up in Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay, where the community school used to be called Ryerson Indian Day School. Children attended junior and senior kindergarten there, and then went on to Grade 1 in nearby Parry Sound, Ont. By 28

the time I began in 1983, it was a day school in name only; the band had assumed control, and it no longer served as an assimilationist tool of the Indian Act where children were punished for speaking their language or practising Anishinaabe culture.

At that young age, I knew who Ryerson was, but my parents only described him to me as a prominent figure connected with education in Ontario. As I got older, they carefully told me about residential schools, and his influence in creating them. Only a handful of people in my extended family were forced to attend the vile institutions, but as a child, I was well aware of the damage that system inflicted upon the families in our community, and beyond.

Wasauksing built a new school in a new location by the time I entered Grade 5 and named it Wasauksing Kinomaugewgamik, the word for school in Anishinaabemowin.

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It was a new beginning that erased Ryerson from our education, proudly making space for Anishinaabe practices and knowledge.

Our teachers made time for visits from Elders, land-based teachings like medicinal gathering, and daily Anishinaabemowin classes. Our learning was scholastic resistance against the regime Ryerson helped create.

But his name surfaced again when it came time to choose a post-secondary path. I wanted to go to journalism school, and was accepted at the university named after him, and at Carleton University. It was a tough decision, but ultimately I wanted to be in Toronto, mostly because it was closer to home. I had to reconcile that with once again attending an institution that bore the Ryerson moniker. Being Indigenous in Canada means weighing the contradictions of simply trying to exist in a state that wants to erase your culture and history.

I moved to Toronto in the fall of 1998. I soon

NADYA KWANDIBENS/RED WORKS PHOTOGRAPHY

BY WAUBGESHIG RICE ·

Activists protest Egerton Ryerson’s legacy in front of his statue at Ryerson University

X University; as an alumnus, it’s an initiative I wholeheartedly support.

Finally, this past spring, people at the grassroots removed the Ryerson statue from its perch, provoked by the revelation of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential school sites. The university administration promises it won’t be restored.

The toppling of another statue of a historic Canadian figure prompted the usual tedious cries of erasure and vandalism from colonial apologists. But those attempts at moral debate are always pointless when weighing vandalism against the kidnapping, rape and death of Indigenous children that proliferated as a result of the residential school system that Ryerson and others helped create.

So when X University does finally change its name, as it should, I expect the administration to mail me an updated diploma with the new name, free of charge. It’s the least an institution named after an architect of genocide can do.

Waubgeshig Rice grew up in Wasauksing First Nation and is now based in Sudbury, Ont., where he’s working on his forthcoming novel, Moon of the Turning Leaves.

met other Indigenous students with the same experiences and perspective as me. In what was then called the Aboriginal Student Lounge in Jorgenson Hall, we talked about Ryerson’s traumatic legacy regularly, and we were united in our resolve to succeed despite him and his racist efforts. We knew that succeeding at a university named after a man who would have never wanted us there in the first place would be the ultimate educational triumph.

I graduated with a journalism degree in 2002.

In the years that followed, I watched from a distance as the university publicly wrestled with Ryerson’s infamy, which accelerated in the recent Truth and Reconciliation era. Arguably, the results of those discussions became mere platitudes, and many in the Indigenous community within the institution became frustrated enough to strike the name from their official titles and communications. Students wrote an open letter proclaiming it henceforth

‘THIS ENTIRE COUNTRY IS HAUNTED’ A mere 15-minute drive from where I now type this in Brantford, Ont., is the Mohawk Institute, one of the oldest residential schools in Canada. It’s a building whose purpose—which, in Sir John A. Macdonald’s words, was to withdraw Indigenous children “as much as possible from parental influence” so they could “acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men”—had been established for 36 more years than Canada as an independent nation had even existed.

Remember this.

In 2016, I went to an art and performance installation on the grounds of the Mohawk Institute, otherwise known to the hundreds of Indigenous students who were trapped within its walls over its 139 years as “the Mush Hole.” They called it such because, despite the students working on nearby farms withBY ALICIA ELLIOTT ·

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

out pay as soon as school was done, thus furnishing the staff dining table with fresh, delicious produce, the children themselves had nothing more to eat than mush. Sometimes the mush had worms crawling in it. It didn’t matter. That was what they were fed.

Remember this, too.

The art exhibit was called The Mush Hole Project. Survivors of the school acted as tour guides, leading us through the still-standing building—the places where the children bunked, the places where they were “taught.”

Our tour guide was a woman from my reserve, Six Nations of the Grand River. Her daughter and granddaughter were on the tour with us. This was the first time either of them had heard their mother/grandmother speak of her experiences. She spoke in few words about the physical and emotional pain of having her language beaten out of her. Her daughter later spoke of how she and her own daughter were learning Kanien’kéha. The woman who had attended the school said nothing. It was as if, along with English, she had been taught the Christian tradition of silence. These days, I’m recognizing it’s also a Canadian tradition.

As soon as the tour took us into the boiler room, I felt physically sick. My stomach dropped and my head started to hurt and I focused on the words coming from our tour guide’s mouth: that this was where many Indigenous children were taken by staff to be abused, because the sound of the boiler would better mask their screams. Don’t even bother trying to forget this.

Before that moment, I had always wondered whether ghosts were real. I’d watched horror movies about angry poltergeists slamming furniture around old houses and Ouija boards whose planchettes seemed to move by themselves, spelling out otherworldly knowledge. But there, in that room, as my chest got heavy with breath that felt barricaded in my lungs, I was certain: this place was haunted.

The pain those Anglican priests and teachers caused those children—many from my rez— lingered thick in the air. Like the criminals they were, the priests and teachers found the room most likely to help them hide their crimes. Remember this most of all.

A building built on an Indian burial ground is a trope in horror movies. The protagonists in these films are always white families who are pure and innocent as the snow. They step into these houses or hotels unaware of the Indigenous blood that was spilled before they came. If they find out about the history of the land they’re settling, the haunting that colonialism has created, like in Pet Sematary, that doesn’t stop them from settling in and 29

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ada seem to believe they are innocent. If they don’t acknowledge the violence that’s been done historically on their behalf to Indigenous children via residential schools, if they don’t acknowledge the violence being done today to Indigenous children via the foster care system, then they can continue their lives, unencumbered by inconvenient guilt.

They lean into the silence that’s expected of them, hoping that the nationalistic myth of Canada—polite, multicultural, consistently more tolerant and humanitarian than the United States—will overcome the gruesome facts of how this country was actually forged.

But the reality is this entire country is haunted by the violence enacted to create what

The Mohawk Institute Residential School, referred to by former students as ‘the Mush Hole’

ground—one that criminals parading as teachers, religious leaders and politicians took great care to cover up. However, unlike the nameless, often nationless Indigenous people whose deaths are used to clumsily explain hauntings in the movies, the children whose tiny bodies have been unearthed on the grounds of residential schools across the country in recent weeks had names and nations and communities. They had families who ached for their return, who asked after them and were deliberately told nothing.

Just like those white families in horror movies, though, non-Indigenous people of Can30

we now call “Canada.” These acts were done on behalf of every non-Indigenous family who proudly calls themselves Canadians, because this is what its leaders deemed necessary to carve out this colonial, capitalist nation from the already occupied land it once was.

We can no longer ignore the human cost of creating this haunted nation. In fact, we must remember. The question is: what, if anything, will this country, its leaders and its citizens do to actually show that they’ve changed?

Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer and author of the award-winning book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.

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THE BURDEN OF TELLING When I first heard in June about the sprawling, unmarked burial where 215 children were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C., I skimmed the article, taking note of who and where, how and when. I sighed deeply, shaking my head, and then read the next story.

That sounds callous, and I hesitate to even mention it, but trauma is not new to Indigenous people, and sometimes it’s hard to endure yet another story. This is our reality.

But as the news was picked up, appearing in hundreds and thousands of social feeds, I realized I would have to talk with my daughter—again—about a trauma that she would hear about, be it from a misinformed classmate or on the news.

I picked up Aerie from a sleepover on Sunday morning, and we sat in the car. I told her about the 215 children found, and what that meant. I told her about the many residential schools that operated in Canada, and how the last one only closed in 1996. I told her about the residential school that was on our reserve, and how her Papa had attended, and when it had been torn down.

I told her about the first time I heard stories of unmarked graves, of babies being buried, and how I didn’t believe it. I was quite young, younger than her. I was ignorant, then. And I didn’t want her to grow up ignorant in this world. So even though these stories are hard to hear, hard to feel, it’s important we honour them. That we witness them.

She was quiet, and I wiped my eyes. I didn’t even realize I was crying. “Are you sad because this could have happened to Papa?” she asked.

I nodded, knowing Aerie has grieved for the grandfather she knows as Papa ever since she found out about him attending. Papa is alive and well, but her heart still hurts for him. Every Sept. 30, as swarms of classmates wear orange and listen to stories of residential schools as part of the past, Aerie sits in that space of living history, the granddaughter of a residential school survivor. She understands so much, but she still can’t comprehend why people would steal children from their homes and families.

While I held her warm hand in mine, I explained that there was a call in for people to bring shoes, to represent the children stolen, and she nodded.

BY TENILLE CAMPBELL ·

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX JACOBS-BLUM

expecting uninterrupted colonial happiness.

After all, this land was cleared for them to settle.

And yet, once the haunting starts, we’re not supposed to empathize with the nameless Indigenous people whose bodies were buried beneath these homes. We’re not supposed to even think of them. We’re supposed to empathize with the white families being terrorized—the very people who decided it was okay to build their lives atop Indigenous death.

The very people who thought that because they themselves didn’t commit the crimes that allowed them to have their homes on Native land, they were still somehow innocent.

As we’re seeing more and more every day, this entire country is a real-life Indian burial

of the past—and the present—that happen to Indigenous people. I am tired of watching the light in her eyes die every time she comes to the realization that people hate us because of who we are, what we represent.

The pride in knowing our roots and our history and where we come from is always in direct conflict with ideas of the Canadian history shown in textbooks, and explaining the term genocide and how it applies to her, to us, is a soul-wearying moment.

I’m tired.

But I’m tired within my community, and I’m grateful for that. For the hugs. For the texts. For the messages. For the songs sent.

For the love felt. I’m not alone in my grief, and I see you all.

Fam, be gentle with yourself.

And for my non-Indig readers, consider donating to the Residential School Survivors Society. If you are unable to do so, please

I’m exhausted from having to explain the atrocities of the past to my nine-year-old

TENILLE CAMPBELL/SWEET MOON PHOTOGRAPHY

The memorial at St. Paul’s; the church’s doors were later painted with the words ‘We were children’

We went home and she came out of her room with the shiniest, blingiest gold-coloured shoes in her collection, saying: “I think a little girl would have liked these.”

Then we stood witness under a hot sun, listening to a tiny, powerful child sing at the big drum, on the steps of St. Paul’s Catholic Co-Cathedral in Saskatoon. A friend I hadn’t seen since the start of the pandemic came over,

wrapping an arm around me. No words were needed. Grief is sometimes silent, shown in a mutual deep breath.

We showed Aerie how to smudge her gold shoes and where to place them, amid the growing pile. We let the sun burn on our shoulders, silent, present.

I am exhausted, so tired of having to explain to my nine-year-old daughter the atrocities MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

educate yourself by reading books by Indigenous authors about residential school, but also about Indigenous joy. Understand that yes, residential school happened, and we are still processing the effects of that today, and that we are more than just resilient, we are more that just survivors.

We are complex, diverse, creative and strong. Watch the movies—by Indigenous producers and directors—about our stories and our lives. Go out of your way to support Indigenous businesses and startups. Listen to the many podcasts out there by Indigenous creators on matriarchs, on love, on relations.

We still mourn, but as the initial shock passes, I can only hope that my non-Indig readers and community continue to seek systematic change, for themselves and with us, collectively.

Tenille Campbell is a Dene-Métis photographer and writer from the English River First Nation in Saskatchewan.

She is based in Saskatoon.

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INDIGENOUS ISSUES

‘CANADIANS ARE WAKING UP’ Outgoing AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde on a critical decade of progress and the road ahead Perry Bellegarde has been involved in Indigenous politics since 1986. In July, that long run will come to an end: after seven years as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), the soft-spoken leader from Qu’Appelle, Sask., will watch his successor be elected from among seven candidates.

What’s his state of mind as that transfer of responsibility approaches? “I feel at peace,” Bellegarde says one bright afternoon during an interview in the backyard of a mutual acquaintance. “We’ve definitely moved the yardsticks down the field.

“Think back seven to 10 years ago, the discourse in Canada about First Nations issues wasn’t there. The opportunities for investments and growth weren’t there. Ten years ago, we didn’t have an Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Nobody was talking about any of these Indigenous concerns in Canada, from MMIW to 40,000 children in foster care. So we moved things.”

Bellegarde mentions significant legislation that’s recently passed in Parliament. There’s Bill C-5, which designates a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation each Sept. 30; Bill C-8, which amended the citizenship oath to include a promise to respect Aboriginal and treaty rights; and Bill C-15, which incorporates the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into Canadian law. Bellegarde’s list included a few more new laws.

As significant as the changing legal framework is a changing fiscal picture for Indigenous Canadians. In 2015, Justin Trudeau’s new government lifted a two per cent cap on annual increases to funding for First Nations programs that had been in place for 19 years.

Since then, “we’ve got $40-plus billion over six fiscal years that has been announced. That’s investments in housing and education and water and infrastructure, all the social determinants of health.”

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So that’s measurable progress. “But progress doesn’t mean parity,” Bellegarde adds.

It’s one of his most often repeated sayings.

“I always say, you’re not going to close those socio-economic gaps in three years or five years. I always talk about sixth versus 63rd.

In the United Nations Human Development Index, Canada is rated sixth, but if the same indices are applied to our people, we’re 63rd.

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That doesn’t make sense for our people and it doesn’t make sense for Canada. So therefore you have to make those continued investments in the fastest-growing segment of Canada’s population: young First Nations men and women.”

Bellegarde’s first run for the top job at the AFN, which represents about 900,000 First Nations citizens in Canada, was in 2009. It was

‘We’ve definitely moved the yardsticks down the field,’ Bellegarde says of his time at the AFN

in 2014 and has spent most of his term dealing with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Did that make a difference in outcomes?

“Of course,” Bellegarde says. “Of course.

When I became national chief, I did have some meetings with prime minister Harper and we met on a few issues. [But] you have to have a willing partner to bring about policy and legislative change. That’s what we witnessed with this Liberal government.”

With a federal election likely this year, Bellegarde is careful not to sound too supportive of any party in particular. “As a national chief you have to build relationships with all parties, all party leaders.” Partly because in a minority Parliament like the one Canada has had since 2019, more than one party must support any initiative if it is to pass a Commons vote. Partly because it can be hard to know who’ll win. “When I went to the NDP caucus that year”—in 2015, soon after he became national chief— “they were a government in waiting.” Tom Mulcair, then the NDP leader, “was just so excited you could feel the verve and the energy.” The Liberals’ tiny caucus, not so much. They were in third place in party standings, third place in the polls. A few months later, Justin Trudeau was the Prime Minister. It’s a lesson Bellegarde hasn’t forgotten.

Trudeau is often criticized for missteps and missed opportunities on Indigenous files, such as his decision to oust Jody Wilson-Raybould from the Liberal caucus after her resignation from cabinet, or his missed deadline on eliminating long-term drinking-water advisories on reserves. Bellegarde says his successor must keep the pressure on the next government, but he insists Trudeau deserves considerable credit for delivering on several issues.

“What prime minister ever went to the United Nations and delivered a speech the way Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did?” he asks. The reference is to Trudeau’s 2017 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, an extended admission of failure and bad faith before the world.

“For far too many Indigenous women,” Trudeau said then, “life in Canada includes threats of violence so frequent and severe that Amnesty International has called it ‘a human rights crisis.’ That is the legacy of colonialism in Canada—of a paternalistic Indian Act, of the

forced relocation of Inuit and First Nations communities, and a systematic denial of Métis rights and history, of residential schools that separated children as young as five years old from their families, punished them for speaking their own language, and sought to extinguish Indigenous cultures entirely.”

“It was almost like truth-telling,” Bellegarde says now, “acknowledging Canada’s colonial history. How many prime ministers of Canada have done that?”

But Bellegarde says there’s been a shift in public opinion in Canada that no government can take credit for, and none would be wise to resist. “If the discourse with Canadians was not there, it would have been more difficult to do,” he says. “The catalysts for this discourse, what were they?” He lists several. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report in 2015, with its 94 calls to action. The Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls with its 203 calls to justice. “And then more recently, 215 little spirits, talking to everybody, waking up everybody”—the news of 215 bodies detected in unmarked graves outside the Kamloops Indian Residential School. (A week after our conversation, hundreds more unmarked graves were found at a former residential school site in Saskatchewan. Bellegarde tweeted that it was “absolutely tragic, but not surprising. I urge all Canadians to stand with First Nations in this extremely difficult and emotional time.”)

“Canadians are waking up and getting it, that this is just not acceptable. And as a First Nations leader, you need that support. You need Canadians pushing their members of Parliament, demanding that action be done.”

What’s next for the AFN? That will be for Bellegarde’s successor to answer, but Bellegarde has more than a few items he’d put on that to-do list. His list starts with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to action number 58, the demand for an apology from the Pope for the Catholic Church’s role in running residential schools. He says there’s still room for greater use of restorative justice as an alternative to criminal-code remedies, to reduce the huge over-representation of First Nations in Canadian prisons. And the increased spending of the first two Trudeau governments needs to continue, Bellegarde says, to ensure fragile progress isn’t reversed.

For Bellegarde himself, not yet 60? “Getting some rest, to reset and rejuvenate. The rest is in the Creator’s hands.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA DEEKS

There’s a shift in public opinion that no government can take credit for, and none would be wise to resist, he says

a race for the ages, running eight ballots. On six of them, Bellegarde was virtually tied with Shawn Atleo, the British Columbia regional chief. After the eighth ballot, Bellegarde withdrew, making Atleo the new national chief.

As a practical matter, that meant Atleo spent his entire term in office dealing with the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Bellegarde became national leader

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THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

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really happy with where I am in my training right now, and I’m excited for the summer.”

But Mac Neil’s race on this day has revealed a degree of strength and ferocity that belies her youth and Olympic inexperience, and should put the world’s top competitors in her event on notice. No wonder her coach is worried for those starting blocks.

Before she could walk, or for that matter crawl, Mac Neil was jumping head-first into water. Her mother, Susan McNair, remembers the first time she brought baby Maggie to parent-and-tot swim lessons at a local pool in London, Ont.; she could barely keep a hold of her little girl. “She would spontaneously jump out of my arms, dive her little body underwater and come back up laughing,” recalls McNair, who is a staff physician at St. Joseph’s Family Medical Centre in London and a former Ontario provincial coroner. “She was completely and utterly smitten with water.”

Lessons were a must for safety, not sport.

McNair calls herself anxious by nature—perhaps on account of the five years she served as coroner, when she reviewed too many

kicks—after every push off the wall. Some of Mac Neil’s peers occasionally treated those underwater kicks as optional when they were tired, Craven says, but young Maggie would complete the full set after every single wall during every single practice. “If you’re really good at it, that can really become a weapon,” Craven says, “and Maggie is now regarded as one of the best in the world.”

Even when she wasn’t in the water, Craven remembers Mac Neil showing the mental strength needed to excel. When she was 12, she botched a race at the Eastern Canadian Championships in Montreal, standing oblivious after the announcer called her name for the 50-m butterfly, even though her mother was waving frantically from the stands for her to move to the starting block. She stood at the end of her lane and watched her heat go. “I don’t know if it was [me not understanding] people speaking French or if I was overwhelmed, but I completely missed the race,” she says.

But for Craven, the missed heat stands out less than what happened next. Mac Neil didn’t cry, or even sulk. In fact, it didn’t seem to phase her at all. The next day, in the 200-m butterfly, Mac Neil smashed the provincial record for girls 12 and under, a record that had stood for 32 years.

foot plate on the starting block wasn’t properly secured. As she pushed off, she slipped, albeit only slightly. Ever since, she has kicked the starting blocks to make sure that never happens. It’s one less variable that can hold her back.

Bitter experience also explains her ritual of vigorously splashing herself with water—three rounds of five splashes—before each race. She says when her parents bought her very first racing swimsuit, it wasn’t the perfect fit. When she dove in for her first race, her swimsuit bone dry, “there was this big bubble in the chest area when the water got in,” she says.

Her compulsive attention to detail extends outside the pool, too. It’s as if she has a need to internalize all the knowledge she possibly can. As a teenager, she memorized every element on the periodic table—just for fun—in the form of a song. At the London Aquatic Club, “she knew every swimmer by name,” Craven says. “We’re not a huge club, but we have maybe 250 swimmers. I’m the head coach and I don’t know the name of every swimmer.”

At the start of the pandemic, when Mac Neil had to quarantine for two weeks after returning home from the University of Michigan, where she studies psychology on an athletic scholarship, she used the time to memorize the first 100 digits of pi—and when that was accomplished, she floated the idea of memorizing So what’s with those pre-swim foot stomps? the second hundred digits before opting to There was a race when she was a kid, Mac put her energy elsewhere.

