Author name: Townships Weekend

 The journey of a local world-class institute

William Crooks
Dr. Pierre Sirois holds a copy of his newly released book, L’Histoire de l’Institut de Pharmacologie, in The Record’s office. The memoir chronicles the creation of the Institut de Pharmacologie de Sherbrooke and its impact on the region’s scientific and economic landscape.

Dr. Pierre Sirois reflects on innovation and impact

By William Crooks

Local Journalism Initiative

In the early 1990s, a restless Christmas vacation at home in Sherbrooke set Dr. Pierre Sirois on a path to establish what would become a cornerstone of Canadian pharmacology research: the Institut de Pharmacologie de Sherbrooke. This vision—borne from a desire to expand the Department of Pharmacology at the Université de Sherbrooke—would ultimately transform the region’s scientific landscape and place Sherbrooke on the map as a leader in pharmaceutical research.

Dr. Sirois has now chronicled this journey in his newly released book, L’Histoire de l’Institut de Pharmacologie, which offers an intimate look at the creation of the institute and the collaborative efforts that made it possible. The book not only captures the political and scientific challenges but also reflects on the significant impact of the institute on Sherbrooke and beyond.

“I’m a restless person,” Dr. Sirois reflected during a recent interview at the The Record’s office. “Being at the CHUS [Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke] was my holiday. I was always there.” In the quiet of the 1990 holiday season, while others rested, Sirois began to conceive of an institute that could expand research, attract industry, and contribute significantly to the region’s economic and scientific growth.

Dr. Sirois’ journey to this monumental achievement was far from straightforward. His career began with degrees in biochemistry and pharmacology from the Université Laval and Université de Sherbrooke, followed by postdoctoral studies in the prestigious institutions, the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. He joined the Université de Sherbrooke in 1978, quickly ascending to become Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 1987. During this time, his research focused on inflammation and asthma, and he played a key role in the identification of leukotrienes, critical compounds in inflammatory processes.

Building from an idea to an institute

The initial concept for the institute was met with enthusiasm. “When I came back from Christmas, I shared the idea with my boss. He said, ‘Go ahead. If you need me, let me know,’” Sirois recalled. The proposed institute’s aim was ambitious: to establish Sherbrooke as a centre of excellence in pharmacology by attracting pharmaceutical companies, facilitating collaboration, and fostering innovation.

One of the pivotal moments came when Dr. Sirois collaborated with the city’s economic development team. “We were already the best group in Canada for pharmacology, even ahead of McGill,” Sirois said. However, bringing the project to life required significant funding and navigating political and bureaucratic hurdles.

Dr. Sirois’ perseverance was critical in securing multi-million-dollar funding from the federal and provincial governments, as well as contributions from local entities. Monique Gagnon-Tremblay, then President of the Treasury Board, played a key role in approving provincial funds. “I told her about my conversation with a Quebec Ministry of Education official,” he said. “She found it interesting, and soon after, the funding was approved.” The City of Sherbrooke and the then-village of Fleurimont also contributed. Fleurimont’s mayor at the time, Francis Gagnon, even held a referendum to secure $1 million for the project, ensuring local buy-in.

According to the Université de Sherbrooke website, research in pharmacology at the Université de Sherbrooke traces back to 1968, when Professor Domenico Regoli emphasized the importance of integrating pharmacology with medicinal chemistry. His efforts laid the groundwork for the department’s success in respiratory and cardiovascular pharmacology. By the early 1990s, Dr. Sirois and Professor Pierre Deslongchamps—a specialist in biomolecular synthesis—combined their visions to create an institute that would house over 2,500 square metres of state-of-the-art laboratories and establish Sherbrooke as a hub for pharmacological innovation.

Political and scientific collaboration

Former Premier Jean Charest’s preface in Dr. Sirois’ new book highlights the collaborative effort that made the institute possible. He acknowledges the role of the Quebec government’s industrial cluster policy under Robert Bourassa and the federal policies under Brian Mulroney’s government, including the contentious Bill C-91, which strengthened pharmaceutical patents. “Without these frameworks, this project might never have materialized,” Charest wrote.

The book offers an intimate look at the creation of the institute. Dr. Sirois recounts not only the political negotiations but also his day-to-day involvement, from securing CVs for funding proposals to selecting paint colours for the building. “I was involved in every detail,” he said, “even though I’m not a builder.”

The institute’s unique structure also set it apart. From its inception, it included a business incubator designed to foster innovative technologies with high commercial potential. Companies like IPS Pharma, Télogène, Néokimia, and more recently Immune Biosolutions and Phenoswitch Bioscience, were among those nurtured within its walls. This approach has facilitated significant advancements in drug development and diagnostic technologies.

Legacy and impact

Since its inauguration in December 1997, the Institut de Pharmacologie has played a crucial role in advancing pharmaceutical research. Its initial structure included space for business incubators, fostering the creation of local biotech companies, including two founded by Dr. Sirois himself. IPS Therapeutique Inc., one of these ventures, continues to flourish, employing 60 scientists and maintaining partnerships with pharmaceutical companies worldwide.

The institute’s interdisciplinary approach has been pivotal. By 2008, researchers from multiple faculties, including medicine, science, and engineering, joined forces, creating a dynamic environment for interdisciplinary projects. Later leadership under Professors Éric Marsault and Philippe Sarret emphasized translational research and industrial partnerships, aiming to optimize technologies with direct applications in medicine.

The institute’s impact extends beyond the local economy. It has positioned Sherbrooke as a leader in pharmacological innovation and training. “We’re unique in Canada,” Sirois noted, “and Sherbrooke is fortunate to have this.” The Université de Sherbrooke’s pharmacology program, bolstered by the institute, remains a national leader, attracting top talent and producing groundbreaking research.

Reflections and the road ahead

For Dr. Sirois, the journey of establishing the institute is one of his proudest achievements. Yet, his motivation wasn’t personal gain. “I did this for Sherbrooke, for Quebec, and for Canada,” he emphasized. He hopes his story will inspire future researchers and policymakers to pursue ambitious projects that can transform their communities.

In his book, Dr. Sirois provides not only a detailed narrative of the institute’s creation but also insights into the collaborative spirit required for such endeavours. As Jean Charest aptly summarized in his preface, “Dr. Sirois built an institute that improves the health of our citizens, makes us more prosperous, and defines our future.”

Dr. Sirois’ book is available on Amazon, and he remains eager to share his story with audiences across the region. For a man who has spent decades shaping the future of pharmacology in Sherbrooke, the publication of his memoir is another milestone in a life dedicated to science, education, and community building.

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Townships life is good

Courtesy www.easterntownships.org

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

Those of us who live in Quebec’s Eastern Townships (aka Estrie) know how good it can be. We have a selection of universities and colleges to feed our brains and sufficient internet connections to improve ourselves without leaving home. We have one of the best research and teaching hospitals anywhere, several other regional hospitals we should try not to go to and many local health clinics we should work hard to expand. We have a regional airport. Two innovation zones and five poles of excellence provide (relatively) strong economic and business development. We can enjoy an observatory and the first international dark sky reserve for star-gazing. And of course the natural beauty of four national parks and a global reputation for year-round outdoor activities serves us all well.

The Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) wants life here to be even better. IRIS is a 20-year-old, independent non-profit founded to analyze Quebec’s public policies with a view to creating a better life. The Institute recently turned its attention to the Townships. (IRIS: Revenu Viable En Estrie 2024). There’s an amazing difference in the amount of money it takes to live modestly in each of our nine municipal regions (MRCs). The researchers suggest that life could be infinitely more affordable for many of the half-million people who call Estrie home if only a few missing services could be provided. The big question is whether their prescription is possible.

The study looked at three types of households — a single person living alone, a single parent with one pre-school child and a two-parent family with two preschool-aged children. Drawing from both Statistics Canada and Institut de la statistique du Québec, it paints a detailed portrait of life here. In general, Estrie looks much like the rest of Quebec. Except that we’re growing faster because more people are choosing to live here – especially in the municipalities of Saint-Denis-de-Brompton (MRC du Val-Saint-François), Waterville (MRC de Coaticook), Bromont (MRC de Brome-Missisquoi) and Roxton Pond (MRC de La Haute-Yamaska).

We have a stronger manufacturing sector (16.6 percent) than in the rest of Quebec (10.1 percent.) We’re older than Quebec as a whole: while every fifth Quebecer is 65 years old or more, in the Townships, one in four belongs to this age group.

In a city like Bromont, the high concentration of wealthy households pushes up prices for all categories of expenses, including a basket of quality food.  A single person needs more than $50,000/year to live there.  A household of two adults and two preschool-age children needs nearly $95,000. These amounts are considerably higher than for a single person in Granby ($33,490) or for a family of four in Lac-Mégantic ($71,044). It’s therefore not surprising that relatively few poor people live in Bromont.

In the majority of MRCs, the supply of childcare services, particularly subsidized childcare, doesn’t meet the demand. Even in the two MRCs where supply is slightly higher than demand (Granit and La Haute-Yamaska), there’s a significant lack of places. In other words, to find an available facility, families sometimes have to travel quite far from where they live. Unless there is reliable public transportation, these families need access to a car.

Public transit exists in each MRC, but with the exception of Sherbrooke, it’s intermittent and unreliable. For rural villages, it’s rare to find a shuttle service to bigger towns that have services. La Haute-Yamaska and Coaticook MRCs stand out by the high proportion of their populations who work in their locality. In contrast, the majority of residents in Val-Saint-François and Haut-Saint-François commute outside their local MRC. These are also the MRCs with the fewest people able to get to their jobs in less than 30 minutes. The situation is better for workers in Granit and La Haute-Yamaska Granit and La Haute-Yamaska, where the vast majority have a shorter commute. Sherbrooke stands out for its ability to retain workers on its territory.

That said, there are wide variations within each MRC. In many villages and towns, the absence of local shops, health clinics (dental, medical, etc.) and cultural venues requires travel to varying distances.

All MRCs have public and adapted public and paratransit services. In most cases, you need to book your trip a day in advance. While the service is punctual and predictable, it does not, for example, allow for emergencies such as a child becoming ill at the day-care center while the parent is at work. This not ideal for a single-parent family.

The study suggests than if a public transit network could be established and all families who wanted it could obtain a quality and affordable childcare place near their home, single-parent families as well as households of two adults and two children in Granby, or even in Cowansville, could consider a life without a car, thus making living more comfortable on a modest income.

Considering the times in which we live – namely the unsettling and often terrifying demands coming from the president of the United States — we can be appreciative that the researchers at IRIS have produced such an interesting portrait of our home region. As for their suggestions for more taxpayer-funded childcare spaces and public transit, it’s possible that more childcare spaces could be created some time in the future – perhaps after the federal and provincial debts have been paid down a bit. It’s unlikely that affordable public transportation can be established in a land area where the population density is only 31 souls/km2 — minimal density at least 10 times this number is necessary.

For now, let’s give ourselves a little pat on the back and savour our good fortune to be living in this particularly well-endowed and relatively peaceful corner of the world.

Cohendian560@gmail.com

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Uncle Louis, where are you?

PM from Townships showed skill and integrity, but image remains grey

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

The last two months have seen a whirlwind of political activity in Canada, with the rapid-fire resignations of a finance minister then the prime minister, followed by the suspension of Parliament and the launch of a Liberal leadership race. All this occurs as Canada braces for the incoming hurricane of a disruptive new President in the U.S.

Even apolitical folk wonder, where are we headed? What responsible and competent political leaders will emerge?

As a politico, someone who follows politics intently, I do not recall many recent eras with such rapid-fire changes in the Canadian scene. One possible example: back in 1979-80 Joe Clark’s Conservatives defeated the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau. He then returned to power just eight months later and propelled himself into the midst of Quebec’s first sovereignty referendum, the year Ronald Reagan came to power in the U.S. But such a collision of big events is very unusual.

Macleans
St. Laurent ranks high in a 2016 Macleans survey of historians.

High-ranking low-profile PM

Today, as we look for solid and competent governance, the name of one Townshipper, Louis St.  Laurent, comes to mind. Largely unknown to Gen X and younger Canadians, St. Laurent does not even benefit from having his face on the currency, as his francophone predecessor Wilfrid Laurier does on the five-dollar bill (visible at least for those not swiping all their purchases). A somewhat grey, grandfatherly image also clouds the picture people might have about LSL’s achievements.

And yet, St. Laurent was ranked fourth-best among all prime ministers in a survey of Canadian historians assessing the first 20 PMs (through to 1999 and Jean Chrétien), as reported in the book Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders. In that poll, St. Laurent fell behind only the Big Three of Macdonald, Laurier and Mackenzie King.

The Compton-born St. Laurent was also ranked No. 6 in recent Macleans magazine surveys on prime ministers (trailing PMs Mackenzie King, Laurier, Macdonald, P. Trudeau and Pearson). Yet when I scanned the stacks at the excellent North Hatley library recently, its extensive shelf of political biographies included the Big Three above as well as multiple bios of Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien. But nothing on Louis St. Laurent.

St. Laurent did not seek attention or glory. He was exceptional for his personal integrity and sense of responsibility. In his lifetime, he declined both a Rhodes scholarship and a Supreme Court appointment. After he started his federal career as an adviser, Prime Minister Mackenzie King saw his discreet ability and recruited him in 1941 as wartime Minister of Justice.

By all accounts, St. Laurent showed remarkable ability early in his life. After a small-town upbringing, St. Laurent was successively an outstanding student, a top lawyer, a Cabinet appointee, then Prime Minister from 1948 to 1957.

St. Laurent was born in 1882 to Jean-Baptiste-Moïse St. Laurent and Mary Anne Broderick, an Irish Canadian. Like Pierre Trudeau, St. Laurent grew up fluently bilingual, as his father spoke French while his mother spoke only English. (His English reportedly had a noticeable Irish brogue, reports Wikipedia.) A museum in Compton, conveniently located on route Louis-S.-St-Laurent (the 147), commemorates his family life and roots in their onetime storefront.

He received his B.A. in 1902 from the Séminaire Saint-Charles-Borromée (also known as Séminaire de Sherbrooke) and then his law degree in 1905 from the Université Laval (where he declined the Rhodes). He continued with a prosperous and very successful law career in Quebec City, where he retained his father’s Liberal partisanship.

In 1941, with World War II exploding, Mackenzie King asked the sure-footed St. Laurent to accept the post of Minister of Justice. He retained this office until being named External Affairs minister after the war, during which time he attended the birth of the United Nations at San Francisco. On the strength of his accomplishments, St. Laurent succeeded Mackenzie King in 1948. His Liberals won a majority government that year and again in 1953.

Popular 1950s government

Productive and popular as PM – and widely admired as “Uncle Louis”— St. Laurent’s Liberal government expanded the social safety net, while also launching major public works such as the St. Lawrence Seaway. As Policy Options magazine noted in an enthusiastic assessment (“Uncle Louis and a golden age for Canada: A time of prosperity at home and influence abroad”, June 2003): the St. Laurent Liberals “could boast of hospital insurance, the Canada Council, a six-dollar raise in old age pensions, and Canada’s prominent peace-making in the Suez crisis”.

However, his Liberal government – stop me when you’ve heard this before –started to wear out its welcome by the nine-year mark of governing in Ottawa. Calling an election in June 1957 proved hazardous, despite Liberal achievements and St. Laurent’s pleasing personality. A controversial pipeline debate in 1956 was forcibly ended using parliamentary closure. A recession also appeared on the horizon. Suddenly, a Conservative populist was nipping at the government’s heels.

 The Liberals were defeated by the Conservatives of John Diefenbaker. In September 1957, St. Laurent announced his retirement as Liberal leader, returned to Quebec City and lived in “honourable obscurity” there until he died on July 25, 1973. He is buried with family at the Saint-Thomas d’Aquin cemetery in Compton.

Policy Options concludes that St. Laurent“left behind an enlarged and prosperous Canada, respected in the world. He was an architect of the multilateralism which, with American power, kept the Cold War cool. His era was such a golden age that many Canadians believed that peace, order and good government was their natural destiny.”

We can only hope that 2025 will again offer us political leaders of his calibre. Canada is perhaps ready to trade in glamour and clever talk for a dependable pair of hands.

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“Now is the time to speak up” amid arts funding crunch

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiaitve

Three years after the lifting of the last COVID-19-related restrictions on public gatherings in Quebec, the word “cancelled” is once again cropping up on cultural events listings again around the province.

From the Hilarium comedy festival in Sherbrooke, which cancelled its second edition this month; to the Orchestre métropolitain de Montréal, which cancelled two concerts; Théâtre La Bordée and Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina in Quebec City, which suspended new projects; the Le Festif! Music festival in Baie-Saint-Paul, whose director has said he is worried about the event’s long-term survival; to a cascade of smaller concerts cancelled due to a lack of advance ticket sales, cultural institutions are hitting a financial wall. The Musée régional de Rimouski has been closed indefinitely since Jan. 23, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke (MBAS) and other provincial museums have suspended school field trips and end free admission for adults on the first Sunday of the month due to funding cuts as the government seeks to reduce an $11-billion deficit. Even smaller events like the Knowlton Literary Festival in Brome Lake,  which is sheltered from rising costs by its all-volunteer management structure, is aware that expenses will probably increase and thus result in a tighter budget in future years, according to festival vice president Lesley Richardson.

Following the Ex Machina announcement, Québec solidaire cultural affairs critic Sol Zanetti asked his social media followers to let him know about cancellations and cuts to cultural events around the province.

“I got about 25 different responses, and every cancellation is a big event; it’s an alarm signal,” Zanetti said. Cancellations have “been snowballing since December, but we’ve been seeing signs for years.”

Nick Maturo, programming director of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) says the trend is “disappointing, but not surprising.” He and other arts advocates say it has a range of causes.

“During the pandemic, there were some really important investments, both at the national

and the provincial level, to help stabilize the arts and culture sector,” he said. “I think that coincided with a situation in which a lot of artists or organizations, if they were not reliant on public funding in the past, all of a sudden, that became a really important way of supporting their work. Of course, as we exited the pandemic years, investment in arts and culture returned to levels we would have seen prior to that. Alongside that, obviously, everybody is well aware of inflation.”

“Culture has always been underfunded,” said Maude Charland-Lallier of the Musée des Beaux-arts de Sherbrooke (MBAS). “The pandemic, with the closures and the rules, accentuated everything. We did have punctual help during that time, but people had to get back into the habit of going out. Now we get even more [visitors] than before, but the assistance is not there anymore. Meanwhile, all of our costs have gone up – suppliers, fixed fees for maintaining the building – and there has not been an increase in funding to respond to that.”

The MBAS is a member of the Société des musées du Québec (SMQ), which has joined the Front commun pour les arts (FCA), an ad hoc network of dozens of arts and culture organizations formed to call for a more solid arts funding model. In a report tabled at the National Assembly as part of pre-budgetary consultations, FCA members called on the Legault government to increase funding for the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec (CALQ). “The core funding of the CALQ has been set at $106 million since 2017, despite 22 per cent inflation during that time … [while] funding for cultural organizations has risen by only seven per cent,” they write. “In addition, the basic budgets available in artist grants have stagnated for nearly 20 years at $10 million while inflation was 53 per cent over the same period. An additional $10-million envelope has been granted in recent years, but since the measure expires in 2024-2025, its renewal is not guaranteed.”

“When there is inflation and there hasn’t been [adequate] indexation, at one point, you hit a crisis,” said director general Pierre Mino of Culture Estrie. “Even when there are no funding cuts as such, the lack of indexation has the same effect as cuts.”

Echoing the FCA, he noted that attendance at live events generally has not come back to pre-pandemic levels, as people try to cut spending amid overall inflation and inexpensive online entertainment options abound. “We’re in an adaptive period…where the way of reaching people has evolved,” he observed.

According to a recent report by Hill Strategies in collaboration with ELAN, the cultural sector contributed over $15 billion to Quebec’s GDP in 2021. Mino worries about the economic knock-on effect that the cancellations could have on early-career artists trying to get a foothold in the industry, on economic activity in neighbourhoods where restaurants and bars can no longer depend on the “theatre crowd” and on longer-term efforts by municipalities to attract workers. “Would you want to take a job in a city where there’s hardly anything to do outside of work?”

“We’d like to see … the recognition that arts and culture is not just a silo, it’s not just a luxury that when times are tough, we tighten the belt and that’s the first thing to go,” said ELAN’s Maturo. “I think there needs to be a recognition that arts and culture can be an asset in many, many areas of society, whether that’s education, mental health or fostering a shared identity. In that sense, it’s money well spent; it’s not just money going to an artist that stays within the arts and doesn’t benefit all of society. If the arts are important to you, now is the time to speak up.”

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Why weren’t we already buying local, and Canadian?

By Mary-Ellen Kirby

Quite Contrary

Local Journalism Initiative

   We are less than 40 days into the new year and North America’s political players have somersaulted back and forth so many times already that trying to keep up with developments has given me a severe case of whiplash. The overheated rhetoric, snarled threats and fist-shaking are reminiscent of the orchestrated hype leading up to a WWE wrestling match, except that the only folks likely to end up knocked out flat on the mat at this event are the spectators. The ‘War of the Tariffs’ would be a great show if it weren’t so stupidly dangerous for the rest of us.     

   The personal fortunes of both Horrible Orange-Man and Captain Sparkle-Socks guarantee they are well insulated from any financial repercussions of their little grudge match. And I can’t help but think that grudge is part of the motivation here. Only the saintliest among us could resist the urge to retaliate against someone who has quite publicly mocked and maligned us and it is probably safe to say that ‘saintly’ is a highly unlikely descriptor of the POTUS. Even a blind shark can smell blood in the water, and #47 can see that our lame duck leader is about to get his trust-fund keister handed to him on a silver platter so, naturally, the Great Orange shark circles for the kill. Hard to fault him for that, obviously a shark’s gotta do what a shark’s gotta do.

   I have a harder time understanding our PM’s response to the tariff threats, though. At a time when extremely high grocery costs have caused escalating food insecurity and more than 2 million Canadians are relying on the strained resources of food banks,

Jr. thinks it’s a good idea to impose counter tariffs on the American-grown fruits and vegetables we import into the great white North. I find it unconscionable that the PM would choose to weaponize food; the disregard for struggling Canadians is shameful. But then again, I suppose we can’t really expect him to relate: he has never had to worry about where his next extravagant meal is coming from, has he? In fact, he seems quite comfortable expecting taxpayers to pick up his grocery tab.

 Trump & Trudeau…has a nice alliterative ring to it, doesn’t it? Almost like an old-time comedy duo. Except there is nothing at all funny about these two posturing playboys and the harms they are willing to inflict on their citizens in the service of their respective egos. However, there may be some not so obvious up-sides to the great tariff war. First, it seems more than three-quarters of Canadians have agreed on something: a recent poll shows that a vast majority of Canadians want an immediate federal election so that we can deal with the U.S. from a position of a strong four-year mandate.

This is an astounding number, especially when you factor in Quebec’s customary anti-federal stance. Evidently, Trump is good for Canadian unity. Whodda thunk it?    Secondly, a nascent ‘Buy Canadian’ ‘Buy Local’ trend has surfaced in the last few weeks and my social media feeds are clogged with earnest calls for Canadians to boycott products of the U.S.A. accompanied by long lists of various ‘Made in Canada’ goods as substitutes. Even The Globe & Mail and the CBC have happily hopped onto that bandwagon. 

   As a local agricultural producer, I truly appreciate the sentiment and intent of this movement. However, I have a couple of caveats: First, I distrust bandwagons. I have seen far too many of them abandoned in ditches when the wheels fall off. A case in point: the gardening bandwagon of the recent Covid years, when seeds were in short supply. Any small seed supplier that planned to invest and increase their catalogue based on that hyper demand is probably now sitting on an excess of inventory, one that is subject to decay and loss. Bandwagon passengers are notoriously fickle; it is best not to factor them into any business plan. This is especially dangerous ground for farmers because agriculture moves at Nature’s pace, not at the speed of the internet. By the time farmers could gear up for increased local demand, most of the demanders would have cooled off and gone back to Costco because, in the end, buying cheaper is more important to them than buying Canadian. We are among the blessed few to have a good, steady, appreciative client base for our farm products, but we won’t be expanding in response to this latest trend: it is too risky and unreliable for us to bank on.

   My second concern is this: why aren’t we already buying local and buying Canadian, in that order? It is quite demoralizing to be taken for granted and this farmer is here to tell you that the rule of “Use it or Lose it” very much applies to farms and farmers. If buying Canadian is truly important, then do it regardless of trade wars, bombastic rulers or social media trends. It is the only way to ensure that ‘Buy Canadian’ remains a viable option in the future. Please don’t misunderstand me: I am very much in favour of a grassroots ‘Buy Local/Buy Canadian’ movement. I just wish it came from a more generous and sustainable motive than flipping our collective middle finger to the big, bad Horrible Orange -Man.  

   If Trump & Trudeau were pugnacious little banty roosters, riling up the citizens of the barnyard and upsetting the production of the hens, then I would know exactly how to deal with them. We have a down-home, made-on-the-farm solution: it’s called Mean Rooster Soup, and I wouldn’t waste any time sharpening my axe, either. Since that is not an option here, I will have to satisfy myself with a heartfelt “BAH!! A pox on both their houses!”

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Lorna Gordon’s journey through dance, resilience, and Black History Month

Courtesy
Lorna Gordon

A life in motion

By William Crooks

Local Journalism Initiative

Lorna Gordon’s life has been one of movement—across continents, across stages, and through the ever-changing landscape of race relations in Canada. Born in St. Vincent and raised in Trinidad, she arrived in Canada in 1966, drawn by her passion for dance and a desire to chart her own path, despite familial disapproval.

“My family, they’re lawyers and doctors and teachers. They did not approve of having somebody as a dancer,” Gordon recalled in a recent interview. “I disgraced the family by working to death.”

But her love for dance was unwavering. In the Caribbean, dance was a natural part of life—woven into school plays, cultural celebrations, and community events. Gordon embraced a variety of styles, from calypso and limbo to African dance, performing with fire and taking part in elaborate stage productions. When an opportunity arose to perform in North America, she seized it, touring the United States and Canada before settling in Montreal.

The vibrant arts scene in Montreal reminded her of home, and she found work quickly, performing in supper clubs and theatre productions. “At that time, you had a lot of different shows, all kinds of shows,” she said. “Not like now—it’s not as it was.”

Her career took off when a promoter, impressed by her talent, offered her a contract without an audition. This led to performances with well-known producers, including Madame Grimaldi, a major figure in the Quebec entertainment industry. Grimaldi booked high-profile acts like Michel Louvain and André Roc, and Gordon was one of the few Black dancers in these productions. Over the years, she honed her craft, refining her stage presence and earning a reputation as a captivating performer.

Despite her success, she encountered difficulties. Promoters often sought Black dancers for exoticized performances, reinforcing stereotypes rather than celebrating culture. She also had to navigate the challenges of being a young Black woman in an industry dominated by white men. Some advances were inappropriate, and she quickly learned to stand her ground. “They didn’t respect this girl,” she recalled of one instance and her attitude towards it, “All you guys who were after me, go to hell.”

By the 1970s, she was raising children and seeking stability. She moved to the Eastern Townships around 1971, becoming, she remembers, one of the first Black women in Lennoxville.

Facing racism in the Townships

Adjusting to her new home came with challenges. Gordon encountered racism in ways that were both blatant and insidious. “I found them rude. Really rude,” she said of some of her early experiences. “I heard, ‘Black women are hot, and I never went to bed with a Black woman,’”. She felt like “spitting in their damn face”.

She also faced a troubling culture of sexual aggression, where some men saw her as an object of conquest rather than a respected member of the community. “They were nasty,” she said. “The women didn’t like me, but the men wanted to sleep with me.” Rather than let these experiences define her, Gordon remained firm, ensuring her children understood their worth. “I told my kids, ‘Keep your head up. You are blessed. Don’t let anyone shame you.’”

For Gordon, the prejudice she faced was compounded by being a single mother. “I warned my kids,” she recounted. “I said, I don’t care what you do, but none of these guys—if they come at you, you come get me.”