Neil explains, and she didn’t realize the back Needless to say, Mac Neil puts more time (left) Mac Neil at age 3 by the family pool; (below) Sjöström, Mac Neil and Emma McKeon at the 2019 world championships; (right) Mac Neil with Kylie Masse at the Pan Am Sports Centre

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COURTESY OF MAGGIE MAC NEIL; ANTONIO BRONIC/REUTERS PREVIOUS SPREAD: FRANÇOIS-XAVIER MARIT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

aquatic mishaps. When the family moved to a house with a pool, she wouldn’t risk either of her two girls sneaking to the backyard without adult supervision. Mac Neil, with only a touch of hyperbole, estimates her mom had eight locks on the back door of their home.

Still, the pool became a place for Mac Neil to make friends, and every year those friends had more trouble keeping up with her in the water. She joined the London Aquatic Club at the age of eight, and soon staffers were urging the club’s head coach, Andrew Craven, to step away from teaching the teenagers and watch the new kid.

“The coaches were telling me Maggie was something special in the way she floated in the water,” Craven remembers. She seemed at home in the pool—moving through the water with ease, while staying highly engaged in each lesson. During practice, coaches asked for a minimum of three underwater butterfly kicks—also known as underwater dolphin AUGUST 2021

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCY LU

these days into studying her competition for Tokyo—which may or may not include her greatest rival on the international stage, Swedish world record holder Sarah Sjöström, who is returning from elbow surgery.

Mac Neil will be one of the first to know Sjöström’s status once the news is public. The Canadian proudly calls herself “the biggest swim nerd ever,” constantly checking out the website Swim Swam, which has the latest updates on meets and records around the world. It gets to the point that coaches have threatened to take away her phone at meets.

“She’s so plugged in,” says Titley. “She texted me yesterday about how this person made the U.S. team and this person didn’t. I don’t really look at stuff, but Maggie’s all over it.”

Five years ago, Mac Neil failed to qualify for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio; she was forced to watch the 100-m butterfly final on TV as Sjöström edged out Canada’s Penny Oleksiak (who, like Mac Neil, was just 16 at the

time) to win Olympic gold. By 2019, Mac Neil had dethroned the Swede at the world championships, and has since solidified her status as Canada’s best butterfly swimmer. (Oleksiak did not compete in the event at Canada’s recent Olympic trials.) Mac Neil also anchored Canada’s bronze-medal 4 x 100-m freestyle relay team at the 2019 world championships.

Instead of staying in Canada to train most of the year, Mac Neil studies at the University of Michigan, whose spending on athletics dwarfs that of any Canadian school. But when swimming facilities shut down across Michigan and Ontario during the first COVID-19 lockdown, she returned to London to train in her family’s backyard pool. For a swimmer of Mac Neil’s power, it left a bit to be desired: “I watched her a few times and she’d get two strokes before she’d be at the other end,” says McNair, her mother. “I guess she did a lot of turns.”

Mac Neil didn’t appear to lose a stroke on account of the pandemic—and her turns have MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

only gotten better. Earlier this year, she won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) title in both the 100-yard freestyle and the 100-yard butterfly, breaking the NCAA record time in the latter.

“She’s not quite as dynamically fast as some of her competitors, so when you see her race at the Olympics, there is a very good chance she’s not going to be turning first or second,” Titley says. But then he starts to talk about her “fabulous” turn, her skill underwater, and her confidence to close the race in the final 50 metres. “It’ll give people something big to think about.”

It’s a blend of talent, resolve and sheer power that has put her on the podium at meets around the world since she sat out Rio. If it works for her in Tokyo, suffice to say, no one in this country—inside or outside the swimming community—will begrudge the cost of a starting block or two at the Pan Am Sports Centre in Toronto.

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JUSTICE

Forgiving Jaskirat Sidhu Who deserves absolution, and when, is one of humanity’s most vexing questions—one families devastated by the Humboldt Broncos tragedy can’t seem to avoid. By Aaron Hutchins

Scott Thomas reached for his necklace.

It felt like it was choking him as he struggled to fall asleep. With his fingers, he traced the contours of the pendant with the number 17 engraved on one side and the Humboldt Broncos insignia on the other. The markings represented the number his son Evan wore in hockey, and the last team for which the 18-year-old had laced up skates.

This would be Scott’s last restless night’s sleep before he and his wife, Laurie, drove to a courtroom in Melfort, Sask., and came face to face for the first time with Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, the truck driver who had cruised through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan and crashed into the Broncos’ bus while it was en route to a junior hockey playoff game. Sixteen people, including Evan, died in that crash on April 6, 2018. Thirteen were seriously injured.

Scott took off the necklace.

“I always think about what Evan might be thinking,” he says. “I worry that I don’t talk to him enough. I worry that I don’t think about him enough. I worry that I’m not representing him well. I worry that I’m not standing up enough for him. There are times when I wonder if I should hate Sidhu.

There is no blueprint for this.”

The Thomases had their victim impact statement ready for the court proceedings, written in the form of a letter to Evan from his mother and father. It was an open-hearted accounting of all the ways and places and times that they miss him—an expression of love for their only son.

But on the morning of day three for the sentencing hearing, the day after the Thomases read that letter aloud before the court, the couple couldn’t shake a haunting thought: their 18-year-old son would forgive the truck driver. They were certain of it.

So in their hotel room, they sat down with pen and paper and wrote another letter, this time to Sidhu, saying as much. Then, as a gesture of forgiveness, they placed the pendant in the envelope with the letter and gave the package to a lawyer on the defence team. Later that day, one of Sidhu’s relatives approached the couple, proposing that they meet in private with the man responsible for Evan’s death.

Scott and Laurie acknowledge feeling some residual hostility at the time toward Sidhu, even as they felt the capacity to forgive. But mostly, they felt grief. So Scott walked into the police-protected room reserved for the defence and his family. Sidhu was down on Sidhu pleaded guilty to all 29 charges against him after the collision that claimed 16 lives

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one knee, tears dropping onto the floor. Scott held both his hands, pulled him up to his feet and hugged him close, as if he were comforting a weeping child. Both men wept.

“What happened?” Scott asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Sidhu replied.

“I’m so sorry.”

“You must have got the letter,” Scott said.

They talked about what the Thomases had written, about Evan, about faith. Scott didn’t doubt Sidhu’s sincerity, and gave voice to the message in the letter: that he forgives him. Sidhu took a step back, reached under his shirt and pulled out the No. 17 Broncos pendant. “I’ll wear this for the rest of my life,” he told Scott.

Today, Sidhu looks back on these fleeting moments in the anteroom of a Prairie courthouse as a minor miracle—as pivotal in setting the course of his life as the sentencing itself. The arc of pain and outrage set off by the Humboldt tragedy seemed at the time as though it would never bend back. The scale of loss was too great, the anger too raw for a single one of the victims’ families to extend a hand of forgiveness.

“When I close my eyes, I can see myself standing in that room with Mr. Thomas and it gives me the energy to move forward,” Sidhu told Maclean’s in his first interview since the

crash, speaking from Bowden Institution, a medium-security prison near Red Deer, Alta.

“The pendant reminds me of my mistakes—and it reminds me of the power of forgiveness.”

Many of the loved ones of other Broncos killed in the collision may never reach the place the Thomases have, and some speak of feeling an unwelcome pressure to forgive.

Yet none who agreed to be interviewed for this story slammed the door on the possibility, and their reasons for withholding it are every bit as considered and heartfelt as the Thomas family’s reasons for extending it.

The result, only three years on from heartrending trauma, is a surprisingly open conversation about the limits of grief, and the usefulness of a deceptively simple-sounding word. What is forgiveness? Who does it serve?

What purpose does it serve?

“From where I’m standing,” Sidhu says, “forgiveness means everything.”

Generosity granted to the wrongdoer is an idea that has resonated through the centuries in religion, ethics, politics and modern psychology. In Canada, few cases have thrust it to the fore as surely as the disaster in Saskatchewan. As Sidhu’s case passed through the justice system—as he pled guilty to 29 counts of dangerous driving; as he was sen-

tenced to eight years in prison; as he awaited a Canada Border Services officer’s report recommending whether he, a permanent resident of Canada but not a citizen, should be deported to India upon his release—the survivors and families of the dead were asked the question again and again. Do they forgive?

Will they? Ever?

Some of this interest arises from Sidhu’s inadequacy as a villain. He never sought to minimize his personal responsibility, nor did he intend to kill or injure. (Indeed, he came within a fraction of a second of losing his own life.) He has expressed remorse for his actions, repeatedly. With less than one month on the job at the time of the crash, he is now viewed by many as a trucking novice who was unready to be sent out solo behind the wheel of a B-train tractor-trailer unit pulling 22 tonnes of peat moss.

But the interest on the part of the media and public in the families’ answers also speaks to our collective stake in the conditions under which forgiveness is granted, because Sidhu’s case highlights the real-world consequences of offering or withholding it. For the offender, gaining forgiveness can affect the length of their sentence and the availability of parole. It can have a profound impact on their mental health.

JONATHAN HAYWARD/CP; PREVIOUS SPREAD: RYAN REMIORZ/CP

The wreckage from the April 6, 2018, collision of the truck driven by Sidhu and the Broncos bus; Sidhu had been on the job for less than a month

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Thomas (above), whose son Evan was killed in the crash, gave a pendant bearing his son’s hockey number (below) to Sidhu in an act of forgiveness

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For those harmed, offering it can be no less life-altering. “When you hold onto a grudge, [the perpetrators] are the ones responsible for your suffering,” says Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, a research initiative on interpersonal forgiving. “When you give up the grudge, you are now again responsible to give yourself a good life. And that’s really hard.”

The concept of forgiveness dominant in modern Western cultures is strongly influenced by religion, especially Christianity.

Common expressions for the idea, like “wiping the slate clean,” are found in the Old Testament. Jesus is quoted as saying: “If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

A more modern understanding would emerge, though, shaped by social scientists and secular thinkers studying its impact on victims, offenders and society as a whole.

They tend to frame forgiveness not as a matter of faith but as a factor in the psychological recovery of the individuals involved. Or, on a societal level, as a way of relieving social and political tension. (Sometimes, the old and new lines of thinking converge in a symbolic way, as when the Black Anglican cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.)

Scientific study of forgiveness, meanwhile, only began in the last few decades. In a groundbreaking 2009 study, researchers screened patients at a Wisconsin veteran’s hospital, identifying those who’d suffered deep and unresolved psychological injuries. One group went through interpersonal forgiveness therapy sessions; a control group did not. Four months later, when the subjects were asked to recall the person who hurt them, the people who had completed the program showed markedly greater blood-flow improvement than those who had not.

“It was the only study that showed a cause and effect of learning how to forgive, reasonably, and there being improvement in a major artery of the body,” says Robert Enright, a co-author of the study and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is considered a pioneer of forgiveness science.

“Forgiveness therapy is for the client, to get better [after] being pulled down psychologically by the injustices against them.”

On a population-wide level, forgiveness is seen as essential to a functioning society.

How many more divorce cases would clog our courts without it? How would we move beyond wars and historic injustices?

Yet there are persuasive examples of withholding forgiveness yielding social good.

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Unforgiving victims can ensure a domestic assailant faces stronger consequences. They can prevent groups of people from being further victimized in a cycle of abuse. They can spur much-needed changes in the law.

“If Rosa Parks forgave and moved to the back of the bus, a lot of things wouldn’t have changed,” says Kim Pittaway, a journalist from Halifax and author of her forthcoming memoir Grudge: My 10-Year Fight With Forgiveness.

“Forgiveness is a kind of social lubrication.

If there was no forgiveness, the gears would grind to a halt. But if it is dispensed too easily, no one is ever held responsible for the terrible things they do to others.”

Pittaway struggled to forgive her father, who she describes as a narcissist, a bully and someone who would say awful things to people. His children were not exempt from his behaviour. Pittaway coped with that by moving 1,500 km from Moncton to Toronto.

“We are immersed in a culture that sees forgiveness as a kind of saintly state—that a good person forgives, a bad person doesn’t forgive,” says Pittaway. “I’m a fan of grudges.

Grudges protect people. There’s a difference between being consumed with hatred and holding a sensible grudge against someone.”

She maintained minimal contact with her father for decades, because he was still married to her mother. But when her mom turned 75, she left Kim’s father. Pittaway, who had moved back to the East Coast, agreed to help him with the occasional banking or apartment crisis. Otherwise, she would go long stretches without talking to him. He wasn’t going to change his behaviour, and he wasn’t going to apologize. She never forgave him.

“People who refuse to forgive, who just continue to bear witness to horror and tragedy and a wrong that was done, play an important role in reminding us that these things should never happen,” says Alice MacLachlan, a York University philosophy professor whose research includes the nature and limits of forgiveness. “One way to say ‘never again’ is to keep insisting that we sit with the discomfort of horrible things.”

All of which suggests the circumstances under which forgiveness is offered, or denied, says much about a society—even in instances as wrenching and traumatic as the Humboldt bus crash.

When Jaskirat Sidhu’s sentence is over and the question of his deportation is settled, it seems possible the outcome will serve as a mirror to Canadians, reflecting some part of our character back at us. Something in our values, perhaps, or our collective nature.

Will we like what we see?

AUGUST 2021

‘I don’t think we’d be doing Darcy justice if we didn’t model the things that were important to him’ Evan Thomas was six when he made a local competitive hockey team in Saskatoon.

One of his friends didn’t, however, and in his anger stole Evan’s track suit. It turned up later in the garbage. Evan was upset, but Laurie and Scott offered some context. This boy’s parents were going through a divorce, they told him, and it’s hard to imagine how tough that could be. Evan went back and told his buddy that he forgave him. They grew up to become best friends.

It’s a memory Scott and Laurie Thomas look back upon fondly. Sometimes those principles last well into adulthood, as was the case with Darcy Haugan, Evan’s coach with the Humboldt Broncos, who was also killed

PHOTOGRAPH BY LEAH HENNEL

in the crash. Partway through that fateful season, someone slipped a letter under Haugan’s office door. It said Haugan should quit as coach—that he should not be here, so just pack up and leave—only in less kind words.

Why the writer felt that way was unclear; the Broncos were having a pretty good season. It was left unsigned.

Christina Haugan read the note later that day, and was dismayed by the vitriol on her husband’s behalf. But when she asked Darcy how he felt, she recalls him saying: “You know what? Someone obviously needed to get that off their chest. I can’t take that personally.”

Says Christina: “Instead of being angry, he had that instant, forgiving mindset.”

It was a mentality partly rooted in Christian faith, which they shared. But when Darcy died, forgiveness was far from instant for Christina. She was angry and hurt, and no longremembered Sunday school precept could change that on its own. “I’ve been taught my whole life that you should forgive other people,” she says. “It’s a little different when you’re faced with having to do it.”

Haugan’s children were nine and 12 years old when their father died in the crash. She knew they’d be influenced by what they heard, and she didn’t want them to witness anger that wouldn’t subside.

After Sidhu’s conviction, the court invited the survivors and the families of the dead to MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Christina Haugan’s children were 9 and 12 when their father, Darcy, died in the crash

submit victim impact statements for sentencing. Christina’s first draft came out mostly as a rant, she says, until it struck her that it was not her place to appraise someone’s errors or sins. The consequences of human wrongdoing vary widely, from trifling to tragic, but she looked back at the times she’d been forgiven for her mistakes. How could she not do the same? And like the Thomases, she thought of how the person she’d lost would react. Darcy Haugan would want her to forgive, she decided.

So she did. “I don’t think we would be 43

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Raelene and Russell Herold go through family photos and their son Adam’s things at the farm

making peace with the word ‘no,’ ” he says.

“What you’re doing is accepting the totality of one’s life experience, both the blessings and the suffering.” That does not, he adds, necessitate reconciling or giving someone who harms you a hug: “Forgive your ex, but still go to court and get child support.”

Other scholars hesitate to define forgiveness, noting that those thinking about it most are often doing so in the wake of extraordinarily painful experiences and have differing understandings of what the word means.

York’s MacLachlan, for one, cautions against getting caught up in its perceived societal benefits. “I don’t think forgiveness is always required, an obligation or even a good idea,” she says. “Victims have a lot of autonomy in deciding whether or not they get to forgive.

As a society, we sometimes pressure victims to forgive too much, too fast. And this can be really dangerous.”

Cherry calls it the “hurry and bury” ritual: the public expects a Hollywood-style plot line, where they feel uncomfortable for

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK TAYLOR

Experts say that’s because forgiveness has doing Darcy justice if we weren’t modelling things that were important to him,” she says. become part of a script for public tragedies.

“Chances are you’ll be asked by someone, Raelene and Russell Herold had yet to like the media, ‘Do you forgive this person?’ ” bury the ashes of their son Adam, a 16-year- says Myisha Cherry, a philosophy professor old playoff call-up for the Broncos, when a at the University of California, Riverside and reporter outside the courtroom at Sidhu’s author of the forthcoming book The Failures sentencing hearing asked them about forgive- of Forgiveness. “So they’re immediately preness. Raelene looked at Russell, who looked sented with this question: are you going to back at her. “Put yourself in my shoes,” she be a forgiving victim or an unforgiving one?” replied to the reporter through tears. “Tell me That confluence of private decision-making what you would do.” She doesn’t remember and public interest exposes another problem. We have no common understanding any questions after that.

The Herolds didn’t fault other Broncos of what forgiveness means. Is it letting go family members who had chosen to forgive; of anger? Is it absolving the wrongdoer? Is those gestures didn’t make their pain any it extending grace, in the Biblical sense? Is worse. But Sidhu’s sentencing was the first it setting terms for how severely an offender time they’d even heard anyone raise the issue. should be punished?

Now they wished each person’s decision on the “Forgiveness is not excusing. It’s not formatter wouldn’t be treated as a public event. getting. It’s not abandoning justice. It’s not The effect of such moments, say the Her- letting them out of jail,” says Enright. “They olds and others who have experienced it, is can stay in jail and you can still forgive them an unspoken yet discernible pressure—and by seeing them in their full humanity, beyond a fear of appearing ungenerous, even self- just those behaviours.” involved, if they can’t forgive, as if they’re To Luskin, the Stanford psychologist, it letting down society by failing to let go of means relinquishing the idea that the past their anger. could or should be different. “Forgiveness is

‘We never say we’ll never forgive. It’s not that we’re not trying, or not thinking about it.

It’s just hard.’ a certain period before things get settled. It could be part of a narrative about reconciliation, Cherry says, “but we also want to know that it’s been resolved so we can go about our lives. We quickly ask and expect for them to forgive. And these individuals are usually gender minorities and racial minorities.”

She points to some of the best known “moral exemplars” who suffered greatly and forgave— individuals who minorities are asked, implicitly or explicitly, to emulate amid injustice: Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. “What do all these people have in common?

They are Black or brown folk who have suffered under racial colonial oppression.”

In such cases—even the ones with storybook endings—the public can be left wondering whose interests forgiveness has served. There’s a 2016 segment from 60 Minutes, the American current affairs show, about a crooked white police officer who falsified a report in a drugdealing case to send an innocent Black man to jail. Years later, it was revealed the officer had falsified many reports, and he was sent to jail for a year and a half, while the Black man was exonerated and released after four years behind bars.

Coincidentally, the duo later found work at the same small-town café. The ex-officer apologized, the one who lost four years of his life behind bars forgave, and they became friends. The segment ends with the narrator— blithely, as if there were some equivalency between the men’s experiences—asking the viewer: “If these two guys from the coffee shop can set aside their bitter grounds, what’s our excuse?”

When some families started to offer their forgiveness at the sentencing hearing for Sidhu, it was Chris Joseph’s first inkling that the 29 Broncos families didn’t all align on the matter. It was less than a year after the tragedy, and Joseph hadn’t had time to process his thoughts about Sidhu. He and his wife, Andrea, were angry, he says, and that’s how they appeared in the media. A number of news outlets made headlines out of a quote from Andrea’s victim impact statement: “You don’t deserve my forgiveness.”

Chris Joseph believes there is now more logic to their position. While Sidhu apologized, they feel he took a chance at that intersection by running the stop sign. That gamble, they say, MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

cost the Josephs their son Jaxon, a 20-yearold centre on the Broncos. Chris notes that Sidhu submitted the paperwork to stay in Canada after his sentence is served, instead of accepting deportation. To Joseph, that in itself suggests a lack of remorse, a denial of rightful consequence.

Joseph thinks about Sidhu someday getting back behind the wheel of a vehicle in Canada.

(Sidhu is under a court order that prevents him from driving on any public road, street or highway in Canada for 10 years from the end of his imprisonment sentence.) He thinks of Sidhu raising a family in Canada after devastating Joseph’s. He thinks of Sidhu’s name popping up in the news—whether he moves to Nova Scotia or the Yukon. He thinks about Sidhu living in a nearby community in Alberta.

If he returns to India, says Joseph, and the couple never hear his name again, that’s one less trauma for them to endure: “Why does he have to stay? You can still forgive, no matter where he is.”

Joseph says he doesn’t feel burdened by his anger, and he doesn’t feel a need to “release” it. “I’m comfortable in my lack of forgiveness right now,” he says. More concerning to 45

him and other Broncos families who spoke to Maclean’s is how the public might judge them for holding to their view three years after the crash. They don’t want to come across as the bad guys. They’re simply still grieving.