Despite the challenges, she was determined to carve out a life for herself and her children. She went back to school, earning a diploma in special education and securing a job at the local Butters Home, where she worked for nearly two decades. “We were the second batch of educators that graduated from Champlain [College],” she said proudly.

Building a legacy

Beyond her work in education, Gordon became a business owner, running a home for the elderly while also hosting international students. “The Arab countries, the Muslims, the Chinese, and the Japanese students—they were the best students to have,” she said, speaking of the young people she welcomed into her home.

Over time, attitudes in the Townships shifted. “It changed over the decades,” she acknowledged, though she remained wary of certain lingering biases. “I told my kids, ‘You are immigrants, you are Black, and if you don’t have an education, they think you belong in the kitchen.’”

Gordon made sure her children had opportunities. Her daughter Joanne became a high school teacher in Kingston, while Suzan established her own business in Brockville, helping companies improve their operations. “They got their education and made their own way,” she said proudly.

Her businesses demanded long hours, and she often had to balance multiple responsibilities. “I would sleep at the home some nights because staff was expensive,” she said. Even when she went on vacation, she prepped all the meals in advance, ensuring that the residents were well taken care of. “The first time I left for 12 days, I came back, and they told me how bad the food was. I said, ‘Don’t do that to them,’” she recounted with a laugh.

A voice in the community

Through the years, Gordon also remained deeply involved in the community. She became a lay reader at St. George’s Anglican Church and later took on the role of warden. Her involvement in the church extended to singing in choirs, including at Bishop’s University, where she took part in symphony performances. “We sang with the symphony, and we went to Drummondville—it was really, really nice,” she said. She is a member of the Bishop’s choir to this day.

Her contributions did not go unnoticed. “A lot of people know me in Lennoxville. I am friends with a lot of people, and a lot of people respect me,” she said. “The mayors and different people, they all know me. I’ve been in this town a long time.”

Black History Month and looking forward

For Gordon, Black History Month is more than just a time of reflection—it’s an acknowledgement of the contributions Black Canadians have made to society. “We gave a lot to this place,” she said. “We did a lot. We are part of this society. We gave a lot of our time and energy and education and everything to this place.”

Her journey—marked by perseverance, success, and resilience—mirrors the broader struggle and triumphs of Black Canadians throughout history. From overcoming discrimination to breaking barriers in dance, education, and business, Gordon’s life embodies the spirit of Black History Month.

At nearly 80 years old, she remains active, connected, and determined to share her story. Whether through dance, education, or community involvement, Gordon’s impact on the Eastern Townships will not be forgotten. “I have to say, people respect me,” she said. “And that, I’ve earned.”

Lorna Gordon’s journey through dance, resilience, and Black History Month Read More »

Massawippi Conservation Trust secures vital wetland for future generations

Courtesy Tim Doherty
Lim Wetlands property

Protecting local nature

By William Crooks

Local Journalism Initiative

In a landmark move for environmental conservation, the Massawippi Conservation Trust (MCT), in collaboration with the Appalachian Corridor, has announced the permanent protection of the Lim Wetlands property. This 8-hectare wetland, located in Hatley near the Tomifobia River, is a vital ecological site. “This is our first conservation project on this scale, and we couldn’t be more thrilled,” said Hélène Hamel, Executive Director of the Fondation Massawippi Foundation (FMF), in a recent interview.

The property—dubbed the “kidneys of the lake” by Hamel—plays a crucial role in maintaining water quality and mitigating the impacts of climate change. An ecological assessment conducted in 2022 by the Appalachian Corridor revealed the land’s biodiversity significance. It is home to species at risk such as wood turtles, Canada lilies, and four types of bats, as well as 44 bird species, including the Bank Swallow and Eastern Woodpecker. “Protecting this ecosystem ensures high-quality drinking water for surrounding communities and safeguards essential ecological services,” explained Appalachian Corridor General Manager Mélanie Lelièvre in a related press release.

A unique donation

The Lim Wetlands property was donated by a family that had owned it for decades but never developed it. “This land is extraordinary. It’s never been disturbed,” Hamel shared, adding that the donor had never even walked on the property. This untouched land, valued at $90,000, strengthens the conservation network surrounding Lake Massawippi, connecting it to other protected areas just 4.3 kilometres away.

The project was made possible by substantial financial backing. Funding came from several government initiatives, including Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Canadian Nature Fund and the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s Natural Environment Partnership Project, which received support from the Quebec government. Locally, the FMF provided additional funds to aid the MCT in its conservation mission.

Jaques Bouvier

Conservation and community

Hamel emphasized the dual role of the MCT and FMF in both conserving land and promoting public engagement. While the MCT handles land acquisition and stewardship, FMF raises funds and manages educational programs. Together, the organizations have protected 546 hectares of land since their founding in 2011. “We aim to conserve as much of the watershed as possible, ensuring its biodiversity and ecological balance for future generations,” Hamel said.

Looking ahead, the Trust is expanding its focus to farmland conservation. Hamel revealed plans to work with local farmers on organic practices, riverbank planting, and reducing chemical use. “Farmland is often overlooked in conservation efforts, but it’s critical to the overall health of our ecosystem,” she noted. The first such initiative will be with FMF President Margot Heyerhoff, whose organic farm is set to become a conservation servitude.

Beyond wetlands: Tomifobia Nature Trail

In addition to wetlands, the MCT is in discussion to acquire a transfer of ownership of the Tomifobia Nature Trail, a 19-kilometre green corridor connecting Ayer’s Cliff to Stanstead. The trail is currently owned and maintained by volunteers from the Sentier Massawippi Inc. team. “This trail is a gem,” Hamel remarked. More information is expected in the coming months.

Céline Lahaye

A legacy of trails

Hamel also shared updates on other ongoing projects. This year, the team will complete the Burroughs Falls Trail, the first on the eastern side of Lake Massawippi. In 2026, the Trust plans to develop trails on conserved land at Quebec Lodge. These trails, designed for family-friendly walks, complement the more extensive hiking paths already available in the region.

The ultimate goal, Hamel explained, is to create a cohesive network of protected lands and trails. By working under the Appalachian Corridor’s umbrella, the Trust uses biologists’ assessments to prioritize properties threatened by development or ecological decline. “Our mission is long-term. We’re not just conserving land; we’re fostering a culture of stewardship and sustainability,” Hamel said.

Collaboration and the future

The success of the Lim Wetlands project highlights the importance of collaboration. From government funding to partnerships with property owners and local volunteers, conservation efforts require a collective approach. “We’re in discussions with other landowners to establish conservation servitudes,” Hamel explained. “It’s not just about acquisition; it’s about ensuring long-term protection.”

For Hamel, the work is deeply personal. “We’re not just preserving land; we’re protecting our heritage,” she said. With ambitious plans for the future, including expanded farmland conservation and new trails, the Massawippi Conservation Trust is set to leave a lasting impact on the Eastern Townships.

Massawippi Conservation Trust secures vital wetland for future generations Read More »

Mousquiri tourney marks 60 years of scoring for Richmond

Courtesy

By Rebecca Taylor

Local Journalism Initiative

Guy Marchand took time out of a very busy schedule to talk about this year’s Mousquiri Tournament that will be taking place at the Paul-Émile Lefebvre Arena in Richmond (800 Rue Gouin) from Feb. 3 to 16.  Marchand, who is also this year’s honorary president, has been a dedicated tournament volunteer for over 50 years, serving as one of the directors of the Mousquiri for 40 of them. He was also, notably, a player in the 5th Mousquiri tournament, held in 1968.

This year the tournament celebrates its 60th anniversary, an achievement that would have been impossible were it not for the dedicated volunteers who put their skills to use each year. The tournament counts approximately 140 volunteers. Back when the tournament started – before there was a Zamboni at the arena- many volunteers were required to scrape the ice. This was where Guy Marchand started his decades long stint as a volunteer for the tournament.

When the Mousquiri started, it was one of the only hockey tournaments in the Eastern Townships. Until some 15 years ago, many residents of the region would take in players from the hockey teams and be their host families. Some of the friendships developed from this still exist today and with social media, it is much easier to keep people connected than when the tournament first started.

This year the tournament has teams coming from Drummondville, Sherbrooke, Longueil, Deux-Montagnes, Montreal, Le Gardeur, Beauce-Appalaches and Vermont. One year there the tournament welcomed  a team from San Diego, California because one of the fathers of a player was from this region, and they had played in the tournament and wanted their son’s team to be able to participate in it. They raised funds to make the trip.

Courtesy

Each year since 1995, the organizers for the Mousquiri tournament have been giving out the “Prix D’Excellence Réné Thibault” to highlight the achievements and contributions of a person in our region that stand out. This year the recipient is Clifford Lancaster, who will receive the award on Feb, 7 at 5:30 p.m. during the tournament’s opening ceremonies. Clifford Lancaster is a dedicated member of the community and currently a councillor for the Town of Richmond. Other organizations that he has been involved with include Richmond Fair, Celtics of Richmond Soccer Club and the 50-Plus Club.

While many things have changed over the years for the tournament, the dedication of the volunteers has always been there. The Mousquiri tournament brings together the community, both anglophones and francophones to celebrate the youth who play hockey. Should anyone want to learn more about the tournament, they can visit the Facebook page (Tournoi National atome – Mousquiri ) or website (www.mousquiri.com ). Volunteers are always welcome, and they are encouraged to reach out via the website or to call a director.

Admission is free for all spectators. So, if you get the opportunity to watch a game or two, be sure to stop by and cheer on the youth. Maybe one day you’ll have the opportunity to watch some of them play professionally. Several professional hockey players got their start playing in the Mousquiri tournament. A complete list can be found on the website and Facebook page but includes Sean McKenna, Sylvain Lefebvre, Martin St-Amour, Eric Dandonneault, Sylvain Daigle, Sébastien Charpentier, Patrice Brisebois, Patrick Roy, Marc-André Fleury, Alan Haworth, Vincent Damphousse, Luc Robitaille, and Martin Brodeur.

Mousquiri tourney marks 60 years of scoring for Richmond Read More »

Magasin Comeau is part of the fabric of Richmond

Courtesy
Jeannette Comeau

By Rebecca Taylor

Local Journalism Initiative

If you drive or walk down Rue Principale in Richmond, you’ve likely seen Magasin Comeau, (396 Rue Principale Nord), but you may not know the store’s amazing history in this town. This year will mark the store’s 55th anniversary in operation, making it one of the older businesses still in existence in the region. Magasin Comeau is a fabric store that is held in high regard for its selection of material for clothing, décor, and upholstering.

“My knowledge of sewing and fabrics comes from my grandmother, Rosa Pellerin, who taught it to my mother, Liliane Comeau, who in turn passed it on to me. Today, I share this knowledge with my daughters, my employees and all my customers,” said Jeannette Comeau, owner of the store.

In 1970, when Liliane Comeau and her daughter Jeannette opened Magasin Comeau, there was a fabric store in every city. Over the years, many of them have closed, but Magasin Comeau has grown, expanding the products and services that it offers. Today, the store’s services include clothing repair, custom curtain making and cushion coverings for both interior and exterior fittings. They have also manufactured a good number of custom protective covers and other diverse projects for both residential and commercial needs.

Today, this business isn’t just essential for the people of Richmond. It has become known by clients from across the province with some coming from as far as the Gaspé.

The store is known for its personalized customer service. Jeanette Comeau said, “We take the time to understand our customers’ needs in order to advise them well, they sometimes even leave with a detailed plan and the steps to follow to create their projects. We got the nickname ‘The Miracle Department’ because we find solutions to all kinds of problems, and ‘Alibaba’s Cave’ because we really have everything, and many customers who come for the first time say that they feel like they are in a candy store.”

Throughout the shop’s fifty-five year history, it has seen a lot of evolution and expansion. It began as a very small space with a few boxes of patterns at the beginning when sewing was a way to save money, but the business quickly expanded its range of offerings. In the 1980s when mass production gradually replaced homemade products, more changes were required. The store started selling curtain fabrics, and increased its surface area, as well as adding upholstery fabrics, leatherettes, and foam. For several years now, it has also been offering custom-made tailoring services, thus meeting a wider range of needs for its clients.

“Today, fewer people are sewing out of necessity, but DIY and especially quilting are booming. Gone are the days when women made blankets from old clothes; quilts are now made from high-quality 100% cotton fabrics. Nowadays, people work with this noble material mainly for pleasure. Driven by passion, they make pieces, some of which rise to the rank of works of art. Magasin Comeau has recently adapted to new purchasing methods and has developed a transactional website that offers a wide range of products and reaches a clientele from all over the province, extending to remote regions,” stated Jeannette Comeau.

Although she plans to run her business for several more years, Jeannette Comeau knows that the time is approaching when she will have to pass the torch. “I would like to find someone who shares the same passion for fabric and to whom I could share my knowledge passed down for three generations and my values ​​in terms of customer service.

Magasin Comeau is a regional gem in a unique market that serves a clientele as vast as it is varied, ready for a dynamic succession that is committed to continuing to offer these services that are essential to the development of our community. Who will be the next owner? Maybe you?” said Jeannette Comeau with pride.

Magasin Comeau is part of the fabric of Richmond Read More »

Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi de Richmond helps build better futures

Courtesy

By Rebecca Taylor

Local Journalism Initiative

Meet Jade, Mathilde and Martin, the team at Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi located at 139 Principale Nord in Richmond, that can be a game-changer for many youth.

The Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi de Richmond was created in 1997 with the purpose of assisting 16-35 year olds. All services offered are provided at no charge. However, lately the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi has been considering a change to its name because it can help people of any age with their job searches, CVs, presentation letters, simulate job interviews and accompaniment in the job market. Many of the activities which take place at the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi are designed to help participants learn and enhance their skills, gain additional knowledge and to help them overcome obstacles.

One of Martin’s functions as part of the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi’s team is to host the woodworking classes. It is a weekly training session that lasts for four months. Of the numerous benefits to this program, participants get into a routine of having to attend the program on a certain schedule.

Projet Passerelle Découverte is a literacy workshop offered by the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi from October to June each year. This is a fun and interactive way for participants to practice their reading and mathematical skills as well as  break isolation by being in a group and to do creative activities such as cooking together.  It was initially started for mothers, but its mandate has expanded over the years and is now open to anyone wanting to improve their literacy. This program is led by Mathilde.

The CarrefourJeunesse-Emploi is committed to providing inclusive free services in a confidential manner. It is an important resource for the community and boasts a solid bank of contacts with local businesses and resources. In addition to helping individuals at the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi, they can also refer people to the necessary organizations so that they can get the type of assistance they need. There is no shame in needing to ask for help of any kind and the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi is a welcoming and listening ear. Their services are provided in English and French, and they can also use translation apps to give services to newcomers to the area who might not yet be comfortable in either of these languages. There is also a guidance counselor, Laurence, who can help people heading to the job market for the first time or looking for a career change more suited to their needs and interests. Another benefit to their services is the flexible hours and that you always reach a person, not an answering machine when you call.

Each year the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi is involved with the Knight of the Arts at Richmond Regional High School. This is a project that helps promote volunteering as well as allow students to work towards raising money for a local organization or project.

They are also part of  Trio Desjardins Etudiants program for students ages 13-14 to have a first experience in the job market working with non-profit organizations in the region.

The team stated that it is a privilege to be able to give people the tools to get a new start and to achieve their goals and dreams.

To learn more stop by and see them, call 819-826-1999 or visit the Facebook page or website at cjerichmond.qc.ca. 

Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi de Richmond helps build better futures Read More »

New housing and summer projects on Richmond agenda

Courtesy Laurent Frey

By Rebecca Taylor

Local Journalism Initiative

In a recent interview Richmond Mayor Bertrand Ménard outlined some of the priorities and challenges the council  will be dealing with in 2025

The 2025 budget has now been approved and can be found on the town of Richmond’s bilingual website at https://www.ville.richmond.qc.ca/ When citizens receive their tax account, it is important that they look at the description as there is one section for service costs, and another for the tax portion. Should anyone have questions, they can address them to the municipality.

An additional 200 lodgings are expected to be added to the town in the coming months and in order for this project to be a success, one of the town’s priorities will be to invest in the necessary infrastructure so that resources like water can reach the new developments. One planned project which the town was approached about is at the site of the old St. Famille Church (Rue Coiteux), where 48 residences for people aged 55 and older would be added. This plan includes the addition of an elevator and is central to numerous services in the area, even without a car.

Another major project that will be worked on over the next several years is in response to Quebec’s Climate Plan. Richmond’s plan will focus on the downtown and Rue Principale areas to create more green spaces in order to reduce the temperature during the summer and make walks on hot summer days more pleasant. Some areas will see trees and grass  planted instead of having asphalt. To consult the complete plan, visit the town’s website.

One of the major challenges for municipalities is working with the regulations passed down from the federal and provincial governments and finding ways to implement and finance them. There are sometimes subsidies towns can apply for, but that isn’t always the case. Another challenge is meeting requests for funds from the region’s many organizations. Grants aren’t always available for their projects the mayor explained, and the groups in turn request financial assistance from the municipality. It is a balancing act for the town to try and assist them when possible, and to be fair to everyone at the same time.

There will be some changes around the council table later this year as Mayor Ménard will retiring after serving eight years as mayor, and 10 years prior to that as a councillor for the Municipality of Cleveland. The mayor said he is looking forward to having more time to spend with his family, and to go fishing and golfing once he officially retiremes from public life. It remains to be seen which councilors will reoffer as several are currently in a period of reflection.

New housing and summer projects on Richmond agenda Read More »

And a new chapter began

Courtesy
Marie-Ève White

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

Richmond’s stationery store, Papeterie 2000, has always sold books, however, since Marie-Ève White purchased the business last July the number of books sold and the floor space given over to books have increased exponentially.

“I’ve always loved books,” Marie-Ève says.  “We live in an age of computer tablets and smart phones, which tend to induce solitude.  Books, on the other hand, open us up to the world.  They bring comfort, and they’re friends for life.  Books can contribute greatly to making us feel comfortable in our own skin.  They give us perspective and understanding.”

“At home,” she continues, “I have a personal library of about 1000 books.  My kids have 400 books or more.  They all give themselves an hour or more of reading time before they turn off the light at night.”

If it was a love of books that led Marie-Ève to become a bookseller, the path there was far from direct.  Her paternal grandfather, Norman White, was of Scottish origin.  He was a promising hockey player who was drafted by the New York Rangers.  However, he declined a tryout preferring to pursue a career in music.   He was a jazz drummer who got gigs as far afield as Cuba.  Her paternal grandmother, Madeleine Delorme, had a strong entrepreneurial streak and a stronger work ethic.  She opened her own restaurant in Laval and, for a quarter of a century, she regularly worked from 5 a.m  to 10 p.m.      

“I attribute my entrepreneurial spirit to her,” Marie-Ève says.

While she was strong academically, Marie-Ève did not find it easy to decide what she wanted to study.  For a time, she thought of becoming a funeral director, drawn by the spiritual implications of the job.  In Cégep, she tried Dance, and then Science, before finally graduating in the Humanities.  At the Université de Montréal she began studies in Anthropology before earning a degree in Criminology.

“In Montreal, I worked with mental health patients who were living in transitional housing,” she explains.  “Then, when we moved here, I started working with the Centre d’aide aux victimes in Sherbrooke.  But after two years, I took a leave.  I felt there was something missing.  That turned out to be contact with a wider public.  The work I had most enjoyed was in retail sales when I was a student.  One of my favourite jobs was at Archambault’s where I was surrounded by books and music.”

It was one day when she was on leave from work that she stopped at Papeterie 2000 hoping to perhaps find a book.  Michel Lachapelle, the owner of the shop explained that he didn’t carry many books because of the complexities of dealing with publishers and distributors.

Marie-Ève continues, “Then, he made a comment to the effect that a different owner might have a different attitude towards carrying books.  I was intrigued and asked him if he was selling his business.  Michel replied that he was thinking about it.  I went back to see him the next day and we worked out an agreement.  This all happened in the span of a couple of days.  I officially took over on July 1 of last year.  Part of the agreement is that I can consult with him for the year following the sale, and I have called him a few times.  He’s been very helpful.”

“I have had a few moments of doubt,” she says, “when I wondered what I had gotten myself into.  But they always passed quickly.  I’m glad I acted as I did, because this way I know I won’t have any regrets, I won’t ever ask myself, what if?”

Another factor that prompted her to buy the business was travel time.  She didn’t want to deal with a daily commute to work.  She was looking for something in Richmond, where she lives

Since taking over the store, Marie-Ève has had one employee, Lysanne Burrill, who had previously work for Michel Lachapelle.

“I appreciate having Lysanne,” Marie-Ève says.  “She’s experienced.  She knows the store and she knows a lot of the clients.  It would be difficult to be alone all of the time.”

At one point, Marie-Ève White thought that she might carry only children’s books, but she realized that there was a demand for books for adult readers as well.

“I won my bet with Michel,” she says.  “He thought that nobody reads and that books wouldn’t sell.  My first month, we sold 30 books, and we’re now selling 60 a month.  I’ve been ordering 100 or more new titles every month.  The books that sell best are Quebec novels and biographies, but there’s demand for a wide variety of books.”

(During the recent postal strike, one client came in looking for a book of crossword puzzles in English.  He missed his daily crossword in the Record, which would otherwise have come in the mail.)

Papeterie 2000 carries books by four local authors.  My own books have been available there for over a decade.  Last October, Dominic Fontaine-Lasnier published Le Legs d’un philosophe amateur, Essai sur François Hertel, and Papeterie 2000 promptly sold almost two dozen copies of the book.  Philippe Collard and Marc-André Dufour-Labbé are two writers who have moved to the Richmond area more recently and they have several titles between them available at the store.

Marie-Ève is conversant in English and Spanish but most often she prefers to read in French.  Her reading is wide ranging but she does have a few favourite authors.  “Dany Laferrière, Serge Bouchard, and Anais Barbeau Lavalette are among the writers I most like.  However, just recently I’ve been reading a lot of books about bookstores!”

Papeterie 2000 still sells envelopes and office paper, but books represent an ever-increasing percentage of its sales.  A small glass display case with half a dozen books has given way to solid wooden book cases with rows of books.  As well, there’s now an attractive armchair conveniently near the bookcases that seems to be inviting the bookshop browser to peruse a few paperbacks before deciding what to buy.

And a new chapter began Read More »

Policy standoff leaves families in limbo as immigration sponsorship applications are suspended

Courtesy
André Yves Cloutier (centre) with his wife, Nona Abkaei (right), and their friend Firat Turan (left) at their wedding in Antalya, Turkey, May 2023. The couple has been separated since the wedding due to prolonged immigration delays.

By William Crooks

Local Journalism Initiative

The Canadian immigration system is under scrutiny following Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) announcement of a suspension on new sponsorship applications under the Parents and Grandparents Program (PGP) for 2025. According to IRCC, this measure aims to address processing backlogs by limiting application reviews to those submitted in 2024, with a cap of 15,000 applications. This decision comes as Canada grapples with broader immigration adjustments, including reduced targets for permanent resident admissions in 2025.

The suspension, reported by CIC News and other sources, provides no immediate relief for families separated by prolonged immigration delays. Advocacy groups like Québec Réunifié argue the policy only worsens existing problems, particularly in Quebec, where immigration processes are already the slowest in the country. The policy shift also coincides with the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, adding uncertainty to the future of Canada’s immigration priorities.

“Families have been waiting far too long,” said Marie-G. Pilon, vice-president of Québec Réunifié, in a recent interview. “This decision doesn’t address the root causes—it only deepens the suffering of separated families.” Pilon’s organization has been vocal in demanding reforms, especially in Quebec, where provincial quotas and additional processing steps create bottlenecks.

Quebec’s distinct delays

The delays for Quebec sponsors stem largely from the Canada-Quebec Accord, which grants the province the authority to assess the financial eligibility of family sponsors and issue a Certificat de sélection du Québec (CSQ) for approved applicants. This dual-layered process, detailed in a government response to a parliamentary petition, significantly extends wait times compared to other provinces.

As of September 2024, spousal sponsorships in Quebec take approximately 26 months, compared to 12 months in the rest of Canada, according to IRCC’s published figures. Pilon explained that Quebec’s self-imposed cap on family-class immigration—set at 13,000 admissions annually until 2026—further restricts processing. “Quebec limits the number of CSQs, and the federal government aligns its processing accordingly,” Pilon said, adding that this quota leaves thousands of families in limbo.

Cloutier’s personal struggle

For Windsor, Quebec, resident André Yves Cloutier, these delays are not just bureaucratic—they are deeply personal. Cloutier has been separated from his Iranian wife, Nona Abkaei, since their May 2023 wedding in Turkey. Despite filing her permanent residency application in September 2023, the couple has seen little progress. “We were told the process would take a year. Now it could be four or five,” Cloutier said in Jan. 7 conversation.

Abkaei’s attempts to obtain a visitor visa to reunite with her husband have been repeatedly denied. “They claim she’d overstay her visa, but this leaves us with no options to see each other,” Cloutier said. With travel to meet in Turkey costing upwards of $6,000, the couple faces both financial and emotional strain. “We’re stuck in a cul-de-sac,” he lamented.

Cloutier’s professional circumstances further complicate their situation. As an employee of Hydro-Québec, he is unable to telework from Ontario, where federal processing times are faster. “Unlike others who can relocate to expedite the process, my job ties me to Quebec,” Cloutier explained. He has taken legal steps, including a formal demand letter to Minister Marc Miller, and is exploring federal court action as a last resort.

Petition for equality

In October 2024, Cloutier launched a parliamentary petition calling for reforms to Quebec’s family reunification processes. The petition, which garnered 651 signatures and was tabled by MP Alexandre Boulerice, highlights the disproportionate delays faced by Quebec sponsors. It also argues that the CSQ requirement discriminates against Quebec residents, violating Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The government’s response to the petition, published on the official Parliament of Canada website, acknowledged the challenges but attributed the delays to Quebec’s immigration policies. IRCC stated that while measures like digitized applications and advanced analytics have improved processing times in other provinces, Quebec’s additional requirements continue to slow the process. The government reaffirmed its commitment to working with Quebec to align immigration levels and improve timelines.

Broader implications

Québec Réunifié and other advocates argue that the delays undermine Canadian values of inclusivity and family unity. Pilon emphasized the societal benefits of family reunification, noting that parents and grandparents often play critical roles in family support systems. “They provide childcare, ease household burdens, and contribute economically,” she said.

Critics also point out that sponsors assume full financial responsibility for their relatives, ensuring minimal strain on public resources. Pilon underscored that sponsored relatives do not typically access public funds for years after their arrival. “These families are not a burden—they’re an asset,” she said.

Political crossroads

The resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has added a layer of uncertainty to the immigration debate. Advocacy groups hope the incoming federal leadership will prioritize family reunification and address inconsistencies between Quebec and the rest of Canada. “Families shouldn’t be collateral damage in a political tug-of-war,” Pilon stated.

However, tensions between federal and provincial authorities persist. In March 2024, IRCC proposed exceeding Quebec’s immigration targets to reduce backlogs, but the province responded by further limiting CSQ issuance. This ongoing standoff underscores the need for meaningful collaboration to resolve the issue.

Looking ahead

For families like Cloutier’s, the wait is excruciating. The delays have placed their plans to start a family on indefinite hold. “We’re running out of time to have children. It’s heartbreaking,” Cloutier admitted. Despite the challenges, he remains determined to fight for change. “This isn’t just about us. It’s about all families caught in this system,” he said.

Québec Réunifié continues to advocate for harmonized processes and faster reunifications. “We’ll keep pushing for inclusive policies that reflect the values of Quebec and Canada,” Pilon affirmed.

As political leaders navigate this critical juncture, families across Quebec hope for a resolution. For now, they remain in limbo, their futures dependent on a system in desperate need of reform.

Policy standoff leaves families in limbo as immigration sponsorship applications are suspended Read More »

Newspapers provide a space for local voices to be heard

Courtesy BAnQ

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

During the past two decades our country has seen a drastic decline in the number of local newspapers. In 2023 alone over 100 daily and weekly papers across the country ceased circulation, taking with them the voices of entire communities. In many ways this sad trend marks the closing of a door that was first opened roughly 250 years ago when a nascent publishing industry first brought word of the outside world to a growing population hungry for knowledge.

In 1752 the Halifax Gazette became the first newspaper in Canada. It was soon followed by daily publications in other major centres such as Montréal, Québec City, and Kingston. During the early years of Canadian media the price and complexity of printing presses limited the number of newspapers being published but by the 1850s costs had come down to the point that a newspaper could generally be viable in almost any small town or city. Much like today’s oft-partisan publications, most early Canadian journals assumed an overtly political viewpoint, telling their readers at the outset if they supported liberal, conservative, national or regional viewpoints. As such, many larger towns boasted two or three newspapers in order to address the varying religious or ideological perspectives of their readers.

Courtesy McCord Stewart Museum
Mechanical Printing Press c1850

In the Eastern Townships there were several small privately-owned newspapers published around the middle of the nineteenth century such as the The Canadian Patriot which was produced in Stanstead, the Waterloo Advertiser and Eastern Townships Advocate and The Sherbrooke Gazette. One of the lesser known of these long-lost newspapers was The Canadian Times which was a weekly bulletin published in Sherbrooke between 1855 and 1858. Billed as a political, agricultural, commercial and literary journal its first issue was published just over 170 years ago, on Jan. 4, 1855. The editors of the paper proclaimed at the outset that “While avowing ourselves the strenuous advocates of religious as well as civil liberty, in its most liberal sense, nothing sectarian will be admitted into our columns.” Instead, the paper sought to provide its readers with a wide range of reporting on matters of general intelligence, literature and farming.

The newspaper’s inaugural edition led with the first chapter of a serialized novel entitled “Maretimo” by then famous British travel writer Bayle St. John. It offered readers a tale of mystery and adventure set against the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, something that must have been a very welcome distraction from the cold January evenings of 1850s Canada. Other subjects covered in that first issue included a story on the progress of the Crimean War, a (one would hope) useful article “On making and saving manure,” and a short note advising people that the little town of Bytown had just been renamed as “The City of Ottawa.”

Courtesy McCord Stewart Museum
Sherbrooke, in the middle of the 19th century

Printed by John Edwards in the Beckett Building in downtown Sherbrooke, the newspaper was owned by Ritchie and Company and its first editor was P.W. Ritchie. Its business model was typical of that of most newspapers then and now; income was derived primarily from advertising revenue supplemented by paid subscriptions. To that effect advertisers were charged $1.00 per square of 16 lines for the first instance, and 25 cents for all subsequent publications while readers paid an annual subscription rate of $2.00, which was reduced to a very modest $1.50 if the amount was given in advance. Incomes must have been modest though, given that Sherbrooke’s population at this time was only about 3,000 people.

Nonetheless The Canadian Times operated under these arrangements for most of the next four years, until October 1858 it was purchased by H. Jewitt and Company and George Bottom assumed its editorship. Wanting the re-brand his new newspaper Jewitt ceased publishing it under the name of The Canadian Times at the end of 1858, with the final edition being released on December 30, 1858 after a run of 209 issues. True to its literary roots the last front page featured a story by famed American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Courtesy BAnQ
Final issue, June 30, 1859

The following week, on Jan.6, 1859 the paper re-emerged with very little fanfare as The Sherbrooke Times although beyond a changed name little differed from the original format. Indeed, even the volume and issue numbers of The Sherbrooke Times picked up where The Canadian Times had left off, with the first issue of the former being counted as issue number 210. A new name, however, could not alter the economics of the publication and on June 30, 1859 The Sherbrooke Times shut down following the resignation of its editor. The cause of the paper’s closure would be sadly familiar to the publishers and editors of today, with George Bottom rhetorically asking “Surely if a man devotes his talents which his Maker has given him to their legitimate use, he has the right to expect recompense for his labors.” He goes on to add that the demands of the business, and the time which it took away from his family and his general interests, were not justified by the “scant remuneration” that he received for his efforts. Thus ended the idea of The Canadian and Sherbrooke Times. Plus ça change.

Journalism has sometimes been credited with producing the rough draft of history, and it is often local newspapers that capture the first sparks of what may someday be great events. And as this newspaper has repeatedly shown, even small and relatively out of the way places like the Eastern Townships have been responsible for their share of historical achievements. That is why it is so important for local voices to have a place to be heard. It was important in the 1850s, just as this country was just starting to coalesce around an idea of unity, and it is important in the 2020s when we are faced with threats of disinformation, the erosion of our social cohesion, and the rise of artificial intelligence. It is important so that we know where we came from, who we are, and where we collectively need to be going.

Newspapers provide a space for local voices to be heard Read More »

From Decline to Collapse

Courtesy Amazon

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

Almost 40 years ago, Quebec film maker, Denys Arcand, released Le déclin de l’empire américan.  It was the first of a trilogy of films all set in Quebec with story lines that directly or indirectly examined higher education, health care, and the justice system.

Arcand has been widely recognized for his films which have won an Academy Award as well as awards at the Cannes Film Festival and numerous other film festivals as well.

The title, Le déclin de l’empire américan, comes from a line of dialogue in the film.  A history professor is discussing a book she has just written that deals with modern society’s penchant for self-indulgence.  This societal egocentricity is the opposite of the selflessness and self-sacrifice that mark societies that are growing and flourishing.  The self-absorption in today’s society, the history professor argues, is a sign that the American empire is in decline.  Quebec, the history professor notes, is on the periphery of the American empire and is similarly experiencing societal decline.

One of the signs of this decline is the systemic injustice that permeates academia.  Any given undergraduate university course might be taught by a lecturer or by a professor.  The work involved in preparing a course is the same for both, but while the professor will earn a six-figure salary for teaching three courses over the course of the school year, the lecturer will be paid a few thousand dollars per course.  Worse, in a publish-or-perish environment, professors routinely affix their own names to work done by their graduate students.

The corruption to be found in Arcand’s first film is just as present in the other two films of the trilogy.  Be it in health care or the legal system, the characters in Arcand’s films time and again find themselves dealing with institutions that have been corrupted by greed.

Not quite four decades after Le déclin, the phrase that is popping up on You Tube is the collapse of the American empire.  Among others commenting on the collapse is Richard D. Wolfe who, in addition to hosting Economic Update, a weekly podcast, is the author or several books and a professor emeritus who taught at a couple of American universities and also briefly at the Sorbonne in Paris.  Wolfe is unusual in that he is a Marxian economist who is very critical of American capitalism.  (Being a Marxian is just different enough from being a Marxist that Wolfe can avoid arrest; it is illegal to be a Communist (or Marxist of Leninist) in the United States.)

Not unlike Arcand, Wolfe points out that corruption has permeated America and, although few are aware of it, the American empire (an economic empire backed up by the biggest arsenal in the world) has already begun to collapse.  From Wolfe’s perspective, this is due in part to corruption which is fueled by capitalism and greed.

Le déclin was filmed just as Quebec’s schools were about to make a massive educational reform.  This reform was American in origin.  It minimized the idea of right and wrong by abandoning the old school emphasis on grammar, spelling, and syntax.  It no longer asked students what they thought about a poem, story, or novel, but rather asked only how that piece of writing made them feel.

Wolfe points out that the American educational system fails the vast majority of the population.  While the rich send their children to expensive private schools, public schools in the United States are severely underfunded and plagued by social problems, violence, and mass shootings.  The result is that today the average American reads at the level of a Grade 5 student. 

It may be worth remembering that the Greeks who first created a democratic system of government were also leery of it.  To function properly, they said, a democratic society needs an educated, well-informed electorate. 

Similarly, America’s health care system is dystopic.  Rich Americans have access to arguably the best health care in the world.  However, most Americans find themselves paying exorbitant sums for health insurance that, one time in three, will fail to cover the costs of the medical service they need.  The United States is the only developed country in the world where private health insurance companies post multi-billion-dollar annual profits.  Health insurance executives—like the one recently shot in New York—earn multi-million-dollar annual salaries.  A very few capitalists, Wolfe points out, have grown enormously wealthy at the expense of the many.

As for the judicial system in the United States, the corruption rises like cream to the very top.  At least two Supreme Court justices have been found to have accepted lavish gifts worth millions of dollars from individuals and corporations who had cases before the court.  Yet both remain on the Supreme Court, above the law.  During his two impeachment trials, Trump was found innocent by American legislators who were not concerned with right or wrong but only worried about Republican and Democrat.     

Wolfe argues that America’s decline can be traced back to Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economic policies which began creating the wealth gap that today has a few thousand billionaires sharing the country with almost 37 million people (11% of the population) who live under the poverty line.  More than half a million of those are homeless.

The America of the mid-twentieth century, Wolfe points out, was the envy of the world.  That is no longer the case.  Nor is America the dominant economic force that it was in the post-WWII era when it emerged all but unscathed from the global conflict.

American armies have suffered humbling defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan.  American economic dominance is being challenged by BRICS, (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) which, in the last decade, has continued to add more and more member nations.  Wolfe points out that growth in the US and in the G7 nations (US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan) has been less robust recently than that in the BRICS countries.  America, Wolfe notes, is no longer the industrial and technological leader that it once was.  Worse, it is a country that is enormously in debt ($36 trillion to start 2025) and making no effort to pay down that debt.

What does it mean for us in Quebec that the American empire (according to Richard Wolfe and others) is collapsing?

In 2018, Denys Arcand released a movie entitled La chute de l’empire americain.  However, the film is an action film (although based on a true story) and it was originally called, Le triomphe de l’argent.  It doesn’t add to Arcand’s original trilogy.

Wolfe has no specific advice for Quebecers.  He does however say that the sooner we wake up and smell the coffee, the sooner we’ll be able to adapt to a new world order.

From Decline to Collapse Read More »

Are you a digital dissident?

Many tech options and apps may not suit you — just turn them Off

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Everything’s digital these days. Soon, you’ll be able to click Start on your car from the bedroom on a cold winter morning, then have it drive to the local grocery for a litre of milk.

Just kidding about the milk part, but the wonders of tech are proliferating.

While digital stuff is generally useful and labour-saving, it is sometimes a pain. I actively avoid some innovations, while letting others wither from neglect.

This is not some rebellion against tech or a fruitless call to turn back the (digital) clock. I am quite comfortable with desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and their various apps, and spend endless time online. I have run two websites (including, ahem, davidwinch.website) and I operated a governmental publishing unit that was 100 per cent online and paper-free.

So I am not incompetent. Just critical: there’s lots of digital stuff you don’t need.

Photo courtesy
Retro-tech author phones in his story to The Record: “Get me Rewrite!”

Shift for yourself

In our household, we have one foot in the new world, one in the old. I write cheques regularly, read many paper publications, opt sometimes for counter service at banks, keep an emergency landline at home, pay for cable TV rather than streaming, and choose numerous non-digital services.

In our car, for example. We first bought a Volkswagen ten years ago straight off the boat from Wolfsburg. So we were able to get a European model with manual stick shift. Vroom.

We bought another VW in 2024, but now, no chance of a stick shift. No clutch, just a push-button start. Luckily, it still has handy manual controls for wipers and a radio dial.

During car repairs, however, we had to rent a vehicle. It included a super-proliferation of digital everything. A big screen dominated the dashboard, with many flashy options. We had trouble turning the radio off. It was a relief to return to our old car, with less digital clutter.

Resistance is futile! you say. No, it isn’t. There have been several successful pushbacks.

Let’s look at some choices:

Banking: Yes, everything can be done online. Cash transfers, bill payments, direct deposits. But I still use paper cheques often enough, ordering packs of 50. I find them handy to pay our many contractors and for small gifts and local transactions. It feels simpler.

Media: I love newspapers, always have — I sold them on street corners, delivered them by hand, then founded a couple of high-school newspapers before becoming a letters-to-the-editor regular then a writer. I call paper “the real thing”. Once it has been printed and is in your hands, nothing can be revised, retracted or touched up. There is no risk of losing a story in cyberspace.

Buying papers these days, I am a real outlier. While their outlets have definitely shrunk, we keep track of the supermarkets, dépanneurs and bookstores that stock daily newspapers. I head straight to MultiMags in NDG-Montreal for the Globe and Mail, or to Maxi in Lennoxville for Townships Weekend and the Journal de Montréal.

Photo courtesy
Record store in Vancouver’s trendy Gastown: all-in on LPs.

Retro trend albums

Music. The most striking retro trend is in musical recordings. Vinyl LPs have made a huge comeback in recent years. In the hippest parts of the trendiest neighbourhoods, they are everywhere.

 I always liked CDs, and amassed quite a collection — classical, rock, jazz, country, Christmas —from the 1990s through their decline in the 2010s. And we have a solid Bose stereo with CD tray in my office. All good.

But I am bombarded with online requests to sign on to Sirius for our car radio and to subscribe to Spotify at home. I guess creating your own playlists is convenient; it avoids storing physical CDs. But I don’t really want it. However, since our new car has no CD tray, my hand is being steadily forced.

Meanwhile, vinyl LPs keep surging:  The Conversation reported in 2023 that “over the past decade, vinyl records have made a major comeback. People purchased $1.2 billion U.S. of records in 2022, a 20 per cent jump from the previous year. Not only did sales rise, but they also surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1988, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America”.

In Vancouver’s trendy Gastown district last month, we came upon a huge music store entirely stocked with LPs. Every type of music (see photo). In Toronto’s hipster Ossington district, LPs seem just as popular, with young and youngish music-lovers.

Why this change?  The blog Freestyle Vinyl concludes: “This trend reflects a growing appreciation for the tangible, analog aspects of vinyl and its unique sound quality”.

Landline phones: As cell phones have surged, landlines have steeply declined.

Statistics Canada reports: “In 2021, 93.9 per cent of Canadian households reported having at least one cellphone …. Conversely, the share of households that reported having a landline has declined consistently, from nearly two-thirds (63.3 per cent) in 2017 to less than half (47.4 per cent) in 2021”.

In a recentarticle in The Atlantic monthly on “things we wish would come back”, one writer mused:

“My parents disconnected their landline, but the number is seared in my mind alongside the other home numbers of my childhood friends. I recently learned that my internet provider offers a free landline, and my apartment has a number of its own. All I have to do is plug a phone into the jack.

“It’s an idyllic thought: coming home, putting my cellphone—and all its distractions—away, but not being disconnected. I can still chat aimlessly with my sister while doing chores, or catch up with a long-distance friend. I’m all for bringing back the landline as a way to create a just-large-enough opening for the outside world to reach me.”

Go ahead: carve your own niche in this all-digital world.

Are you a digital dissident? Read More »

Cold blooded social engineering

Photo courtesy
Scene from Fritz Lang’s dystopian 1927 film Metropolis.

By Guy Rex Rodgetrs

Local Journalism Initiative

In 1961, Stanley Milgram conducted a social psychology experiment at Yale University that could only have been justified as an attempt to understand the horrors of the Second World War. Milgram wanted to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who gave instructions to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. The experiment was simple. And horrifying. Each participant believed they were an assistant in the experiment, rather than the subject. The project leader directed the ‘assistant’ to administer electric shocks to a ‘learner’ as punishment for wrong answers. The ‘assistant’ was directed to increase the voltage at each ‘punishment’ until reaching levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

The Milgram experiment found that most ‘assistants’ would obediently administer painful 300 volt shocks, and 65% would follow instructions to inflict the full ‘potentially lethal’ 450 volts. 

Why were participants in a study willing to inflict severe pain on a total stranger? Social scientists have sought answers to this question for decades. Did participants simply allow an authority figure to silence their conscience?  Or did participants need to fabricate a justification for their compliance?

In November, the Gaspé municipal council wrote to its English-speaking citizens via facebook informing them that it can no longer communicate in English because of Bill 96 *.  The council explained that they had protested the new policy and pleaded for exemptions. “Although we support the preservation of the French language in Quebec, we believe the historical, social, cultural, and economic significance of Gaspé’s English-speaking and Mi’gmaq communities warrants acknowledgment. While French may be in decline across Quebec, it is English that faces decline here in Gaspé, our town built on a linguistic and cultural diversity we strive to preserve. However, this recommendation was rejected by the National Assembly, meaning Gaspé must comply with the Act as all other municipalities.”

Imposing the language policy was clearly painful for the mayor and the municipal council but the consequences of disobedience are severe.  “It is important to note that if Gaspé were to disregard the Act (Bill 96), the main penalty could be the loss of access to all government grants or financial assistance. This could amount to millions of dollars annually, significantly impacting property taxes for residents.”

When the Coalition Avenir Québec government sought support for Bill 96 they ran ads declaring, ‘We have to protect French in Québec.’ (Simon Jolin-Barrette) and ‘It is reasonable and necessary.’ (François Legault).  The Gaspé municipal council does not think these new measures are reasonable or necessary or that they protect French.  But they felt compelled to comply with the law.

I am not accusing Gaspé municipal council members of cowardice for allowing ‘authority figures’ to override their ‘personal conscience’.  The Gaspé council members had the courage to publically declare their discomfort with enforcing aspects of Bill 96 that harm vulnerable minorities without helping Quebec’s French language and culture. But they decided to comply with the law.

Where does this ‘punishment’ to Gaspé’s English-speaking and Mi’gmaq communities rate on the Milgram scale? Is this a minor tingle at 25 volts? A perfectly bearable 100-volt blast?  Would it be harder to comply at 300 volts?  Milgram’s ‘assistants’ inflicted pain on strangers. Is it harder to inflict pain friends and neighbours? 

As every salesperson knows, if you can get the customer to say yes once – even to an insignificant question – it becomes easier to close a deal. Authority figures know that the first battle with conscience is difficult, but once the conscience has been silenced, everything that follows is easy.  

Are we reaching dangerous voltage levels with Bill 96? How many of our friends and neighbours have been harmed by restrictions or cuts? How many of us have heard and seen things that felt wrong?

Doctors and nurses have muttered that new language laws complicate and confuse their work. Who is better able to evaluate what is better for patients and healthcare workers, the people on the ground or authority figures in Quebec City? And what if complicated, confusing directives are not only harming Quebec’s citizens, but are also harming Quebec’s French language, culture and reputation?       

If the authorities will not revise flawed laws, or repeal them, then the human conscience must find the courage to resist cold-blooded social engineering.

Guy Rex Rodgers was founding Executive Director of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) until returning to filmmaking. You can reach Guy at: GRR.Montrealer@gmail.com

* Ville de Gaspé –  Important Notice to the English-speaking Community /Avis important à notre population Anglophone (November 2024)

Cold blooded social engineering Read More »

Winter is coming and microbes can track it

By Pooja Sainarayan

Local Journalism Initiative

As the seasons change, plants and animals all over the northern hemisphere have begun preparing for the cold winter months ahead. Using environmental cues, these multicellular organisms have complex proteins and the ability to form memories in order to sense the coming of the cold season. Interestingly, this ability to anticipate and prepare for the winter is not limited to complex organisms. Biologists have recently shown that at least one type of bacterium, the cyanobacteria, is capable of its own seasonal response, suggesting that this behaviour is a very innate and fundamental property of life.

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae are photosynthetic microscopic organisms that arise naturally in lakes, ponds, rivers and streams. The oldest known fossil dated 3.5 billion years old coming from Archaean rocks of western Australia are cyanobacteria. Considering that the oldest rocks are relatively only a litter older (3.8 billion years old), the cyanobacteria are indeed one of the oldest life forms on Earth. Since life was completely anerobic during the evolution of cyanobacteria, it is believed that these bacteria were directly responsible for the wiping out of anaerobic organisms and eventually resulting in The Great Oxidation event. The release of oxygen by these photosynthetic organisms was responsible for the earth’s atmospheric makeup, the origin of aerobic metabolism and ultimately, the evolution of multicellular organisms. It would not be wrong to say that we owe our existence to cyanobacteria. Although cyanobacteria helped to form and sustain our oxygen-filled atmosphere, its overgrowth, also known as “cyanobacteria bloom” can result in concentrations of toxins that are unsafe to the environment and living things. Of note, not all blue-green algae blooms are toxic. The reasons behind why some blooms produce toxins at any given time is not completely understood, which is why it is probably safe to avoid them altogether.

Cyanobacteria cells contain certain proteins that allow for photoperiod recognition. These proteins fall under the Kai family of proteins and are called KaiA, KaiB and KaiC, used by these bacteria to sense the hours of sunlight and darkness in a given day, called photoperiod. A group of researchers at Vanderbilt University hypothesized that the cyanobacteria’s photoperiod sensing may also extend to sense seasonal changes. To test this, the scientists grew cyanobacteria on a dish with summer-, intermediate- and winter- like conditions and then took cells from each condition to place into either a bucket of ice (0°C) or an incubator (30°C) for 2 hours. Afterwards, the cells were transferred back into the dish (30°C) to multiply for 5 days. The researchers measured the amount of cells that grew from the ice bucket versus the incubator and found that the cyanobacteria which were subjected to shorter photoperiod were up to three times better at surviving winter-like temperatures compared to those subjected to longer photoperiods. In addition, by removing the Kai-proteins and repeating the same experiments, the researchers demonstrated that the cyanobacteria could sense the shortening of days and prepare for the cold weather.

It is known that some cells can modify their fat composition on their cell walls to preserve their structure during colder temperatures. To understand whether a similar biochemical mechanism was occurring in the cyanobacteria, researchers chemically extracted the fats in the cells of cyanobacteria grown in winter conditions and measured the composition of these fats. This confirmed that the cells grown under the winter photoperiod conditions indeed increased their unsaturated fats to protect the integrity of their cell walls and avoid freezing. To sum it up, cyanobacteria rely on daily timekeeping to sense the shortening of days in order to biochemically prepare for the seasonal changes, known as photoperiodism. As photoperiodism was never observed in bacteria before, the researchers theorize that this ability likely evolved longer than we had previously thought and may even exist in other microorganisms.

The researchers also found that different genes were being used depending on the length of daylight. For instance, colder winter months brought about genes that increased metabolism to counteract the slower metabolic activity during winter. During the summer, genes implicated in protection against sun damage came into play. Apart from extending this research to other types of microorganisms and their ability to sense the seasons, it could also be particularly useful in detecting whether microorganisms responsible for toxic blooms can predict seasonal changes and to study the timing of these blooms to better control them. Further research into understanding photoperiodism in algae may serve to protect water habitats during blooms.

Winter is coming and microbes can track it Read More »

Call for local governance in Memphrémagog health care

By William Crooks

Local Journalism Initiative

In a passionate call to action, Jean-Guy Gingras, co-president of the Vigilance Committee on Health and Social Services for the MRC Memphrémagog (CVSSSM), has urged Santé Québec to reinstate local governance for health services. His appeal, bolstered by a detailed letter co-signed by key municipal leaders and health advocates, highlights the inadequacies of centralized decision-making, particularly in rural and aging communities.

Strong local governance once ensured quality care

“Before the Barrette reform, our hospital operated very well,” Gingras said in a recent interview. “Services were efficient, staff were motivated, and the community felt involved.” He contrasted this period with the challenges following centralization, which he claims has negatively impacted services in the region.

The Barrette reform centralized control under the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS in Sherbrooke, removing local oversight. Gingras highlighted that the reform has led to a loss of efficiency and responsiveness. Decisions, he said, are now made far from the communities they affect, undermining the quality of care.

Lack of flexibility harms vulnerable populations

The committee’s recent letter, dated Nov. 23, further explains these issues. It cites examples of patients needing to travel to Sherbrooke for care that could be provided locally and of specialized services such as geriatrics being discontinued. “We’re the most aging region in Quebec,” Gingras pointed out. “Yet services for seniors, like geriatrics, have not been restored despite promises.”

The letter emphasizes that rural areas like Potton and Sainte-Catherine-de-Hatley face unique challenges. Residents often lack access to reliable transportation, making centralized services inaccessible. Furthermore, decisions made at a regional level fail to consider the diverse socio-economic and linguistic needs of the MRC’s population.

Services deteriorate under centralization

Both Gingras and the letter point to specific examples of declining services. In the interview, Gingras noted that hospital facilities remain underutilized due to staffing shortages. “We have entire floors waiting to be renovated, but no progress is being made,” he said. Specialized services like orthopedics and neonatology are no longer available locally, forcing residents to travel.

The letter echoes these concerns, describing the “siloed management” that has arisen under centralization. Each service now reports to its regional director rather than functioning as part of an integrated local team. This approach, it argues, has eroded the overall quality of care.

Structural issues outweigh individual efforts

While acknowledging the goodwill of current CIUSSS management, Gingras maintains that the problem lies in the centralized structure itself. “We need someone local who’s accountable and knows the community,” he said. He recalled a time when the director of the local hospital was a well-known figure, attending community events and directly engaging with residents.

The letter elaborates on this point, arguing that local governance fosters a sense of belonging and attentiveness among staff. It questions the feasibility of a central office in Sherbrooke managing hospitals across seven municipalities while also overseeing a major university hospital.

Community-driven advocacy

The CVSSSM, formed in 2017, includes health professionals, community organizations, municipal leaders, and residents. All members, except for elected officials, volunteer their time. The committee meets monthly with CIUSSS leadership to address issues, but Gingras emphasized that these efforts can only go so far without structural change.

In the interview, Gingras highlighted the importance of community engagement. “Residents with concerns can contact us directly,” he said, adding that the committee relies on public input to identify pressing issues. “We’re here to ensure that problems are addressed and don’t escalate.”

A call for action

The letter to Santé Québec was addressed to Geneviève Biron, president and CEO, and Christiane Germain, chair of the board. It was also copied to key figures, including local MP Gilles Bélanger. In it, the CVSSSM requests a meeting to present their case for local governance.

Gingras expressed hope that this advocacy would lead to meaningful change. “Our ultimate goal is to bring decision-making back to the local level,” he said. The committee believes that establishing local governance would not only improve care but also restore community trust in the healthcare system.

Looking forward

The centralization of healthcare services has sparked debate across Quebec, with regions like the Outaouais and Abitibi-Témiscamingue facing similar issues. As the Santé Québec agency begins its mandate, the voices from Memphrémagog add to the growing demand for a more decentralized approach.

Gingras reiterated the urgency of the matter. “This isn’t just about healthcare,” he said. “It’s about ensuring that the people of our region are treated with the dignity and care they deserve.”

Call for local governance in Memphrémagog health care Read More »

Trump 2.0

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

In hindsight, the first Trump presidency playbook is easy to read: Step #1: Gut punch. Step #2: Waiting for your response.

The 2.0 playbook is shaping up. The threat of tariffs directed at us is not a one-off. Trump is nothing if not an equal-opportunity bully. Trump’s 2.0 Day 1 to-do list is long, but Canada has to respond to only a few of the directives. Unless our opinion is sought, we have nothing to do with rolling back protection of transgender students from discrimination, reshaping the US federal government by firing thousands of employees, halting wind projects, rolling back targets that encourage the switch to electric cars, or abolishing standards for companies to become more environmentally friendly. Nor do we have to consider options for ending the Ukraine-Russia war, firing Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted federal cases against him, starting the mass deportation of illegal migrants, pardoning people who were arrested during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 or dealing with Hamas.

All these are on the Day 1 list, and while some can be accomplished immediately by executive order, others need the approval of Congress and still others will take months and years for the Trump administration to put the apparatus in place to accomplish the task.

Our Prime Minister is, as of this date, paying mucho attention to the stuff that’s important to our economic wellbeing, namely, tariffs, national security, trade, fossil fuels and the US dollar. These are also on the Day 1 list, which is why the president-elect is starting early, before he’s officially president. He’s busy and expecting to be busier.

That being said, let’s look at the issues in no particular order. They’re all of long-standing importance to the president-elect and all interconnected.