Russell Herold, for one, acknowledges that Sidhu didn’t intend to hurt anyone. But he believes the driver’s actions were reckless.

“It wasn’t an icy road. It wasn’t a brake failure. This was in broad daylight and he never touched his brakes,” he says. “That’s why I struggle to forgive.”

Adam, their only son, has since been buried on their farmland in Montmartre, Sask., but vestiges of his life are everywhere: a machine he’d operate, something he’d built, a regular chore he would do. “It’s a daily reminder,” Russell says, “and I can’t get it out of my mind.”

The Herolds occasionally read articles about the aftermath of the tragedy that raise the question of forgiveness, and they can see that victims who do forgive are held in high regard. “What does that reinforce to people who are not thinking that same thing?” he says.

“That you mustn’t be that good of a person.”

“We’ll never say that we’re never going to forgive,” Raelene adds. “It’s not that we’re not trying, or not thinking about it. It’s just hard.”

Jaskirat Sidhu remembers the first time someone forgave him for causing the deaths of 16 people and altering the lives of countless more. It was day one of his sentencing

hearing in March 2019, the first time he’d come face to face with the families of the Humboldt Broncos.

Sidhu was overcome with emotion as he entered the makeshift courthouse located inside a community-centre gymnasium in Melfort. There was fear. There was sadness.

“I was broken,” he says. “I’m an emotional guy who never wanted to hurt anybody, who never wanted to take the most valuable things in their life from them.”

He was trembling in his chair at one point when a Broncos family member approached and sat down next to him. He can’t remember who. She told Sidhu that she forgave him.

His body froze.

“My mind went blank—it didn’t respond,” he says. “You keep asking yourself: ‘How do they have the power and energy to forgive me? How can they do this? You haven’t done anything good to them.’ ” His thoughts often race back to the day of the crash. He thinks about the Broncos families. He struggles psychologically over the pain he’s caused them. (On the advice of lawyers, Sidhu did not discuss details of the crash, due to ongoing civil actions against him, the trucking company and other parties.)

He also contemplates what the future holds for his family. He wonders who he will be once he gets out of prison. He wonders how he can make life better for himself and others. “I’m struggling every day to think positively about

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myself,” Sidhu says. “And it’s really hard to clear up my mind and start moving forward.”

There are endless questions, he adds, “and I don’t have the answers.”

Sidhu tries to keep busy in Bowden Institution, if for no other reason than to occupy his mind—however briefly. He works at the prison’s tailor shop, where he mends fellow inmates’ torn jackets or pants. It involves a certain level of trust from the prison administration, as he gets to use sharp tools like scissors. He also recently finished a vocational course in warehouse work.

But such opportunities slowed during the pandemic, not least due to occasional COVID19 outbreaks in the prison. “These days, we get 4½ hours [a day] out of our room,” he says.

“Things are hard because there’s no routine.”

So he passes time reading books, among them The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama; No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, the autobiography of a Japanese soldier who held his post in the jungle of the Philippines until 1974, convinced the Second World War had not yet ended; and, most recently, a book about how habits shape us.

One habit he’s struggled with since the crash is getting a good night’s sleep. Until recently, he had a cell to himself. When alone, he’ll sit on a small mat and meditate—something he rarely practised prior to prison, but is now integral to helping calm his brain from the anxiety and post-traumatic stress.

He encouraged his wife, Tanvir, to take up meditation, too. They were married in February 2018, planning for a future in Canada, which they’ve called home since 2013. Sidhu took the truck-driving gig a month after their wedding to help fund Tanvir’s education to become a dental hygienist. A few weeks after that, the crash happened.

Sidhu says he’s not the type of person to run from responsibility. He pleaded guilty to all 29 charges against him, without asking for a plea bargain; he didn’t want to make things worse for the Broncos families by putting them through a trial. “My mom and my dad always taught me if you have done something wrong, go accept it. If you have not done something wrong, stand up for yourself,” Sidhu says. “Those are my values, and that’s what I was doing.”

He is eligible to apply for full parole in October, after serving one-third of his eight-year sentence. But where he and Tanvir will live after he is released is yet to be determined.

Under federal law, offenders who are not Canadian citizens and whose jail sentences are longer than six months can be deported.

Sidhu’s only avenue to remain here is through

PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKK RICH

National

JASON FRANSON/CP

Chris Joseph and other Bronco family members worry how the public will judge them for not forgiving just yet submissions to the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), where an officer will recommend whether he should be allowed to stay or if his case should go to a hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board. “If they send him to a hearing, the deportation order is automatic,” says Sidhu’s deportation lawyer, Michael Greene. “They just have to prove he was convicted of a serious offence.

There’s no doubt that this is.” Sidhu cannot appeal the order, but he could challenge the CBSA’s decision in Federal Court; if successful, his case would be sent back to another officer.

All of which makes Sidhu’s current submissions to the CBSA vital to his hope of remaining in Canada. Included in them are letters from Scott and Laurie Thomas, as well as Christina Haugan. “I believe in forgiveness and I believe in second chances,” Haugan writes.

“A man who took the harshest sentence for a crime of this nature without appealing or defending himself in an attempt to ease even a small amount of pain for those he hurt is someone I believe deserves a second chance.”

Expressions of forgiveness help his chance of staying, says Greene. “In a case like this, where you have all kinds of different families

affected by it, you’re going to have a spectrum of reaction, from total forgiveness to absolute anger,” he says. “It’s very courageous of these people to take that stand.”

But Sidhu is at pains to say he isn’t seeking forgiveness. He respects the decisions of Broncos families who don’t forgive him, he says, whether they say they need more time, or that they never will. “I cannot calculate the anger they have inside them. I can’t judge it.

They have every reason to not forgive me.”

He’s open to speaking in person with any of them should they wish to, he adds, if it might do anything to ease their pain.

Under the circumstances, trying to stay in Canada seems the tougher path—more difficult, conceivably, than returning to India and leaving the entire tragedy behind. But after all Tanvir has been through since the crash, Sidhu says he feels obliged to at least try to build their life in Canada, where they dreamed of settling down. Sidhu speaks of strangers from across the country who’ve written him letters in prison to say they are thinking about him, or praying for him, or lighting a candle for him. He reads those letters in his cell, again and again, and cries.

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Chris Joseph says he thinks about Sidhu raising a family in Canada after destroying his

“Who doesn’t want to be a part of this community?” he asks. “And if I do get deported, my wife would come with me—and I’ve already caused her so much pain, so she’d have to go through more.”

They haven’t seen each other since the start of the pandemic. Weeks have passed between their calls due to COVID-19 outbreaks in the prison, when inmates were not always able to use the phones. When he does reach Tanvir, Sidhu calls their conversations his “medicine.”

They don’t talk about the crash because those memories are haunting enough. Instead, they try to focus on the future, wherever it may take them, and how they might make a positive impact on the lives of others. Tanvir has placed the Humboldt Broncos pendant— that simple token that a grieving Saskatchewan father once wore close to his heart—in a special box for safekeeping, waiting for the day Sidhu comes home. It is their lasting symbol of the forgiving spirit of others, and one small comfort to a man who does not know whether he’ll ever forgive himself.

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CORONAVIRUS

They Were Loved A year ago, Maclean’s committed to paying tribute to everyone who dies of COVID-19 in Canada. We called this project They Were Loved, and through a partnership with Carleton University’s Future of Journalism Initiative, we have had the good fortune to collaborate with journalism schools across the country, where students have taken up the work of speaking with the families of those who have died and writing their stories.

To date, more than 400 students have participated in They Were Loved.

Charles Yonkeu Ndjiya, 49

Annette Giroux, 66

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a fighter,” says Allen Chalifoux, Annette’s brother. “Any situation, she handled it. If she got to know you, you’d be good friends.”

Annette had an unquenchable zest for life. “A beautiful soul,” says Amber. “Friendly, outgoing, honest, trustworthy.” —Shayna Giles WORE HIS TURBAN WITH PRIDE

Mukhtar Singh Clair, 84 Died in Dartmouth, N.S., on April 13, 2020

When Mukhtar Singh Clair arrived in Dartmouth, N.S., in 1970, there were few people there who looked like him. Tall, handsome and Sikh, Mukhtar wore his turban with pride—often matching its colour to his tie—despite the fact that people in the community didn’t always accept him. But Mukhtar understood hardship, and was determined not to let anything break his spirit. As a child, he fled from what is now Pakistan to India during Indian Partition, walking for weeks alongside his mother and siblings away from the place he called home. Mukhtar spent his life in Canada learning about and befriending people of other religions and backgrounds. “My uncles and dad witnessed awful things, all in the name of religion,” says Mukhtar’s niece Gurpreet Clair. “Maybe that’s why they had friends of all backgrounds and didn’t believe in one religion being better than another.” Despite suffering from a degenerative brain disease later in his life, Mukhtar never forgot who he was, where he came from or his family’s history. He instilled a sense of independence in his two children, his nieces and nephews and his grandchildren, and taught them all, especially the girls in the family, the importance of education and self-sufficiency. And

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF FAMILY AND FRIENDS

around Nino and the children. It was a lifeline for Nino. “He was so open, and he had such big ambitions for his family. He was a good father, a good husband, a good son,” Died in Montreal on May 21, 2020 she says, speaking nearly one year after her When Charles Yonkeu Nd- loss. “We’re just taking it one day at a time.” jiya, his wife, Nino Rosine, —Tracey Lindeman and their first three children—all boys—arrived in Montreal back in 2011, AN UNQUENCHABLE ZEST FOR LIFE not everyone was sold on their new city. “He was much more enchanted Died in Edmonton on Nov. 8, 2020 than I was,” Nino says. Charles wanted to When Annette Giroux’s make the most of his new home. He brought friend asked for help painting a four-bedroom his four sons to the library, took them to the condo, Annette was there community pool and found a thriving Cameroonian community and church. The family to help. She painted the hit the road as often as they could, driving walls and the baseboards— to Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto and even and a bit of the floor, too.

Washington, D.C., to see the sights. He also The next day, Annette worked as a personal support worker for sen- was back again, crimping off the baseboards iors in several long-term care facilities, and and scraping the paint off the floor. “If you was hired full-time in 2015 to help the sen- needed something, she would give it to you,” iors at the Montreal Chinese Hospital. “He says her friend Corinne Frost. “She would do was devoted to his work. He always followed anything for anybody.” Annette may not have through on promises,” says Nino. “He always been the best painter, but her good nature answered when they called.” When COVID- and carefree personality made her a joy to 19 hit Montreal, it hit seniors’ residences be around. She had a memorable giggle that first, and hard. The public agency in charge made her loved ones laugh harder. Whether of these facilities dispatched employees like she was joking with her honorary niece about Charles to relieve centres under siege. In the the choice of men at her extended-care home first few months of the pandemic, he split his or sticking her tongue out, Annette loved to time between five LTC homes. And that’s have fun. “We always joked, and she teased, how he got sick. “In the days after, it didn’t and we had good talks,” says Amber Herd, feel real. It left a big, black void,” says Nino. Corinne’s daughter. Annette liked music and They’d been married 16 years, and had been dancing and playing slots at the casinos on friends since their first encounter at univer- Yellowhead Trail. “I’d go and play YouTube sity in Douala in 1993. When word got out videos for her—AC/DC or something like that. in the Cameroonian community that Charles I’d find one that was a live show, and she felt had died, members leaped into action, sign- like she was there at the concert, living it,” ing in for nightly Zoom hangouts, bringing says Amber. “That made her really happy.” meals to the family’s home in Montreal’s Annette had her share of struggles in life, but Sud-Ouest neighbourhood—anything to rally she never let them get her down. “She was HAD BIG AMBITIONS FOR HIS FAMILY

he always celebrated his family’s achievements, planting bushes for them in his garden in Dartmouth, a place he loved to spend his day. —Rinna Diamantakos ‘DEVOTED HER LIFE TO OTHERS’

Norma Guerrero, 80 Died in Toronto on Dec. 30, 2020

for fine things. The Guerreros emigrated to Canada from the Philippines in the 1960s, and while they didn’t have a lot of money, what they did have they spent on what mattered to them. “He would just buy things that reflected [what] he loved,” says Malakias’s son Phil Guerrero. The field trip to Spain was an annual excursion Malakias organized at Central Commerce Collegiate in Toronto, where he taught business for nearly four decades.

Malakias never imposed a curfew on those trips and once even allowed a side excursion to Morocco. “He was in heaven,” says his former student Steve Luciani. “He loved the ‘culture shock’ part of it . . . different food, different languages, different customs.” Malakias took his family on a road trip all the way to Mexico City. “Driving to Mexico—who does that?” says his daughter Michelle Guerrero.

Later in life, Malakias opened an antique store and karaoke bar in Toronto, and he thrived on meeting new people. “He was this guy on St. Clair that everybody knew,” Michelle says. “It became less and less about having a business and making money and more about having a venue where people would come by,” she adds. In the end, his greatest collection was a lifetime’s worth of friends. —I.H.

When Norma Guerrero emigrated in the 1960s to Canada from the Philippines with her husband, Malakias (whose obituary appears below), she promised to sponsor members of her family to come to Canada as well. Her niece, Helen Lorico, was one of them. Helen lived with her aunt and uncle in the 1970s before making her way on her own. Every six months or so, Norma and Malakias would take her on shopping trips that ended with a meal at the Cheesecake Factory. Norma, always dressed impeccably, would parade around like a diva and encourage Helen to buy glamorous outfits and accessories. “Whenever I went out with her, I said, ‘My gosh, you’re more beautiful than me,’ ” Helen says. “I’ve never seen anyone so happy.” Norma spent four decades as MUSICAL TO HER CORE a nurse at Toronto Western Hospital. “She devoted her life to others,” says her son Phil Guerrero. And she always made time to gather Died in Burnaby, B.C., on Dec. 16, 2020 with her extended family. “A lot of families are Elizabeth McGillivray patriarchal,” her daughter Michelle Guerrero enjoyed reading, sewsays. “It was different for us.” Norma was the ing and travelling, but one who held the family together, the one sinmusic was far and away gled out at weddings for thanks. “They always her greatest passion. She mentioned my folks. They always thanked my and her husband, Mike, folks for getting our family here,” Phil says. raised their four children in Prince George, B.C., —Isabel Harder where she acted as an adjudicator for music festivals across the province. For more than 50 LOVED MAKING REAL CONNECTIONS years, Elizabeth, who insisted those close to her call her Liz, taught piano lessons to hundreds of students. She was a caring teacher who Died in Toronto on Dec. 10, 2020 held her students to high standards. “Bring When he returned to Can- a well-prepared lesson, not a well-prepared ada after a school trip to excuse” is something former student and lifeSpain, Malakias Guer- long friend Arne Sahlen says Liz instilled in rero and his 10 students him, and he’s carried that with him througheach carried a couple of out his own music teaching career. In the carefully wrapped por- warmer months, Liz would host piano recitals celain Lladró figurines. for her students at her home, complete with Malakias had bought a delicious potlucks and kids splashing around few too many, so the group had to split them in the backyard pool. She passed her love of up to declare at customs. Malakias shared a music down to the younger generations of collection of the delicate figures with his wife, McGillivrays, teaching her daughter Miriam Norma—an example of the couple’s penchant Scribner and granddaughter CJ to play the

Elizabeth McGillivray, 91

Malakias Guerrero, 83

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

piano. “She always cared that people were doing okay,” says Miriam. Even as she battled macular degeneration and Alzheimer’s in her later years, Liz’s ear for music never left her.

When Arne came to visit her at her care home last year, he brought an electric keyboard as a gift. She fiddled with it and then began playing portions of pieces she could remember— proper notes and all. —Lucas Celle BEING A MOM MEANT THE WORLD TO HER

Silatik Qavvik, 35 Died in Winnipeg on Jan. 2, 2021

Being a mom meant the world to Silatik Qavvik, whose youngest child was born in December 2020.

She loved to spend time with her husband, Peter, and their children SarahMina, Johnassi-Kud, Andrew, Aimu and Lisi-Naqsuq, exploring the outdoors and telling jokes. Her father, Johnnie Cookie, mayor of Silatik’s community of Sanikiluaq in Nunavut, was deeply proud of his daughter. Over the last year, she’d started to work toward her goal of becoming a teacher.

She wanted to work with children, and was passionate about supporting her own. Silatik had a radiant personality. “She was outgoing.

She got along with everyone,” says her cousin Darlene Schaffer. Silatik suffered a miscarriage after being pregnant with twins, a heartbreaking loss. Still, she persevered and maintained a positive outlook. In 2012, Silatik was on a plane coming home from Winnipeg to Sanikiluaq. When the plane overshot the runway upon landing, it crashed, and while Silatik survived with minor injuries, the experience changed her perspective. She understood more deeply that life could be unpredictable, and decided that raising her children and helping others would be the most important things in her life. One of Silatik’s last experiences was holding Lisi, her healthy baby girl. And although Silatik is no longer on this earth, her family believes that she is reunited now with her twins. —Anne-Marie Iemmolo If you would like your loved one included in this project, please email theywereloved@macleans.ca SPONSOR

FOUNDING SPONSOR

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JUSTICE

‘Patient zero’ fights back A small-town doctor blamed for a COVID outbreak launches a counterattack in a politicized case Long before he was infected with COVID-19—and was wrongly accused of spreading it—Jean Robert Ngola Monzinga fought off another virus: polio. When he was a little boy in Congo, his parents didn’t have money for Western medicine, so in desperation, his mother buried her five-year-old in a hole up to his neck for hours on end. The earth, she hoped, would act as a natural brace, keeping his muscles stretched and preventing atrophy. “I’d watch my friends play and dream about being a doctor,” he recalls.

While he survived the worst of the symptoms, the odds of him going to medical school must have looked bleak. His family was near-penniless, his father a blue-collar worker who had to feed the mouths of 11 children. Nonetheless, Ngola (the surname he goes by) quickly showed a knack for making a fool out of adversity.

He attended the University of Kinshasa’s medical school, tutoring students to pay his way through. In 2000, he moved to Belgium and retrained at universities in Ghent and Brussels, but integration proved challenging, so when a delegation from Quebec came to recruit doctors, he signed on. In 2005, Ngola was in school again, this time at Laval University in Quebec City.

Eventually, he settled in Campbellton, N.B., a bilingual border town of 7,000 on the Restigouche River across from Quebec.

A large patient base awaited him and, when he arrived, people there made him feel welcome. He made friends and went fishing with the locals—some called him “the Black Acadian”—and he built a thriving practice of 2,000 patients. “I was the best-known physician in Campbellton,” he told me on the phone in June, wistfully.

The breadwinner for his siblings back in Congo, Ngola also bought one of the more coveted properties in town. Once home to a favourite son—the local undertaker turned speaker of the provincial legislature—it was perched on a hill with a sweeping view of the city and river. An old cannon stood guard on the front lawn.

Nearing 50 years of age in the spring of 2020, Ngola was on top of his own small world.

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Later, it would cast him out—all because of a case against him that never really existed.

At that point, COVID-19 was already ravaging Quebec and threatened the unscathed Atlantic Bubble, including Ngola’s home province. One of the strictest jurisdictions in the country, New Brunswick enforced rigorous protective measures, including two-week quarantines for out-of-province travellers.

In early May that year, Ngola had to make an emergency trip to the Montreal area. His daughter’s mother had to leave town quickly to attend her father’s funeral, so Ngola crossed over into Quebec, picked up his four-year-old child, took a socially distanced job interview on the way back, and crossed back into New Brunswick. He says he called the provincial RCMP to let them know he was returning from Quebec. He also says he informed public health officials to ask if he needed to quarantine.

Even at the best of times, the province faced a chronic shortage of medical professionals.

With a looming health crisis, they needed doctors in hospitals and in the field, not in quarantine. As a result, the self-isolation rules for doctors were fluid. Provided they didn’t have symptoms and were confident they hadn’t come into contact with anyone with the virus, many physicians returned to work.

As it turned out, Ngola was asymptomatic, and he returned to his patients.

Toward the end of May, New Brunswick faced its first outbreak—more specifically, in the Restigouche region. Two patients died.

Dozens of others were infected. On May 27 at 11 a.m., Ngola learned he had tested positive for COVID-19. Within minutes, his life was pulled out from under him. Someone from the health ministry leaked the results and his private medical information to Facebook.

The gears of social-media shame cranked up. Ngola became the culprit—the so-called patient zero.

Three hours later, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs held a press conference.

A trained engineer and former Irving Oil executive, Higgs is both vanilla and austere; he appeared agitated. Until then, Higgs’s AUGUST 2021

minority Progressive Conservative government had been a gold-star performer in COVID prevention.

You couldn’t blame him for his frustration.

But Higgs laced into “a medical professional [who] was not forthcoming about their reasons for travel upon returning to New Brunswick and . . . did not self-isolate as a result.”

While Higgs has maintained he never identified Ngola by name, he merely confirmed what many already suspected from social media. Within hours, Ngola’s employer, Vitalité Health Network, suspended him without pay. Racist taunts and threats came in fast and furious: that he should go back to Africa, that he should be lynched on a nearby bridge. His phone started ringing, tweets tallying up, all hate, all the time. “I blocked everything,” he said. “I was so sad, so depressed.”