  1. He wants the US to be self-sufficient in energy — as a climate change skeptic, Trump sees greater value in the US’s as-yet-unexploited fossil fuels than in the transition to cleaner energy. Canada can help in several ways. First, we can point out that as a time-honored trade partner, the vast amount of oil and gas we religiously send to the US each year is almost as good as made in the USA. We can point out that because of the vast amount of electricity we send to America – mainly New England, New York, the Midwestern states, and the Pacific Northwest — not only will Americans not freeze in the dark, but it’s also clean energy. We can either offer to help develop fossil fuels via pipelines or something else or offer our views on climate change and the need to transition.
  2. Trump sees trade not as a mutually beneficial exchange but as a zero-sum game — a “win” for the US means a loss for others. If others benefit, it must come at the expense of the US. Hence a trade deficit is a bad thing. Canada is way down the list of countries the US owes. China, the ten southeast Asian states that make up Asean, and Mexico are at the top of the list. Canada’s job is to keep this perspective in view along with the fact that what we export to the US is for the most part totally integrated into American refining and manufacturing facilities. Hence it can be truly said that when Canada exports petroleum and natural gas, auto parts and other components to the US, it is contributing to the protection of American jobs.
  3. The president-elect wants the US dollar to remain the strongest currency in the world and the world’s reserve currency. The US dollar has held this primacy since before World War II and is in no danger of losing it. The BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates) angered Trump by saying it’s fed up with America’s dominance of the global financial system. Hence the tariff threat against them. Canada’s role is to reiterate that our trade with the United States is settled in US dollars and that there is zero possibility the Canadian dollar will ever be a threat.
  4. If the US agrees to be in an alliance, Trump expects everyone to pay their fair share of the cost. Trump is not a fan of alliances, preferring to go it alone. He wants to deal with the few alliances the US is in: trade alliances like CUSMA (the Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement or as the US prefers USMCA); defence alliances of which NATO is the most prominent. Besides these, the US and Canada have several national security agreements, which include defense, immigration, and law enforcement. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) provides for aerospace warning, aerospace control and maritime warning for all of North America. The Safe Third Country Agreement is to manage refugee access at the Canada–US land border; cross-border crime agreements are to exchange information on immigration and visa applicants and to work together to counter crime.

Tariff threats against us are linked specifically to these agreements. Canada has to come clean where it has fumbled the ball. We need to present a plan which closes the gap between where we are and where we should be. For NATO, that means getting to 2-3 percent of GDP asap. For NORAD it means stepping up our presence in the Arctic – China and Russia are already there. For the other agreements, it means demonstrating that Canadian border security has already been stepped up in response to the growing numbers of illegal migrants and drugs crossing the border, while acknowledging that border security needs tightening and more coordination with US Border Control.

For the president-in-waiting, threatening or activating tariffs will bring any of the above issues into sharp focus of a trading partner. Whether threatening or activating, the nature of the relationship will change, with the partner either changing behavior or losing more than the US. Team Canada is now fleshing out the nitty-gritty of policy possibilities that will placate the head of the world’s most powerful nation, a nation that has leverage over virtually every other and a president with little compunction about using it. That’s all we need to know about Trump 2.0. That and a sentiment the President-elect expressed in a Time magazine interview last April: He said he made a crucial mistake in his first term: he was too nice. “I don’t think I’ll do that again…” 

Cohendian560@gmail.com

Trump 2.0 Read More »

Can you dig it? Be glad you never had to.

There’s probably an old copper mine not far from where you are right now.

By Maurice Crossfield

Local Journalism Initiative

I’ve held a lot of different jobs over the years, each with its own inherent dangers, upsides and downsides. Truck driver in a quarry: check. Newspaper reporter: check. Forestry worker: check. Auto mechanic: check. But I’m really glad that I never had to venture underground to dig copper ore with a hand shovel.

In fact, most people living in the Townships these days have no idea that the region was once Canada’s cradle of copper production. Not to mention iron, lead, silver, and to a much lesser extent, gold. Yes, there’s gold in them thar hills, just not enough to pay off your mortgage.

When the first non-native settlers arrived in the region, their main concern was all the trees. They were pretty much everywhere, and most of them were very large. Pretty to look at, at least at first, but they tended to get in the way of more typical European pursuits, like planting crops, raising animals or having a back yard. So those early decades were all about the endless supply of trees. I’m sure many a pioneer went just about wiggy trying to clear enough land to survive.

With a few clear spots here and there, folks started to gain an appreciation of the land itself. In Brome Township, in what would eventually become known as Iron Hill, deposits of rough iron ore were found. Metal of any sort being in short supply, folks rigged up a way to smelt it into pig iron.

But the first real mining boom was in the 1850s, with a significant find in Leeds Township. That brought out the geologists, both professional and amateur, in search of what lay under the forest floor. Within a few short years large deposits of copper were discovered in Ascot, Bolton and Acton, while numerous smaller deposits were found scattered across the Townships.

Then the American Civil War erupted and with it the demand for copper. Albert and Capelton Mines opened in 1863, later expanding operations into chemicals, explosives and fertilizer.

For the average, relatively new settler, life was isolated and rough. While land was cheap, almost everything else was expensive and hard to get. And money was even harder to come by. The Townships was a nice place to live, if you could eke out a living. For the 200 men and boys who worked at the Capelton Mine they had a one-hour hike up to the entrance, followed by a 12-hour workday, in near total darkness except for the candlelight on the brim of their felt hats. No safety gear here. On the upside, the hour long walk back home was downhill. Oh, you got to have Sundays off, and you earned a whopping $1.10 a day.

And for them, this was their best option for making a living. Sit with that thought for a moment.

There were a few progressive ideas for the workplace: You could only start working in the mine once you hit the ripe old age of 14, and the newcomers got the job of bringing the toilet carts up to the surface. Meanwhile your little brothers and sisters worked down the hill, sorting the copper ore from the rocks. But you were still better off than the pit ponies used to bring the ore to the surface, who would eventually go blind from spending too many hours in near total darkness.

In short, it was dirty, dangerous, backbreaking, soul crushing work. The air was constantly humid, filled with dust and chemicals. Picks and shovels deafened their users and crippled their hands. And at any moment the ceiling could collapse, ruining your felt hat and whatever was under it. Life expectancy? Your best shot was the afterlife.

But the good times wouldn’t last. Capelton and Albert Mines closed in 1907, while Eustis, one of the deepest mines in the world at the time, held on until 1939. Over near Eastman the Huntingdon Mine opened in 1865, closed in 1883, then reopened in 1890 for another three years, and then from 1912 to 1924. The Quebec Copper Corporation reopened the site in the 1950’s, but the ore was too hard to reach to be profitable.

I really do think that we live in the best time to be alive. For the most part the good old days were never that good. And the next time you feel your financial belt cinching as you struggle to make the next car payment, give a thought to those who came before. And be grateful you never had to send your eight-year-old to sort rocks in a dusty shack.

Makes me feel pretty safe and warm in my garbage truck.

Can you dig it? Be glad you never had to. Read More »

To rake or not to rake?

By Pooja Sainarayan

Local Journalism Initiative

Leaf raking is often a topic of debate amongst many homeowners. Is it necessary? Are there any benefits to leaving the leaves and letting nature take its course? Can raking the lawn wait until spring or is it better done during the fall season? Let’s take a closer look at the ecology behind raking.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, raking our leaves does far more damage than good. In addition to robbing the lawn of essential nutrients, raking disrupts the wildlife habitat and important environmental cycles. In one article from the National Wildlife Federation, naturalist David Mizejewski describes how leaves create a natural mulch that prevents weed growth and enriches the soil as it breaks down.  Nature’s mulch is a much better alternative to spending money on mulch and fertilizer. In addition, raking can disrupt various wildlife habitats that rely on leaves for food and shelter. Pollinators such as butterflies and moths rely on leaf litter for nesting before emerging in spring. Birds also go through leaf litter to find food for their young ones. In cases where leaves are not composted, sending leaves to landfills increases greenhouse gas emissions worsening climate change. According to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 8.7 million tons of yard matter, including leaves, were disposed of in landfills in 2017, totaling approximately 6 percent of all waste in landfills. Combined with other organic waste, they can break down and release methane, a strong greenhouse gas. As leaves do smother the lawn, the National Wildlife Federation recommends replacing stretches of lawn with planting beds consisting of native plants and using leaves as mulch. Instead of throwing leaves away, let them stay where they’ve fallen and when needed, compost them or use as mulch in existing gardens.

While raking may help the ecosystem flourish, it may not be the solution to a well-kept lawn. The most significant benefit of raking is to help the grass grow. A thick bed of leaves will deprive the lawn from breathing and getting enough sunlight, thereby inhibiting the growth of grass. In addition, leaves piling on the lawn can promote snow mold diseases which can kill grass in the winter and early spring. When the mold spores get released in the air, it can negatively impact human health, especially those with mold sensitivities and allergies. Ticks and the presence of other animals like mice can also increase with large leaf beds, which can cause damage. Leaves left on walkways or decks for long periods of time can stain these areas. The best time to rake leaves is during autumn, when leaves are dry prior to the first frost or snow fall. Some homeowners prefer raking as the leaves fall in batches during the season while others wait until all the leaves have touched ground before picking up a rake. Although both are acceptable options, it comes down to the quantity of deciduous trees and the rate at which leaves collect on the yard during the fall season. Spring raking is also recommended as this loosens up any areas of matted grass that did not survive the winter or succumbed to mold.  If this is not taken care of, these dead areas create thatch. Thatch buildup occurs when organic debris in the soil accumulates faster than microbes can break it down.

Although excessive leaf beds on the lawn may smother it, some leaf coverage is perfectly alright. Homeowners can find some middle ground between what is good for the lawn as well as the ecosystem. One way is to rake less often and mow the lawn instead to chop leaves up. In addition to providing nitrogen and other organic matter to the grass, this will maintain soil moisture and protect root systems. The local wildlife can also benefit from the leaf litter remnants. If the leaf layers are too thick, try using a leaf blower to move the piles for later use as compost or mulch in garden beds as much as possible. If the leaves are already on your garden beds or near shrubs or bushes, leave them be. They will break down and be an excellent source of mulch come spring. If surrounding the head of perennial plants, make sure to move those away. If possible, redistribute the leaves along your yard’s perimeter close to wooded areas or in areas where it’s not a bother for local wildlife. As important as it is not to send leaves to the landfill, it is also important not to burn leaves as this can release toxic chemicals such as carbon monoxide.

To rake or not to rake? Read More »

Rocking the solitudes

Photo courtesy

Does it matter if we don’t know the ‘other’ culture’s stars?

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Boomers will be boomers. Give us a name-brand musician from the 1960s or 1970s, and we flock to the concert halls. Whether it’s vintage James Taylor or Pink Floyd or whoever (Who-ever?) at the Bell Centre, I’ve seen ’em all. Or at least, the most memorable ones.

Another music-nostalgia date came on Thanksgiving weekend at the U de Sherbrooke cultural centre. And what an evening it was!

Robert Charlebois has been a rockin’ dynamo since I was a teenager in the 1970s. He somehow found a place on our after-school turn-table rotation beside the Stones, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield and David Bowie.

A fun and inventive musician, Charlebois in his prime was as big in Quebec as Céline Dion ever was, but he never “crossed over” to the English market.

His show prompted me to muse about Quebec and Canada and the bicultural dream.

—Is that overdone, or even possible?

First, Charlebois live

The 80-something Charlebois retains his full voice and range and he pranced about the stage, Mick Jagger-like, in a trim black outfit.

A dynamic performer, his repertory varies between soft, heartfelt ballads and quick, witty rockers. As a songwriter, Charlebois often collaborated with poet and novelist Réjean Ducharme, whose colloquial lyrics often slide into an impenetrable joual.

Always inventive, Charlebois used instruments and symbols in novel ways: at one point he played a nickel-plated guitar, and famously wore a Canadiens sweater under his full head of curls.

In October, he covered many trademark hits, from wistful air-travel fantasies Je Reviens à Montréal and Lindbergh! to the barroom comic-opera Cauchemar. But I missed other favourites like Entre Deux Joints and Demain l’Hiver, a rave about fleeing our winters to Florida.

Charlebois was at his peak in the 1970s, when his eclectic style fit urban Quebec like a glove. Sure enough, this large 2024 crowd was entirely francophone Boomers.  Was I the only anglo? Sure felt like it.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Quebec generated iconic stars in several fields. Somehow, they emerged in series of three. Sports heroes Rocket Richard, then Jean Béliveau and finally Guy Lafleur each embodied their era.  In parallel, three top chansonniers sang out French Quebec’s dreams: Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, then Charlebois.

Lafleur and Charlebois personified the turbulent Quebec of the ‘70s, and each could bring a Montreal Forum crowd to its feet with electrifying performances.

Cultures interact

In the early 1970s, there was an authentic bicultural moment in Montreal. CHOM-FM was a magnet for Montreal teenagers and CEGEP students, and listeners there regularly heard Offenbach, Harmonium and Charlebois alongside Genesis, Gentle Giant and the Moody Blues.

But the CRTC put an end to that, ruling that FM music stations basically had to stick to their language and not infringe on other stations’ niches.

English Canadian interest was generally light. Does anyone listen dutifully to the stars of the “other” culture? Sometimes this did work, in Montreal at least, as seen in the cross-cultural fan bases for Leonard Cohen or Céline Dion.

More recent stars have appealed to all comers, like 2024 Juno winner Charlotte Cardin. (Checking into a hotel in Baltimore this year, a clerk looked at my ID and chirped: “Oh, Canadian?! I love Charlotte Cardin!”)

But more frequently, bands that enthrall English Canada are unknown in Quebec, and vice versa. The 2017 death of Gord Downie of Toronto’s Tragically Hip prompted an outpouring similar to a state funeral; Justin Trudeau even gave an elegy. Quebec barely noticed. Then in 2023, Karl Tremblay, lead singer of folk-rock band Les Cowboys Fringants, passed away. It was a huge shock for Quebecers — not so much in Vancouver.

Brendan Kelly, a culture and sports critic at The Gazette, encourages anglos to try some French content: “The two communities still live in their own worlds for the most part”.

 In Montreal, “the Mile End anglo hipster alt-music community has little connection to the franco music milieu. Go see an anglo artist and the audience will be likely evenly split French and English. Go see a hot franco band … and you’ll be lucky if you find one anglo in the hall. That’s just the way it goes”, he noted resignedly in 2016.

Photo courtesy

MacLennan’s legacy

For some time, I have thought the phrase “two solitudes” was stale and tiresome.

When I hear a Toronto-based pundit use it, it sounds like a substitute for first-hand knowledge about Quebec. A cliché. Or a headline writer’s last-minute patchwork.

The phrase’s origin is clear, in Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel Two Solitudes. The source is poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other”.

The book famously begins: “Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec […. ]”.

“But down in the angle at Montreal, on the island about which [the] two rivers join, there is little sense of this new and endless space. Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side”.

The novel’s 1920s French-English romance focuses on the values clash between rural religious folk and big-city anglo moneymakers.

  • Does this sound compelling in our world today?

MacLennan commuted between his teaching job at McGill and his country home in the Townships. Today a large stele, an upright stone slab, stands in front of that property above Lake Massawippi, inscribed “Two Solitudes”.

Is this a division worth overcoming?

I worked for 15 years in Switzerland, where the Swiss live peaceably separate, each in their own language-based cantons. They are as blissfully unaware of pop culture on the “other side” of their Confederation as we are. Yet somehow, they’ve stayed together for over 700 years.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that. But I still love Charlebois.

Rocking the solitudes Read More »

Quebec municipalities debate law on council size

Photo courtesy
Jacques Demers, President of the Fédération québécoise des municipalités, discussed the new law allowing smaller municipalities to reduce council sizes, emphasizing it as an optional tool to ease recruitment challenges

Smaller councils, bigger questions

By William Crooks

Local Journalism Initiative

In an attempt to address governance challenges in Quebec’s smallest communities, a new law now permits municipalities with fewer than 2,000 residents to reduce their councils from six members to four. This option, brought to light during recent municipal discussions, has been met with both support and hesitation across various regions. Fédération québécoise des municipalités (FMQ) President Jacques Demers explained in an Oct. 30 interview that the change aims to provide an option, not an obligation, for smaller towns struggling to fill council positions.

“We put it in there to allow municipalities that want to do it, to have the option,” Demers said, noting that no municipality is required to reduce its council. “It’s really just a tool that was given.”

An optional tool for small communities

The law, which grants towns this flexibility until Dec. 31, 2024, was driven largely by recruitment issues. Demers observed that some smaller municipalities have faced recurring difficulties in attracting new council members, often leaving council seats empty for lack of willing candidates. He attributed this challenge partly to the unique demands of small-town governance.

“In places with 300 or 400 people, council members interact much more closely with the citizens than in a town with a population of 5,000 or 10,000,” he said. This increased proximity brings added responsibilities, which, coupled with limited financial compensation—often less than $1,000 annually—can make the role less attractive.

Demers also pointed out that several towns are considering their options carefully, especially since this decision is not reversible. “I think even among those who initially requested it, some will ultimately decide not to use it,” he noted. “It’s an opportunity, but it remains to be seen which municipalities will take advantage.”

Barnston West council retains six members

Barnston West, a municipality of approximately 500 residents, is one such community weighing the decision carefully. During a conversation on the same day, Councillor Ziv Przytyk shared insights into why the town has opted to retain its six-member council. “We didn’t choose to reduce the size of our council,” Przytyk affirmed, highlighting that despite the recruitment challenges, they believe maintaining six members is beneficial.

With four council members, he suggested, decision-making can become more streamlined but at the cost of decreased representation. “It’s less representation,” he remarked, adding that while smaller councils might ease operations in some towns, Barnston West’s needs were best served by keeping the original six seats.

Przytyk highlighted a significant limitation in the new law: once a council opts for a reduction, it cannot revert to six members in future elections. “Once you go to four, you can’t go back,” he emphasized. This permanence influenced Barnston West’s decision, as community leaders want to preserve a larger representative base to address future needs and ensure a broader diversity of voices in council decisions. He added that maintaining a six-member council helps prevent potential issues like collusion.

Implications for governance

Another factor influencing municipalities’ decisions is the potential impact on council voting dynamics. Demers explained that reducing council size also shifts the requirements for achieving a majority vote. With a five-member council, three votes are needed to pass a resolution; in a four-member structure, however, a split vote could hinder decision-making.

In addition, for certain critical decisions, a pure majority may not be enough if only a few council members are present. “If we’re down to only four around the table, then the vote is only valid if all four have agreed,” Demers said, indicating that the decision to reduce council size could inadvertently create procedural challenges in municipalities accustomed to a more populated council table.

Weighing costs and community values

While cost savings are often cited as a reason for restructuring governance, Demers clarified that for the smallest municipalities, financial considerations rarely drive this decision. “For these small municipalities, if you look at the salary, it’s sometimes not even $1,000 per year,” he explained. Instead, recruitment pressures and the logistical challenges of sustaining an engaged council are the primary motivators for considering downsizing.

Some municipalities with larger populations also experience high levels of civic engagement and are unlikely to consider reducing council size. “In places where there are plenty of candidates, I’d be very surprised if anyone would think about bringing this in,” Demers said, noting that it is mainly the municipalities with persistent recruitment issues that are exploring the option.

Flexibility and autonomy at the local level

The introduction of this law aligns with broader efforts to provide Quebec’s municipalities with the flexibility needed to address local governance challenges effectively. Demers emphasized that the FMQ’s role is to advocate for resources and solutions that respect each town’s autonomy while recognizing the unique realities of smaller communities.

Looking ahead, the real impact of this legislative change will only become clear after the Dec. 31 deadline. At present, the FMQ and local leaders across Quebec are watching closely to see if any towns decide to implement the reduced council size. In the meantime, communities like Barnston West demonstrate that for some, maintaining a larger council is essential to meeting the diverse needs of their residents.

Reflecting on the future of municipal governance

As Quebec municipalities navigate these governance changes, discussions around council structure have spotlighted the evolving role of local government in rural communities. Demers acknowledged the unique position of small councils, where the proximity between officials and constituents is greater, requiring adaptability and responsiveness that larger cities may not experience in the same way.

For now, the debate on council size underscores the balancing act faced by many of Quebec’s municipalities: upholding effective representation while addressing recruitment challenges and resource limitations. Whether towns choose to reduce their councils or maintain existing structures, this legislative change allows each municipality to assess its unique needs and priorities, highlighting the FMQ’s broader goal of empowering local governance across the province.

Quebec municipalities debate law on council size Read More »

Learning (or not) from history

Photo courtesy

By Guy Rex Rodgers

Local Journalism Initiative

The 1960s were stormy years in Quebec. One of the most consequential battles of the era exploded in Saint-Léonard.  A new film by Félix Rose makes the case that La Bataille de Saint-Léonard (1968) was the impetus for Bill 101.

Félix Rose deserves full marks for archival research.  His film shows Italian parents and their children inhabiting a brand new neighbourhood rising in bushland. We see diverging visions of education that degenerate into streets battles and death threats. We see panicked politicians struggle to find a peaceful comprise, which is impossible as the crowds grow larger and angrier.  The film works hard to recreate the passions of the era. This makes for a rip-roaring film experience. Josée Legault, Journal de Montréal: Il faut courir voir « La bataille de Saint-Léonard. »

Rose’s story-telling technique is less successful for a history documentary. It does not create the space to view events and motivations from an objective distance. It does not ask new questions or listen to new voices. This is a pity because the Saint-Leonard riots were a pivotal event in Quebec’s history.

In the twenty years following the Second World War, more than 150,000 Italians migrated to Quebec, which offered the New World in a version that was strongly Catholic and where the majority spoke French, a language close to Italian. It was an attractive combination. Things didn’t work out as planned.  Quebec was in the throes of an extraordinary baby boom. Schools were full. They did not need immigrants.

Quebec’s predominant school system was Catholic and French. There was also a Protestant system, that was mostly English, and a small English-Catholic network of schools created for the Irish. Which system would make room for the thousands of new immigrants? The French Catholic system rejected non-Catholics: all the Jewish kids and the Greek Orthodox, as well as French-speaking Protestants. What about Italian kids, who were Catholic? This is where the story becomes complicated. Some Italians were accepted into French Catholic schools. Many were rejected.  Rose’s film adopts the Nationalist narrative that immigrants were to blame for rejecting French schools because English was the language of work and prosperity, while French was the language of poverty and humiliation.

Context is important. Saint-Leonard was a brand new district built by Italians and mostly populated by Italians. They left their homes in districts such as Saint-Michel, Rosemount or NDG to buy a house in Saint-Leonard. Many of the kids moving there had already attended English Catholic schools because that’s were they were sent by the neighbourhood French Catholic school. 

A new French Catholic school board was created for Saint-Leonard.  Many Italian parents enrolled their children in schools that offered a bilingual curriculum. This was a time when radio and TV stations were experimenting with bilingual programming.  Montreal was de facto bilingual, so why not bilingual schools?  It was a reasonable question then, and is still pertinent today.

The human story behind the Battle of Saint Leonard is complex.  The politics of the day reduced it to a stark duality.  On one side, a bunch of foreigners manipulated by Quebec’s hereditary enemies – the English; on the other side, Quebec’s underdogs fighting to defend their language, culture, history and soul!

The leader of the ruling Union Nationale party proposed a law to provide freedom of choice in education. Jean-Jacques Bertrand allegedly justified this solution because, ‘We fought on the Battle on the Plains of Abraham and lost….’ J-J Bertrand and the Union Nationale party lost the 1970 election and were erased from history.  Robert Bourassa’s Liberal’s gained power and passed a language law that alienated Anglos but did not placate French Nationalists. In the 1976 provincial election, a new party founded by René Levesque took power. The Parti Québécois immediately passed Bill 101.

We still do not have linguistic peace. Many Quebecers (46%) have quietly chosen to be bilingual, and that is a problem for people who insist that the only official language in Quebec is French, as if being bilingual is incompatible with speaking French and enjoying French culture. I have interviewed hundreds of Quebecers who arrived in successive waves of immigration. Most were happy to learn French… and English. Most Italians learned French, even if French schools in the pre Bill-101 era rejected them. This complex history needs to be confronted and reckoned with.  Films like La Bataille de Saint-Léonard do not help us understand why it was a mistake to villainize multilingual minorities in the past.  It is inexcusable today.

Learning (or not) from history Read More »

The $20,000 housewife

Courtesy of Dian Cohen

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

This little item appeared in the newspapers I submitted to back in 1973. Most women didn’t work outside the home, and with the average salary being around $10,000/year, this was pretty off-the-wall revolutionary.

And maybe subversive. After all, women weren’t meant to work in the real world  — being a woman meant being passive, kind, nurturing, helpful and caring – everything required for rearing children, pacifying husbands and keeping a clean and welcoming home. The women’s lib referred to in that long ago piece was in its second wave in Canada, having benefitted from the women who transformed the idea of women as natural caregivers into women holding public office to care for and civilize society. That was happening just around the time I was born. Hail to the Persons Five.  

Of course, the more masculine characteristics of problem-solving with brute force made women who went into the workforce acceptable — by 1944, more than a million women worked full-time in Canada’s paid labour force. Many women expressed the view that after the war, they should be trained or retrained for jobs on the same basis as men and that household workers should receive labor benefits like unemployment insurance. Not to be. Five years after the war ended, more than half a million women were back at home.

The same equity suggestions were raised decades later in the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. It was not as widely promoted as a stunningly bold advertising campaign that touted smoking as the key to female empowerment, independence, confidence and liberation. To this day, a lot more of us know the phrase “you’ve come a long way, baby” than what was accomplished by the Royal Commission. (Women couldn’t open a bank account, get a credit card or a mortgage without a male co-signer. The Royal Commission made this illegal.)

Women’s rights legislation has continued onward and upward – the Canadian Human Rights Charter, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Employment Equity Act, Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act, Pay Equity Act. They undoubtedly helped — in the ‘70s, about 3 million women were in the workforce and the pay gap was close to 40 percent.   Today, there are 10 million women in the paid workforce, still a participation rate that is less than men, and now earning, on average, 12 percent less than men.

To understand why the gap remains, we need go no further than Harvard professor Claudia Goldin. She’s now 77 and has spent her whole working life filling in the data gaps and misconceptions about women in the work force – for which she received the Nobel Prize in economics last year.  Canadian data is not as detailed but supports Goldin’s conclusions. Here’s what we now know: back in the day, the wage gap can be explained through differences in education and occupational choices – since women were expected to stay at home, they didn’t get as much education, and those that did paid work did it in ‘domestic’ professions like looking after children or housecleaning, which were lower-paying jobs.

Courtesy Philip Morris/Leo Burnett Agency – one of 356 images in series

More recently, women in general are more educated than men. The pay differences between men and women in the same profession have more to do with lifestyle choices. The wage gap widens after the birth of the first child. Women still do most of the unpaid caregiving so they still take more time off from work. Their career path has gaps and they make less. Interestingly, while mothers make less than non-mothers because they work less, fathers make more than non-fathers over the course of their careers.

Couples make these choices together. Employers pay a premium now for people who will be on call 24/7. Many couples find it makes sense for fathers to respond to the needs of paid work and mothers to answer to the needs of kids. Goldin says, “Why can’t dual-career families share the joys and duties of parenting equally? They could, but if they did, they would be leaving money on the table, often quite a lot. The 50-50 couple might be happier but would be poorer.” (A small, aside: now that men get paternity leave, a study out of Spain provides evidence that while women take “maternity leave full-time and immediately after childbirth, men split their leave entitlement into several periods that are spread out during the first year of the child’s life, with a significant spike in the summer months… We find that a disproportionate number of men were on paternity leave during the exact dates of the 2022 soccer World Cup, relative to the surrounding dates.” Do men really do more caregiving?)

Were I to write the article today, I would note that the shape of paid work is changing – remote and online work play to women’s strengths. Otherwise, not much is different. Unpaid housewives still work about 15 hours a day – about 100 hours a week. Their tasks have expanded beyond what I could think of 50 years ago: Salary.com lists chief financial officer, chief operating officer, logistics analyst, housekeeper, laundry manager, van driver, public school teacher, facilities manager, event planner, kitchen manager, assistant athletics director, staff nurse, bookkeeper, physical therapy supervisor, nutrition director, consumer loan officer, fast food cook, server, conflicts manager, interior designer, fundraising coordinator. According to several different surveys, the value of this unpaid work has risen to around $190,000/year.

Cohendian560@gmail.com

The $20,000 housewife Read More »

Aviation firsts in the Eastern Townships

Photo courtesy
Watching the airship, Sherbrooke Exposition 1907

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

Most people familiar with the Eastern Townships know that Bombardier, one of the largest civilian aircraft manufacturers in the world, was founded in the town of Valcourt in 1942. What is perhaps less well known is the fact that residents of the Eastern Townships were often among the first people in Canada to witness several aviation firsts in this country. Indeed, starting in the middle of the 19th century local citizens followed the exploits, and accidents, of early “aeronauts” with the same attention that the first astronauts were watched more than 100 years later.

In August, 1856 Eugène Godard, a famous French aeronaut, arrived in Montreal following a tour of the United States. He placed advertisements for seamstresses in local newspapers and, using their labour, oversaw the fabrication of the first balloon made in Canada at that city’s Bonsecours Market. Aptly named “Canada” the craft was 42 feet (12.8 metres) in diameter and had a capacity of 36,860 cubic feet (1044 cubic metres). Using this balloon Godard made three flights from Montreal during the month of September, including the first flight to carry any passengers in Canada when, on Sept. 8, Godard went aloft with three men and floated eastwards from Montreal to the little parish of Saint Mathias near the town of Chambly. While Godard and his balloon never made it closer to the Eastern Townships than the Richelieu River residents of the region were nonetheless deeply interested in his exploits of the air and followed them long after he departed Quebec. In March, 1859, for example, the Sherbrooke Times carried a fascinating story about a Godard expedition in Belgium wherein the unfortunate pioneer found himself being assaulted by a dissatisfied customer 5,000 feet over the countryside.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Crewed flight finally came to the Eastern Townships in early September, 1888 when Professor William Hogan of Jackson, Michigan was contracted by the organizers of the Sherbrooke Exposition to make two balloon ascents during the fair. In addition to performing a trapeze act from a bar hanging beneath his balloon Hogan also made what was almost certainly the first-ever parachute descent in the Province of Quebec (and only the second-even in Canada) from over the fairgrounds on September 4 when he jumped from a height of almost 6,000 feet and floated to the ground.

Following Hogan’s breathtaking performance ballooning became a regular attraction at the Sherbrooke Exposition and by the early 1890s another famous aeronaut, Professor Charles Walcott, was a regular visitor to the region demonstrating both his balloon and his dare-devil parachute jumps from it. At times he also performed “parachute races” from his balloon to the ground with his partner Nellie LeMount. Walcott was a star attraction to the 1894 Sherbrooke Exposition, at which time he also assisted local businessman Seth Nutter, who went on the found the Silver Spring Brewery, by distributing thousands of Nutter’s business cards by throwing them from his balloon as he floated over the townships. Sadly, in October, 1895 Walcott was seriously injured during a parachuting accident in Venezuela where he shattered his ankles and pelvis and broke a femur, several ribs and his spine, thus demonstrating the danger of early excursions into the sky.

The Sherbrooke Exposition was once again the showcase for new flight technology when Lincoln Beachey, an American aviation pioneer, made the first dirigible flight anywhere in Canada on Sept. 4, 1907. Residents and visitors alike were enthralled with Beachey’s machine, with the Montreal Gazette reporting that Beachey took off from the fairgrounds and “sailed over the city for a distance of about a mile and a half and returned again to the grounds. He then circled around the grounds a couple of times, steering his ship first in one direction, then directly in the opposite, demonstrating his perfect control of it.”

Courtesy BANQ
George Mestach c1907

On Jan. 26, 1912 it was announced that the planning committee of the Eastern Townships Agricultural Association had secured the attendance of noted French aviator George Mestach and his Borel monoplane at its upcoming fall exhibition. This was at a time when most Canadians had yet to see an airplane and there was much excitement about the prospects of seeing such a craft. While this would be the first plane to fly over the Eastern Townships it was actually not to be the first airplane to visit the area. In mid-July, 1912 an airplane owned by American aviator Harry Atwood was towed through the region behind an automobile (itself a relatively new sight) on its way from Montreal to Newport, Vermont.

In what was clearly the highlight of Sherbrooke’s 1912 exposition, residents and visitors finally got to witness Mestach’s aircraft take flight from East Sherbrooke on Monday, Sept. 2. It was eagerly reported that “His machine sailed high in the air in front of the grandstand, and was absolutely under control of the airman at the helm. He circles round and round, and finally came to ground without the least trouble.” The flight on Sept. 3 was even more spectacular as Mestach flew over the city, allowing thousands of people not at the fairgrounds to witness his craft. Leaving Sherbrooke three days later Mestach proceeded to Montreal where he engaged in a two mile (3.2 kilometre)  race with an automobile and a motorcycle. 

While the pace of aeronautical innovation may appear to have slowed since the early days of the Sherbrooke Exhibition there are still people in this area who reach for the heights just as the first aeronauts did more than 100 years ago. Sherbrooke native Vincent Beaudry, for example, was among the top 32 candidates for the latest round of astronaut selection by the Canadian Space Agency in 2017. Later, in 2022, University of Sherbrooke scientist Myrian Lemelin received funding from the Canadian Space Agency for a project to look for water-ice on the south pole of the moon. In this way people from the Eastern Townships continue to stand at the forefront of modern aviation, even at it carries us away from this earth.

Photo courtesy
Montreal Gazette, August 14, 1907, p. 7

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Courageous, cowardly or just more confusion?

Photo courtesy

By Guy Rex Rodgers

Local Journalism Initiative

Let’s start with courage. Full marks to citizens who raised their voices against this summer’s bizarre 31-page health ‘directive’ that made it sound like it was necessary to hire a team of lawyers or win a bureaucratic lottery to qualify for healthcare in English. The brave citizens deserve full marks for courage because they were accused, as has been the typical response in the era of Bill-96 against anyone who questions the new language laws, of being part of an elitist, Quebec-bashing, Anglo cabal.

Our elected members of the National Assembly also demonstrated courage by unanimously affirming that English-speaking Quebecers don’t need a certificate to prove they’re entitled to English-language education in order to receive health care and social services in English. No conditions. Period.

Liberal MNAs exposed themselves to the serious political risk of reaffirming their public image as the party controlled by an elitist, Quebec-bashing Anglo cabal. CAQ and PQ MNAs exposed themselves to the serious political risk of being branded hypocrites who are easily manipulated to abandon Quebec’s official language and culture.

Prime Minister Trudeau and Premier Legault can also claim to have made courageous stands. Prime Minister Trudeau, after ignoring Bill 96 and its disturbing ramifications and after abandoning Quebec’s minority English-speaking community while rewriting the federal Official Languages Act, finally spoke out against Bill 96’s negative impact. The cynical could suspect his primary motivation in speaking up for minorities was to earn votes in an important by-election in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun. Prime Minister Trudeau’s ‘too-little-too-late’ courageous stand was rewarded with a by-election vote of no confidence.

What can we say about Premier Legault’s response to Prime Minister Trudeau’s accusation? Did Premier Legault courageously set the record straight?  Or was he blowing smoke out of both sides of his mouth to create a distracting cloud of confusion?  

Health Minister Dubé displayed courage in writing a succinct, relatively clear health directive on September 20.  So what was the purpose of the lengthy, convoluted and disturbing health directive issued by Language Minster Roberge two months earlier, which has now been repudiated?

Have these new statements ended the confusion?

Alas, no.

Forgive me for being cynical. But I have been watching and listening to the CAQ government justify Bill 96 for three years now. The right to work and live in French is primordial. The right to services in English is conditional. The CAQ have made it clear that their end game is to restrict English-language education to ‘historic Anglos’ who can obtain an eligibility certificate. The CAQ have also made it clear they want to restrict all government services to ‘historic Anglos’ plus recent immigrants, but only during their first six months in Quebec. The plan behind Bill 96 has been perfectly clear and loudly trumpeted. But now Premier Legault and the National Assembly assure us that anybody and everybody will receive health services in English, without condition or qualification. How is this coherent with the rest of Bill 96? How are these ‘feel good’ affirmations credible?

During the past few years we have heard, from the highest levels of government, that Quebec is being turned into Louisiana north by too much English on public signs and spoken on the streets. The government is even spending millions to eradicate the monosyllable ‘hi’ that has offended shoppers. We have been told that Quebec must become entirely French, and that this work of purification must be implemented in an exemplary manner by all government departments and agencies.

Where did this lead? In the realm of healthcare it led us – predictably – into a head-on collision of clashing-rights. It is quite possible for healthcare workers to believe they have the right to work only in French and to believe that by serving non-Francophones only in French they are actually helping them integrate into the new Quebec that Bill 96 is designed to create. It is also easy to believe stories about healthcare workers taking an English-speaking patient into a private room and whispering to them in English because they are afraid of being reported by colleagues for breaking the language law.

It was shocking for minorities that Bill 96 invoked the notwithstanding clause to circumvent their Charter rights. Now it is equally shocking for supporters of Bill 96 that Premier Legault and the National Assembly have declared that access to English-language health services will not be subjected to a single condition or qualification. Clashing rights – like the right to work in one language and the obligation to provide services in another – need a clear framework, not an improvised response to bad PR.

This isolated ‘clarification’ has only added to the confusion.

 Guy Rex Rodgers

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Phelps Helps reflects on the fight against systemic barriers to education

Photo courtesy
Katie Lowry, Executive Director of Phelps Helps, poses with a group of students who participated in the organization’s youth committee, a program designed to foster leadership and life skills through community events.

By William Crooks

Local Journalism Initiative

Just days after Quebec’s “Journée du Refus de l’Échec Scolaire” , a day that focuses on school success, Sept. 25, Katie Lowry, executive director of Phelps Helps, sat down to reflect on the progress made and the challenges that still lie ahead. The annual event, organized by the “Regroupement des organismes communautaires québécois de lutte au décrochage” (ROCLD), is aimed at raising awareness of the systemic barriers that continue to impede educational success for many Quebec students.

“The ‘Journée du Refus de l’Échec Scolaire’ is a chance to focus on the bigger picture,” Lowry said during a Sept. 27  interview. “Kids don’t drop out of school because they’re not motivated or because they aren’t trying hard enough. There are deeper issues at play, and we need to address those if we want to see real change.”

Barriers to success in Stanstead

Phelps Helps, a community organization based in Stanstead, has been on the front lines of this fight for over a decade. Founded in response to the alarmingly high dropout rates in the area, the organization now serves 400 participants annually, reaching one in three youth in the region.

“When we started, only about 50 per cent of students in Stanstead were graduating from high school,” Lowry explained. “By 2021, that number had improved by 21 per cent, but the pandemic set things back. We’ve seen how hard-hit families have been, especially with rising inflation, and it’s having a direct impact on students.” Across Quebec, the dropout rate has risen by 2.5 per cent since the pandemic, and disadvantaged youth are feeling the brunt of the pressure.

One of the most significant barriers to education in rural areas like Stanstead is transportation. “Our kids are spending an hour to an hour and a half on the bus each day,” Lowry said. “For a student who’s already struggling, that long commute can make it even harder to stay motivated.”

Additionally, economic factors play a major role. “We know that kids from low-income families often start the school year already behind. If you don’t have the school supplies you need, or you’re coming to school hungry, you’re at a disadvantage from day one,” she said.

A broader solution: Community involvement

For Lowry, the solution lies in stronger collaboration between schools, families, and community organizations like Phelps Helps. “The schools can’t do it all on their own,” she emphasized. “Teachers are doing their best, but they’re under a lot of pressure. What we’ve seen work is when schools partner with community groups like ours to provide the extra support that kids need.”

This partnership model has been key to Phelps Helps’ success. By working closely with local schools and school boards, the organization has been able to create programs tailored to the needs of students in the area. But Lowry stressed that families also need to be engaged. “There are families in our community who have had negative experiences with institutions like schools, and that can get passed down to the next generation. Community organizations can help bridge that gap by building trust and creating a positive connection between the family and the school,” she said.

Lowry highlighted the importance of giving young people real responsibilities and engaging them in meaningful ways. One successful initiative at Phelps Helps has been their youth committee, which empowers students to plan events for their peers. “We had a group of kids organize a winter ball last year. They were responsible for everything—budgeting, decorating, even cooking some of the food. It gave them a sense of ownership and taught them life skills, which translated into academic success,” she explained.

Photo courtesy
Phelps Helps Executive Director Katie Lowry with several youth from Stanstead, where the organization has been working to combat school dropouts through community-driven initiatives and educational support programs.

Reflecting on the “Journée du Refus de l’Échec Scolaire”

While the “Journée du Refus de l’Échec Scolaire” helped raise awareness, Lowry emphasized that the work is ongoing. The initiative, now in its sixth year, highlights the structural causes behind school dropouts, particularly in disadvantaged communities. As Lowry noted, the dropout problem is not just about individual students’ performance or motivation but is rooted in larger societal issues.

A press release from Phelps Helps and ROCLD pointed out several key areas where action is needed, including anti-poverty measures and increased funding for community organizations. “In Quebec, a student’s social background is the primary determinant of success at school,” Lowry explained, echoing the sentiments of the press release. “We need to strengthen our support systems for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and that includes everything from ensuring they have access to proper school supplies to addressing broader economic inequities.”

Another critical issue is the lack of support services for students in the anglophone community. At Stanstead’s regional high school, Alexander Galt, for instance, there is only one guidance counselor for nearly 1,000 students. “It’s impossible for one person to provide the individualized support these kids need,” Lowry said. “We need to advocate for more resources, particularly for English-speaking students, who often don’t have the same access to services as their francophone peers.”

Looking forward

As Phelps Helps continues its mission to support youth in Stanstead, Lowry remains optimistic but realistic about the challenges ahead. “We’ve made progress, but there’s still so much work to do. We need more community involvement, more volunteers, and more recognition of the role that organizations like ours play in helping kids succeed,” she said.

Phelps Helps invites community members to get involved, whether by volunteering, donating, or simply learning more about the challenges facing local youth. “We all have a role to play in this,” Lowry said. “If we want to see real change, we need to take responsibility for our part in supporting the next generation.”

For more information on the work Phelps Helps is doing, or to get involved, visit their website. To learn more about the “Journée du Refus de l’Échec Scolaire”, visit: www.refus-echec-scolaire.ca

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Two years of musings on Justin, population booms and smoky summers

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Since its launch in fall 2022, Townships Weekend has continued to defy the trend of newspaper downsizing. As other papers disappeared or thinned out, The Record … expanded!? Great news!

A defiant generalist, my 30 columns since 2022 have ranged over politics (seven articles), culture and society (five), the environment (five), population/demography (four) and sports (four).

Today, it’s perhaps time to follow up on some articles, and invite reader feedback.

Politics: Justin fatigue

In April 2023, Townships Weekend published my take on Justin Trudeau (“Tale of Two Trudeaus”), which contended that J.T.’s act was wearing very thin. Decades after we were enthralled with his father, the entire country now seems to have caught anti-Justin fever.

This was perhaps inevitable. For any elected leader in power nearly a decade — Mulroney, Chrétien, Harper – the rule is: Yer out! Voters get tired. Agendas are exhausted. Pollsters note that, once leader-fatigue sets in, it doesn’t matter who the alternative is.

Pierre Trudeau was defeated in year 11 as prime minister. He resigned and actively sought a job elsewhere. Then suddenly, a miracle. The Conservatives bungled a vote of confidence, and PET was called back in extremis.

In 2024 Justin, perhaps dreaming of his father’s Houdini-like escape from the iron laws of politics, refused to get the hint. He could easily have taken a final-act “walk in the snow” back on February 29th, as his father had. That would have been strikingly symbolic. Instead, at press time he is hanging on, in a clinical study of denial.

The Liberal party, a useful vehicle for centrist voters that sets Canada apart (the U.K. Liberal Party has been marginal for a century), may be headed for a crash landing.  Good MPs will go down in the next election — maybe even Madame Bibeau, the hard-working Liberal MP for Compton-Stanstead, who is present for every ribbon-cutting and school fair. Dommage.

Demography, not exodus

One repeated subject has been population and demography. In short, people numbers. I wrote several columns on federal census results, mostly based on 2021 StatsCan data.

In 2023 Canada bounced over the 40 million mark. On Oct. 1, 2024 we were 41,706,342 Canadians, while Quebec had jumped to 9,125,657 people.

My demography interest was sparked in the 1970s when the term “exodus” was thrown around recklessly. Recently, one anglo community leader used it again. This is a mistake.  

Exodus means: “a large number of people leaving a place or situation”, with the implication that it is definitive and perhaps fatal.

The encyclopedic Histoire des Cantons de l’Est (Presses Laval, 1998) cites a 1991 figure of 42,400 anglophone Townshippers; The Record’s Outlet banner today claims 41,000; the correlation of rising English school enrolment here with general population suggests about 45,000 anglos. These estimates fall within a fairly stable range. Anglos are here to stay.

Personal anecdotes are often deceptive in population matters. I discuss that in detail here: http://tinyurl.com/Anglo-Numbers .

And remember: the 2026 mid-term census is just around the corner.

Forest fires: the day after

The year 2023 was a torcher for forest fires in Canada. Writing last June (“The Burning Question”), I asked: Are forest fires actually more frequent or severe than in the past?

The article traced the history of a heavily forested country in which fires are a permanent menace. They were first recorded in the 1700s when smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed Boston and Detroit.

So, after a very high-fire year in 2023, how bad are fires likely to be in 2024 and after?

The authority on Quebec fire levels, SOPFEU (Société de protection contre les feux de forêt), reports that fires plunged in 2024. Through early October, a total of 16,961 hectares burned. This is about one-seventh the level of the 10-year average for Quebec fires: 116,152 hectares. Somehow, this good news did not inspire any journalistic applause (hello, CBC).

(Canada-wide data is reported in the national database, CNFDB, Canadian National Fire Database; that will be released late in the calendar year.)

Doomsaying predictions that high wildfire levels are inevitably rising recall some communication fiascos of the green movement. Climate change may be incontrovertible, but its impacts need to be thoroughly verified. As a journalist I can attest, however, that green messaging has often been terrible.

A decade ago, polar bears were highlighted as symbols of climate-change devastation. Majestic animals were portrayed as pathetic victims. Then that message stopped. Why?

Polar bear numbers have risen, reports the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), from about 12,000 in the 1960s to over 26,000 in 2024. Despite fluctuations in the mid-2010s, their numbers remain healthy. There never was an extinction crisis.

Then there was the Great Barrier Reef panic: coral was alleged to be shrinking away. (Not so, concludes the Government of Australia in its interdisciplinary report.) Same for Pacific atolls and islands. (They’re similarly resilient, reports France’s national research institute.)

Then a whopper by the U.S. Parks Service. It erected signs during the 2010s in Glacier National Park, stating: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020”. Oops. In 2021, with no indication the glaciers had changed much, the signs were discreetly dismantled.

Forest fires in Canada – a serious and ongoing environmental issue — should be saved from alarmist narratives. These prompt cry-wolf weariness. Fire seasons vary hugely in intensity and level. Not every wildfire is unprecedented or human-sparked. Even the CBC should grasp that.

Feedback welcome

A surprise comment came in August after a wedding at St. George’s in Lennoxville. A lady approached me to say: “I know you; I read your columns. Every word”. Gee, thanks. For a writer, that is like Christmas morning.

While friends and family have reacted, both pro and con, I have not been otherwise reachable. So here we go: dcwinch-editorial@yahoo.com

And bravo, Weekend!

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Accessing your health files

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

While there’s not much we can do to fix the overall healthcare system, there are ways to use the system we have to our best advantage. One way is to know what our health professionals are saying about the state of our health so that we can be part of the team trying to improve it and the quality of our lives. We can do that by accessing our personal health information and medical records – we’ve had the legal right to do so since 2004.

There are two streams of information in Quebec. One is Quebec’s Health Booklet. It’s an online service that lists the medications you get from the pharmacy, your lab test results, medical imaging reports, medical services you’ve received that are paid on a fee-for-service basis, health workers who’ve consulted your health information. It also allows you to make an appointment in family medicine online using the Québec Medical Appointment Scheduler or register with the Québec Family Doctor Finder (GAMF). It’s all in one place and it’s free.

The second stream is your health professionals’ notes. Your always-curious reporter has had experience requesting health records in Ontario, and like most Canadians, has found the process both frustrating and confusing. You’re given paper photocopies of documents in the file. They’re difficult to  understand as they’re written in medical jargon and barely intelligible shorthand.

A quick review of Statistics Canada findings on the subject shows that just over 50 per cent of Canadians reported accessing electronic health information in 2023; 27 per cent were unaware of the existence of such records, and the rest were uninterested or uncomfortable and so never asked.

On Sept. 22, 2024, Quebec added a new phase to its Law 25, that says, among other things, that, at the applicant’s request, computerized personal information must be communicated in the form of a written and intelligible transcript. Your reporter has been running late following up in Quebec; this provided a perfect opportunity to evaluate the provincial system.

To register for your Québec Health Booklet, the only eligibility criteria are having a health insurance (RAMQ) card and being 14 years of age or over.

The first step is to be computer-literate – this is an online service. Next, you have to prove that you’re you — the Government Authentication Service. This is a new service “that will gradually replace clicSÉQUR for authentication to online government services,” according to the website. Opening an account and verifying who you are gives you access to everything you may have to do officially with the government — SAAQclic – Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec online service; Québec certification service for early childhood educators; registration for Public Prescription Drug Insurance Plan; replacement of a RAMQ card if it is damaged, lost or stolen; making your consent to organ and tissue donation official; issuing your directives in case of incapacity; and of course the Québec Health Booklet.

There are more eligibility criteria to authenticate yourself to the government. To open an account you must be over 14, have a social insurance number (SIN), a RAMQ card and ensure that your Quebec-issued identity cards (RAMQ card and driver’s licence) show the same first and last names. Your reporter immediately ran into trouble — driver’s licence has the married surname but the RAMQ card has the maiden name. This situation arises because Quebec’s digital platforms don’t talk to one another. If they did, they would know from other identity markers that the person holding both cards was one and the same. Until this is corrected by your disgruntled reporter going in person to a Service Outlet with other identifiers like a passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, she is locked out of the system. A big red flag for newcomers to Quebec – make sure the names on your driver’s licence and your health insurance card are the same! And understand that as of 1981, RAMQ for your health insurance card insists on the maiden name, but SAAQ for your driver’s licence doesn’t.

Fortunately a friend became a surrogate – he opened an account without a snag and was able to access his Québec Health Booklet. He reviewed the prescription drugs he takes and the lab tests he’s had and thought the Booklet was complete. A couple of things to add: When you go into the Québec Family Doctor Finder, the first thing you see is that as of April 2024, you will be registering for a nurse-practitioner. The site tells you that it’s not possible to say how long you’ll be on the waiting list.

Bludgeoned but unbowed, your reporter moved on to accessing her files from her local healthcare provider. This doesn’t seem to be difficult. You ask. They print out your file, charge you a small amount for the paper and you’re on your way. Asked why the doctor’s/nurse’s notes can’t be emailed, the answer is concern about security. This is but one of many local healthcare providers. All of them operate in more or less the same manner. The difference between them and other aspects of our lives is striking: we live in the age of email, e-banking and e-commerce. We can not only access, but also manage our private banking, insurance, purchasing and investing online from anywhere. Securely. Why isn’t access to our health information as convenient and secure as it is in banking or buying? Because no one has put in the effort – they’re so far back in the dark ages that the digital systems can’t even speak to each other. 

Patient access to information is valuable. It helps us manage our own health. It saves the system money! Our money! Almost half the people surveyed by Canada Health Infoway said that having their health information saved them from having to see a doctor at least once. “The return on investment is significant when we can avoid wasted patient and physician time when a visit isn’t necessary,” says Canada Health Infoway.

What we have is way better than nothing. But we need to keep pushing to ensure that different platforms can talk to each other and then to us. In confidence. We should be able to access to our health information whenever we want and from wherever we connect.

Cohendian560@gmail.com

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Sweets Chez Ludovic

Photo courtesy

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

Somehow, the term pastry chef doesn’t quite have the same ring as pâtissier, just as the word pastries doesn’t necessarily evoke the image of the delectable petits gâteaux traditionally found at a salon de thé.  The pastries available at Chez Ludovic are unmistakably in the latter category.

“I’m a traditionalist,” says Ludovic Meunier who owns and operates a small pâtisserie on the corner of Heriot and Loring Streets in downtown Drummondville.  “There is a new wave in the world of pastries, but the recipes I use all have a long history.  Some I’ve tweaked a little bit, but the cakes and pastries I make are essentially the same as those you might have eaten a century ago.”

Born in the town of Mortain, Normandy, Ludovic grew up near Paris.  At the age of 17 he started a two-year program where he learned to make pastries, chocolates, and ice cream.

“It was a hands-on education,” he says.  “We would spend one week in the classroom, and then three weeks working as apprentices in one type of shop or another.  It was learning by doing.”

There were no family antecedents with a similar interest in baking, but Ludovic knew from early on that it was what he wanted to do.  He was happy to find that there was a demand for his skills.

“It’s not difficult to find work if you’re a pastry chef,” he says.  “It’s also a trade that lets you travel the world.  French pastries have been introduced pretty well around the globe.  There were lots of openings when I graduated and, if I’d wanted to, I could have worked as far afield as Scotland or Brazil.”

That Ludovic ended up in Canada had much to do with a family vacation he took in January of 1991.

“I came with my parents,” he recalls.  “I remember standing on the Plains of Abraham on a day when the thermometer was at minus 15 C and there was a bit of a wind to top it off.  It was brisk.  Yet, the cold here in Quebec is a dry cold.  In France, the air is damp and the cold is more penetrating.”

Two years after that trip, in March 1993, young and single, Ludovic came to Canada as a landed immigrant.  He found a job in Three Rivers.  There he met Line Vaillancourt, a native of Danville.  The couple moved to Sherbrooke, where they stayed for a year and a half before moving downriver to Drummondville in 1996 to open their own French pastry shop.

“We found a place on Brock Street, just a few blocks away,” Ludovic says.  “It took two of us to run the place.  I worked in the kitchen in the back and Line served our customers in the front of the shop.  When we started, we had a few tables and we served coffee, but the café part of the business never really took off.  I no longer even have a coffeemaker.” 

In 2000, Ludovic changed location and settled into one of Drummondville’s oldest, and most historically significant houses, built in 1881, by William John Watts whose family played an important role in the city’s early history.

Ludovic Meunier starts his day early.

“I’m up at 3:30 in the morning and here by 4 ,” he explains.  “I turn on my ovens, take the croissants out of the cold room to let them rise, and I start my day.  Everything sold here is made from scratch.  I work alone in my kitchen and I generally have two or three things on the go at the same time.  With breads and pastries, there’s always a wait time between steps, and during that time I work on something else:  prepare a quiche, whip up a cream, or doing whatever is next on my to-do list.  My day in the kitchen is planned and structured.  I like things to be precise.”

Croissants are in a perpetual state of fabrication.  Made of flour, butter, sugar, yeast, and a dash of salt, the dough has to be repeatedly rolled out and folded over on itself, and then given time to rest. 

“Because of the butter, the trick to croissants is to work on a cool surface,” Ludovic explains.  “A wood surface is much better than a metal surface for that reason.  The actual work time on a batch of croissants—rolling the dough, slicing it into squares, and folding them into their crescent shape—is probably an hour and a half.  If it takes a long time to make them, it’s because they need time to rest, and later, to rise.

Making pastries like the Pavé Royal similarly requires wait times of varying length between the multiple steps.

“The bottom layer of the Pavé Royal is a praline, a mixture of almonds, hazelnuts, sugar, and a specialty biscuit,” he explains.  “Over that is a layer of chocolate cake, then a layer of mousse made of whipped cream and chocolate, topped with a blanket of cocoa powder.”

“This is one of the recipes that I’ve tweaked,” he continues.  “I’ve made the bottom layer thicker, and I’ve made the pastry a little less sweet.  I prefer it like that, and my customers do too.  I make close to 20 different pastries and cakes, including éclairs and fruit tarts.  Some, like Yule logs and galette des rois, which I make at Christmas time, are seasonal.”

Typically, on an annual basis, Ludovic will use 1200 pounds of butter, 600 kilos of two different types of flour, and 200 kilos of sugar.  