At a press conference the next day, Higgs doubled down on the accusation. The province’s north zone—the Restigouche area—was “at a higher risk due to the actions of one irresponsible individual,” he said, adding that information about the individual’s case had been passed on to the RCMP, which would determine whether charges were warranted.

That was news to the RCMP. Fifty pages of Crown disclosures to Ngola’s defence team showed that leading RCMP detectives learned about the investigation only after Higgs’s announcement. The next day, they would have to chase down the evidence to back up the allegation.

The documents also depict an unusual partnership between the police and government officials to target one person, Ngola, to bring him up on charges of criminal negligence.

“What frightened me was the intensity, the doggedness of what they did,” Ngola told me. “It is politics that made them look for a scapegoat. I love Canada, but there should be separation between politicians and police.”

(Neither the premier’s office nor the RCMP responded to a request for comment.)

Gregory Marquis, an expert on criminal justice at the University of New Brunswick, felt the Higgs government crossed the line: politicians shouldn’t be involved with the police in investigations that target individuals. “I’ve been studying criminology in Canada for 30 years, and I’ve never seen a case like this.”

University of Cambridge historian Richard McKay, a native of British Columbia, has long taken issue with the idea that one person can be blamed for an outbreak.

Ngola joined a medical clinic in Quebec after he no longer felt safe in Campbellton, N.B. 51

It’s the so-called patient-zero narrative, which was popularized during the AIDS epidemic.

The term was thrown around a lot in the pandemic’s early days. After all, it had to start somewhere. In McKay’s view, it’s a misnomer—imprecise and potentially harmful.

“There are so many holes in the idea of looking for patient zero,” added McKay, author of Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic. “It implies that there is always a way of knowing exactly who the first case is—as if there is some kind of broad population surveillance that makes this possible.”

What’s more, the phrase can be dangerous, triggering a kind of witch hunt, a human desire to pile on a suspect, or a group of them, and shame them without evidence or process.

Often it’s the “other” who is scapegoated.

Medieval as that may sound—like Jews being blamed for spreading the Black Plague—the phenomenon is recent, too. Haitians were singled out for spreading HIV-AIDS. So was Gaëtan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was the first person to receive the label “patient zero.”

McKay also points out a few harrowing instances from the early COVID era that echo Ngola’s plight: patients who are not identified but identifiable. In March 2020, Wojciech Rokita, a prominent obstetrician, rushed home to his native Poland after a ski trip before the border closed and got tested immediately, but in the meantime, ran errands. He was asymptomatic. A tabloid, Echo Dnia, published the news about a nameless doctor being the first patient in the area to be infected, and soon enough, readers identified him in its comment section. Eventually, Rokita took his own life.

That same month, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio addressed the city’s first instance of community spread at a press conference and offered personal details about the patient in question, whom the New York Post referred to as “Westchester’s patient zero,” including the law firm where he worked, that he had a son and daughter, and the name of the suburban synagogue that one of them attended.

De Blasio later apologized.

On the morning after Higgs announced the RCMP investigation, the police force was in a stir. “I noticed the premier mentioned in the media that the RCMP was taking over the investigation, at that time none of us were aware we were getting involved,” wrote a top RCMP member in the region, Jean-Marc Paré, to colleagues. If anyone would have been informed about an investigation into a highprofile case like this, it would have been Paré, 52

acting officer in charge of the Serious Crime For reasons not explained in the docuSection at the RCMP’s “J” Division in Fred- ments, though, the group scuppered the Babin proposal. Instead, they focused on ericton. But no one informed him.

What’s more, if there was information Gilles Lanteigne, the outgoing CEO of Ngola’s about Ngola—evidence, a complaint—no one employer, Vitalité Health Network. Two days had told Paré anything. “There are already a earlier, it was Vitalité that had suspended couple of issues,” he wrote. “[T]he first thing Ngola without pay within an hour after the being we don’t know who our complainant premier had given his first press conference. is.” In Fredericton, another leading RCMP According to disclosures, Andrew Easton, detective, Cpl. Jonathan Simard, echoed the the director of security and emergencies in same sentiments but in breathless, bureau- Babin’s department, first contacted Lanteigne cratic tones. “Who is the complainant . . . we that day, asking him to be the complainant. must find a complainant . . . we must verify Cst. Martin Primeau of the RCMP’s Major with upper management.”

Crimes Unit followed up with him around Those notes were part of the 50-page col- dinner time. (“The premier was angry and lection of Crown disclosures handed over demanded an inquest because of the grave to the defence in March—memos, emails, consequences of the doctor’s actions,” Pricontemporaneous notes. They mostly come meau wrote in a task-action report.) “Minfrom the RCMP and depict the force work- utes later, Simard confirmed in an email to ing in concert with senior government officials the day after Higgs’s announcement to gather evidence against Ngola. It was a highpriority pursuit. According to the documents, the Mounties at one point had assigned 21 members to the case—a surge in policing one might associate with a manhunt.

But before they could press charges, they needed evidence—or a complainant. One candidate they circled was Dr. THE ‘PATIENT ZERO’ Mariane Pâquet, the medNARRATIVE CAN BE ical officer temporarily in DANGEROUS, charge of health in the Restigouche region. According TRIGGERING A KIND to the Crown disclosures, OF WITCH HUNT she told Simard over a series of conversations that Ngola had complied with the health regulations and that their suspicions had no scientific basis.

And if the RCMP wanted Ngola’s personal information, they needed a warrant. “No warrant, I say nothing,” she said. Complaining that she felt harassed by the RCMP, she Easton that the Vitalité boss would write an suggested they instead focus on protecting official letter of complaint.

Ngola and his daughter.

Still, one big obstacle stood in the way: the By late that afternoon, the RCMP still had premier had announced the investigation no complainant. According to Crown evi- on May 28, whereas Lanteigne’s complaint dence, Simard spoke to Jacques Babin, chief came two days later. How to reconcile the and executive director of New Brunswick’s dates without the case looking as though it Department of Justice and Public Safety, at had been reverse-engineered?

On June 2, Jullie Rogers-Marsh, an RCMP 4.05 p.m. Simard’s notes from that conversation support the defence’s argument that corporal and spokesperson at the time, raised senior government and police officials worked that issue with Jean-Marc Paré, the detective in unison to target Ngola: according to the who had learned about the force’s investiganotes, Babin had told Simard that he’d met tion only after the premier had announced with Mike Comeau, New Brunswick’s dep- it. She proposed the date the complaint was uty attorney general and deputy minister for filed—May 30. But Paré had reservations. “I public safety, and Higgs. The group decided believe Premier Higgs announced the RCMP that he—Babin—would serve as an official were investigating on Thursday, May 28,” Paré complainant against Ngola. wrote back. “Not sure how we deal with that.”

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JOHN MORRIS/REUTERS; PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTOGRAPH BY ROGER LEMOYNE

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ANDREW VAUGHAN/CP

While the RCMP and the provincial government built their case against Ngola, the suspect was holed up at home, both patient and prisoner. As a COVID patient, he was obliged to self-isolate with his daughter, who had also tested positive. Cooped up with her dad, she wondered what the fuss was about, why they couldn’t go out, why she couldn’t be with her mother.

With Ngola’s life in danger, he requested and received RCMP protection. But he also felt these patrols acted like jailers. Locals would call in false sightings to the Mounties, and soon enough, members would be on his stoop asking him questions: someone said Ngola had broken his quarantine and gone shopping at Walmart. Or it was claimed there was a moving van right outside his house— Ngola was trying to leave town!

in Campbellton and suggested he leave town.

He put his house on the hill on the market and crossed over the Restigouche to Louiseville, Que., where he set up a new practice.

Louiseville Mayor Yvon Deshaies—often seen in a fedora and bow tie—gave Ngola a hearty, if not salty, welcome.

It’s not always easy attracting doctors to smaller towns like his, he told the local media.

New Brunswick’s loss was his region’s gain.

“Our premier, [François] Legault, would never have done such a thing: to condemn before investigating,” he said. “If I were the doctor, I’d say, ‘New Brunswick, go ahead and eat sh-t.’ ”

More conflicting signals from the RCMP followed. Simard privately notified his lawyers, Joel Etienne and Christian Michaud, that they were dropping the criminal investigation for lack of evidence. But once the lawyers went public with the news, the force denied it.

Weeks later, the RCMP formally acknowledged they had dropped the case, but they also slapped a charge on Ngola under the Emergency Measures Act: failure to quarantine for 14 days. As a result, Ngola could face a fine of anywhere from $240 to $10,200. The Crown set a trial date for June 2021. Were he to take the stand, Ngola had the potential to become the world’s most notable quarantine delinquent.

That same month, Ngola’s legal team determined it was no longer safe for him to remain

Higgs (second from right) with his wife and daughters at his September 2020 election win

In preparation for Ngola’s June trial for failing to self-isolate, his legal team fought for more disclosures from the Crown. There

were two sets, the first coming out in March 2021. That’s the one that focused mainly on the hunt for a complainant. Recall that one of its critical entries, written by Simard, explained the allegedly pivotal role played by Jacques Babin, the executive director of public safety, who was also appointed to act as the RCMP’s liaison with the office of the premier. According to Simard’s notes on May 29, 2020, Babin told him that he met with the premier and another senior government official, and they decided that he—Babin—would be the complainant.

Two months later, a new set of disclosures came out. They include a pivotal confrontation between Babin and Simard on April 8, MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

2021, only two months before Ngola’s trial.

According to notes from Simard, Babin personally called him, questioning the veracity of his note-taking and threatening to contradict him in court. The notes also indicate that Babin distanced himself from the Ngola investigation and told him he “never participated in a meeting between himself, the premier and the deputy minister for public safety, Mike Comeau.”

Toward the end of the conversation, Babin supposedly warned Simard that “he would provide a testimony that would be contrary or different than what’s reported in my notes.”

Undaunted, Simard told Babin he had transcribed the notes right after their discussion and stood by them. Two weeks before the June 15 trial could begin, the Crown dropped the case, saying there was no longer a reasonable probability of conviction.

Still, Ngola says, he has to live with a tarnished name for the rest of his life, and that he is being treated for PTSD. “What happened to me had nothing to do with science. It was an insult to science. This was all about politics.”

As his first response to the dropped charges, Ngola asked for an apology from Higgs. Unlike Mayor Bill de Blasio, however, the premier refused, explaining the government was just ensuring that people followed the rules. “It’s unfortunate he took it personally,” he said.

On June 11, Ngola’s legal team announced it was suing the New Brunswick government and the RCMP, alleging “institutional anti-Black systemic racism,” as well as abuse of power, negligence, defamation, malicious prosecution and a breach of the doctor’s Charter rights.

“Dr. Ngola’s is the first and only modern-day experience that a Canadian has ever had in relation to having to relocate because of a social banishment that was spurred on by a government, a police force and social media,” reads the statement of claim, which did not specify the amount of damages the suit was seeking or name Higgs himself.

“We will vigorously defend the action and contest various allegations made by Dr. Ngola’s lawyer,” said Justice and Public Safety spokesperson Coreen Enos in a statement.

Several political observers say the lawsuit won’t cost Higgs too many voters. “There are no political consequences at all,” said Roger J. Ouellette, a public policy professor at Université de Moncton. Voters liked the premier’s handling of the COVID crisis: that snap election, held in the middle of the pandemic last October, gave his government a majority. The next election is three years away.

Ngola’s house on the hill, though, remains another matter. No one has bought it yet.

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VACCINES

Don’t hesitate to listen To reach herd immunity, we need up to 90 per cent of the population to get shots in arms. That means helping a critical minority feel confident about getting the vaccine.

Michelle DesRosiers is a non-binary parent and IT consultant in Kitchener, Ont., with hair that’s dyed metallic red at the top and shaved at the sides. When they were pregnant with their second child during the H1N1 pandemic, both their family doctor and obstetrician told them, “Basically, you would be crazy not to get the [H1N1] vaccine,” according to DesRosiers. The discussions made them feel “almost on a personal level like there’s something wrong with me to

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even question it.” Feeling they couldn’t discuss it with their doctors, DesRosiers turned to Google and came across anti-vaccine info that “seemed science-based.” From then on, DesRosiers stopped vaccinating their children. Over the next 10 years, they learned that other parents and friends would judge their vaccination decisions, and they stopped talking about it.

Now, with experts saying we might have to vaccinate as much as 90 per cent of the AUGUST 2021

population to reach herd immunity, health advocates are determined not to make the same mistakes DesRosiers’ doctors made.

Compared to countries around the globe, Canada has above-average rates of confidence in vaccines, which is part of the reason we’re now a world leader in single doses. And the number of hesitant Canadians has been trending downward since March, when 36 per cent were either unwilling or unsure. Still, there is cause for concern. The results of a June poll

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PHOTOGRAPH BY BRETT GUNDLOCK

DesRosiers (centre) and their children, Aiden (left), 13, and Easton, 11, in Kitchener, Ont.

by the Angus Reid Institute say nine per cent of Canadians won’t get a vaccine, and seven per cent either aren’t sure they will or want to wait longer to make a decision. That’s 16 per cent of Canadians who aren’t exactly running to book their vaccine appointment as soon as they hear they’re eligible. As of mid-June, 65 per cent of Canadians had at least one shot, but the speed of vaccination was slowing, and some provincial governments were starting to worry. Manitoba announced in early June that those who got vaccinated could enter a lottery for cash prizes worth up to $100,000.

At the time, hesitancy was high in some rural communities of the province; in one, only 13 per cent had received a vaccine, compared to a provincial average of 63 per cent.

The stakes are high. Before vaccines, more than three per cent of those who tested positive for COVID in this country died, and that was when the more deadly variants weren’t

spreading. Toronto-based family physician Dr. Ritika Goel summed up the collective anxiety around hesitancy when she tweeted in early May: “I’m afraid for my patients who may die because they were more worried about the vaccine than the real risk of COVID-19.

I worry I will have failed at changing their minds and it will be too late. Every day, these conversations haunt me.”

Why are people hesitant? Memes and cartoons characterize people who don’t want to get vaccinated as selfish, close-minded or conspiracy-obsessed. But the reality is that staunch conspiracy peddlers are only a fraction of those who are saying no to vaccines.

The majority of those who fall in the “vaccine hesitant” category have understandable reasons to be concerned, says Dr. Maya Goldenberg, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and the author of Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise and the War on Science. The good news: they’re open to changing their minds about vaccines, and it’s not only health-care professionals who can help get them there. Experts say we can all inspire vaccine confidence in friends, family and acquaintances, by sharing information and personal experiences about vaccines and having non-judgmental conversations that speak to people’s concerns.

The World Health Organization describes vaccine hesitancy using three “C themes”: confidence, complacency and convenience.

Confidence is a big one—some people are hesitant because they don’t have a lot of trust in the government officials or health system authorities telling them vaccines are safe and effective. Vaccine hesitancy in Canada is higher among those who lean to the political right and are generally suspicious of greater government intervention in people’s lives, according to a 2021 study from the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a joint initiative by McGill and the University of Toronto. This may explain why Alberta has higher rates of hesitancy, says Dr. Finola Hackett, a resident doctor in rural family medicine at the University of Calgary and a volunteer with the Calgary-based health advocacy group 19 to Zero. It may be part of the high hesitancy in rural Manitoba, as well.

Confidence can also be shaky among groups that have “a history and even a present situation where health care is not always working to their benefit,” says Goldenberg. Research shows that includes Indigenous people and Black people, who historically in Canada have MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

been subject to harmful experimentation without their consent. Today, these communities continue to face discrimination in the medical system. For example, studies show Black people’s pain is often undertreated. And multiple reviews show Indigenous people face high rates of discrimination and abuse in health settings, as captured by Joyce Echaquan in a video in which a health-care provider hurled insults at her in a Quebec hospital before Echaquan’s death in 2020.

The confidence explanation also fits people like DesRosiers, who shy away from vaccines after being dismissed by health-care providers—studies show compassion is a key building block of trust.

This gives perspective to reports earlier this year that around half of personal support workers were wary about the vaccines. After being asked to work without proper PPE, without sick days and other supports, some essential workers were suspicious when they were suddenly prioritized for the vaccine, says Dr. Zain Chagla, a Toronto-based infectious disease physician. “We’ve thrown [essential workers] under the bus . . . and now all of a sudden, we’re saying, ‘Just take the vaccine and you’ll be fine,’ ” he says. Goldenberg says it was egregious that in the first stage of the rollout to health workers, we expected them to line up, despite the fact that many weren’t provided with Q&A sessions about the vaccines. We should have known better, she says, as “we have a history of vaccine hesitancy among health-care workers around the flu vaccine and other vaccines.”

The next C in the list, complacency about the disease, may be less of an issue with COVID compared to, say, eradicated-inCanada polio (thanks to vaccines, ahem).

But health researchers are hearing the sentiment from some vaccine-reluctant folks that because they’re healthy, they don’t have to worry about COVID. And complacency is likely to increase when COVID rates go down due to first doses of vaccines. Complacency may help explain why, according to a midApril poll by Abacus Data, people aged 30-44 were almost three times as likely to be against or unsure of COVID vaccines, compared to those aged 65 and up.

The convenience category, also described as “constraints” by some researchers, represents the pragmatic barriers that might stop people from getting a vaccine, especially those who aren’t super eager to begin with. Constraints are lineups and vaccine clinics that require people to drive or take transit for an hour.

This category also includes “digital literacy and language barriers, and whether people 55

have paid sick leave if they have vaccine side that Vyse and the other health workers are organized, but not in a fussy way, and she’s effects,” says Sabina Vohra-Miller, a pharma- familiar faces—they’ve been providing isola- quick to laugh at things, like epic spills, that cologist and science communicator who co- tion advice, and linking workers to income would cause others to lose their cool. She’s founded the South Asian Health Network. and food supports, since the start of the pan- exactly the kind of person you’d want in her In many cases, people are in an overlap- demic—helps to address confidence. “To build job, supporting adults with special needs. ping part of the Venn diagram of confidence, that trust takes consistency. It takes being But she hasn’t yet been vaccinated, despite complacency and constraints. Stacy, a Black open and available, it takes translation and it being eligible for more than a month as an single mom homeschooling five in a hotspot takes building alliances with community part- essential worker. in Toronto who prefers to use her first name ners,” says Vyse, noting that information for In our conversation, she says it’s still posonly, thinks she’s already had COVID and the Cargill vaccine clinic has been translated sible to get COVID after getting the vaccine therefore has some immunity. But her bigger into nine languages, including Tagalog, Arabic and she’s worried about the side effects—she issue is confidence. She feels like the vaccines and Chinese. In speaking to his patients, he gets debilitating headaches as it is. But as we were expedited; she points out that in the also addresses complacency, as some believe talk more about this risk-benefit calculation, rush to get out the polio vaccine in the ’50s, they already have natural immunity. He she says, “I’m just anxious. I get anxious about a batch that mistakenly contained live polio explains that yes, natural immunity is good, new things.” That’s not exactly captured in the virus ended up killing five kids.

But the roots of Stacy’s wariness go deeper than a deadly human error from almost 70 years ago. When I ask about her overall experiences in the health system, she says she’s “never really had any problems with the systematic medical racism most people of colour face” because “I call it out, and I try to block it off. I say, ‘No, no, no, this is what should be done.’ ” She credits this approach—pushing back, cross-checking information—for keeping her, and her kids, healthy. The same low level of confidence that can be detrimental to vaccine uptake can be helpful at other times.

Telling people who have reason to distrust the health system that “Health Canada says it’s safe, you shouldn’t be worried about it” is not going to work, says Vohra-Miller. The discus- Shoush, at a Toronto midwifery clinic, is frustrated by the discriminatory narrative around vaccine hesitancy sion “has to be very nuanced and trauma-informed.” Vohra-Miller says but vaccine-driven immunity has been shown WHO model. But we all tend to overemphashe’s had half-hour-long conversations with to be “much more robust” and longer-lasting size risks when anxious. Being able to get the people who were reluctant about vaccines. than natural immunity. The multi-pronged vaccine around people she feels comfortable For some people, it takes many conversa- strategy has been successful: as of early June, with would likely help Theresa. Ironically, in tions. Dr. Adam Vyse, a High River, Alta.- around 1,700 of the 2,200 workers, or 77 April, public-health workers came on site to based family physician, says most hesitant per cent, had been vaccinated at the clinic, vaccinate clients and staff at her workplace, people, however, are either on the fence or according to Cargill spokesperson Daniel Sul- and Theresa assured her manager she would pretty close to it. And it doesn’t take long livan. (Additional workers got their vaccines make a game-time decision. But in the end, to persuade that “movable middle,” as he at public health clinics and pharmacies, but she didn’t have the option. The vaccination describes it. Providing concrete information Cargill can’t track that number.) team didn’t bring enough shots for all the to address their particular concerns is often Though the WHO model may seem clear- staff members.

Grassroots organizations have been workenough to convince someone to be immun- cut, vaccine hesitancy is nuanced, filtered through highly individual experiences and ing to build vaccine confidence in frontline ized, he says. Hesitancy is fluid.