“I’m in the kitchen all day,” he says.  “On the days that the shop is open—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning till 12—I leave about half an hour after the shop closes at 5:30.”

Not only does Ludovic put in a long day, he also puts in a long week.  Although the shop is only open three and a half days a week, his weekend consists of Sunday afternoon.  He does, however, give himself an annual holiday, about four weeks in the summer that he and Line spend with family in Normandy, in the area around Mont St. Michel.

Ludovic is a specialty shop, at the far end of the spectrum from big box stores.  It appeals to a limited, but faithful clientele.

“I’ve been here 28 years,” Ludovic Meunier says, “long enough that clients who first walked in the door with their parents when they were 10 or 12- years-old are now coming in with young children of their own.  Over that time some people have passed on and new ones have started coming, but overall, my clientele is very stable.  Almost all are regular customers.  With many of them, if I see them come in, I can usually predict what they’re likely to choose.”

“My busiest days are Friday and Saturday,” he continues.  “Lots of people will call in the morning and ask for something in particular.  It does occasionally happen that at the end of the day I have half a dozen loaves of bread left, and it also happens that a customer comes in at 2 p.m. to buy a loaf of bread for supper and everything I’ve baked is already sold.  But usually, I’m fairly good at estimating how much I should prepare.  Business in the summer is slower than in the winter, and the busiest time of year runs from mid-October to Christmas.”

“If you count the hours, I’m probably working for much less than minimum wage,” Ludovic Meunier says, “but I love what I do.  The pleasure I see in people’s faces is worth more than money.”

French pastries have been described as being very attractive and as expensive as they are small.  They are very much a specialty item, but there are several French pastry shops in the Townships, including two in Drummondville.

Ludovic’s eponymously named shop, according to more than one afficionado of petits gâteaux, offers among the best pâtisseries.

For more information Ludovic can be reached at 819 477-7131.

Sweets Chez Ludovic Read More »

Cyrus and the Husk Ferry

Photo courtesy
Husk Scow Ferry

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

Drummond County was at the northwest edge of the Eastern Townships as they were laid out late in the 18th century.  Unlike most of the Townships, which were first settled by Americans from the New England States, Drummondville was founded by a British army officer.  Frederick George Heriot, who had distinguished himself in the War of 1812-14, was given the mandate to establish a dual-purpose settlement.  This new place would be a farming community, but it would have an armory and a ready militia.  Almost all of the first settlers who followed him to Drummondville were disbanded British soldiers and mercenaries. 

One of those disbanded soldiers who received a 100-acre allotment was John Husk.  Born in 1781 near Plymouth, on the south-west coast of England, he was a married man with a young son when he enlisted and was shipped out to Canada to fight in the War of 1812-14.  He and his fellow soldiers arrived in St. John, New Brunswick and inaugurated their first winter in Canada by marching 1400 km to Niagara, Ontario.  He fought and survived several battles, and at the end of the war, he opted to join Heriot’s colony rather than return to England. His wife, Elizabeth Wood, and son, William, joined him some time later.  The couple had a second child, Mary Ann, whose date of birth is unknown and who passed away in 1881.

The first years, John Husk and his fellow soldiers-turned-farmers had a very rough go of it.  Unbeknownst to them, as they were scurrying to erect shelters and sow crops, halfway around the world the eruption of Mount Tambora was starting to spew so much smoke and ash so high into the atmosphere that the Earth’s climate was changed for the next few years.  Carbon particulate floating ever so slowly downward blocked so much of the sun’s light and warmth that 1816 came to be known as the year without a summer; and 1817 was not much better.  

John Husk’s 100-acre allotment was on the west bank of the St. Francis River, approximately where the Drummondville airport is situated today.  He fulfilled his obligation of building a cabin and clearing a certain acreage of farmland.  Sadly, he was killed in 1823, at the age of 42, while felling a tree.

John’s son, William Wood Husk, perhaps partially prompted by his father’s death, moved upstream to L’Avenir.  Many of the early settlers did likewise as the Drummondville area’s sandy soil—the dried-out bed of the Champlain Sea—was ill-suited to farming.  William moved to another river-front property, a location which would later lead his son to operate a ferry service for almost half a century.   

Photo courtesy
Cyrus Husk, 1870ca

William Cyrus Husk, son of William Wood Husk and grandson of John Husk, the disbanded soldier, was born on the family farm in what is now L’Avenir on September 8, 1847.  In 1868, when he was 21, he married Sarah Ann Barker and the couple had nine children.  Sadly, in 1884, Sarah passed away.  Five years later, Cyrus remarried and with Mary Selina Harriman he had five more children.  At the time of his death, in 1924, 11 of his children were sill living, some of them as far afield as Saskatchewan and Ohio.

Cyrus Husk played an active role in his rural community.  His death notice in the Sherbrooke Record following his passing on May 27, 1924, reads in part:

A long life spent in the service of other—no duty shirked, no task evaded—warrants the statement that in the death of Mr. Husk, Drummond County has lost one of her outstanding citizens.

The relatively long obituary mentions that Cyrus Husk died of pneumonia following a short illness.  He died on the family farm where he’d been born 76 years earlier and where he’d spent all his life.

Cyrus had played a major role in church affairs and this was reflected in his funeral services.  They were officiated by not one but two clergymen, the Reverends Thomas Knowles and J.S. Dickson. 

The Sherbrooke Record noted:

Mr. Husk ever displayed a keen interest in the work of the church with which he was long connected as a member and an official.  For more than 40 years there was scarcely an activity of the Methodist Church or of the Sunday school of Ulverton in which he did not have an important part. 

The obituary notes that Cyrus Husk was keenly interested in education and served as a school trustee.  He was similarly involved with agriculture, serving for 30 years as president of the Ulverton Farmers’ Club.

What is not mentioned in the obituary is that between 1876 and 1920, Cyrus Husk operated a ferry service across the St. Francis River. 

Cyrus was 25-years-old in 1872 when, following his mother’s death, he inherited the family farm on the first range in what is now L’Avenir.  The farm fronted on the St. Francis River and was only a short distance from the road that ran from Richmond to Drummondville.

Four years after taking over the farm, Cyrus invested in a long steel cable, a scow, and a couple of rowboats—all the equipment he needed to begin ferrying people and livestock from L’Avenir and Ulverton near the west bank of the river and St. Felix de Kingsey and St. Lucien near the east bank. 

A vivid description of the ferry is provided by J. Clifford Moore who, in 1996, when he was in his 90s, published a slim volume entitled The Life and Times of a High School Principal in Rural Quebec.  Moore grew up, and later taught, in St. Felix.

Moore wrote:

The ferry boat was able to accommodate two rigs at $0.25 per rig and $0.10 a person for pedestrians.  I don’t think Mr. Husk adhered strictly to that regimen.  This writer remembers helping his dad drive ten or twelve head of cattle to the river en route to the fair in L’Avenir.  Mr. Husk and his sons were very cooperative, loading about four of the animals on the boat and those of us on shore urging the rest of the animals into the water.  As I recall, when we had safely crossed the river, my dad asked Mr. Husk how much he owed him, and Mr. Husk said, “Forget it,” and that was that.

Moore points out that the ferry was particularly important to the younger generation.  While Ulverton’s two-room schoolhouse offered primary education, it was St. Felix that had a Consolidated School—the first such school in the province—that provided high school courses.  Several families, including the Husks, on the west bank of the river, sent their older children to the Consolidated School thanks to the ferry. 

The scow was moved back and forth across the river by one or two men hauling on the steel cable.  Pedestrians, if there were only two or three of them, were ferried over on one of the rowboats.

The ferry ceased operating when the river started to freeze up, usually in December, and, after the ice was thick enough, people crossed on an ice bridge.  In the spring, after the ice had cleared, ferry service resumed.  This meant that for two or three weeks every year, students from the west bank were unable to get to school.

Cyrus Husk operated his ferry service until 1920 by which time roads and vehicles had improved enough that people found it easier to travel to Richmond or Drummondville where bridges spanned the river.  During its four decades of operation, it was one of a handful of ferries that regularly crossed the St. Francis River.  To the people of Durham and Kingsey Townships, Husk’s Ferry was a vital service.

Family lore recounts one other unusual story about Cyrus Husk.  Along with another man, he was hired by a Montreal merchant, James Millar, to drive a flock of lambs to pasture in Vermont.  The trip took several days and was made with a horse and buggy.

After his death, his farm was taken over by Stafford Husk, the oldest of the children of Cyrus Husk’s second marriage.  Stafford would be the last of the Husks to operate the family farm.

Cyrus and the Husk Ferry Read More »

Disturbing Language

Photo courtesy

By Guy R Rodgers

Local Journalism Initiative

In August I had the pleasure of being invited to Bishop’s University to show my documentary film What We Choose To Remember. The annual Bishop’s Forum offers young leaders (18-26) an “immersive look at Quebec’s political, social and economic systems and the opportunity to connect with youth from across the province.” Other presenters at the Forum included Jean Charest, former premier of Quebec, and Éric Girard, Quebec Minister of Finance and Minister Responsible for Relations with English-Speaking Quebecers.

Just a few years ago, I would have expected youth to be preoccupied with environmental and social justice issues, dismissing language conflicts as old fashioned and irrelevant to their reality. However, after two years of Bill 96 and an aggressive government campaign against English-language institutions of Higher Education – because too many English-speakers are bad for Quebec, and because English-language institutions of Higher Education corrupt Allophones and Francophones – I was disturbed, but not surprised, that young English-speakers are concerned about language and have serious questions about their future in Quebec.

“Does our government want us to leave?”

Last year, after a screening my film in the Eastern Townships, a member of the audience stood up to say, “My family has farmed here for 193 years. Because of Bill 96 we are wondering if the government will help us celebrate 200 years in Quebec, or if they would prefer to see us pack our bags and leave.”  No one in the audience jumped up to say, “That’s crazy talk!”

The Coalition Avenir Québec government has polarized language to a degree not seen since le Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ) was terrorizing Anglo Quebec with bombs in mailboxes while presenting themselves as heroic freedom fighters.  The last period of intense conflict triggered an exodus. 

Does our government want to provoke another Anglo exodus?

 When Anglos and Allophones expressed concerns about Bill 96, their questions were dismissed as predictable rhetoric. “Privileged Anglos fought Bill 101 for decades and will obstruct Quebec every time it defends its language and culture.” Serious concerns about using the notwithstanding clause to negate protected rights were dismissed as routine obstructive rhetoric. When educators and students contested improvised attacks on universities and CEGEPS, they were dismissed as whiners too entitled to appreciate the privileges heaped upon the best-treated minority in the world. More recently, when serious questions were raised about access to healthcare in English, questioners were ridiculed as too concerned with their own ‘privileges’ to recognize the higher right of healthcare professionals to work in French.

What is going on here? Does the government have a sinister plan to progressively eliminate minority rights until all Anglos and Allophones assimilate or pack their bags and leave?  Much of the Francophone media dismiss such questions as Quebec bashing. Quebec’s Francophones-de-souche are “the most tolerant, welcoming and generous people in the world” while Quebec’s Anglos are “the most privileged, pampered and ungrateful minority.”

This irreconcilable culture clash reminds me of an incident when I was on the founding board of le Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. A fellow board member, an award-winning playwright who would go on to become one of Quebec’s best-selling novelists, loved to demonstrate her urbanity by peppering her speech with English words. Still popular in France, this pretention was fashionable in Quebec prior to the current regime of linguistic puritanism that sternly rebukes public use of English words and anglicisms.

One morning in Quebec City, as we met in the hotel dining room at breakfast, my colleague greeted me with, “Good morning, Mr. Rodgers, how are you?” I replied, “I’m very well and how are you?” Her reaction was extraordinary. The blood drained from her face and she staggered backwards muttering her shock at being brutally accosted in English. My effrontery was particularly inexcusable in public, at a meeting of CALQ, which was created to promote and protect French culture. Shocking!

It was no use pointing out that she had accosted me or that I was merely replying in the language and, seemingly, playful spirit of her greeting.

I had misunderstood the rules of engagement. For her to say a few words of English was a sign of her urbanity. Addressing me in English was a declaration that her Quebec is tolerant, welcoming and generous. But only up to a point. To protect its endangered language, Quebec must enforce zero tolerance on privileged, pampered, ungrateful Anglos imposing their language everywhere they go. If Anglos don’t like it, they are always welcome to relocate somewhere in the vast Anglosphere.    

I understand perfectly why today’s English-speaking youth are confused – and disturbed – by the mixed signals they are receiving.

Guy Rex Rodgers was founding Executive Director of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) until returning to filmmaking. You can reach him at: GRR.Montrealer@gmail.com

Disturbing Language Read More »

Who’da thunk it?

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

The gentle souls who so astutely peruse this august publication excluded, we are an unenlightened lot that, when it comes to electricity, exhibit a stunning amount of internal conflict.

Electricity is so everywhere all the time that we think about it only when it’s not. And when it’s not, life is really tough. If the power goes out in summer, we can’t have air-conditioning. If it goes out in winter, we can’t have heat. Not to mention light. Or in the country, water. In the space of a hundred years give or take, we’ve gone from zero to total dependence. (How many candles, whale oil or kerosene lamps, ice and iceboxes, wood- or coal-burning stoves do you keep on hand for light, heat and refrigeration?)

We are among the largest electricity consumers in the world – maybe it’s because it’s cold here. Or maybe it’s because we have a huge global advantage – our water resources and our technological resourcefulness have created hydroelectric powerhouses around the country – Quebec alone produces more than half our domestic electricity, BC’s facilities notch it up to two-thirds. These developed natural resources allow us to produce mostly clean energy in sufficient quantities that we can export about 10 per cent of what we produce. And we have a ready taker right next door.

Our World in Data, Energy Institute-Statistical Review of World Energy, 2024

There’s a huge demand for electricity and it’s growing at its fastest rate in years. Leaving aside developing economies like India and China, the increasing uptake of technologies that run on electricity – electric vehicles, a charging system for them, heat pumps and the data centres that teach artificial intelligences – are on course to set new demand records.

Canada’s gearing up for a lollapalooza future, right? Well, sort of.

Clean and relatively cheap electricity is made from manipulating water – Quebec does this most. Less environmentally-friendly electricity is made from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum) of which the western provinces have a lot. More expensive electricity comes from nuclear and renewable energy (on- and offshore wind, solar panels). We make electricity using all these methods and we argue a lot about how bad it is to use less-than-pristine-but-plentiful fossil fuels.   

Ember (2024); Energy Institute – Statistical Review of World Energy (2024);   Our World in Data.org

Our ace in the hole is our water – we’re one of the top five countries in the world with the most renewable fresh water. Here’s the double-edged sword. Unless we live on a reserve, whom the powers-that-be have despicably neglected, we’ve taken it for granted – we’ve failed to look after its infrastructure (think Calgary water main rupture), we haven’t priced it properly, we waste it.  

Not only don’t we have a water conservation ethic, but we’re also oblivious to the dimensions of a world with less of it. Scientists at Environment Canada say that in the past four decades, snowfall in both Canada and the United States has dropped by about 4.6 billion tonnes per year. That’s a lot of lost water. According to a 2019 report commissioned by Environment and Climate Change Canada, temperatures in the country are increasing faster, on average, than the rest of the globe. With hotter summers and less snowfall in winter, water reservoirs aren’t filling up the way they used to. Without water, we can’t make cheap, clean electricity. Overall, exports to the US fell nearly 25 per cent last year, to the lowest level since 2016.  Quebec, BC and Manitoba all reported less hydro production; the latter two reported more power imports from the US.

Less water may not be forever, but greater variability from Mother Nature seems assured. Water inflow variability is actually well understood in the hydropower industry – specialists have many ways to capture what’s available. It’s less clear that we have any interest in conserving water for purposes such as drinking, bathing and other somewhat civilized endeavors.

Government of Canada

We don’t respect our natural resource bounty but we’re ingenious at exploiting it. Along with hydroelectric power, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and biomass are practically infinite. We’re in the world’s top-10 in onshore wind capacity, even though it produces only a small fraction of our electricity. The idea of placing turbines at sea to harness wind energy over open water has come to Newfoundland and Labrador – it hopes to have offshore wind areas leased by 2025 and has the federal government’s blessing to proceed with approvals in provincial waters. Unconstrained by hills or cities, offshore winds tend to be stronger and more consistent than onshore ones, able to produce three times the power of their onshore facilities.

We can do solar too, although solar energy’s potential varies across the country. Not so good on the coasts lower because of increased cloud cover, much better in the central areas. Solar panels on the roofs of these sunny residential homes could possibly supply half of Canada’s home energy demands. Notwithstanding the dozens of residential solar incentive programs currently available across the country, we’ve hamstrung ourselves with an equal number of legislative, regulatory, and infrastructure hurdles that prevent these installations.

As for storing electricity, Canada is #1 among 30 countries that were assessed for their potential to build a secure, reliable, and sustainable lithium-ion battery supply chain. “This [2024] marks the first time China has not claimed the number one position. Canada’s consistent manufacturing and production advances, and strong ESG credentials, have helped it become a leader in forming the battery supply chains of the future. Strong integration with the US automotive sector means Canada is also a big winner of the ‘friendshoring’ ambitions of the Inflation Reduction Act. The country’s position in BNEF’s ranking is propelled by policy commitment at both the provincial and federal level,” says a Bloomberg entity that specializes in energy.

Who’da thunk it? Where would we be if we pulled together?

Cohendian560@gmail.com

Who’da thunk it? Read More »

The fall saga – healthy eating that helps the environment

By Pooja Sainarayan

Local Journalism Initiative

Food preservation has been a practice since ancient times, and basically refers to the process of safely lengthening the lifespan of food while maintaining as much of the nutrient quality as possible. There exists various methods – drying, smoking, salting, freezing, canning, pickling and more. With the increasing demand for fresh food and reducing overall food waste to promote a healthier environment, preservation has become increasingly important in food independence and culture.

One of the oldest methods of food preservation is dehydration. By removing moisture from food, the bacterial growth is inhibited. Depending on the humidity of your location, this method may prove to be a challenge. However, if humidity is an issue, dehydration followed by freezing the food may be the best technique to prevent bacterial growth. Storing dehydrated food in airtight containers is important in maintaining the dehydration levels. Modern-day methods such as water-bath canning which uses heat to kill any bacteria or enzymes in the food products is commonly used for high-acid foods such as tomatoes and fruit jams/jellies. Similarly, pressure canning used for low acid-foods such as vegetables and meats is another method of processing product in a jar. Pickling uses high acid concentration through the pH preservation of food, which needs to be followed by water-bath canning to kill off any potential bacterial growth that remains in the jar. Finally, freezing food is also commonly used and is one of the most affordable methods of food preservation. Freezing slows down the growth of bacteria and enzymes but does not completely eliminate them. For this reason, thawing food in a refrigerator helps keep them safe. So how are the nutrient contents affected by various preservation techniques?

Some vitamins are less impacted by processing than others. Fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin K, A, D and E are more stable during processing and storage than water-soluble vitamins (vitamin B and C). The most stable vitamins include vitamins B3 (niacin), K, D, B7 (biotin) and B5 (pantothenic acid). The most unstable vitamins are folate, thiamine (B-complex vitamin) and vitamin C. Food processing methods that expose food to high levels of heat, light or oxygen may cause the greatest loss in water-soluble vitamins such as vitamins B and C. However, the fat-soluble vitamins, minerals, protein, fat and carbohydrates would be less affected by processing methods using high heat, such as canning.

Pressure canning may preserve more vitamin content compared to water bath canning, as the food is subject to high pressures rather than heat. Dehydrating food can also reduce the amount of vitamin C, but it can result in higher nutrient contents such as fibre in plant-based foods. As the food becomes more energy-dense when it dries out, over-consuming dehydrated products may result in weight gain. If the dehydrated food is cooked with water, this results in more nutrient loss as they are leached out of the food and into the water. Freeze-drying is also commonly used to preserve food and conserves more nutrients than simple dehydration. In contrast to dehydrated food where roughly 75 per cent of the original nutrients are retained, freeze-dried foods retained approximately 95 per cent of its nutrient value. On the other hand, cooking food has lots of benefits such as breaking down parts of vegetables that are harder to digest, destroying harmful bacteria and releasing phytochemicals (chemicals produced by plants). For instance, phytochemicals are greater in cooked tomatoes than when consumed raw. Freezing food is a great way to preserve the nutrients. The nutrient losses are often due to the processing prior to freezing, such as blanching where the food is heated very quickly with steam or water. Onions, leeks, rutabaga and peppers do not need to be blanched prior to freezing and therefore results in high nutrient yield post freezing. The nutrient loss (mainly vitamins B and C) from blanching is generally only 10 to 20 per cent. Although canning may result in some nutrient loss, other nutrient content may actually increase. Therefore, canned foods and frozen foods are both a comparable means of preservation in terms of retaining the foods nutrient contents.

In summary, there is some vitamin and mineral loss with all preservation methods, but this is relatively minimal. The global impact of food preservation helps the environment by significantly reducing food waste. In addition, there is continual demand for fresh and sustainable food to meet the needs of producers and consumers. Food preservation also faces challenges, in ensuring safety, quality and effectiveness which requires continuous research and education to promote a healthy and durable food system.

The fall saga – healthy eating that helps the environment Read More »

Can Quebec Liberals bounce back?

Despite its fall in 2022, PLQ has voters, ideas and soon a new leader

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Have we seen this movie before? A restless Quebec electorate tires of a government after a couple of terms. The beleaguered party leader struggles against the new tides of opinion. Then comes the election, and voilà – a brand-new government.

These are the cycles of Quebec politics, both provincial and federal: successive waves of red, blue, orange and light-blue party support. New parties are formed, rise, quickly grow, then get bounced.

Liberals and PQ alternated for decades in Quebec City. Then the CAQ upset the checkerboard.  

Historically, this is quite new. Provincial parties in Canada often used to stay in power for decades. The Union Nationale of Maurice Duplessis retained power for almost two decades, totalling 18 years before 1960. (In Ontario, the Conservatives governed for 42 straight years, from 1943 to 1985.)

By contrast, the last two Liberal and PQ governments were each kicked out after just one term. Maybe it’s the caffeinated effect of new media— voters are often impatient for change.

CAQ failures

In 2018 the Coalition Avenir Québec was elected. Ostensibly pragmatic, the CAQ proposed to move past federalist-sovereigntist debates and focus on practical matters. Health care, for example.

But after six years in power, there’s been no progress on that front. The CAQ’s latest initiative, a large central health agency called Santé Québec, is not trusted by anyone to improve service or access to doctors.

“In their daily lives,” writes soft-nationalist commentator Josée Legault in the Journal de Montréal, Quebecers “are at the end of their tether with a health system which, instead of improving, is deteriorating.”

“If a real change of direction does not occur on this crucial issue, whether or not the federalist-sovereigntist debate returns, there will be no forgiveness in the voting booth.”

Today, given these and other policy shortfalls, the CAQ is viewed as ineffective. It looks like a new Union Nationale, a regional, patriarchal, top-down party losing touch with social trends.

Can the Parti Libéral du Québec (PLQ) now challenge the CAQ?

“Any new leader of the PLQ who is the least bit presentable would pose an additional danger to [the CAQ] on the electoral front,” concludes Ms. Legault. And this, despite what she described as “the historic debacle of the Couillard-Barrette duo” during the 2014-2018 Liberal reign.

Predictions galore

So what will happen in the 2026 election? Nobody knows. Political consensus is often wrong.

A decade ago, Quebec media were unanimous: the 2014 election was the PQ’s to lose. One top writer at La Presse, Lysiane Gagnon, published a guest column in the Globe and Mail titled: “PQ Has Reason to Be Confident”. Gagnon basically foresaw an easy victory for Pauline Marois’ PQ and another defeat for the hapless, post-Charest Liberals.

My political intuitions told me this was quite wrong.

So I published a comment in the Globe pointing out that in British Columbia just a few months earlier, the media had been similarly unanimous that the NDP would win — and yet it was crushed by the Liberals in a huge upset. Conclusion: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Indeed, the Liberals in Quebec surged back to power in 2014 with a new majority.

Fast-forward to 2024. The Parti Québécois has moved ahead in most polls. Many voters may be “parking” their votes there, as the nationalist CAQ steadily declines. In April this year, l’Actualité magazine published a poll by Pallas Data showing the PQ in first place, but with the resurgent Liberals moving into second, ahead of the CAQ.

Few polls have repeated this result, but it is credible: Quebec Liberals thrive when sovereignty becomes an issue. Despite its aura, independence is not a winning option with mainstream Quebec voters; it has stagnated in polls for decades.

In a three-way race, the Liberals might just slip up the middle. The Montreal media would again be stunned.

Slow to relaunch

After the Liberals’ humiliating defeat in October 2022, they proceeded slowly toward a relaunch. Many voters asked: Where are they — in hiding? Callers deluged talk radio with complaints about their absence.

Finally, in mid-2023 dates were set for an official leadership race to be held between January and June 2025, leading to a Liberal convention.

Some contrarians argued that the steady-as-she-goes Liberals might be on the right track.

 “With the next [Quebec] election on the distant horizon, the decision to hold off selecting a new leader might not be such a bad idea after all,” wrote former MNA Robert Libman in The Gazette, in September 2023. “Timing in politics, as it relates to election cycles (momentum, peaking too soon, political honeymoons) is a critical consideration that must be managed skilfully to maximize chances of winning.”

This go-slow strategy is largely the work of André Pratte, president of the political commission of the PLQ and former editor of La Presse. An honest man, Pratte quit his plum post as a federal Senator (“I was ‘fed up’ with partisanship in all its forms, which continues to derail debates,” he wrote). Instead, he is carefully preparing a serious Liberal programme to govern again.

 Pratte, in an interview with Radio-Canada in May 2024, described his role as trying to “rebuild, find our values, create an alternative”. He said Quebec Liberals need to stress individual freedoms, along with a commitment to Canada and to economic liberalism.

As for identity politics, Pratte told The Gazette in 2023: “Liberal nationalism is not the same as the identity nationalism of the CAQ or PQ. The nationalism of the Liberals is to make Quebec’s interests in the Canadian federation a priority.”

“We are convinced that there are many more Liberals in Quebec than the ones who voted for the party in 2022.”

Can slow and steady win the race? Pratte’s wager suddenly has decent odds.

Can Quebec Liberals bounce back? Read More »

If wishes were horses…

Photo: courtesy

By Mary Ellen Kirby

Local Journalism Initiative

   Could we have a moment of silence, please? I think a brief acknowledgement of the passing of giants is in order. It is a melancholy thing to wander the back roads of the Eastern Townships this summer and count the increasing number of stalwart old barns falling to wrack and ruin or simply disappearing altogether. Time and gravity have ravaged many; they have succumbed to vicious winds or punishing snow loads. Others have been scavenged, the bones picked apart, reduced to pricey plunder taken away to be repurposed as décor in city homes. Truly, I mourn their loss. It seems to me more than the simple loss of a building; it is also the loss of history and culture those grand old barns represent.

Some barns sit derelict, surrounded by cropland, like ghost ships adrift in a sea of waving corn tassels. Some are still attended by dilapidated farmhouses and decaying outbuildings, so at least they aren’t dying alone. Some have lost various parts of their anatomy, have listed sideways off their moorings or bear the indignity of trees growing through their roofs. They remind me of nothing so much as wounded soldiers, shamefully abandoned on the battlefield. And make no mistake: scraping a living from the land was indeed a battle back when those barns were built. A good, sturdy barn – or the lack thereof – could make or break the farm and the farmer.

   In those days, erecting a good barn was not farmed out (yes, pun intended) to various experts, engineers, architects and contractors. Farmers were both the brawn and the brains behind barn construction, relying on the life experience of older farmers and the willing hands of neighbouring farmers to get a barn raised. At least one winter would have been spent cutting and hauling out the logs to mill into the lumber needed, and a barn of any size at all needed a lot of lumber: no steel trusses or beams in those days. Many barns would have been roofed with cedar shakes, only replaced with sheets of tin as the farmer could afford it. Here in the Townships, many a barn foundation was built of field stones, painstakingly picked by hand, hauled by a team of horses and a dray or stone boat to the rock pile, where they waited patiently for future repurposing. A starkly different proposition than calling the closest cement plant for delivery of already mixed, ready to pour cement, I wager to say.