Vyse helped set up a clinic that addresses values. Take my friend Theresa, who’s had workers like Theresa, especially in heavily all the Cs. For one, it’s located on the grounds the same long brown hair and perfect skin racialized and low-income hotspot areas. The of the Cargill meat-packing plant near High since grade school (and also prefers to use Greater Toronto Area’s South Asian Health River, so workers wouldn’t have to sacrifice her first name only). She lives with her hus- Network, for instance, has been organizing an afternoon’s pay to get their shot. The fact band and kids in southern Ontario. She’s virtual town halls on vaccines since early 56

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PHOTOGRAPH BY SOLANA CAIN

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March. Vohra-Miller, who has spoken at them, will say to the people in attendance: “Yes, we haven’t done enough to protect our communities,” she tells me. “There’s no gaslighting on that; there’s no making excuses for it. We talk about the racism in health care that everyone has had to face, and things that need to be changed.” Then, when vaccine educators share encouraging information—such as the fact that the twodose regimen reduces hospitalization due to COVID by 94-97 per cent—they’re more likely to be seen as trustworthy.

Groups like Toronto’s Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Organization have also been highly organized, going so far as enlisting property managers and superintendents to announce vaccine clinics on emergency announcement systems in residential buildings. These groups didn’t become as innovative as they did because their communities had especially high rates of hesitancy. Instead, they saw how hardhit their communities were, with higher rates of essential workers and multi-generational households being infected with COVID-19, and they knew that vaccines were their best hope of stopping the devastation.

That racialized communities have been more often singled out as being “hesitant” frustrates Dr. Suzanne Shoush, a Black and Indigenous family physician who works at Unity Health in Toronto.

For one, the narrative can be used to say that low-income and racialized people are getting vaccinated at lower rates by choice, when the reality is likely more by design. Pharmacybased vaccine clinics have been far less accessible in low-income communities compared to high-income ones, for example. The narrative is also discriminatory. “You can have hundreds of white people at a rally against masks and vaccines, and we don’t make the assumption that white people don’t trust the vaccine,” Shoush says. “A Black person says they don’t want the vaccine to one person, and suddenly that becomes, ‘All Black people don’t like the vaccine.’ ” In fact, vaccine concerns are more common in rural areas, which are largely white. Hank, a 39-year-old real estate broker in southern Alberta who prefers not to give his last name, isn’t yet eligible for the vaccine, but he isn’t sure he’ll get one. He’s wary of the new mRNA technology and the possible side effects in proportion to his risk of COVID. “I still have a higher risk of getting into a car accident than

ending up in the ICU because of COVID,” he says. But that may not be true, at least not when we spoke, as the disease was ripping through his town at that time.

Telling people they’re wrong is not an effective strategy, according to Goldenberg and many others who research hesitancy. So I agree with Hank that, being a relatively young and healthy person, he’d probably have a milder COVID course should he become infected.

But I tell him the evidence is growing that vaccinated people are far less likely to both get and spread COVID. Does it resonate with him that, if he gets vaccinated, he’ll be less likely to give the virus to someone who could end up in the hospital? “Definitely,” he says.

“We’re compassionate about other people and I see elderly clients,” he says. “My wife and I, we’re on the fence. I’m pretty sure we will get it, and that will be the reason—to stop the spread and get businesses opened up again.”

Evidence shows that most people are like Hank—more likely to be encouraged by positive, rather than fear-based, messaging. Shoush says she used to be “super over-the-top” about the dangers of not vaccinating, because as a doctor working in the North, she saw a child die of a vaccine-preventable disease. “It is ungodly to watch a child die of meningitis. It is truly . . . it’s burned into your soul,” says Shoush, who has supported vaccine clinics in northern Ontario as well as an Indigenous-run vaccine clinic in Toronto. But, she says, when “we try to tell people that’s what we’re trying to stop from happening . . . [it] doesn’t work.” That’s not to say that sharing stats about a disease’s hospitalization or death rates doesn’t help— it can, especially with complacency—but the evidence shows emphasizing fear can counterintuitively make people want to avoid the topic altogether, rather than engage with the information.

Shoush works to counter the perception that the vaccines were rushed. She tells her patients, “The 2003 SARS pandemic triggered huge interest in the potential for mRNA technology to be applied to vaccine development.” In other words, “there’s been research going into mRNA vaccines for more than 15 years.” She puts a positive spin on it, too, explaining the vaccines’ development is an example of what happens when “we put our brightest minds” toward the same goal, all around the globe.

In Alberta, Hackett’s 19 to Zero group talks

Evidence shows people are more likely to be convinced to get the vaccine by positive, not fear-based, messaging

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about how vaccines are “how you can see your loved ones again.” They try to frame vaccines as “calling people to action, as something you can actually do,” she says, “whereas ‘stay home’ is calling people to inaction.” Positive messaging from people you trust is a double whammy, says Hackett. “It’s way more effective for a friend or family member to talk to someone about vaccines, than for me, a physician who they don’t know.” Her group holds town halls with community leaders to “equip people with the tools to go and have these conversations.” Even seeing smiling selfies of friends and neighbours getting vaccinated, and hearing about their not-so-bad experience with sore arms, can be extraordinarily powerful, adds Vohra-Miller. When she talks to people in her community, despite all the data and information she shares, the biggest question she gets is: “Have you had the vaccine?” (Unsurprisingly, she has.)

More surprising, perhaps, is DesRosiers’ decision to get the vaccine and bring their oldest child for his COVID vaccine this spring. Just before the pandemic, they became involved with “a very empathetic doctor” and the subject of vaccines came up. “He invited me to talk. He’d say, ‘Tell me what you’re not sure about, and I can help you navigate the information,’ ” DesRosiers says. He didn’t dismiss DesRosiers’ concerns about Guillain-Barré syndrome post flu-vaccination, for instance.

He said DesRosiers is right that it’s a risk, but the risk of Guillain-Barré after getting the actual flu is 17 times higher. Today, DesRosiers plans to catch their children up on their childhood vaccines.

DesRosiers’ story is common—mothers raising concerns with pediatricians, “getting shut down” and then going online, “where they can easily tip toward a more hardened view,” says Goldenberg. As younger children become eligible for vaccines, parents are going to have concerns about the risks versus benefits for their kids, who are far less likely to get seriously sick from COVID, but have died from it, and can pass it to others. Rather than dismissing a parent who’s concerned, “acknowledge that asking questions is actually a sign of good parenting,” says Goldenberg.

Advocates have been training health workers across the country in ways to encourage people to get their COVID vaccinations, or bring their children for their shots. But experts say everyday Canadians can help, too, by assisting people with booking their appointments, for example, and providing information that can help assuage fears. We don’t need science degrees to have these conversations. We just need empathy.

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HUMAN SECURITY

THE UNSTATED ISSUES

If you have never heard of Al-Ahwaz, an ancient place of great rivers and mountains, and rich farmlands and oil wells, don’t be hard on yourself. It’s just as unlikely that you’ve heard of the Ahwazi people. There are perhaps six million Ahwazis, and they are some of the most viciously oppressed among the various religious and ethnic minorities that make up roughly half of Iran’s population.

Al-Ahwaz is not celebrated in the histories the Khomeinist regime teaches to Iranian children. Once an autonomous emirate, Al-Ahwaz was a place of amity between Muslims, Christians and Jews. For the refuge he

BY TERRY GLAVIN ·

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provided Chaldean Catholics following the Ottoman genocide of Assyrian Christians in the 1920s, Pope Benedict XV awarded a knighthood in the Order of St. Gregory the Great to the Ahwazi emir, Sheikh Khaz’al Ibn Jabir.

The Ahwazi emirate was annexed by Iran in 1925. Sheikh Khaz’al, a fervent opponent of religious extremism of the kind the Khomeinist regime typifies, was quietly murdered in Tehran while under house arrest in 1936.

Following the Khomeinist takeover in 1979, the Ahwazi homeland, centred in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, has been routinely rocked by uprisings—most recently AUGUST 2021

in 2005, 2011 and 2018—along with waves of repression and ethnic cleansing.

The centre of Iran’s oil wealth—about 80 per cent of the country’s proven oil reserves lie in Khuzestan—the Ahwazi homeland was also, until recently, the country’s breadbasket, producing wheat, corn, rice and sugar.

But river diversions and climate change are turning Khuzestan into a dustbowl, and the security of the China-dominated oil industry is the Khomeinists’ overarching priority in the province.

What all this has meant for the Arabicspeaking Ahwazis is the bulldozing of their villages, the ongoing obliteration of their culture, and the regime’s strangulation of Ahwazi life in a savage policy of routine and arbitrary arrests, torture and executions.

If you’ve heard of the Ahwazi people at all, it could be because every few years their nightmare attracts the attention of Amnesty

VIBRANT PICTURES/ALAMY; HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES; SAID KHATIB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A growing number of stateless peoples are locked in political limbo, exposed to dangers the international community is too fractured to address

International

NEXT SPREAD: LAUREL CHOR/GETTY IMAGES

(clockwise from top left) Ahwazi Arabs in London in 2016; fleeing Tibet in 1950; Palestinians and Israeli forces clash in 2016; a protester is arrested in Hong Kong in 2019

International, or Human Rights Watch, or a United Nations committee. But what little the outside world knows about the slow death of the Ahwazi people is due largely to the Torontobased Dur Untash Studies Centre, a refugee-funded archive and information clearing house, and to the efforts of the centre’s editor, Rahim Hamid.

And the only reason the 35-year-old Hamid has been able to undertake the work of keeping the world informed about the misery of the Ahwazis is that he escaped Iran in 2012. He’d been a student leader at Abadan Azad University in Khalafiya, and he’d been arrested in a roundup of Ahwazi activists in 2008. After enduring horrific torture in Khuzestan’s dreaded Sepidar prison, Hamid went underground, eventually crossing the mountains into Turkey and ending up in the United States as a refugee.

“Every day now we have Iranian security forces arresting Ahwazi people. Environmentalists, civil society people, or people making demands for the right to education in their mother language. But from even BBC Persian and the opposition groups, we see nothing,” Hamid told me. “Suppose it happens in Pal-

estine. We have hundreds of human rights organizations condemning Israel. But when it is us, they are dumb and they are blind.”

In their own uniquely tragic way, the Ahwazis share something with the Palestinians, and with the Taiwanese, the Kurds, the Uighurs of Xinjiang, the Rohingya of Myanmar, the Baloch of Iran and Pakistan, the Tigrayans of Ethiopia, the Afghan Hazaras, the Tibetans, and the Hong Kongers. These are among dozens of distinct ethnic and national minorities and stateless nations around the world whose peoples are locked in intractable predicaments that the United Nations is proving increasingly incapable of even acknowledging, let alone resolving.

Taiwan is a thriving liberal-democratic republic, but the People’s Republic of China insists it is a breakaway province. Beijing has lately ramped up its precipitous aggression— even to the point of threatening invasion and war—even though the People’s Republic has never ruled Taiwan. Even so, Taiwan enjoys full diplomatic relations with only 15 of the UN’s 193 member states, owing mainly to the 1970 “Canadian formulation,” the sleight of hand devised by the government of Pierre Trudeau that allowed Beijing to take Taipei’s place at the UN Security Council, banishing Taiwan. As a result, the Taiwanese exist in a kind of UN limbo, with de facto or informal relations with most democracies, but still otherwise unprotected by the UN Charter.

Palestinians are in a strangely similar bind.

Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom and most of the European Union countries do not recognize Palestine as a state, but 138 UN member countries do. The UN recognizes Palestine as a non-member observer state, but most Palestinian people exist in a kind of UN-registered netherworld.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) counts 5.6 million Palestinian refugees in its registry—descendants of an initial refugee population of about 700,000 from the 1948 Palestine War when Israel won its independence. UNRWA provides services to 1.5 million Palestinians in 68 “camps” in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan—where they have no citizenship rights—and also in the West Bank and Gaza, where there have been no elections for 15 years. Then there are nearly two million Palestinians, or Israeli Arabs, who live and vote in Israel, making up about a fifth of the Israeli population.

The membership of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples’ Organization (UNPO), founded in 1991 while the Soviet Union was collapsing, has waxed and waned over the years—former UNPO constituents Latvia MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

and Estonia are now fully recognized UN members states, for instance. And it may be questionable whether the UNPO’s recent admission of the four provinces of Catalonia, in Spain, is a good fit for the organization’s mandate. But the UNPO still counts 300 million people around the world—the Ahwazis of Iran among them—who are “systematically excluded from the international system through colonization occupation, or discrimination and oppression.”

There are two places, however, where the world’s unrepresented peoples are dramatically overrepresented.

The first is the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) endangered languages list. Ethnologue, the international linguistic research agency, counts about 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, and 23 of them are spoken by about half the world’s population. Roughly 40 per cent of the world’s languages are considered endangered—they’re spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Every two weeks, another language vanishes along with its last speakers, and linguists who study language loss say that, at the current pace, perhaps half the world’s languages will be gone by the end of this century.

The world’s unrepresented peoples are also overrepresented among the 80 million people worldwide the UN counts as displaced. While the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) registered about 10 million people a decade ago—people like Rahim Hamid—the number of UNHCR-designated refugees has since doubled to exceed 20 million.

“We’re into this kind of consistent pattern now where big, small and medium countries can get away with literal murder,” Lloyd Axworthy, formerly Canada’s foreign affairs minister and currently chair of the World Refugee & Migration Council, told me.

Democracy has been in global retreat for 16 years, and powerful UN member states, like Russia and China, are acting with impunity in their assault on long-standing international human rights norms, Axworthy said.

Former champions of an international order built on basic human rights standards, like the United States and the United Kingdom, have been retreating into dysfunctional introspection, he said.

Axworthy was a pioneer of the “responsibility to protect,” or R2P, doctrine, which might have been of some use to the small nations of the world. Adopted unanimously at the UN World Summit in 2005, the doctrine placed an onus on the international community to protect minority populations suffering severe 59

International

human rights abuses, and arose largely in response to the UN’s paralysis in the face of the Rwandan genocide and genocidal atrocities in the former Yugoslavia.

Canada might well have secured enough votes for a seat on the UN Security Council two years ago, Axworthy said, if Ottawa had forcefully lobbied UN member states on the basis of Canadian leadership in a revival of the doctrine—many could have used R2P as a shield against the depredations of the Russia-China-Iran bloc. But the UN has been “in regression” in protecting minority and stateless populations, Axworthy told me.

The UN Security Council has failed to invoke R2P ever since China and Russia were taken aback by the outcome of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Authorized by the UN Security Council and nominally endorsed by Beijing and Moscow, the air-power intervention was intended to prevent Moammar Gadhafi from carrying through with his threat to slaughter everyone involved in a mass uprising against his regime.

But NATO’s air support ended up playing a decisive role in Gadhafi’s overthrow, and Russia and China protested that they’d been duped into voting for “regime change.”

Axworthy said a consequence of the multinational effort in Libya, which ended after Barack Obama’s White House declined to provide peacekeeping troops in the aftermath, is that there is a widespread misapprehension that R2P is all about military intervention.

In fact, R2P was a unanimous UN curtailment of member states’ sovereignty, offering a range of restraints—like coordinated, multilateral sanctions.

“Nobody’s going to go into China with guns blazing” to protect the Uighurs, Axworthy said, referring to the Muslims of Xinjiang, where Beijing has imprisoned at least a million people in “re-education centres” and work camps. Several international human rights organizations—among them Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International— have obtain independent verification, including China’s own official documentation, of policies that are widely understood to meet the threshold of genocide. They include the sterilization of Uighur women, the bulldozing of mosques and ancient shrines, and experiments with advanced surveillance and population-control technologies.

Nevertheless, the establishment of R2P-type restraints on state sovereignty as an international norm could go a long way in putting in place a robust and coordinated regime of international sanctions, Axworthy said.

As things stand, Canada can’t even bring 60

itself to co-operate with the U.S. in preventing goods produced by forced labour in Xinjiang from entering North American markets—even though the recently renegotiated NAFTA treaty, now known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, requires Canada to do so. And as things stand at the UN, the R2P doctrine is going nowhere.

“It still shows up at the United Nations in preludes and things of that kind, but the breakdown is at the Security Council,” Axworthy said. Even if the Security Council remains deadlocked, even in the face of genocide, the UN’s member states are not powerless. “The creative thing would be to see what you can get at the General Assembly, but the problem is there hasn’t been a champion. So right now, the UN is kind of a commedia dell’arte operation. They have an R2P coordinator, and they write a nice report, and then they go back and stay in a nice hotel for another nine months.”

default position of the international community, and even in Canada, where the Dalai Lama is an honorary citizen, has become an acquiescence to Beijing’s standpoint: Tibetans are merely a “Chinese minority.”

Sherap Therchin, executive director of the Canada Tibet Committee, said there are a couple of reasons for this backsliding. “The never-ending disinformation from the Chinese government” is one reason, he said. Another is that the leadership of the world’s 6.7 million Tibetans have resigned themselves to aspirations that fall short of full independence— genuine autonomy, under Chinese sovereignty. The Tibetan government-inexile, based in Dharamsala, India, is reluctantly pursuing diplomatic dialogue with Beijing. “It is not that we do not believe in independence,” said Therchin. “It’s just that we now believe that this is more practical.”

But it doesn’t help that Canada is among the countries that refuse to formally recognize the Tibetan government, Therchin said.

“That is something that has a lot to do with the government’s fear of upsetting China. Or, you could use the words, appeasing China.”

Whether the “Sino-Tibetan dialogue” that

‘Nobody’s going to go into China with guns blazing’ to protect the Uighurs, said Lloyd Axworthy

The UN has proved useless even to the roughly 45 million Kurdish people, arguably the world’s most populous nation without a national government of its own. The Iranian Kurds, neighbours of the Arabic-speaking Ahwazis, are similarly subjected to Khomeinist repression and cruelty.

The Kurds of Turkey have been systematically disenfranchised by the increasingly brutal and authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Iraqi Kurds have managed to carve out some autonomy from Baghdad, but they are also forced to make accommodations with Ankara and Tehran.

The embattled Syrian Kurds have kept Bashar al-Assad at bay in Damascus, but they were largely abandoned by the NATO powers after having shed more blood than anyone else in the ground war against the Islamic State.

Like the Kurds, everybody knows about the Tibetans, too. But as the years pass, the Activist Lau speaks at a rally for Hong Kong democracy in London on June 12, 2021 AUGUST 2021

Canada formally supports will produce any meaningful results is very much an open question, Therchin said, because Beijing insists that the Tibetans submit to the fiction that Tibet is historically part of China. “Tibetans cannot submit to this. History cannot be changed.”

Mao Zedong’s armies invaded and annexed Tibet in 1949, and the following year Lester Pearson, the foreign affairs secretary of state who would go on to become prime minister, noted that the prior sovereignty Beijing claimed over Tibet was a “mere fiction,” and that Tibet had been in control of its own affairs right up to the Chinese invasion. “I am of the opinion that Tibet is, from the point of view of international law, qualified for recognition as an independent state,” Pearson wrote.

Whatever Justin Trudeau’s view might be, he’s not saying. “We still haven’t had Canada issue a clear position on Tibet, and I am disappointed,” Therchin said. “It’s been now almost seven years since Prime Minister Trudeau was elected, and we have not heard him say anything about Tibet. Nothing from the Prime Minister himself.”

There does come a point when political persecution and oppression become so intolerable that basic demands for democracy and the rule of law can give way to aspirations for national liberation and independence. That

is how Hong Kong’s democrats have changed over the past decade or so.

Around the time of the British handover to Beijing in 1997, Hong Kongers were inclined to believe that the former British colony could serve as a fulcrum for the spread of democratic values throughout China. Under the terms of the Sino-British joint declaration—itself an international treaty, registered at the United Nations—Hong Kong was to retain its liberties and way of life until at least 2047. Beijing had further promised that Hong Kong’s 7.5 million people could set their own course for universal suffrage—one person, one vote.

But Beijing reneged on its promises, abrogated the Sino-British “basic law” treaty, imposed an extradition law and, finally, the draconian “national security law,” in June 2020. Neither the UN as a whole, nor the UN’s liberal democracies, exacted any proportionate consequences. The mood among Hong Kong democrats, who were once merely determined to secure democratic reforms, has shifted to a desire for independence. Hong Kongers increasingly see their struggle as a kind of national liberation movement.

“From the bottom of their hearts, they support independence, but the only question is whether it is feasible. That is all,” the prominent Hong Kong activist Finn Lau, now in exile in London, told me. Lau is a fugitive, wanted on charges under the National Security Law. He managed to evade the authorities, who were unaware of his identity at the time of his arrest in January 2020.

The idea that democracy would grow and spread outward from Hong Kong no longer has any traction, he said. “It was just a dream, and the older generation, they were devastated to know it was just a dream, after 2019.”

Lau points to a massive public opinion survey undertaken by the activist group Citizens’ Press Conference in May of last year, involving 370,000 respondents. Among the survey results: opposition to the National Security Law came in at 98.6 per cent; 80.4 per cent supported the U.S. Hong Kong Policy Act, which withdrew Hong Kong’s special trading status; and 64.2 per cent said Hong Kong independence should be the ultimate goal of the pro-democracy movement—even though the average score for optimism about reaching independence was only 4.5 out of 10.

Lau said that despite everything, he holds out some optimism for the UN, or a multinational initiative, to bring Hong Kong out of Beijing’s clutches: “Some kind of autonomy, under the protection of the international community. We see that as the only way out.”

It might not seem reasonable to expect, he MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

added, “but we could see a collapse of the system like the U.S.S.R.” Nobody expected that, either. And then, Hong Kongers could democratically decide whether they want independence or not.