   Barn design was different in those days, as well. Cavernous hay mows were needed to store a winter’s worth of loose hay, pulled up into the mow with big rope and pulley operated hay forks. Far above our heads in the old barn that houses our sheep, the rusted steel track for the hay rig is still affixed to the cobwebbed ridge beam; it bears mute witness to a way of life that no longer exists. Hay mows are dim, dusty places, redolent of summer sun-warmed grasses; they are full of mysterious shadows, secretive, skittering noises and dust motes dancing in sunbeams slanting through cracks in the wall boards. For generations, hay mows have been beloved by farm kids looking for a dry place to play hide & seek on rainy days, barn cats hiding a litter of kittens, nesting barn swallows and the occasional farm boy intent on stealing a kiss from his sweetheart. Today’s modern barns have dispensed with hay mows as the hay is stored chopped and blown into a silo, stacked in a separate hay shed or left outside wrapped in plastic against our weather. Modern barns are long and low-slung, clad in shiny metal and they sport multiple enormous fans to circulate the air; new barns slouch and sprawl, while the old-timers stand tall and proud: beaten but not bowed. Old barns have tall wooden chimneys at either end. The chimneys were equipped with doors that could be opened or closed at floor level inside the barn and this simple system allowed the farmer to regulate the flow of hot and cold air manually, providing good air flow for the comfort and health of the winter-stabled livestock. Old barns have unique shapes and characters, and no wonder: each one was conceived according to the individual needs, tastes and budget of the farmer. Juxtapose the quirky individuality of ancient barns with the cookie-cutter models that seem to be popping up all over farm country these days; the new ones seem to be much of a muchness in their blandly boring uniformity. Yes, yes…I know: ‘efficiency’, blah, blah blah…’progress’, blah, blah, blah. But have we chosen to trade efficiency and progress for the very soul of the farm? If that is the case, I can’t help feeling it was a very poor trade indeed.

Photo: Courtesy

   I realize my prejudice is showing, but I won’t apologize for that. I prefer grizzled old veteran barns with stories to tell, stouthearted barns whose hand-hewn beams are infused with a century’s worth of memories, generous barns that offer shelter and succour to both man and beast. New barns don’t have time for any of that fanciful nonsense: they are much too busy proudly proclaiming their efficiency. I think their bright and shiny, new and improved allure is a poor substitute for the comforting countenance of an old barn. New barns are brisk, business-like structures; they more closely identify with an industrial setting than an agrarian one. They unapologetically make no provision for mama cats and kittens, fledgling barn swallows, courting farm boys or, most sadly, children at play. If small children can’t exercise their imaginations in the safe embrace of an old barn, how can we expect them to imagine themselves as the farmer? I have been accused of harbouring overly romantic notions about farming and perhaps that is true. Again, I make no apologies. But it is very difficult to fall in love with sprawling industrial facilities, no matter how efficient they are. And, at the root of it all, it is love that makes a farm – and a farmer.

   I am grateful that the old barn I grew up in is still standing resolute; that it still hears the lowing of cattle, the rustle of barn swallows, the mewling of kittens and the laughter of children. Does it still provide the romantic setting for a stolen kiss or two? I’m not telling. The dying barns dotting our countryside haven’t been occupied in decades; they are unequivocal proof that the adage of ‘use it or lose it’ still applies. Most old barns still in use have been modernized: electric lights in lieu of lanterns, mechanical barn cleaning systems replacing pitch forks and wheelbarrows, automated water bowls instead of lugging endless pails of water. I am not opposed to bringing 21st century function to 19th century structures; I just wish the iconic character of old barns could remain intact. I wish the solid legacy of those barns, and their builders could be honoured by continued purposeful use. Those tough old barns and the resourceful, determined farmers who built them, are the rock-solid foundation this country was built on. With the neglect and destruction of every old barn, goes a piece of our history, a piece of our culture. It is a very sad day when another giant topples.

   I wish I could launch an old barn rescue mission. I wish I could save them all, give them the respect they are due. I wish it was contagious, this passion of mine for the weary old warriors still standing; maybe then we could reverse the distressing modern trend of abandoning these monumental old heroes. Oh well…if wishes were horses, then beggars could ride, as the old saying goes. And if my wishes came true, the horses would have beautiful old barns to live in.      

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The sustainable consumption index

Your Personal Carbon Calculator? Photo: Mastercard

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

We’ve been hearing for years now that the big challenge is to limit global warming to below 1.5C above the pre-industrial era. Now comes word from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service that June was the hottest ever, the 13th consecutive time a month has set a new average temperature record. The average for the year through June 2024 was 1.64C higher than the era from 1850 to 1900. This suggests that, if we don’t want to spontaneously go up in flames, we will have to work our tails off to achieve the emissions targets to which Canada has agreed.

How we get motivated to do that is the challenge. Most of us are broadly aware that a flight from Montreal or Toronto to Rome or Riyadh makes a lot of CO2 emissions. COVID provided concrete proof that less flying reduces CO2 emissions – they went down more than 5 per cent in just the first few months of COVID. But we have no real idea what difference it makes to the environment if we recycle our plastics, or if we go out for a nice steak dinner, or if we buy a brand-new outfit in a high-end retail store.

The fact is that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated from our lifestyle choices. Industry and regulators are unlikely to solve the climate crisis — most emissions are directly connected to consumer demand. So if we’re going reach our global decarbonization targets, we have to change our habits, and it would help if we could know how much our individual actions count.

There may be a way to do just that, although email conversations with the creators leave some doubt. A Sustainable Consumption Index has been developed by Mastercard and Doconomy, a Swedish fintech company. Here’s how they say it works. Mastercard takes its total debit transactions (it makes them anonymous) and categorizes them into spending categories – food, transportation, retail, etc. Then it adjusts for inflation so comparison with past years is possible. Doconomy has created an index of estimated CO2  emissions for each of the spending transactions. The index can create interactive simulations of the impact of a population-wide shift to low-carbon consumption. For example, it can answer the question, “what’s the impact of everyone using a carpool or public transit, or eating less meat, or buying more second-hand ‘vintage’ goods compared to current emission levels from driving a car, eating lots of steak and burgers or buying new retail goods?”

Does it work? That’s as yet unknown. Sweden was motivated to try it out apparently because they already knew that individual Swedes need to reduce their emissions fivefold by 2050 to meet that country’s climate change commitments. So they took it on: the two companies created the index starting in Q1 2021, using Swedish data. The quantitative measure of Sweden’s aggregate consumer carbon footprint was launched publicly this past June.  So far, one example of the consumption index shows that emissions resulting from spending on air travel and fuel are not declining as fast as those on retail spending. It also shows that there’s been a 2 per cent reduction in national emissions from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024.

Maybe this new measurement tool could be a step forward in the battle for a cooler planet. Up to now, we’ve been working in hindsight, looking at what has happened in the past to inform our decisions going forward. The Doconomy index purports to be forward looking, reaching people before they back out of the driveway, book their cabs, buy their T-shirts or fire up the barbeque. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency says the simulation models can be used by manufacturers, advertisers and policy-makers to encourage Swedes to change their buying habits toward more sustainable choices.

The two companies have also created a personal Carbon Calculator app that’s supposed to show the impact of individual users’ purchases. The idea is that if we have insight into the effect our day-to-day footprint has on the planet, we can make small adjustments resulting in real change. The Carbon Calculator allows us to view the estimated carbon footprint of all our purchases. Our footprint is tracked month by month across a variety of spending categories so we can better understand where we’re having the greatest impact.

Except of course that the index is available only in Sweden right now and it’s still not clear that a majority of Swedes are aware of it. The spokespeople for Mastercard and Docomony were most forthcoming about what they had already published in their own news releases. But then your spunky reporter asked questions like

How would Canada begin if we wanted an index like the one created for Sweden? Who would have to contract with Doconomy and Mastercard? Would it be the government? the financial community? how does that work? How much does it cost to have an index created? How long does it take? Once you were contracted, would you use earlier years of Mastercard spending to create the index? Has there been a lot of publicity in Sweden about the index and how to use it? Have you had a lot of feedback from consumers? Do any other countries have such an index?

Your waiting-with-bated-breath-reporter has been ghosted. It’s been a month since our last correspondence with either Mastercard or Doconomy.

It’s an interesting idea, and maybe the two companies will be more forthcoming. I’m still hoping for a response.

Cohendian560@gmail.com

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Remembering the International City of Jazz

Guy Rex Rodgers and Alain Simard July 2024. Photo: courtesy

By Guy Rex Rodgers

Local Journalism Initiative

What Quebecer has not enjoyed a summer’s day at the Montreal International Jazz Festival? Over the years, we came to take for granted the throngs of people of all ages and backgrounds happily enjoying the music and the street performances, some scripted and others purely spontaneous. We recalled how extraordinary it was through the eyes of out-of-town visitors marvelling that so much was freely available to so many.

Montreal’s jazz festival was a reflection of its co-founder, Alain Simard. During the 2024 edition of the festival Simard, now retired, launched a book about his dream to create a festival that became one of the biggest and most popular in the world.

Full disclosure, I worked with Alain Simard and the festival for several years, interviewing artists for televised concert broadcasts. The Gatsby-era solid oak desk in my office belonged to Alain when he founded the jazz festival in 1980.    

Simard’s book Je rêvais d’un festival1 is the story of a young man discovering culture, politics, the music business and entrepreneurial skills that would enable him to create Montreal’s International Jazz Festival. The book is also a fascinating encapsulation of contemporary Quebec history.  

Born in 1950 in Villeray, not far from Michel Tremblay’s Plateau, Simard experienced the end of the Duplessis era, now remembered as La Grande Noirceur (the Great Darkness). It is difficult in today’s militantly secular society to imagine that Quebec was so recently deeply religious. Simard’s family was no exception, in the faith of his youth or the subsequent embrace of secularism.  

The 1960s in Quebec were an explosively exciting march to modernity with the creation of a Church-independent education system, CEGEPs and a network of Université du Québec campuses. In Montreal: the metro system, towering steel and glass skyscrapers, demolishing acres of inner-city slums and Expo ’67.

The 60s were also the era of a more violent program of modernization with le Front de liberation du Québec (FLQ). The young Alain Simard had a summer job at Eaton’s, infamous for refusing to serve customers in French, where he discovered that francophone employees were not permitted to speak to one another in their mother tongue. Simard’s girlfriend, who worked for an airline, also discovered that her unilingual Anglo bosses refused to allow Francophone employees to engage in private conversations in a language the bosses could not understand or monitor.  

I found the book’s chapters on the FLQ and the rise of Quebec’s separatist movement particularly interesting. Simard was stopped and questioned twice by police during the October Crisis, under the exceptional powers of the War Measures Act, simply for being a leading figure in the underground music scene. His sister was clubbed by police during Lundi de la Matraque. Simard’s family was a microcosm of the divided society that held two referendums on independence and twice voted to remain in Canada. His father was a militant indépendantiste and friend of René Lévesque, and his mother a discreet federalist whose letters-to-the-editor in support of Pierre Trudeau, written under various pseudonyms, were discovered only after her death. 

Like many Québécois of his generation Simard made a pilgrimage to Vancouver in the 60s where he practiced his English and discovered the kids in BC were more liberated than his religiously repressed peers back home. Simard was profoundly influenced by Expo ’67, which flooded Montreal with modern ideas, global culture and visitors from around the world. The jazz festival he created in 1980 would hold its first edition on Île Ste-Hélène, on stages built for Expo, before migrating to St-Denis Street, where the festival encountered severe opposition from the mayor of Montreal. Jean Drapeau was the father of modernity in the 60s and 70s but Drapeau was also the politician who built his career on cleaning up vice associated with jazz clubs that flourished in Montreal during the years of American prohibition. Drapeau was adamantly opposed to the rebirth of jazz in his city, and ordered city workers to remove the festival’s first street stage during the middle of the night.

Alain Simard’s book is a fascinating account of culture and politics in modern Quebec. His passions are complex. He wanted Montreal to be proudly French but his city also included Oscar Peterson and Leonard Cohen. Simard wanted his festival to be an international showcase for the most talented musicians on the planet and for fans from around the world. Simard’s vision is broad, generous, ambitious and as welcoming as the festival he created. Je rêvais d’un festival is a celebration of things that make us proud of Quebec and happy to call it home.

Guy Rex Rodgers was founding Executive Director of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) until returning to filmmaking. You can reach him at: GRR.Montrealer@gmail.com

1 Je rêvais d’un festival (I dreamed of a festival) Alain Simard, Les Éditions La Presse (2024).

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Does it bug you too?

Grest Golden Digger Wasp. Photo: Susan Mastine

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

The neighbour in question lives on the other side of the street, up just a few houses.  His back yard fronts onto the river, and as such, he sees quite a bit of wildlife.  A small telescope set up in his living room that overlooks the St. Francis lets him keep a close eye on local fauna.  This year, he had a resident beaver at the foot of his property for a short while.

Like an expert woodcutter, the beaver felled a couple of trees, dropping them into the St. Francis so they stretched from the riverbank to a small island.  The trees were the starting point for a dam that would have spanned ten metres or more.  Given more time, or other conditions, the beaver would likely have completed the job.  As it was, there were heavy rains, the river rose, and his (or her) hard work was swept downstream.   He (or she) moved on.

Mammals that haven’t moved on, the neighbour said, are the muskrats.  There’s a small colony of them digging tunnels into the bank of the small island.  Eventually, their burrows will hasten the erosion of the river bank and shrink the small island even further. 

The neighbour sees lots of birds.  This year, at one time or another, he has spotted almost 40 different species in his back yard.  He frequently sees two eagles, and he suspects they have a nest nearby.  He has also spotted an osprey fishing in the river.

Still, despite the variety, he says there are fewer birds this year than he is accustomed to seeing.  With the possible exception, he adds, of starlings which are at least as numerous as ever.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, starlings are not native to North America.  The good folks who brought 100 European Starlings to New York City in the 1890s and let them loose in Central Park had no idea how quickly they would multiply and become an invasive species across the city, the state, the country, and the continent.  They thought that, in a very subtle way, they were enriching the culture of their fellow citizens.  They wanted Central Park to have all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, including the starling.   Did any of them know that in Celtic mythology, the starling is a symbol of fertility? 

As for insects, my neighbour hasn’t noticed the same significant decline as he has with the bird populations.

That’s not the case on my side of the street.  In the past, at the right time of the day, our back yard often hummed with insect life. 

Some insects, I consciously hunted and killed.  When I found a wasps’ nest—often up quite high under the eaves of the roof—I resorted to insecticide, a long ladder, and the cover of darkness to exterminate them.  I rationalized that eliminating the wasps would make the garden safer for the bees. 

I now have some regrets.  We had no wasps last year and have not seen any this summer.  As for bees, I have only seen one in our garden this year.  (I’d have seen more had I spent time in the garden in May.)  We still have flies and mosquitoes and other insects, but noticeably fewer than in previous years.

While I am not the resident gardener in our household, I am occasionally called on to help with one small task or another.  In previous years, any job that involved strenuous work like digging was scheduled to avoid peak insect times.  A job might not be finished until the next day because, when the insects got too bad, seemingly not at all deterred by insect repellent, I would abandon my tools and take refuge in the house. 

The other day, I had a couple of small tasks in the garden.  I was not quite finished the first job when I became aware that it had suddenly turned quite hot and it was no longer overcast.  Even before I finished thinking that these were conditions that brought the bugs out, there they were.  No-see-ums are small, black, flying insects that want to get into your ears and eyes.

I was a little annoyed with myself.  I could have started earlier and dawdled a little less.  I could have had both jobs done before the little midges started biting me to death.  I continued on.  If I could finish at least the first job, it wouldn’t feel like a lost morning.  For the moment, they weren’t that bad.  Then, to my surprise, they were gone.  They came back once more, but again didn’t stay long.  I ended up getting both jobs done. 

I know that, in previous years, under the same conditions, the no-see-ums would have driven me into the house.  This year, the swarm that came at me was small, and was disinclined to pester me for more than a few minutes.

Nor is it just in my back yard that there are fewer insects.

It has always been common, in the summer, to return from a road trip with the front of the car encrusted with the remains of insects. 

The other week, a day after getting back from Three Rivers, I decided to take half an hour to give the car an unaccustomed wash.  Because I have an electric car, the front end lacks a grille.  Instead, there’s a solid front panel that stretches from headlight to headlight.

While the sides and back end of the car accumulate a certain amount of dust and dirt, the front end, in the summer time, tends to accumulate a lot of small, dark dots—the tiny carcasses of insects killed by a vehicle travelling at a 100 km/h.

What was surprising, given that the car hadn’t been washed in over a month, was how few insects’ remains I had to scrub off the front of the car.  They were as difficult to wash off as ever, but there weren’t very many of them, not compared to previous summers.

I don’t have any particular fondness for flies, mosquitoes, wasps, and other flying insects.  Scraping them off the front of the car is a bit of a nuisance, even if the water I’m using is hot and soapy.  Having them hover around me like a dark cloud when I’m working in the garden is an impediment that I’m glad to do without.

Still, it troubles me that insects that were once abundant are now scarce.  It doesn’t help that I’m all too conscious of the direct correlation between insect populations and bird populations.

As for the neighbour up the street, it may be that insects are faring better in a riverfront habitat.

Does it bug you too? Read More »

The ever-changing world of AI

Photo: courtesy

By Pooja Sainarayan

Local Journalism Initiative

AI technology allows machines to learn from experience and adapt human-like intelligence. The reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all around us, from its use in banking, GPS guidance, smart home devices and generative AI tools like chat GPT. Humans have been toying around with AI for several decades, however the implication of the technology is evolving now like never before. AI can be traced back to the 1950s, from the design of chess-playing computers to the first artificial neural network. There are two major subgroups of AI – weak and strong. Weak AI, also known as artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) is trained to perform very specific tasks. This is the type of AI that is most common in day-to-day tasks today, some examples include Amazon’s Alexa and self-driving vehicles. Strong AI on the other hand, is a theoretical form of AI where a machine would have an intelligence equivalent to or even greater than humans. It would be self-conscious with an ability to learn, solve problems and strategize. Strong AI only exists in science fiction for now, but research on its development is ongoing. AI technology often goes hand-in-hand with deep learning, which is closely modeled after the adaptability aspect of the human brain, to develop AI algorithms in learning from accessible information and perfect its ability in making predictions over time.

Several cities in Canada have been implementing deep learning AI technology for various projects. For example, Edmonton has integrated AI with remote cameras to monitor wildlife coming into the city. Since 2022, Alberta has been using AI tools to analyze data points and foresee where new fires are most likely to occur the following day, giving firefighters a head start. A powerful tool worth research and improvement, as tech partners predict this investment could save up to 5 million dollars a year. Montreal is experimenting with Fujitsu, an AI tool used to analyze the traffic flow of over 2000 traffic lights in order to help the city take proactive measures in decreasing traffic-related issues. Apart from increasing the flow of traffic and reducing air pollution, it can also help the city plan maintenance routes for snowplows or other service vehicles more competently. In addition, Montreal’s transit agency is planning to use AI to monitor the CCTV footage to recognize any signs of public distress in efforts to prevent suicide in the subway system.

Recently, municipalities in Quebec City have been adopting AI tools to track everything from trees, cars and backyard pools. The Communauté métropolitaine de Québec (CM Quebec) which encompasses Quebec City and its suburbs, states that this project will help municipalities monitor urban growth, parking availability and environmental goals. The geomatics development manager of CM Quebec, Frédérick Lafrance mentioned the organization has worked with deep learning AI technology using aerial photos of the city to identify buildings, swimming pools, backyard trampolines, cars and various other features. As expected, the AI would be able to analyze larger data sets of the aerial photos in a shorter time frame compared to humans, to get more work done in less time. This AI-generated data analysis can be used in several ways, such as measuring urban greening and tree cover versus how much of it has been converted to asphalt over time, said Lafrance. Tracking backyard pools and such features can help the city coordinate inspections. However, the use of AI as a surveillance tool is very different from having an inspector perform the duty, so it remains to be seen how the public reacts to this change. In this case, the AI is using already generated aerial footage to differentiate objects, and not digging into further information such as licence plate numbers or the make and model of any objects.

Interestingly, on the other hand, the impact of AI can go beyond measuring trees and backyard pools. In a 2017 U.S study, an AI deep learning tool was used to characterize the make and model of cars in millions of pictures from Google Street View. Researchers found that in cities where sedans were the majority over pickup truck vehicles had an 88 percent chance of voting Democrat whereas cities with more pickups had an 82 percent chance of voting Republican. Findings like these serve as an important tool for policymakers and pave the way for ethical and sociological questions.

Despite having a relatively brief history, the technology has shaped our lives like nothing ever before. As AI technology grows more and more powerful, we can only expect its impact to increase with the years to come.

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The first pint

George B. Capel, 1863. Photo: McCord Stewart Museum

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

When most people think of Lennoxville and beer, their minds likely turn, perhaps a little fuzzily, to the Golden Lion (or, if you prefer, Le Lion d’Or). First opened in 1986 this pub was at the vanguard of Canada’s microbrewery revolution. Since that time, it has served locals, students, and visitors alike with a variety of bitters, lagers, stouts and ales to sooth the soul and fire the imagination. But long before this institution crafted its first pint, another brewery also made fresh beer for hard-working and thirsty locals.

The Lennoxville Brewery was one of the very first beer makers to be established in the Eastern Townships. Opened by British immigrants Thomas Austin and George Slack in 1837 it was located on four acres of land between what is now Queen Street and the Massawippi River in lot 12, range 11 of Ascot Township. Powered by a water wheel, the brewery pulled the water needed for the brewing process directly from the river via a series of pipes. Inside the brew house there was a large cast iron kiln to dry barley, a malt mill, and other vessels necessary to the art of making beer including two large copper kettles and all of the required cooling and storage equipment. Local wheat, barley, hops and clean water were all readily available and the brewery had an impressive capacity of 1,260 litres per batch.

This was, however, a difficult time for a small-scale brewery to open in the Eastern Townships. The region had not yet been reached by any railways and there was only a rudimentary network of roads and trails. As such it was both difficult and expensive to transport beer out of the area to the larger markets of Montreal, Quebec City or the United States. Additionally, the local population was insufficient to permit the business to grow. Only three years earlier, in 1834, there were fewer than 200 people living in Sherbrooke and while the influx of immigrants to the area following the founding of the British American Land Company undoubtedly brought in additional customers there were simply not enough local drinkers to allow Austin and Slack to make any money. To complicate matters, at least from the perspective of aspiring brewers, there was an active temperance movement in Canada during this time committed to riding the country of alcoholic drink. In November and December 1841, for example, R.D. Wadsworth of the Montreal Temperance Society toured the Eastern Townships and while he made many converts to his cause he also noted that the recent establishment of the brewery in Lennoxville had undermined his efforts.

Lennoxville near the time of its first brewery. Photo: BANQ

In the face of these pressures the owners were actively trying to sell their brewery as early as June 1841, billing it as “a desirable opportunity” for “emigrants and others” in the Quebec (City) Gazette. Unfortunately for them, they were unable to find a buyer and the enterprise went out of business in the summer of 1843. By this point Austin had moved to St. Johns (Saint-Jean-sur Richelieu) where he was working as a trader while Slack had relocated to Eaton. In an attempt to recoup at least some of their investment the defunct brewery was auctioned off by James Scott at the Merrick’s Hotel in Lennoxville on March 11, 1843 and was purchased by Charles Anderson Richardson, the town’s postmaster, for the modest sum of ₤213 (approximately $46,000 today). This sale included the brewery, granary, stables, all equipment necessary for the production of beer and the land upon which it sat. Alas, for reasons that are lost, Richardson could not pay for his newly acquired brewery and the property was seized by Sheriff Charles Whitcher later that autumn. The site was once again put up for auction at Whitcher’s office in Sherbrooke on October 10, 1843 at which time it was purchased by G. Weston who then went on to sell “Lennoxville Beer” throughout the region for the next 15 years.

In 1858 Weston sold the brewery to George B. Capel, a native of Salisbury, England who had just immigrated to the Eastern Townships following a stint in India. Soon after acquiring the brewery Capel partnered with Robert Atto, a local farmer also from England, to run the business. In what must have been a great relief to the drinking public Capel and Atto ran an advertisement in Sherbrooke’s The Canadian Times newspaper that they would “spare no pains to keep up a constant supply of Good Ale and Beer” to the area. Capel, it should be noted, was a man of keen entrepreneurial spirit and less than a year after buying the brewery he also partnered with local soap manufacturer E. Moe and started selling soap directly from his brew house. Much more importantly, in 1863 Capel discovered copper on his farm south of Lennoxville and lost no time in developing what would become the Capelton Copper Mine. He was also instrumental in founding a number of other companies during this period including the Magog Petroleum Company in 1866 and the Dominion Gold Mining Company the following year before he sold his various businesses and returned to England in 1868.

It is not clear if Capel’s departure from Canada marked the end of the Lennoxville Brewery or not. The last mention of the brewery in any Sherbrooke area newspaper occurred in the summer of 1859, long before Capel returned to England. The Coaticook Historical Society, however, has suggested that the brewery was in business until sometime around 1875. This is supported somewhat by a record of a Thomas Guinan working as a barber at the “old brewery” in Lennoxville in 1876. It would certainly seem that the brew house was closed by then, but that the reference to the former establishment was still recent enough to be meaningful. Regardless, whenever its closure occurred it did not appear to be a newsworthy event which is a pity given how important the enterprise likely was to the earliest inhabitants of Lennoxville. Slàinte Mhath.

George B. Capel, 1861. Photo: McCord Stewart Museum

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Not all weeds are our nemesis

Photo courtesy

By Pooja Sainarayan

Local Journalism Initiative

Invasive plants and weeds are often used interchangeably, but generally speaking, weeds refer to plants growing where they are not welcome. Weeds can be local or non-local, invasive or non-invasive, and competitive or easy going. However, weeds tend to share certain properties in which they can gain advantage over desirable plants. First, they can reproduce in many way – sexually by seed and asexually by rhizomes. Second, certain weeds can block the sun from other plants by leafing out sooner than slower growers. They can also retain their leaves for a longer time during fall, allowing for a longer photosynthesis period and ultimately increasing their survival. As a result, weeds have populated areas undergoing extreme conditions such as draughts and have come on top as survivors. Apart from their top-notch survival skills that can harm the reproduction of other plant species, can our local weeds serve other purposes?

Weeds can give us a lot of information about soil, as all plants have specific environmental conditions, including soil preferences in order to thrive. For instance, the nitrogen content and whether the soil is too compacted or eroded. Identifying weeds that give hints on these possible issues can help us make the needed changes such as tilling or adding organic matter to our gardens. An example is weeds with deep taproots, such as dandelions and burdocks can be an indicator of compacted soil that lacks air, water and nutrients. On the other hand, weeds are the ecosystems way of correcting the soil to achieve more balance. Dandelions and burdocks have deep and strong roots that also help break up the compacted soil. Similarly, weeds can also be an indicator of good soil. In the case of common groundsel, knapweed, lambsquarters and fiddleheads that are all common weeds of Quebec, signal nutrient-rich and fertile soil.

Apart from providing hints of soil conditions, some weeds have played crucial ecological roles. The milkweeds are a prime example of such weeds. In Quebec, there are four native species – Common milkweed, Swamp milkweed, Poke milkweed (relatively uncommon), and the Butterfly milkweed (endangered species in Quebec). Milkweeds are perennials that carry flowers grouped in umbels. They are called milkweeds because of the milky white sap that leaks when the plant is injured, which may cause an allergic reaction in some people. The nectar of milkweed attracts many pollinating animals such as butterflies, hummingbirds, bees and wasps. Monarch butterflies feed exclusively on milkweed, being the only host plant for this butterfly species. The issue is, despite the importance of native milkweeds, these plants are often mistaken for regular weeds and wiped out causing harm to pollinators and declines in the monarch butterfly populations. In addition, milkweed has been used by the First Nations as food, and to make rope. The common milkweed has made a comeback because of the properties of its fiber, which is made by the silky hairs of its seeds. It is used primarily in thermal insulation, stuffing for quilts and pillow and even as an absorbent material in oil spills.