As for the Ahwazis, nobody is expecting some kind of war of independence, Rahim Hamid of the Dur Untash Studies Centre told me. Over the years, several armed separatist groups have sprung up, only to fade away. Hamid said all he can hope to do is to focus international attention on the suffering Ahwazis are facing, every day. It’s a struggle for basic human rights, not independence.

“The only way that I see is just to raise awareness of the systematic ethnic discrimination, the ethnic cleansing that is taking place,” he said.

It hasn’t been easy. Hamid is still suffering from the effects of the torture he endured in Iran. He’s had several surgeries to repair damage to his sphincter and his bowels, and part of his large intestine had to be removed.

It was only after his family raised the equivalent of US$13,000 to bail him out of prison in Iran pending a trial, and only after finding help among Kurdish activists, that Hamid got away. He escaped into the Zagros mountains and after walking for two nights, turned himself into the police in a Kurdish district of Turkey.

From there he made his way to Ankara, to the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, where he eventually gained refugee status. He works as a translator with the International Rescue Committee and lives in Virginia, a couple of hours from Washington, with his Kurdish wife, Aran, and their two daughters, three-year-old Neel and 18-month-old Yara.

Like Lau, Hamid remains an optimist. The Khomeinist regime cannot last, he said. While he worries about the lifeline the Biden administration is holding out to the regime by reviving the Obama-era nuclear agreement—a key Democratic Party foreign-policy objective that overrides human rights concerns—sooner or later, like the U.S.S.R., the regime in Tehran will collapse, Hamid said.

When that happens, the international community should not make the same mistake the Americans made after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. “It will be important to understand the ethnic minorities of Iran, to understand what we are suffering, and to understand what the people want,” Hamid said. “Otherwise, the Ahwaz people, the Baloch, the Kurdish people—it will be a time bomb.”

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Education

MBA

A degree for the future

PHOTOGRAPH BY KATE PETERS

Canada’s business schools are adapting to a new financial landscape and appealing to some of the country’s highest performers (from other fields)

Olympian Melanie McCann is completing her MBA at Queen’s

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CRYPTOCURRENCY

New kid on the blockchain Over the past five years, digital finance has increasingly become part of business education Cryptocurrency courses have become a big deal in a short amount of time—much like cryptocurrencies themselves.

As recently as three years ago, it still seemed disreputable for business schools to teach about Bitcoin or other electronic currencies that are secured through online databases.

“At the very beginning, there was a misconception that cryptos were funny money and a speculative tool,” says Henry Kim, associate professor at the Schulich School of Business, York University, and director and co-founder of the school’s blockchain.lab. “Business schools didn’t want to teach that because they thought it was faddish.”

Andreas Park, an associate professor of finance at the University of Toronto, agrees.

“For the longest time there was great skepticism among my colleagues,” says Park, who will soon be starting a course on decentralized finance and cryptocurrency in the RotBY JAIME WEINMAN ·

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man School of Management’s MBA program.

Today, it’s more common to hear cryptocurrency described as something that is becoming an inescapable part of business education.

That’s especially true of blockchain technology, the vast, decentralized databases that cryptocurrencies rely on to verify and process new transactions with a minimum of human involvement. “Blockchain has become part of elective business education over the past five years,” says Jean-Philippe Vergne, the former director of the Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab at Ivey Business School in London, Ont. “Over the next five, it will likely become part of core business education, just like database management is integrated into core business undergrad and graduate modules in information systems management.”

Katya Malinova is an associate professor at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, where she teaches a course called AUGUST 2021

“Introduction to FinTech” (financial technology). She says the status of these technologies seemed to reach a turning point in 2017, when there was a boom in cryptocurrency investment, with investors throwing money at cryptocurrency tokens (the equivalent of shares in a more conventional company) and companies like Bitcoin and its younger competitor Ethereum. Not all of these investments were wise, “but the idea of digitizing assets and putting them on the blockchain stuck,” Malinova says. And that raises questions about whether traditional financial technologies can be replaced by new ones.

Even though the many worthless tokens of 2017 are sometimes referred to as a cautionary tale, that outpouring of investment made cryptocurrency impossible to ignore. By the fall of 2018, “it was fairly clear that FinTech and/or blockchain should be discussed in business schools,” Malinova says.

Business schools that added the subject as early as possible, before the boom of 2017, may be benefiting from being ahead of the curve, just as it paid off to be an early investor in Bitcoin. Vergne definitely thinks that’s true at Ivey, which began teaching about Bitcoin in 2013 and integrating it across programs in 2014; they were listed in a Forbes article on the relatively small number of important “bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurren-

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RAYMOND BIESINGER

Education

cies” courses. Vergne, now an associate professor at the UCL School of Management in London, England, co-designed the “Bitcoin Crash Course” when he was at Ivey, and says the school’s head start in integrating cryptocurrencies into its programming paid off for some of its students: “Several financial technology startups were founded in Toronto by Ivey alumni who took this kind of module,” says Vergne, referring to companies such as Ledn, Lending Loop and Satstreet. “They were the trailblazers and their trajectory has been spectacular,” he says.

It would be easy to assume that students, especially younger ones, would be pushing for knowledge on cryptocurrency to be included in business curriculums, but it’s not always the case. “When I started including it in my classes, most students hadn’t even heard of Bitcoin,” Park recalls. Vergne thinks students were initially reluctant to ask for courses on the subject—not because they didn’t know about it, but because “they simply did not believe that a school like Ivey, which can appear quite conservative at first, would be open to the idea.

But as soon as they were presented with an opportunity to engage, interest surged, and students kept asking for more.”

Another aspect of business education that plays a role in increasing cryptocurrency’s profile is something that is one of the most important functions of MBA programs: helping graduates find work. “Business schools are very vocational,” Kim says. “We want to make sure we teach courses that are directly applicable for our students’ job opportunities or provide really good complementary learning for the jobs they take.” MBA programs can’t downplay something that’s becoming a major source of employment: “Clearly if there’s $2 trillion worth of investments in it, there’s probably some job opportunities there,” Kim adds.

The content of programs doesn’t only respond to the market; it also changes to fit research. “I would say that in most cases, faculty expertise is behind the introduction of new courses,” Malinova says. Don Cyr, professor of finance at Brock University’s Goodman School of Business, says that around 2015 or 2016, there was an “explosion” in the number of research studies being done on cryptocurrencies. Business schools also take some cues from professional certification programs; once the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program included some of these topics, it became what Cyr calls “a very strong indicator” that they also belonged in MBA programs.

Even though cryptocurrency is a mostly

new subject, most agree it still requires a traditional teaching approach. “Students are often very interested in the potential for investing in cryptocurrencies, and may have dabbled in it,” Cyr says, but they are “often unaware of the broader implications of blockchain or digital ledger technology in general in the finance field.” Asked if anything important has changed in the principles she teaches, Malinova says there is “nothing fundamentally new in my opinion.” Vergne says blockchain “changes the practice of finance in depth, but not its fundamental laws.” Park just says, “No. Economics is economics.”

There are, however, some new things that have to be taken into account when teaching this topic. The typical way to teach about financial history is by describing how a new concept developed out of a “pipeline of academic researchers and practitioners in the field of finance,” Cyr says, adding that a key

MBA programs can’t downplay the fact that cryptocurrency is becoming a major source of employment fact about cryptocurrency is that it developed outside that pipeline: “We don’t know the identity of the developer of Bitcoin, and to some extent its adoption was fuelled by dissatisfaction with central banks and their control of the money supply.”

Business schools are also learning to focus not on individual currencies like Bitcoin— which themselves may well turn out to be fads—but the principles and technologies they’re attached to, which are impossible to put back into the bottle. Park says he often has to deal with the misconception that blockchain is the same thing as Bitcoin, and that the significant thing about blockchain is MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

that it operates “all value transfers on a single infrastructure,” instead of splitting them up into payments, stocks, bonds and other assets we’ve gotten used to.

Park says a securities trade today requires the use of “many platforms and systems: your broker’s internal system, stock exchanges, clearing and settlement services, beneficiary ownership record keepers, custodian banks and the payments system—all separate and awkwardly linked,” he says. A blockchain combines all of these things, which could potentially reduce the role of those familiar platforms and systems, and the jobs that go with them.

In addition, because blockchain organizes investment and payment in such a streamlined way, without all those intermediaries, Vergne thinks it has the potential to shake up organization theory and how it’s taught. “It changes what we know about the role of managerial hierarchies and centralized coordination in the growth of business organizations,” he says. “This is where most of the exciting research is happening these days.”

That means we’re only seeing the beginning of the types of courses and teaching approaches that crypto and blockchain will inspire. Kim points to the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, which has “a complete master’s program in blockchain.” Closer to home, he notes, York University offers blockchain education through its School of Continuing Studies. Future classes will have the benefit of very informed, even experienced students, says Kim: “Most high schools in Toronto have a blockchain/Ethereum club. Eventually, we will see these folks in the MBA programs.”

As students come in more informed about the subject, faculty will need to figure out how to help them think about it in a transformative way; Malinova likes to point out that blockchain could help to reach the billions of people “who have no access to financial services through no fault of their own,” and she thinks there shouldn’t be too much focus on the potential negatives. “Yes, there are bad apples, scammers and the like, and they need to go, obviously,” she says. “But the important issue is how much good this new world can do. For what it’s worth, after taking my class, the students get it.” Park says that in order to make sure they’re providing a long-lasting education, business schools need to be “forward-looking, and inform students about the broad changes that blockchain technology can bring.” If cryptocurrency ends up changing the world, it will be partly because of the students and researchers who were convinced that it could.

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After winning gold at the 2016 Olympics, Wiebe began looking for a new challenge outside of sport

O LY M P I A N S

Field to boardroom Three elite athletes on the transferable skills that help them find success in their MBA programs There’s a lot of overlap between the qualities athletes must possess to make it to the Olympics and those required of successful students and, later, businesspeople: leadership, collaboration, determination and time management are key in both fields.

But talk to Erica Wiebe, Brad Gushue and Melanie McCann, current and former Olympians who are all enrolled in an MBA program at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business, and it quickly becomes clear that their athletic prowess sets them up for success in other ways, too. Being coachable, for example, or understanding how to spot—and close— the “gaps” in their knowledge or experience.

These athletes are well-suited for careers in business, but they are also pursuing MBAs as a way of setting themselves up for the future.

They enrolled at Smith through Game Plan, a program intended to provide Canadian athletes with resources to support their education, skill development, health and career management both during their athletic careers

BY STACY LEE KONG ·

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and as they transition into the next phases of their lives. Smith has signed on as a partner for an eight-year term and has pledged to provide 1,200 Olympic athletes with access to scholarships. Game Plan has also partnered with other institutions—including Athabasca University, Royal Roads University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary—that provide flexible course loads, alternate delivery methods and student athlete-specific resources.

Maclean’s caught up with Wiebe, Gushue and McCann to talk about the similarities between their athletic and academic careers, what attracted them to business school and what they hope to do with their MBAs.

ERICA WIEBE—EMBA AMERICAS PROGRAM “I thought an MBA would be an accelerator to really get me where I want to go.”

After winning the gold medal in women’s 75-kg freestyle wrestling (Canada’s third-ever AUGUST 2021

gold in freestyle wrestling) at the 2016 Summer Olympics, Erica Wiebe embarked on a “whirlwind” of other projects, from wrestling in a professional league in India to trying out for the WWE to embarking on a speaking tour that saw her reach 15,000 kids across Canada. But none of these felt like quite the right next step. “I still needed something outside of sport to challenge me and be part of my identity,” she says.

So, she took a consulting job in Deloitte’s Calgary office, where she focused on human capital. “That gave me exposure to a huge breadth of industries and sectors and roles, and really got me excited about all the possibilities within business,” she says. “But I started to realize I had some gaps in terms of my business acumen. I thought an MBA would be an accelerator to get me where I want to go.”

She applied for the Queen’s-Cornell partner program in 2019 with the understanding that, if she got in, she’d defer until after the Olympics. But then, COVID. Not long after she interviewed for the program and qualified for the Olympics, the 2020 Summer Games were postponed indefinitely. Clubs and training facilities were closed, too. But school was still in session, and when the adviser for the Executive MBA Americas program reached out to ask Wiebe whether she’d consider starting that June, with the assurance that the school would work around her training schedule if and when the Olympics were back on, she said yes. So, for the past year, she’s done both.

“I competed in the World [Cup] championships in Serbia in December and I did a European tour in February, all while doing classes on the weekends and in between wrestling sessions,” she says.

If that sounds like a lot, well, it is. In fact, Wiebe decided to defer three courses this summer so she could focus on preparing for Tokyo.

But there’s also a real benefit to having multiple priorities: “Having a class [helped me] forget the fact that I couldn’t train or compete,” she says. “Having something to take my mind off that and give me structure and focus outside of sport has been really helpful.”

Of course there’s overlap between these two parts of her life. “We’ve talked about athletes having great time management skills, but I think what athletes are really exceptional at is energy management,” she says. “That’s understanding the micro and macro cycles of training, and how that actually relates to prioritization for any really challenging task.

An athlete knows you can’t go 110 per cent 365 days a year. You have to take care of the whole spectrum, which includes rest, recovery, rehab and prehab.”

COURTESY OF WRESTLING CANADA LUTTE

Education

Education

BRAD GUSHUE—ACCELERATED MBA PROGRAM “This is an opportunity for me to be more prepared when I’m done my athletic career.”

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For curler Gushue, experience competing on a team has been hugely helpful in his MBA studies

work for big companies, so they bring that. chat about their respective experiences in Meanwhile, I think I may be the only small the program.)

In addition to teamwork, resilience and business owner in the group,” he says. “We determination, McCann says taking and actcan learn from each other.” ing on feedback have been important transskills between her two careers. “As MELANIE MCCANN—ACCELERATED MBA PROGRAM ferable an athlete, I thrived on feedback,” she says.

“I couldn’t help but see the parallels between “Recognizing that I can be coachable and performance in sport and in business.” improvement-focused in the MBA setting Melanie McCann was interested in business has been a game changer for [me].” before she discovered modern pentathlon, Still, there have been some adjustments. an Olympic sport consisting of five differ- Zoom fatigue is real, for one thing. And ent events (swimming, fencing, equestrian, McCann has had to figure out what success running and shooting), at age 16. Growing looks like outside of sports. “As an athlete, I up, she saw what it took for her family to run had my sights clearly set on the Olympics and their concrete construction company and was my goals were crystal clear,” she says. “Shift“inspired by their entrepreneurial spirit and ing my focus and finding new goals [in] acamanagement of employees and customers in demics has been a challenge.” the rural community,” she says.

She does know what she wants to do with After making it to the Summer Games in her MBA, though: become a better leader.

2012 and 2016—and achieving the best-ever Inspired by her dad’s career, she wants to Olympic result by a Canadian modern pent- run her own business one day, so while she’s athlete, a record she still holds—she retired working to improve hard skills like business from sport, and naturally looked to business strategy and finance, she’s also excited to build for her next career. First, she took a consult- the soft skills—and the network—she needs to ing role on the infrastructure and capital achieve that goal. “As an athlete, I gained so programs team in Deloitte’s London, Eng- much from going the extra mile. Tactics like land, office. “I have always been a ‘jack-of- working with a mental performance coach or all-trades,’ which is why I love pentathlon,” targeting specific training partners helped me she says. “[That’s also] why I enjoy being a see the gaps in my performance and work to consultant on a wide range of projects.” In narrow them,” she says. “Pursuing an MBA January, she enrolled in Smith’s Accelerated is equipping me with the knowledge and netMBA program. (She and Gushue are on sep- work to build my next chapter in business. I arate teams at Smith, but they do sometimes can’t wait to find out what I am capable of.”

AUGUST 2021

COURTESY OF ANIL MUNGAL/TEAM GUSHUE

Sixteen years after he first won gold at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, curler Brad Gushue is training to represent Canada at next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing. The married dad of two is also a business owner— he and teammate Mark Nichols opened Newfoundland and Labrador’s first Orangetheory Fitness studio in St. John’s in 2017, and have been dealing with the uncertainty of COVID since last March. And, as of January, he’s back in school—almost two decades after he completed his undergrad in business administration—this time in the Accelerated MBA Program at Smith.

Gushue, who is 40, doesn’t see retirement in his immediate future, but he does want to make sure he’s planning ahead. “I don’t want my curling career to end any time soon, but you know, nature and Father Time sometimes decides that for you,” he says. “I’d love to play a leadership role in any sort of company, whether it’s my own or in a corporate environment or in a not-for-profit, politics, who knows. So, I can’t see how this program’s ever going to hurt me.”

Still, he was a little nervous to head back to school—though not for the reasons you might think. “I wasn’t as heavily stressed from a time management standpoint,” he says. “But it had been 17 years since I’d written a paper or studied or done anything like that. So, I was very stressed about getting back into that routine. But after a couple months, and seeing some good grades coming back and getting good feedback from professors, I realized I’m capable of doing this, and I’m at a level where I shouldn’t be stressed about my capacity or ability to complete the program.”

In fact, he says, he’s better equipped to succeed now than he was the first time around.

Time management and work ethic are maybe the most obviously relevant skills, but experience competing with a team has been hugely helpful, too. That’s because Smith’s Accelerated MBA program is team-based—the entire cohort of students is split into smaller groups of six to eight students within the same geographic region. The team members are also, by design, from a variety of industries, ages, cultural backgrounds and experiences. Gushue says that can make collaboration a challenge, but a worthwhile one.

“I don’t have a whole lot of corporate experience, but some members of my group

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Society

MUSIC

THE TEACHINGS OF PRINCE The polymathic artist’s first posthumous studio album releases this summer. Recorded in 2010, it remains ahead of its time.

Society

There’s a special kind of skepticism that follows a posthumous album release from a major pop artist. Projects like Aaliyah’s highly successful I Care 4 U and Johnny Cash’s abysmal Remixed have been called out as vulgar record-company cash grabs and critically panned as either unrealized potential (the former) or inessential versions (the latter). Michael, the first album Michael Jackson’s estate released shortly after his death in 2009, is a cobbled-together grouping of what sound like rejected B-sides or unwanted works-in-progress. Amy Winehouse’s Lioness: Hidden Treasures, an album released a mere five months after the British vocalist tragically passed away, contains tracks that sound more suitable as added bonus material for an anniversary edition of her Grammy-sweeping Back to Black.

Prince’s upcoming release, Welcome 2 America—his first posthumous studio album since his death in 2016—has little in common with the afterlife output of Jackson, Cash or Winehouse. Set to stream on July 30, this full-length album is a cohesive start-to-finish concept that bridges many of the artist-formerly-knownas-a-symbol’s career highs.

At the same time, Welcome 2 America does what Prince’s former output does not. It’s pre-woke wokeness at its best, a searing and tender yet direct critique of the United States, created during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Long-time fans, such as Dr. Christopher Smith, a research associate at the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, think the decision to hold the record back is a reflection of Prince’s social acumen.

He “checked the collective temperature of the nation and decided to not discount the historic moment,” Smith says. Much of the U.S. was still celebrating its first Black president.

“Prince didn’t want to rain on the parade,” says Smith. “Having an African-American president had very material manifestations where people were actually feeling a certain kind of hope. I can completely understand why Prince was like, ‘Yeah, now is not the time.’ ” Prince had a reputation for being politically-on-the-job early in his career. Sign o’ the Times, released in 1987, was a lament on the drug wars and the Reagan administration of the day. But this new album goes further in its socio-political commentary, with lyrics that refer to the singer’s homeland as “land of the free, home of the slave,” and unabashedly claim that “truth is the new minority” and “everybody and their momma has a sex

BY ELIO IANNACCI ·

Prince released an album as Camille, his alter ego, evincing his connection to both genders MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

tape,” while chanting a call to action to “dismantle all monopolies.”

Little Red Corvette it ain’t.

At a first listen, the key tracks on Welcome 2 America might sound like they were crafted post-2013, when the Black Lives Matter movement spread globally after George Zimmerman fatally shot an unarmed 17-yearold African-American high school student, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Fla. And, based on Welcome 2 America’s forward-sounding instrumentation (electro-fused structures that Lil Nas X and Frank Ocean have built upon), the disc also sounds like it might have been made weeks or months before the Minneapolis-born polymathic musician died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl.

But the album, like Prince, was ahead of its time. Recorded in 2010, Welcome 2 America was fuelled by conversations Prince was having with the New Power Generation (or NPG, his supporting band from 1990 to 2016).

Between sessions, the band would sit down at Prince’s insistence to watch Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 2008 PBS series African American Lives 2. Gates is a professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and the miniseries featured research into the ancestral lineages of prominent AfricanAmerican guests, putting a spotlight on past injustices and present achievements, as well as historical experiences pre- and post-slavery.

One of the most prominent vocalists on the new album is NPG singer-songwriter Shelby Johnson (her stage name was shortened to Shelby J. by Prince), who had worked with Prince since 2006. She describes studio time for Welcome 2 America as part classroom and part therapy session. “Prince gave me DVDs about African-American culture to absorb when we weren’t singing,” she says over the phone from her home in North Carolina.

“Historic moments that I didn’t learn in school, films about Black Wall Street and the mistreatment of Black communities . . . stuff that is so ugly, you don’t want to acknowledge it. But it made me think about the injustice happening in my own country.

“We also watched a documentary of Wattstax over and over again before we sang,” Johnson says, referring to the 1965 benefit concert that featured more than a dozen gospel, R&B, soul, blues, funk and jazz acts commemorating the seventh anniversary of the Watts Rebellion, an event that took place over six days and was instigated by police brutality. “I just became such a sponge. He kept telling us that things don’t just happen when it comes to racism. I learned that once 71

you acknowledge something that’s bad, you can’t change the past but you [also] can’t pretend that it never happened and that things are just the way they are now. The creativity and the collectiveness and the conversations about what we were watching on PBS or in documentaries, and what was happening with the elections in the news—that made it into the music.”

Johnson takes the role of lead vocalist on a Welcome 2 America track called Running Game (Son of a Slave Master). When she first received the music, she was taken aback by lyrics such as, “How much do U want 4 that real dope beat? / Another A&R man, lyin’ through their teeth / Son of a slave master, meet and greet / There goes the publishing and U’re back on the street.” “We [the band members] would come into the studio, look at the lyrics and stare at each other,” she says. “I remember saying, ‘Ooh, he is going deep!’ ” Running Game is a mirror to Prince’s own career, including his widely publicized legal battles with Warner Bros. in the ’90s, when he changed his name to a symbol and appeared in public with the word “Slave” on his face. The song connects America’s civil rights movement to Prince’s own challenge of working with a major music label, one that expected him to be a non-stop hit machine.

For all its sharp critique, the record has its bright sides. In a song called 1,000 Light Years From Here, Prince lays it all out for his country: “Now got 2 show / What it means 2 b American / Good life, liberty, innovation / Every child, no matter what colour / Getting an education.” And on a track titled Yes, Prince, Shelby J. and NPG vocalist Liv Warfield offer up a jubilant anthem that is nevertheless laced with caution: “If U’re ready 4 a brand-new nation, YES / If U’re ready 4 a new situation, say YES / If U’re ready we can turn the page, YES / As long as they ain’t movin’ us 2 a bigger cage.”

“I’ve worked on more than 50 songs that are in Prince’s vault that touch on all of these concerns for the world,” says Johnson. “The joy is there. You can hear [it] in the music.

But consciousness for what causes pain is also there. This album is the beginning of a new journey for him. He wasn’t about just reporting on the news this time around. He wasn’t wasting time whining about it. He saw NPG as part of the solution to the chaos. He’d constantly ask us, ‘How can we change this system moving forward?’ ” Prince’s early work was known for focusing on explicit sexuality and the complexities of romance and monogamy in the midst of ’80s excess. Sign ’o the Times marked a turn 72

to the more political, getting into themes of racial justice and his developing interest in spirituality. The record was “less of a shift in terms of his overall consciousness with regards to engaging with the historical memory and legacies of racial oppression in the U.S.,” says Daphne A. Brooks, an award-winning music critic, author and professor of African American studies at Yale University, “but rather a seizing of growing entitlement to be able to speak about it directly through his art. Prince worked in stages around different kinds of goals, especially in the first quarter of his

‘I STILL HAVE HIS VERSION OF OVERCOME ON MY LAPTOP. I GUESS I’LL HAVE TO RELEASE IT ONE DAY.’

U.K. singer Mvula rethought her entire sound after hearing the recording Prince had made

career. His later development has to do with the economic shift in who he was and how he was treated as an artist.”

A standing theme throughout his career is Prince’s powerful connection to both genders. “It goes all the way back to his alter ego, Camille,” Brooks says, referencing the pseudonym Prince used for an album of the same name that was never officially shared with fans, save for one, rare, advanced pressing of the record, which went up for auction AUGUST 2021

and sold for US$29,645 in 2016. On Camille, Prince sped up his own singing and heightened his register and pitch on various tracks, so his voice could be perceived as being biologically female. A few of the album’s songs, including If I Was Your Girlfriend, went on to be resurrected for Sign o’ the Times.

Brooks describes Prince as having “progressive feminist ideals” and points to his deep and meaningful professional relationships with women such as Sheila E., Sheena Easton, Wendy & Lisa (Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman), and Rosie Gaines—whom he shared the spotlight with onstage and in recordings. “He became interested in having different kinds of female voices represented,” Brooks says. “He also believed their voices to be a piece of him.” Many of those collaborations, as well as songs he wrote for female artists such as Sinéad O’Connor (Nothing Compares 2 U), Martika (Love . . . Thy Will Be Done) and the Bangles (Manic Monday), have recently been re-examined after Prince’s estate exhumed his own recordings of these songs on a 2019 disc called Originals.

And there may still be more new Prince offerings to come. Yet another unreleased recording, a song titled Overcome, written

by British pop singer Laura Mvula and Chic legend Niles Rodgers for Mvula’s 2016’s The Dreaming Room album, was a catalyst for Mvula’s Pink Noise, scheduled for release on July 2. Upon listening to Prince’s take of Overcome (which he secretly recorded and sent to Mvula), she decided to rethink her entire sound and depart from the moodier, cinematic soundscapes she’s known for.

“I still have Prince’s version on my laptop and I guess I’ll have to release it one day because it means so much to me and my career,” Mvula says via phone from London.

“His take on this song was the premonition to my new album. It made me think in a funkier, sexier way, and it made me be at peace with weaving activism into my music.”

Pink Noise’s jewel-in-crown is a song called Remedy, which would fit perfectly on Welcome 2 America’s track list. Its lyrics echo Eric Garner’s last words—“I can’t breathe”—before dying when former police officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a prohibitive chokehold on July 17, 2014. The choice to include that line was prompted by how unabashedly truth-filled Prince’s most politically charged songs are.

“Prince taught me so much about fighting for your identity and not taking your own music for granted,” Mvula says. “He was a prophet and a teacher, and he [taught me about] having the confidence to continue in this wild industry.”

COURTESY OF ATLANTIC RECORDS; PREVIOUS SPREAD: PLATON/TRUNK ARCHIVE

Society

ENTERTAINMENT

RYAN REYNOLDS AND THE JOY OF META-STARDOM The A-lister opens up about the tyranny of happiness, and why he tries to share the celebrity experience with fellow Canadians It’s not possible to dislike Ryan Reynolds. The Deadpool star is perhaps best known for his raunchy, self-aware and slightly immature sense of humour. But while most other celebrities revealed a little too much about themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic—by Instagramming parties on private islands, or complaining about lost opportunities to play the Royal Albert Hall—Reynolds recorded public service announcements for the government of British Columbia, helped to promote SickKids hospital and even helped to recover a precious teddy bear stolen from a Vancouver park.

It was exemplary behaviour from a hometown boy who has established himself within the ranks of the Hollywood elite. Despite living the life of fame in America, Reynolds keeps one foot grounded in Canada, the country he credits with instilling his brand of selfdeprecating humour. He also made a show of showing his love for home and native land at a moment when the country was struggling.

He spoke with Maclean’s contributing editor Jen Gerson about the pandemic, parenting and why he doesn’t like to hurt people. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Let’s start with this: how’s your pandemic going?

A: Wow, yeah, I’m reluctant to personalize it in such a way but, as with anyone who has three young children—or two young children, or one, or a dog—it’s definitely challenging.

Lots of Zoom school and that kind of stuff, but we’re really happy that we’re seeing the waning days. It’s feeling great now.

Q: There seems to be an air of relief now that it’s coming to an end.

A: Yeah, that is something that is felt across this country and North America. Hopefully it’s going to continue to get better. The coun-

COURTESY OF GUY AROCH/20TH CENTURY STUDIOS

BY JEN GERSON ·

‘Being born and raised in Canada, I learned at a young age to laugh at myself,’ says Reynolds

tries that have less access to vaccines, hopefully that will change.

Q: I’ve been poking around with the new movie you have coming out, Free Guy, and it’s a really fun concept for a movie. You’re playing an NPC, which stands for non-player character. NPCs are unmemorable background avatars used to fill out crowd scenes in video games, but this one is a nice guy who realizes he’s a character in a video game, and becomes the hero of the tale. What interested you about that movie?

A: I really love this idea of making a film that is a large, summer blockbuster in scale, but that is also not [pre-existing intellectual property]. It’s not based on anything like a comic book or a sequel or anything like that.

It felt exciting to dig into. There’s also an adventure element to it. I grew up watching Amblin movies that [Steven] Spielberg was making and they were real adventures that MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

would take you off to some place that was extremely exciting. And I love wish fulfillment. I’ve always loved that.

Also, just this notion that there are people living in the background: there’s no better personification of that than an NPC—someone who is meant to fill the space in the background, don’t speak up, don’t take action, don’t do anything. Shut up, work, breathe and die. I like the idea of those people stepping into their light. This movie isn’t just about my character stepping into his light.

It’s about a whole bunch of NPCs stepping into their light, and that was a lot of fun.

Q: It’s an interesting parallel to the Deadpool character; it’s still an action-adventure, you still have the flashy pyrotechnics and all that, but it’s a much more wholesome character than what we’ve come to expect.

A: He’s technically four years old in the movie, 73

Society

so when he becomes somewhat sentient or realized, he’s almost like a child. In some ways, the character is inspired by Will Ferrell’s Elf. He’s a little like the elf—he’s got this childlike innocence. But when you meet that at the intersection of “fed up”—I’m using less salty language than I’d like to there—it gets really interesting.

This movie is one in which I just couldn’t believe the level of talent around me. The actors, the crew, the directors—everyone was just there to make something extremely special.

Q: I want to talk a bit about humour, which is part of your persona and character. This character is not at all raunchy, and is quite the contrast to Deadpool, yet it’s still identifiably a Ryan Reynolds character. There’s something that is inherently wholesome about your humour. If you think about it, there was also something kind of wholesome about the humour of Deadpool; it just happens to be over-the-top raunchy humour at the same time. How did you master this kind of wholesome/not-wholesome comedy dichotomy?

A: I think it’s part of how I was raised. I don’t just mean my parents, I mean being born and raised in Canada and having close ties to Canada.

I learned at a young age to laugh at myself. I think self-deprecating humour is something Canadians are well known for all over the world.

And I think you learn from mistakes. When I was a young buck starting out in Hollywood, I made a couple of jokes at the expense of someone else, and I remember noting how that didn’t feel good. Despite the fact that it got a laugh, there was something darkly icky about it, and I made this promise to myself that I wouldn’t do that anymore. I think making that promise really helped me. It taught me to laugh more at myself—to direct that acerbic, vitriolic style of humour at myself. That way, the [total] casualties are one, and they only serve to help me grow as a performer.

I don’t know if I would ever call it wholesome, because I have the mind of an 11-yearold. But I would say it’s definitely not aimed to hurt anyone, and I think that is a tricky tightrope to walk because you still have to be subversive, you still have to provoke because that’s what you hope comedy and performances do. I just don’t love attacking anyone in particular besides Ryan f--king Reynolds.

Q: Was the other person you made fun of Hugh Jackman?

A: No! I don’t mind making fun of somebody if they’re in on it. If they’re not in on it

and it’s coming at them in a surprising way that they don’t feel good about, then I don’t feel great about that. Hugh and I have had a decades-long rivalry that I hope will end sometime around 2063.

Q: Who is winning?

A: Oh, there is no winning here. We’re both losers. We’re both losing hideously.

Q: So you’re saying you’re not wholesome because you’re like an 11-year-old, but at the same time, I can’t think of anything more wholesome than an 11-year-old.

A: Right? Yeah, I guess so. Well, maybe a 13-year-old boy. Maybe I have the mind of a 13-year-old boy.

Q: Just old enough.

A: That’s the default. But it’s combined with, I hope, some empathy and compassion as well to balance things out, I think.

Q: There is something meta and self-aware about your humour, as well, which plays well in the post-COVID era. We’re accustomed to celebrities who a) can’t make fun of themselves and b) don’t seem to be aware of their place in the world and the role they play in it. Those two things don’t describe you, and I think people quite like that about you.

There is something culturally Canadian about it, as well. How much of your meta persona is a put-on and how much of it is a genuine reflection of your personality?

A: In real life, if we were to sit down and have a drink in a bar, you might see that I’m a lot more shy than I let on. That’s a bit of a selfdefence mechanism, this guy who takes over.

I remember every talk show I’ve ever done— even the earlier ones, like David Letterman, standing backstage thinking I’m going to die.

And then the curtain opens and this other guy takes over and handles it for me and I’ve always appreciated that.

I think being self-aware and meta all stems from something much more tangible and palpable, which is that I have kids. I don’t know how to parent children. Does anyone? So I read books on how to parent my kids, how to be the best parent I can be. That doesn’t mean being the most-liked parent or the most-beloved parent or their best buddy. It means being the person who is in charge of their safety and well-being.

Back in 2014, I read this thing that talked about how it’s probably best not to strive for happiness for your children, but rather for self-awareness. That really stuck with me.

Happiness is a recipe for disappointment; it’s

The causes that are important to me are important to Canadians. I’m proud of carrying that with me.

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AUGUST 2021

a recipe for evaluation instead of observation.

It’s a recipe for kids thinking, “Why am I not happy at this moment?” Instead you want to welcome every feeling: sadness, anger, grief, anxiety, anything that is coming up.

That weirdly applies to show business—and I recognize what a weird leap that analogy is.

I try not to wake up each day and think, “I have to be happy” or “I have to be this thing or that thing.” As long as I’m aware of what I’m feeling, I’m in a much better position to deal with those feelings. And weirdly, I translate that to comedy sometimes.

Q: Unlike a lot of people who escape Canada and never look back, you’re still very involved in Canadianness. You’re doing stuff with SickKids. I believe recently you did something on Twitter to bring back a beloved teddy bear stolen from a park. There are all sorts of these stories.

You have a foot back in Canada emotionally.

A: I’m very connected to it. I owe a lot of who I am to Canada, and as I’ve gotten older, I look at this amorphous thing called celebrity as something to share, not something to hide in the shadows with.

When I was starting out, the people who were quite famous tended to have a different outlook on celebrity. That it was something to begrudge, or that it was this burden to carry. I just found that it felt really good to share it; I share it with Canada. I like to share power, I like to step aside where necessary. I think all of those things are signs of strength, not weakness. I love where I grew up, I love everything about it. My brothers all live there, my mother lives there.

The causes that are important to me are often causes that are important to Canadians.

I’m proud of carrying that with me.

Q: Is being a celebrity awful?

A: No, no! It is what you make it. Is being anything awful? For me it’s not awful as long as I’m always sharing it. I try to never say no to any video for someone or a hello or anything—even a peek behind the curtain makes it more normal for me.

I’m not saying it’s all puppy dogs and ice cream, but I would be a fool to look down at it. It’s given me amazing life adventures that I might not otherwise have experienced. I want to take as many people on that adventure and that ride with me as possible because otherwise it’s pretty dull and pretty isolating.

Q: It sounds like a lot of work, though. It sounds exhausting.

A: It’s not if you’re not premeditating it. If you’re just waking up in the morning open to possibility, and open to anything that might come as a result of that, it’s not exhausting at all.

ARCHITECTURE

Can we stay in this together?

A post-pandemic Architecture Biennale imagines how we’ll live alongside fungi, bacteria—and each other Sculptures of Black African figures adorned in tribal body paint crowd the entrance of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. They confront visitors out of jagged holes in doors through which they appear to have fallen—or perhaps been pushed. One is bent backwards by the weight of a heavy platter screwed to its face.

In another area, polyphonic voices rise

COURTESY OF ANDREA AVEZZÙ/LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

BY ALEX UL AM ·

from murmurs to crescendos. They come from a circle of totemic audio speakers surrounding an altar displaying a video of what looks like an intergalactic gaseous stew.

Other exhibits explore the microbiological realm: a retractable robotic arm waters a honeycombed earthen structure sprouting orange fungal flora. Designers manning another exhibit display bacterium-infused

concoctions in drinking glasses decorated with 3D-printed algae blooms that they intended to serve to Biennale visitors before COVID19 restrictions kiboshed that plan.

What are these arty installations and science experiments doing alongside building models and diagrams at the 2021 Architecture Biennale? This year’s curator, Hashim Sarkis, titled his pandemic-prescient exhibition How Will We Live Together?, and he hopes it will inspire viewers to think beyond the building envelope.

The experience of living through COVID has certainly made us more aware of the limitations of our homes and our workspaces.

Affluent families in search of more commodious abodes and open space have fled cities for the suburbs. Many people are working online for the foreseeable future in cramped

Architectural firm MAEID’s Magic Queen, 2020, an autonomous techno-organic environment of 3D-printed organic material MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

75

apartments built solely for shelter. Will life ever return to “normal”? Do we really want it to? How Will We Live Together? shows us the perils of sticking with the status quo and offers potential solutions.

Throughout the 317-m-long Corderie section of the Arsenale, a former Renaissance-era rope factory, and at the Central Pavilion, an exhibition hall in the neighbouring Giardini fairground, whimsical models, interspersed with serious plans for action, show where we might end up if we don’t change course.

Several are meditations on social isolation, which, even before COVID, was becoming its own kind of epidemic. A display called Social Contracts presents a dystopian view of the nuclear family, with a table set for four, each setting separated by walls you must walk around to share the salt shaker.

There are potential cures for loneliness, such as the wearable memory-foam contraptions in Heavy Duty Love that are designed to replicate a human hug. Gig workers glued to their desks might actually welcome the gadgets on display in Catalog for the Post-Human, such as the diaphanous, hooded vest equipped with intravenous tubes to keep your body stocked with essential nutrients while you are “multi-tasking.”

At first glance, this year’s Biennale may appear chaotic. But the exhibits are arranged in sections ranging from the human body, to the household, to the community, to entire regions and, in the final section of the exhibition, the planet that sustains us. Governments are seen as unequal to the task. Sarkis, who is dean of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture + Planning, and who appeared at the Biennale’s opening dressed in a casually styled blazer, jeans and a T-shirt, is calling for a “spatial contract” that requires architects to design spaces in harmony with all the scales of existence in his show. “The way we thought of ourselves as exclusive, and our existence as anthropocentric, has actually caused a lot of damage to ourselves, to other species and to nature,” Sarkis tells me. “We have to reconsider that relationship.”

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One structure we should definitely rethink is the single-family detached house, the only housing type currently allowed on much of the residential land in major Canadian cities. Many urban planners link the restrictive zoning laws to skyrocketing property prices and sprawl, saying these types of dwellings no longer serve the needs of a great many people who currently call them home. We need to embrace “other models with shared amenities and shared living spaces,” Sarkis says, “like single-occupancy, co-housing and AUGUST 2021

extended-family dwellings, which have been suppressed by architecture and the dominant economic models of development.”

Multi-generational families who want to live together might consider structures such as those displayed in the modern take on the in-law apartment in the House + Plus exhibit, which is designed with prefabricated components including furniture, reconfigurable interiors and aesthetically varied exteriors.

There are clever prefab solutions for how we can afford to live together. Bremer Punkt, an

COURTESY OF ANDREA AVEZZÙ/LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA; COURTESY OF ROB FAULKNER/ICD ITKE INTCDC UNIVERSITY OF STUTTGART

Society

(top left) The Philippine Pavilion’s bayanihan; (bottom left) Maison Fibre’s glass and carbonfibre structures; (right) Peju Alatise’s Alasiri: Doors for Concealment or Revelation, 2020

COURTESY OF MARCO ZORZANELLO/LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

exhibit of reconfigurable four-storey modernist cube-shaped structures, is one of the many responses at the Biennale that address rising housing prices and suburban sprawl. Because of their approximately 14-x-14-m footprints, these units can be installed on lots too small to accommodate other types of development.

Unlike typical cookie-cutter affordable housing, the cubes are available in up to 22 different apartment types.

But the future may belong to buildings like Maison Fibre, a two-storey structure built from a web of glass and carbon fibres that dominates its location in the Arsenale and weighs about 1/50th of a comparably sized building of concrete and steel. These robotically constructed fibrous buildings also are vastly less polluting to produce than standard housing, while erecting them requires a relatively minimal building site where surrounding neighbourhoods endure little construction dust and noise.

The lockdowns and fears that accompanied the pandemic underscore how stifling apartment living can be, especially for low-income people without adequate access to fresh air and open green space. One exhibit includes the description of an award-winning plan for Plateau Central, a large multi-storey development slated for the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb

of Paris, an area populated mostly by immigrants. The design encourages social interaction through public and private spaces that include garden terraces, apartment balconies, a roof farm and a ground-level market with retractable walls to enhance the building’s sense of openness.

There also is a compelling alternative to the soulless monoculture of automobile-oriented high-rise developments ruining China’s landscape. This exhibit showcases Dongziguan Village, a prefabricated, updated version of the traditional Chinese courtyard house equipped with modern conveniences. The affordablehousing development, originally built for displaced farmers, is interlaced with public and

Living through COVID has made us more aware of the limitations of our homes and workspaces private open spaces and pedestrian-oriented lanes instead of roadways, where people from different backgrounds can rub shoulders.

The emphasis on more sociable forms of habitation at this Biennale is underpinned by themes of environmental sustainability, which go far beyond standard tree-hugging tropes.

The Entangled Kingdoms exhibit asks the

viewer to consider the endangered state of fungi and bacteria. “Only 10 percent of bacteria are harmful, the other 90 per cent are either neutral or beneficial,” declares landscape architect Thomas Doxiadis in front of a glass case displaying desiccated mushrooms and a log covered with sparkling orange lichen. “If you are using fungicides and certain pesticides,” he says, “you are killing beneficial organisms.”

The focus on microbiomes might seem out of place until you consider that the modernist architecture movement, which brought us scrubbable surfaces and minimalist furniture you can easily clean around, was in many ways a reaction to the 1918 flu pandemic. We might want to reconsider aspects of that sterile style and invite certain bacteria into our dwellings.

One candidate, chlorella, a type of freshwater algae harvested from streams and ponds, is celebrated at an “urban laboratory” specializing in “biotechnological architecture.” You enter the lab through diaphanous curtains containing a green, powdered version, which is purifying the air around you by absorbing carbon dioxide and heavy metals. Inside is all manner of glassware, including the 3D-printed glasses filled with a liquid chlorella, a protein-rich superfood. “The algae eats the pollution and becomes a nourishing element for you,” Sarkis says. “This is a very beautiful reimagination of the household as being the coexistence of two species.”

This concern with sustainability and coexistence is amplified by the creative ways in which many of the Biennale’s exhibits are slated to be recycled after it closes in November. The Philippine Pavilion explores the principle of bayanihan, which refers to a community cooperating to realize a common goal, with a small one-room wooden library with a sloping roof and exquisitely crafted shelves and cabinets. It will return home to the Filipino community that collaborated with trained architects in building and designing it.

Ego to Eco presents architectural models of housing developments on a large table dominated by hundreds of tree saplings being grown hydroponically. After the show closes, the saplings will be replanted in Denmark as part of a national strategy to reforest that country.

Clearly, even before COVID, many of the visionary architects exhibiting in this year’s Biennale viewed existing boundaries between the private, public and natural realms as being in need of a overhaul. This exhibition shows how new housing and development models can improve our physical health and our lives as social beings, while helping restore the health of the planet. We’d do well to rush out and sign Sarkis’s new spatial contract.

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Society

SCIENCE

Running man An old video game, a lot of practice and one hour, nine minutes and 58 seconds of perfection Mitch Fowler was skeptical that he was minutes away from setting a new world record. Somebody in his audience had dared to mention his impressive pace.

“This is a good run? Well, you know what happens to good runs,” he replied: Fowler had come this close before. Ten minutes shy of a new record, he fell silent. His gaze barely shifted. His hands were sweaty. He cleared another hurdle. “We’ll see, we’ll see,” he said to no one in particular. A few minutes later, a setback that slowed his momentum: “Surprise, surprise!” he barked. Two minutes after that, big exhales and barely contained glee as all that was left was waiting for his final time. The clock stopped at one hour,

BY NICK TAYLOR-VAISEY ·

nine minutes and 58 seconds. Fowler had beaten his own world’s best time by three seconds. “We did it,” he celebrated. “The minute barrier.”

Nobody had ever made a run faster than 70 minutes, but Fowler’s stunning achievement on Feb. 7 was no athletic feat. The 33-year-old Canadian gamer who lives in Salt Lake City had been racing to beat every level in Super Mario Bros. 3, the iconic Nintendo game first released in 1990. Fowler is a “speedrunner,” the name for gamers who obsessively search for optimal paths and exploit glitches that save precious seconds to post the fastest times. He plays to thousands of spellbound fans on the live streaming platform Twitch.

Beating a classic video game might sound like a fun hobby, but Fowler’s years of speedrunning have ballooned into a full-time gig.

And scientists say Fowler’s craft produces more than just the income that pays his bills.

Speedrunning enhances his cognitive abilities, and even blurs the connection between his conscious mind and his tapping fingers.

Before Fowler fell in love with speedrunning, he was a casual gamer, like a lot of suburban teenagers, growing up in Burlington, Ont. He picked up an old-school Nintendo Entertainment System at a garage sale in high school, although several years passed before he mastered Super Mario Bros. But it was Metroid Prime, a 3D first-person shooter on Nintendo’s GameCube console, that was the first game in which gamers discovered “sequence breaking”—a process by which they identify glitches that allow them to skip whole sections, and sometimes advance directly to a game’s final credits. “The idea of breaking the game blew my mind,” says Fowler. That was 2003.

After high school, he struggled to find

his footing, uninspired by studies at Sheridan College in nearby Oakville—“I totally bombed it”—and was eventually lured into a construction job. He gave post-secondary studies another shot, but jumped at a chance to work in Edmonton. By 2009, he was an ironworker on bridge projects, laying rebar by day and gaming by night. That’s when Fowler got serious about Super Mario Bros. 3. He’d game through the night and then head back to his job, which he didn’t enjoy, on little sleep. “Speedrunning was the only thing that made me feel some sort of value,” he says.

Disillusioned by a dreary job, Fowler ventured back to Ontario, where he worked at a Boston Pizza and then a silk screening company. In his spare time, he skateboarded, played drums and kept on speedrunning— assuming it would only ever be a time-consuming, fulfilling side hustle. “Little did I know it wasn’t a waste of time,” he says.

On Sept. 21, 2010, Fowler submitted his first Super Mario world record run to the website that then tracked every game’s best times. Still, he harboured some insecurity

about what had evolved into an impressive skill set. “I felt guilty,” he says, worried that he should be focusing on building a stable career.

Eventually, Fowler found work as a dishwasher at Paradiso, a Mediterranean restaurant in Burlington. He instantly applied the principles of speedrunning to his work, creating systems that allowed him to clean dishes as efficiently as possible. He excelled and was promoted, soon serving a stint as a cook. But live streaming was gaining prominence, and the world’s best gamers earned a living at it. Fowler says he came to a crossroads. He could spend the rest of his life in kitchens, or he could follow his passion.

The choice wasn’t difficult. “If I cut my fingers off making food, I couldn’t play video games.”

him to explain his movements in real time.

But he’s typically in total control.

Craig Stark, a professor of neurobiology and behaviour at the University of California, Irvine, explains that the hippocampus controls declarative memory—the recall of facts and events—but players like Fowler also nurture non-declarative memory: skills, habits and conditioning. “Other parts of the brain learn,” says Stark. “You can take those skills out of the hippocampus and do it just fine.

Amnesic patients who played golf before can still play.”

Jonathan Hay, a visiting lecturer at the University of Chester who studies posthumanism, calls speedrunning an “artistic pursuit of perfection” that casts players as artists unlike any other, whipping up frenzied audiences who are encouraged to be vocal. Nacke likens the experience to a more traditional art form. “Speedrunning is like a beautiful painting. It’s like watching Bob Ross,” he says. “I find it quite relaxing.”

Speedrunning ‘is like a beautiful painting. It’s like watching Bob Ross. I find it quite relaxing.’

When British neuroscientists studied the brains of cab drivers in the sprawling city of London, they discovered that the process of memorizing thousands of streets and routes expanded a driver’s hippocampus, the part of the brain in the temporal lobe that plays a major role in memory formation. The cabbies’ brains were physically larger.

Lennart Nacke, director of the HCI Games Group at the University of Waterloo, says speedrunning could have a similar effect on players like Fowler. “At the heart of every video game is a learning super engine,” says Nacke.

“He’s optimizing learning. He’s becoming an athlete in that way.”

The speedrunner’s lexicon sounds like another language to the uninitiated. They “clip” through walls by hitting exactly the right screen pixel at the perfect speed. They pray that “RNG” (shorthand for random number generators that inject unpredictability into enemy movements) doesn’t interrupt their chosen path: unlucky RNG ruins flawless runs. The goal is to minimize obstacles. “For game designers, it’s all about adding friction and challenges,” says Nacke. “Speedrunners eliminate all the friction.”

“Most speedrunners are perfectly synchronized,” Nacke adds. “The cognitive system is automated. It’s become so ingrained in his motor cortex that now he’s doing that motor function to achieve the optimal time.” In other words, Fowler’s hands move too quickly for Fowler’s reputation as a speedrunner has earned him a vocal, devoted online audience MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

In 2017, Fowler moved to Salt Lake City and married his wife, Kailee. He streamed full-time on Twitch and earned income through a combination of subscriptions, ad revenue and donations from viewers. Fowler describes himself as “not a natural entertainer” and “sometimes a little needy,” but he cultivated a devoted audience thanks to a hard-earned reputation as a top Super Mario runner. And he helped build a community of gamers.

Less than two months after Fowler set his world record, a Japanese speedrunner named maibaRTA bested his time by 233 milliseconds.

The Canadian expat had just announced he was about to do the unthinkable by beating the game using the “wrong warp”—an elaborate series of manoeuvres that produce, as if by magic, a pipe that transports the game’s titular plumber to the end screen. That method is nothing new—but Fowler pledged to do it blindfolded. He’s paused that effort for now, though. There’s a record to reclaim.

He used to feud with gamers in an ultracompetitive community bent on gaining an edge. Now they’re mostly united in pursuit of how far human beings can push their craft. “I get excited when someone beats my records,” he says. It’s just another reason to pick up the controller and break the game all over again.

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Society

CHALLENGE

The Quiz This month, we test your trivia skills on everything from salicin to the Milky Way

fabric, is named after a 17th-century London draper?

9. Debuting on ABC in 2013, what was the first television show set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

10. The Milky Way is part of a galaxy group known by what name?

Round 3: Rhodes Scholar What one-hit wonder from 1995, which hit No. 1 in Australia, Austria, Canada and Ireland, is the biggest-selling pop song by a musical act from New Zealand?

2. In what century did the sale of Chloe Cooley, a woman enslaved by an Upper Canada Loyalist, lead to the first legislation outlawing slavery in the British Commonwealth?

3. The TV shows Without a Trace and Cold Case both existed in the world of what other CBS show that debuted in 2000?

4. What two teams have played the most Stanley Cup playoff series against each other (34) and have also played nine game sevens, the most between any two teams?

5. Salicin, a precursor to aspirin, is found in the leaves of what tree?

6. What word signifying repetition comes from a Tuscan dialect word for “has been said”?

7. What is the most populous city in Florida?

8. Released in 2018, what popular multi-platform game was inspired by the party game Mafia and John Carpenter’s classic horror film The Thing?

9. Joe Mimran, who started Joe Fresh with Loblaws, also co-founded which other Canadian clothing brand in 1985?

10. The Java Trench is in which ocean?

Round 2: Prodigy

1. In its own language, what country’s name means “the sun’s origin”?

2. Glacial Lake Iroquois shrank significantly around 12,000 years ago, and the resulting body of water is now known as what?

3. In 2018, Bell Media merged which longtime pay TV service with Crave?

4. In the 1940s, seven-foot Bob Kurland was the first college basketball player to do what?

5. What Italian sausage is thought to be named after the mortar and pestle used to prepare it?

6. What part of the human body is known in Latin as gingiva?

7. Tom Cruise’s most recent nomination for an Oscar was in the Best Supporting Actor category for what 1999 film?

8. The hyacinth bean, which was grown by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, is native to which continent?

9. What was the set of industry censorship guidelines that governed the production of films released by major American studios from 1930 to 1968?

10. Right belief, right knowledge and right conduct are the three “gems” of what religion, founded in India?

1. The longest-serving non-royal leader in the

world is Paul Biya, who has been the prime minister or president of what African country since 1975?

2. A style of hot dog topped with mustard, chopped onion and fresh coleslaw is named after which North American city?

3. Drafted between 1850 and 1854, the Douglas Treaties, agreed between the Colony of Vancouver Island and local Indigenous people, was modelled after the Treaty of Waitangi, which was between the Crown and what other Indigenous group?

4. With 30 Olympic and World Championship medals, what woman is the most decorated American gymnast of all time?

5. What three-word phrase, now a favourite of conspiracy theorists, was originally associated with American president Woodrow Wilson’s emphasis on global security, democracy and self-determination?

6. The tiny piglet squid uses what chemical compound to aid its buoyancy as it traverses the ocean?

7. In the 18th century, what American state was known by the name New Philippines?

8. What ornamental mat, made of paper or

TERRANCE BALAZO

ROUND 1: 1. Japan (Nihon) 2. Lake Ontario 3. The Movie Network 4. Slam dunk 5. Mortadella 6. Gums 7. Magnolia 8. Africa 9. Hays Code 10. Jainism ROUND 2: 1. Cameroon 2. Montreal 3. Maoris 4. Simone Biles 5. New world order 6. Ammonium 7. Texas 8. Doily 9. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 10. The Local Group ROUND 3: 1. How Bizarre, by OMC 2. 18th (1793) 3. CSI 4. Montreal and Boston 5. Willow 6. Ditto 7. Jacksonville 8. Among Us 9. Club Monaco 10. Indian

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AUGUST 2021

ISTOCK; COURTESY OF OET/NAUTILUSLIVE PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKI CHAN WYLIE; COURTESY OF NINTENDO

1.

Round 1: Honour roll

DID YOU FILE A CLAIM AGAINST PURDUE PHARMA AS PART OF ITS BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDING? DO YOU HAVE A CLAIM AGAINST PURDUE PHARMA’S OWNERS? A Hearing to Consider Confirmation of the Chapter 11 Plan May Affect Your Rights.

CONFIRMATION HEARING AUGUST 9, 2021 WHAT IS THIS ABOUT? On June 3, 2021, as part of Purdue Pharma L.P.’s bankruptcy proceedings, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York entered an order called the “Disclosure Statement Order” that: (a) Authorized Purdue Pharma L.P. and its affiliated debtors and debtors in possession to solicit acceptances of the Fifth Amended Joint Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization of Purdue Pharma L.P. and Its Affiliated Debtors, which includes (a) releases of any actual or potential claims against Sackler family members, and certain other individuals and related entities, relating to Purdue Pharma L.P. and its affiliated debtors (including Purdue prescription opioids, like OxyContin, or other prescription opioids manufactured or sold by Purdue); and (b) an injunction requiring that certain claims against the released parties be asserted only against trusts established under the plan; (b) Approved the Disclosure Statement for Fifth Amended Joint Chapter 11 Plan for Purdue Pharma L.P. and Its Affiliated Debtors as containing “adequate information” pursuant to section 1125 of the Bankruptcy Code; (c) Approved the solicitation materials and documents to be included in solicitation packages; and (d) Approved procedures for soliciting, receiving, and tabulating votes on the plan and for filing objections to the plan.

The Court will consider confirmation of the plan at the Confirmation Hearing.

WHEN IS THE HEARING? The Confirmation Hearing will be held on August 9, 2021, at 10 a.m., prevailing Eastern Time, before the Honorable Robert D. Drain, in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, located at 300 Quarropas Street, White Plains, New York 10601-4140. The hearing will be conducted via Zoom videoconference for those who will be participating in the Confirmation Hearing1 if General Order M-543 is still in effect or unless otherwise ordered by the Bankruptcy Court.

The Confirmation Hearing may be extended and rescheduled by the Court or the Debtors without further notice by an agenda filed with the Court, and/or by a Notice of Adjournment filed with the Court and delivered to all parties who are entitled to notice.

WHAT ARE YOUR OPTIONS? Vote on the Plan: Your vote must be submitted so it is actually received on or before July 14, 2021, at 4:00 p.m., prevailing Eastern Time. Detailed instructions on how to vote are available at PurduePharmaClaims.com or by calling (844) 217-0912 (toll free) or (347) 859-8093 (international). Failure to follow instructions properly may disqualify your vote.

Object to the Plan: An objection must be submitted so that it is actually received on or before July 19, 2021, at 4:00 p.m., prevailing Eastern Time. Detailed instructions on how to file an objection are available at PurduePharmaClaims.com or by calling (844) 217-0912 (toll free) or (347) 859-8093 (international).

Allowance Request: If you believe that you hold a claim against Purdue Pharma L.P. that is not currently entitled to vote but that you believe should be entitled to vote, you can request the allowance of such claim for voting purposes.

To do so, you must file a motion with the Court on or before July 19, 2021, at 4:00 p.m., prevailing Eastern Time. Detailed instructions on how to file an allowance request are available at PurduePharmaClaims.com or by calling (844) 217-0912 (toll free) or (347) 859-8093 (international).

If the plan is confirmed, anyone with an actual or potential claim against Purdue Pharma L.P. or any of its affiliated debtors, or with an actual or potential claim against Sackler family members, and certain other individuals and related entities, relating to Purdue Pharma L.P. and its affiliated debtors (including Purdue prescription opioids, like OxyContin, or other prescription opioids manufactured or sold by Purdue), will be bound by the terms of the plan, including the releases and injunctions contained therein.

THIS IS ONLY A SUMMARY. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Call: (844) 217-0912 (toll free) or (347) 859-8093 (international) Visit: PurduePharmaClaims.com Write: Purdue Pharma Ballot Processing, c/o Prime Clerk LLC One Grand Central Place, 60 East 42nd Street, Suite 1440 New York, NY 10165 Email: purduepharmainfo@primeclerk.com 1

Please be advised that Prime Clerk LLC is authorized to answer questions about, and provide additional copies of, solicitation materials, but may not advise you as to whether you should vote to accept or reject the plan or provide any legal advice.

Parties or members of the public who wish to participate in the Confirmation Hearing should consult the Court’s calendar with respect to the day of the Confirmation Hearing at https://www. nysb.uscourts.gov/calendars/rdd.html for information regarding how to be added as a participant. Members of the public who wish to listen to, but not participate in, the Confirmation Hearing free of charge may do so telephonically at a number to be provided on the Debtors’ case website at: PurduePharmaClaims.com.

BEFORE YOU GO

Dear Lola Conchita . . .

I still replay our recorded conversation from February 2020 until I begged you to stop. You would do anything to make me happy, when I came to the Philippines after you broke your hip. When I and you showed me that daily. heard about your fall, the possibility of losing you was so palpable In high school, I was so focused on assignments and friends, I that I bargained with God. I swore I would preserve your story. That didn’t notice you and Lolo slowing down. First, it was the pain in your night, I held your hand as you walked me through your colourful life. knees. Then, you developed a limp, favouring your left leg over the You told me your parents’ names, Dionisio and Rosita, who both right. One day, you couldn’t leave home without being helped down died before you were 14. You lost your dad in 1940, and two years the front stairs. Next, your hearing faded. I had to repeat my stories later, amid the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, you lost your from school and the dialogue from telenovelas, louder each time. mom while fleeing the war. You hadn’t mentioned them by name We lost Lolo to lung cancer in 2008, months before I was about to to me before. I imagine it was because, after all these years, it was leave for Canada. You convinced us you were okay, but part of me wished I could keep you company a little longer. I was 18 and asked if still painful.

You stared at the ceiling and slowly recounted how, at 18, you you wanted to come with me, but you dismissed the idea. “The cold,” met and married Lolo Isabelo you chuckled, “will kill me.” against some of your relatives’ Separated by an ocean, you wishes and soon started a stayed close by sending me family. You and Lolo worked handwritten letters whenever someone visited you in the hard for your eight children, overcoming long-distance Philippines. The letters are separations between Mindamostly identical: Bible verses nao and Negros islands and you want me to remember, little notes telling me how proud working multiple jobs, from seamstress to pineapple planyou are of me and how lucky tation supervisor, to make you are that I love you. Lola, ends meet.

I am the lucky one.

In the years when you were Yours is the kind of love meant to retire and relax, you that’s secure and selfless. The took another turn at mothertype of love that woke up early hood, taking care of me when to make me a warm cup of hot Mom left the Philippines to chocolate every single day of high school. It’s the same love work in Canada.

I was 13 and I remember I felt when you held me close spending our 2003 Noche that Christmas Day almost Buena (midnight dinner on With his mom in Canada, Lola Conchita (left) gave Arvin love and security two decades ago, and that Christmas Day) packing. Years I feel now when you wave later, I’d learn that close to two million Filipinos have left the coun- on video calls and ask me how I’m doing. The kind of love that can try to provide for their families. I understood my mom’s reason for endure distance and time.

As I’ve moved around Canada, I brought your letters with me. leaving, but it was still the saddest Christmas of my life.

Looking back, I wonder: what was it like for you? Mom was your Whenever I felt homesick, I found refuge in rereading them. Your third daughter to leave the Philippines and I don’t remember see- writing was familiar, your words were comforting and, just like those years back, I felt safe. ing you cry.

Since our last visit, nothing—and everything—has changed. You’re Mom was in Canada, Dad was living in a different city trying to start new businesses, and kids like me were often described as cau- still stuck in bed and we still worry about you from afar. Meanwhile, tionary tales. Filipino movies showed children of Overseas Filipino the world seems different. I feel hopeless and lonely at times. DurWorkers (OFW) as people longing for their parents’ presence, turn- ing those moments, I revisit your letters and, just like when I was 13, ing to drugs or alcohol to fill that void. It scared me. Thankfully, you the warmth of your love reminds me that everything will be okay. and Lolo revised that script.

Lola, through your letters, I’ll always carry a piece of you with me On days when I missed Mom, you were there with the warmest forever. It’s my turn to give you mine. embrace. When I discovered my favourite food—mung beans with pork or fish with malunggay—you cooked them alternately for weeks To submit your own story to Before You Go write to letters@macleans.ca.

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AUGUST 2021

COURTESY OF ARVIN JOAQUIN

Separated by an ocean, Arvin Joaquin found comfort in his grandmother’s letters. Now, he’s sending her one of his own.

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