Other weeds such as dandelions and purslane offer several health benefits to humans. In French, the word dandelion translates to “pissenlit” which translates in English to “pee in bed”. This name comes from the strong diuretic properties of the dandelion leaves. The dandelion plant is edible and has been used throughout history to treat several conditions such as digestive ailments, joint pain and fever, although the evidence of efficacy requires more research. The dandelion leaves are highly nutritious, providing beta-carotene and vitamins C and K. The roots contain inulin, a prebiotic fiber that nourishes the good-gut bacteria. So, skip the weed killer and rid your lawn of dandelions by harvesting them! Similarly, purslane, also known as portulaca is an edible weed. It is known to contain ten times the omega 3 fatty acids found in spinach. It can be served raw in salads where it tastes like pea shoots, or it can be steamed where it tastes like spinach. Of note, beware of toxic imitators such as euphorbias that often grow close by. Euphorbias release a milky sap when its thick stem is broken, providing an easy method of identification.

To conclude, weeds can be detrimental to the garden and in some cases even toxic to humans. On the other hand, they can provide many benefits to pollinators and human health, meriting more respect than they get. It may just be worth it to research our garden weeds in more detail to learn about their possible key roles in our ecosystem and human health.

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Cacography in the age of technology

Photo courtesy

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

A friend who keeps an eye on a wide variety of topics sent me a link to an on-line article in The Conversation, a nonprofit media outlet.  Written by Misha Teramura, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, the article had the long title:  Think tech killed penmanship?  Messy handwriting was a problem centuries before smartphones.

My first reaction was to ignore the article.  I already knew that messy handwriting predated smartphones and computers.  I had firsthand experience with messy handwriting dating back to the middle of the last century. 

I was first made aware of penmanship in Grade 5.  That was the year that pupils were expected to make the big step of graduating from pencil to pen.  In September, we were doing all our work in pencil.  At some point in the year, those whose penmanship was judged adequate began writing with a pen.  This was the late 1950s and a pen consisted of a handle and a nib.  Every few strokes, the nib would have to be dipped into an inkwell.  It could be messy.  Hence, our teacher insisted that we had to write neatly and legibly with a pencil before we were permitted to write with a pen.  At the end of Grade 5, I was one of those still writing with a pencil.  (As I recall, in Grade 6, despite my failures in Grade 5, I was writing cursive with a ballpoint pen.)

It was only on second thought that I scrolled down to scan the rest of the text.  It was written in response to an article in the New York Times several months earlier which attributed the poor penmanship of today to the use of laptops and smartphones.

Teramura begged to differ.  As someone immersed in the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the professor from Toronto had ample evidence that bad handwriting could easily be found 400 years ago.

Teramura wrote, “In countless letters that survive from the early modern period, writers apologize for their bad handwriting.  Sometimes they blame it on circumstances:  they were groggy from just waking up or tired late at night (“scribbled with a weary hand in my bed” reads one sign-off from 1585).”

At other times, he noted, the excuses for poor handwriting were medical:  a broken arm from falling off a horse, a hand injured in a duel, or stiffening joints from arthritis or gout.  A common excuse—as it still is today—was that the letter had to be written in haste and hence the handwriting was poor.

Teramura described cacography—or bad handwriting—as calligraphy’s evil twin.  He pointed out that there is a long list of famous people who had poor handwriting, including Queen Elizabeth I and the Dutch scholar, Erasmus. 

At the time, before typewriters and laptops, handwritten letters were all that could be sent.  Penmanship was a necessary skill, or at least a useful one.     

Strangely enough, although good penmanship was of benefit to the upwardly mobile, it was cacography that that appealed to the ruling class.

Teramura wrote, “The aristocratic nobility was notoriously bad at writing by hand.  Popular dramatists even made jokes about it.  But bad handwriting may have been deliberate.  In fact, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says just that:  I once did hold it, as our statists do,/ A baseness to write fair, and labored much/ How to forget that learning.”

Hamlet had mastered handwriting, but he now intentionally neglects to use this skill.  It was below those born into power and privilege to write neatly. 

Teramura noted, “Writing carelessly could be a way of asserting one’s social or political clout by forcing others less privileged to struggle to decipher what one had written.”

Today, or at least up until quite recently, the medical profession tended to be associated with cacography.  A few decades ago, it was still commonplace for a doctor (sometimes more that one) to run a general practice in a small town.  Typically, a patient would call the doctor’s office, show up for an appointment, and leave with a prescription for the pharmacist.  In my experience, the prescription was always all but illegible.

Cacography is as close as I got to med school.  Perhaps my handwriting wasn’t bad enough.  Equipped with ball point pens, I remember carrying on regular and even frequent handwritten correspondence with friends through my teens and twenties.  (Of course, I made a point of typing my papers at university.)

Today, on my laptop, I type the stories I send to my editor.  The notes I take during interviews however, are scribbled with my ballpoint pen into my notebook.  My handwriting hasn’t improved with age.  I always try to type up a story as soon as possible after the interview.  Even with a fresh memory, I’m not always able to decipher my hastily scrawled notes.  And reading something scribbled three or four days previously is often impossible.

Teramura reminded me that I was in good company, “The Reformation theologian Martin Bucer allegedly couldn’t even read some of his own manuscripts.  Nor was he alone.  As the preacher John Preston (1587 – 1628) observed in a sermon, “One would think a man should read his own hand, yet some do write so bad, that they cannot read it when they have done.””

Teramura finished his article, “Today, the ubiquity of smart phones and laptops has no doubt played a role in the ways we write.  But for those of us who can’t read our own sticky notes and to-do lists, it may come as a relief to know that bad handwriting is not an unprecedented phenomenon, but has its own centuries-long history.  We’re simply living a new chapter of it.”

A quick inquiry into penmanship in school today makes me wonder if handwriting hasn’t already gone the way of straight pens and inkwells.  Has cursive script already disappeared?

Describing her Grade 5 class, one teacher told me that of her 21 students, only one—a girl—always wrote in cursive script.  All her other students wrote in block letters.

As well as being unable to use cursive script, many young people today cannot read a handwritten text.

In 2019, an enterprising teacher at a local elementary school initiated a local history project for Remembrance Day.  The research material included documents from Archives Canada and handwritten letters from WWII.  One of the difficulties the students met was that much of the old documentation was handwritten.  The students had to learn to read and write cursive script to make sense of their research material.  And then, as would those of us long accustomed to handwritten letters, they had to cope with cacography.  The project planned for mid-November was completed in June.

Handwriting was useful until quite recently because writing in cursive script is much faster than printing out words in block letters.  However, it is not as fast as typing and, in most circumstances, not nearly as convenient as a laptop or a smartphone.

Penmanship, in the form of calligraphy, continues to exist as a minor art form.  For those of us who still do put pen (or pencil) to paper, cacography continues to be an occasional—if not frequent—presence, even on things as innocuous as a shopping list.

Cacography in the age of technology Read More »

The wreck of French, the triumph of English

The Raft of the Medusa. Courtesy

By Guy Rex Rodgers

Local Journalism Initiative

This provocative title is borrowed from a new book1 that provides some global perspective on the vitality of French and English. Which language is doing better or worse? Compared to what?  And compared to when?

Lionel Meney is a French linguist, trained at the Sorbonne, who came to Quebec to teach at Laval University. After a lifetime of studying languages in a global context, Meney concludes that the battle between French and English is over. French has been defeated on every significant front and English has triumphed. His assessment is bleak but he supports it with 250 exhaustively documented pages of examples and statistics.

Meney refutes the arguments of naysayers who believe French in Quebec is doing just fine. Global data supports the claims of François Legault’s CAQ and Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s PQ that French is seriously threatened and dangerously declining. However, while language pessimists are correct about the imperilled state of French, Quebec’s desperate attempts to address global problems with solutions that blame local villains are misguided and doomed to fail.   

The most vivid example Meney offers to make his case is the working language(s) of the European Union. The first six countries to form the Union were France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, which has three official languages (French, German, Dutch), and Luxembourg, which also has three official languages (French, German, Luxembourgish). The EU operated with four languages (French, German, Italian and Dutch).  Things changed in 1973 when Great Britain joined.

As the EU increased from six members to 28, the cost in time and money of translation rose exponentially. English became the convenient lingua franca. By 2007, 72% of EU documents were written in English.  No single fact demonstrates the irresistible power of the English language more clearly than the predominant role it continues to play in EU communications eight years after Brexit. The English people could vote to leave the EU, and Europe could wave England goodbye, but the EU continues to communicate in English, now the post-national working-language of the global community. 

Other international institutions are subject to the same reality. The UN has 193 member nations that speak hundreds of different languages but the U.N. recognizes only six official languages: English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. The languages are not equally utilised.  English dominates 75% to 85% of UN communications. 

Meney documents the triumph of English in academic publications, second language instruction, international commerce and product labels. To have a comfortable mastery of English is a distinct advantage while to be unilingual in any other language, including French, is a handicap.

 “Not long ago you could you could have a successful (international) career as a unilingual Francophone.  That is no longer possible.”  “Failure to master this language (English) has become an insurmountable obstacle.”

In addition, French societies are being invaded by English words and transformed by English syntax, and young Francophones are enthralled by English culture. The internet is massively dominated by English. Despite France’s long history of international influence and the large number of French-speakers globally, the French language is everywhere in retreat.

Is this English domination fair? Is it good? The one thing beyond dispute is that it is a reality.

Meney believes governments can play an important role in support of language by providing first class education and assisting immigrants to acquire language skills. The current government of Quebec prefers to score points among its base by reducing the availability of first class education – when it involves English-speaking universities and CEGEPs.  The current government finds it more popular to deny immigrants services in languages other than French after six months rather than invest necessary resources to enable all immigrants to acquire French skills. The CAQ’s francisation program has been strong on rhetoric and aspirations but lamentably weak on planning and implementation.

Meney’s conclusion is sensible. “If the expansion of the domain of English seems inevitable, to save what can still be saved we must organize the cohabitation of the two languages ​​on our territory.”  The inescapable future is linguistic cohabitation, aka bilingualism. The utility and popularity of English are undeniable. Quebec’s worst strategy is to defend French by declaring English an enemy unwelcome in the workplace, the public square and private lives. That war has been fought and lost. If anyone doubts it, they need to read Meney’s book.

Guy Rex Rodgers was founding Executive Director of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) until returning to filmmaking. You can reach Guy at: GRR.Montrealer@gmail.com

  1. Le naufrage du français, the triomphe de l’anglais by Lionel Meney (collections L’espace public, 2024) ↩︎

The wreck of French, the triumph of English Read More »

Poverty reduction  – good, bad, and ugly

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

Shortly after becoming prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau took Jean-Yves Duclos aside and told him to develop Canada’s first-ever national poverty reduction strategy. Thus began many months of roundtables and town halls, in person and online, via conversations and conferences, informing the then minister of Families, Children and Social Development on how to reduce poverty in this country.

Two and a half years later, “Opportunity for All – Canada’s First Poverty Reduction Strategy” was published. Its primary goal was to reduce poverty by 20 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2030 based on the official measure of poverty. (This article won’t deal with the secondary goals of reducing chronic homelessness by 50 percent, ending all long-term drinking water advisories on reserves by 2021 and reducing or eliminating housing need for 530,000.)

There are well over 100 benefit, credit, incentive and other programs offered up by federal, provincial and territorial governments, all designed to transfer cash to low-income Canadians to further the primary goal of reducing poverty. They are all administered, not by the department of Families, Children and Social Development but by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), the tax-collector-in-chief. In Canada almost all government cash benefit payments require recipients to file a tax return. Individuals who don’t participate in the tax system, often the most vulnerable in society, may forego these benefits or even entitlements to government services when such services are tied to tax return information.

For the 31 million of us who filed a personal income tax return this year, it’s a tedious but necessary pain in the ass. Tedious because the basic tax return has 172 lines and 15 different schedules to pore over before you get to “Refund or Balance Owing”. Necessary, because failing to file gets you the double whammy of draconian interest penalties to pay and missing out on possible cash transfers like the Guaranteed Income Supplement or the Canada Workers Benefit.

Do you know how many of us don’t file a return? Neither does the CRA. They think it’s between 4 and 5 million people. They also don’t know why these people don’t file, since the estimated value of cash benefits lost to working-age non-filers is at least $1.5 billion.

Leaving seniors’ benefits aside, the largest benefit is the Canada Child Benefit, which pays out over $24 billion/year to parents. As an example, a low-income family of four with two young children in Ontario is in line for about $19,000 in federal/provincial child and family benefits. Benefits are similar in other provinces. The growing financial importance of these benefits leaves eligible recipients who don’t file a tax return increasingly penalized. As important, it reduces the effectiveness of our poverty-reduction goals.

Courtesy Statistics Canada

In the interests of getting potential cash benefits into the hands of low-income earners, the CRA has, for the past six years, offered an automated phone service that allows low-income Canadians to file their tax return over the phone by answering a short list of questions. The uptake has not been good, averaging only about 60,000/year. Close to half the people invited to file for free may have paid a professional to help them file. The CRA can’t say why people would choose more expensive filing methods, although to an outside observer it looks like people don’t know about file-by-phone or the benefits for which they may be eligible, or the system is just too complicated or there are other reasons.

Indeed, there’ve been sufficient academic studies that say there are lots of ‘other reasons’. Many low-income people are suspicious of government and unfavorably disposed to tax filing. Some concerns are based on ignorance, like, for example, that cash benefit entitlements administered through the tax system will be clawed back from their social assistance benefits. Or they don’t understand how tax refunds work. Or they’re scared, fearing that by filing they might invite the CRA to dig into past income sources and expose them to serious actions by government.

 In Budget 2023, the government announced its intention to increase the number of Canadians eligible for “SimpleFile by Phone” to two million by 2025, as well as to introduce a new automatic income tax filing service. Budget 2024 says the CRA will pilot a digital and paper version of its SimpleFile by Phone service intended for individuals who have gaps in their filing history or have never filed a tax return. It doesn’t say how the CRA will do that, but it does say it will provide an update in the fall of 2024.

So we really can’t say how much all this will cost – either the administrative costs to develop and deliver the file-by-phone program, or costs related to cash benefits delivered to individuals who would have otherwise not filed a tax return and would have foregone the benefits to which they were entitled. And we can’t say whether the CRA’s renewed efforts will be any more successful at convincing non-filers to file than their past efforts over the past six years.

In spite of the many billions of dollars that have been devoted to this project since 2018, the poverty level has moved from 11.2 percent in 2018 to an estimated 11.2 percent in 2024.

No doubt a lot of bad luck and real time issues – Covid 19, inflation, etc. – have intruded. Nevertheless, there’s a serious question to be asked. Is there not a better way to reach non-filers, get cash benefits into their hands and improve our track record of reducing the number of Canadians living in poverty? Other countries don’t require everyone to file a tax return and they manage to transfer money to low-income earners. Canada’s record on poverty reduction compared to other countries is not good. Is this new CRA initiative that builds on a failed old initiative the best we have?

Cohendian560@gmail.com

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Wildlife ups and downs

As deer proliferate in the Townships, many residents cry «stop!». Photo by David Winch

Why are animal species both thriving and facing extinction in Townships?

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Wildlife is everywhere in the Townships. But some animal species are surging, while others are definitely not. Two examples of these extremes are deer and sturgeon.

Everyone sees how ubiquitous white-tailed deer are here. Regional conditions are ideal, with leafy deciduous forests, many farm fields and … tasty gardens.

 Anaïs Gasse, a biologist for the Quebec ministry of forests, wildlife and parks, told The Record in November 2022 that the provincial government is aware of the deer boom in the Townships and has been trying to address the situation. “In the Eastern Townships, we have milder winters [than further north] … and we don’t have very many effective predators in the territory,” she explained.

There are no wolves, a few pockets of coyotes and some bear in the region, but not nearly enough to effectively control the deer. In 2021, the Quebec ministry of wildlife estimated the provincial deer population at 250,000 head— double the number in the 1990s. More control measures are needed.

Hunting licences increased

The province has increased the number of antlerless deer licences, allowing more hunters to target fawns and females, government biologist François Lebel told the CBC.

Hunters are now bagging nearly 50,000 deer a year. “When we are overpopulated with deer, we must reduce the population, and unfortunately, to decrease [that number], it is with a lethal method,” said Lebel.

This reduction may be difficult. Deer are a species known as “synanthropes” – animals that can thrive around human settlements. Deer have this aptitude, along with raccoons, squirrels, geese, rats, coyotes, pigeons, crows and, increasingly, wild turkeys.

Pristine nature is not their sole home. Even the biggest cities feel their increasing presence.

The New Yorker magazine reported in 2021 how deer are thriving in the biggest city in North America. There are now lots of deer in the New York borough of Staten Island; they first swam there from suburban New Jersey. Aerial studies by low-flying planes in 2014 counted 763 deer in the green spaces of the borough’s 18.7 square miles.

This puts local greenery under pressure. And the lack of predators for these urban and suburban deer is obvious.

A much-viewed YouTube documentary highlights how the reintroduction of predators can radically affect deer numbers and forest biology.

Deer in Yellowstone Park had been running wild, with populations booming. They chomped down grass pastures, and reduced the number of full-grown shade trees (see https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/ ).

Once wolves were re-introduced there in 1995, deer started to avoid open grassy areas. Vegetation bounced back. This provided more habitat for songbirds. Firmer watersheds were good for beaver, and fish took advantage of deeper rivers. Wolves also killed coyotes, which meant more foxes and small mammals.

We can only imagine – or fear — how a peak predator prowling around the Townships might affect our deer population, and later, local vegetation.

Instead, we will have to rely on hunters. Venison, anyone?

Sturgeon are harmed by dams, limiting their numbers in Townships lakes.. Photo by David WInch

Sturgeon still around?

At the opposite end of the wildlife spectrum are sturgeon, known to biologists as lake sturgeon (or in French, esturgeon jaune).

Many people in the Townships have seen the classic “fishermen’s chart” wall-plaque, sold around Lake Massawippi. Its handwritten text highlights fishing holes and Massawippi-area animal habitats. It states clearly: “Sturgeon, 50 to 75 lbs., once swam in this lake. Last seen about 1927.”

A brief internet search turns up evidence to the contrary. The Eastern Townships Resource Centre site displays several photos of triumphant fishermen with sturgeon; in one catch dated 1969, a sportsman holds up an 86-pounder from Lake Massawippi.

After I asked on Facebook’s “Friends of Lake Massawippi” page for recent sturgeon sightings, one poster replied: “I saw a large one in Bacon’s Bay around 1999. It was in shallow [water], resting on the bottom. It looked like a log. It then slowly rose near the surface when I passed over it on a windsurfer board. There were two other witnesses with me. We’ve never forgotten it.”

Veteran fishermen in the area, however, caution that false sightings are common. The real number of sturgeon in that lake today, they say, is likely “zero”.

The water-control dam built downstream from North Hatley in 1967 effectively ended sturgeon spawning in the Massawippi River. The fish ladder installed there is not appropriate for slow-moving bass or sluggish sturgeon; they don’t leap like salmon.

Lake sturgeon prefer fast-moving water and spawn where they find that environment. They “can be found at depths of at least 5 meters but no greater than 20 meters,” clarifies Nature Canada. Sturgeon can still be found in good numbers further downstream in the St. Francis River, which eventually empties into the St. Lawrence.

Nature Canada notes that lake sturgeon also remains a threatened species because “it was overfished starting in the late 1800s and early 1900s.” Huge sturgeon hauls were even used as farm fertilizer. Their numbers fell steeply.

 Sturgeon have relatively few outspoken defenders, perhaps because they are not cute and cuddly: “The largest freshwater fish in Canada, the lake sturgeon, can be easily recognized by its external bony scutes which are noticeable ridges along the fish’s body … They also have a pointed snout and four dangling, whisker-like organs, called barbells, located around the mouth. The lake sturgeon has shark-like features such as a cartilaginous skeleton”, adds Nature Canada.

One large biological study (Fortin et al., 1992), concluded that “Quebec is one of the rare regions of North America that still has relatively balanced and productive populations of lake sturgeon,” mostly clustered in the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers or in northern Quebec. Sturgeon have a long life cycle with relatively infrequent spawning, and they can live over 150 years.

So there is still hope for sturgeon here. But unlike deer, they need our help. That recovery could start with something as simple as a workable fish ladder.

Wildlife ups and downs Read More »

A warm welcome for immigrant artist brought rich rewards

Courtesy McCord Stewart Museum

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

For hundreds of years the Eastern Townships has been a destination for refugees. Whether it was the first Abenaki people fleeing early European incursions along the coast of Maine, United Empire Loyalists following the Crown northwards, or displaced Scottish Highlanders evicted from their ancestral crofts, people have been seeking new beginnings in this land for generations.

Robert Scott Duncanson was such a man. Born in the tiny hamlet of Fayette in the Finger Lakes region of New York sometime in 1821 Duncanson spent much of his childhood in Monroe, Michigan just south of Detroit. In 1840 he moved to Cincinnati and it was there that he emerged as the first internationally recognized African-American artist. Largely self-taught he first practised his art as a young man by making copies of popular prints while earning a living as a house painter. Later, he progressed to portraits and still-life paintings, gaining commissions from some of the more liberal minded citizens of the time who refused to let the colour of his skin mask his inherent talent. Towards the end of the 1840s Duncanson turned to landscape painting and was a founding member of the Ohio River Valley technique which sought to capture the soft beauty of America’s pastoral scenes. By the 1850s many considered Duncanson to be the premier landscape artist in the United States.

Despite these talents Duncanson faced an unceasing tide of racism during his time in Ohio. As a frontier city on the border between slave and free states Cincinnati saw major race riots in 1829, 1836 and 1841 and these tensions remained part of the city’s fabric throughout Duncanson’s time in Ohio. As art historian Joseph Ketner noted in a 1993 “A major portion of Cincinnati’s booming economy depended upon southern trade, forcing Duncanson to face the spectre of slavery daily in the markets, at the docks, and across the river from his home.”

Courtesy

These tensions were only heightened during the American Civil War and in 1863 Duncanson finally decided to leave his homeland and seek a more tolerant audience. He intended to go to Europe to exhibit his works but first stopped in Montreal which he had visited the previous year. Upon his return to that city he was so warmly greeted by the local artistic community that he cancelled his European plans and took up residence in Canada. In September, 1863 he mounted his first serious exhibition in his new homeland, showing his popular paintings Land of the Lotus Eaters and Western Tornado in the home of local photographer William Notman.

For the next two years Duncanson used Montreal as a base of operations as he travelled throughout Central Canada collecting material for future paintings. The Eastern Townships were a favoured destination for him during this time, and his journeys to this area ultimately resulted in some of his most beautiful paintings including Mount Orford and Owl’s Head Mountain. The first of these landscapes was last sold in 2005 when it was purchased at auction for the impressive sum of $296,000 US dollars. The latter work, Owl’s Head Mountain, now forms part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada along with several of Duncanson’s other paintings. Other notable works from Duncanson’s time in Canada included Mount Royal, Waterfall on Montmorency, and St. Ann’s River. He also produced a number of other major works during this time not associated with the Canadian landscape including his stunningly beautiful Vale of Kashmir. This work showed the influence of British poetry upon his painting, with Alfred Tennyson, John Keats and William Wordsworth being cited as inspirations for his sweeping landscapes.

Not content to merely paint the local countryside, Duncanson also became an important mentor for several emerging Canadian painters during his time in Montreal. The most successful of these artists was Aaron Allan Edson, a native of the Eastern Townships who became a leading Canadian landscape artist himself and was, in 1880, a founder of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Another close associate at the time was Prussian born Canadian artist Otto Reinhold Jacobi.

Owl’s Head. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada

Following the end of the Civil War Duncanson left Montreal to make his much-delayed trip to Europe, after which he returned to Cincinnati in 1866. He continued to paint for the next several years but by the early 1870s his health was starting to decline. In the autumn of 1872 he suffered from a nervous breakdown while preparing for an exhibition in Detroit and was confined to a nearby “insane asylum.” For the next two months he was beset with dementia and the belief that he was possessed by the soul of deceased artist, with some speculating that his condition was the result of lead poisoning from his earlier work as a house painter in the 1830s and 1840s.

Duncanson died in Detroit on December 21st, 1872 and was buried alongside his parents and several siblings at the family plot in the Woodland Cemetery in Monroe, Michigan. In a sad and troubling sign of the times his obituary in the Chicago Tribune the following week sought to downplay his work, noting that “It added a special feature of interest to his paintings that Mr. Duncanson had negro blood in his veins, and his pictures were, therefore looked upon with more or less of curiosity, and this feat sometimes gained for them a sale which could not always have been secured for them by their real artistic merit…”  Fortunately, a much more enlightened view of Duncanson’s skills holds today, and he is recognized for his fine artworks in leading museums around the world.

While Duncanson’s time in the Eastern Townships was fleeting, limited only to short expeditions to paint the local landscape, his mark on the region is noteworthy. During his short time in Canada he not only shared the beauty of this land with a global audience, but he also helped a new generation of Canadian artists to do the same. No small feat for a disheartened refugee 160 years ago.

Robert S. Duncanson, Waterfall on Mont-Morency, 1864 .Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum

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The Solar Spectacle – Northern Lights explained

Photo courtesy

By Pooja Sainarayan

Local Journalism Initiative

The aurora borealis is a beautiful nighttime marvel that is worth travelling afar to observe. In fact, for most people it is the only way to come across “space weather.” Aurora activity is an indicator of ongoing geomagnetic storm conditions or solar flares. Solar flares are eruptions of energy, extreme ultraviolet light and x-rays that are caused by intertwined magnetic fields at the Sun’s surface. These magnetic fields can abruptly come undone or recombine producing the solar flares. X-class solar flares are the most intense type of flare the Sun produces.

A giant solar storm hit the Earth’s geomagnetic field on the first week of May, resulting in the most intense geomagnetic storm and longest displays of the aurora borealis seen in over two decades. After an approximate two-week break, the sunspot section that resulted in the intense storm seen in the beginning of May named Active Region 3664 (AR3664), had rotated back to face the Earth. Although appearing smaller than when we last saw it, the sunspot now renamed AR3697 still left quite a mark. On May 29th, the returned sunspot blasted out remarkably long intervals of solar flares, which lasted over an hour. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which assesses geomagnetic storms on a five-point scale, this geomagnetic storm was rated at an average G2 that peaked on Friday May 31st, compared to the severe G4 storm seen in early May. The AR3664 noted in the beginning of May, emitted nearly a dozen X-class flares. As the sunspot was going out of view by Mid-May, the emissions reached X8.7-class, the most powerful flare since 2017. Although the brightness and duration of the aurora activity seen the end of May was not the same as in the beginning, the forecast still showed a likelihood of spotting the northern lights throughout most of Canada.

Solar flares release high energy particles and radiation, amongst which energetically charged particles (high-energy protons) and electromagnetic radiation (x-rays) are the most dangerous emissions. On the surface of the Earth, we are shielded from these emissions by the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere. The x-rays from solar flares are halted way above the surface of our planet. However, they do disrupt the Earth’s ionosphere which consequently disrupts radio communications. In combination with energetic ultraviolet radiation, these emissions heat the Earth’s outer atmosphere, causing it to widen. Additionally, emissions and changes in the atmosphere can interfere with satellite communications such as the accuracy of Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements.

It is now known that most of the severe geomagnetic storms are caused by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), commonly associated with solar flares. The precise relationship between CMEs and flares is still not completely understood, as flares can trigger CMEs but sometimes CMEs can be observed without any flares. CMEs carry more material than flares throughout interplanetary space, raising the probability that these dangerous emissions interact with Earth. Solar flares alone produce high-energy particles close to the Sun, some which escape into space. However, CMEs drive a shock wave that can continuously release energetic particles as it spreads through space. When a CME hits the Earth, its impact disrupts the Earth’s magnetosphere, producing a geomagnetic storm. After it leaves the Sun, a CME normally takes three to five days to reach Earth. So, observing the correlated solar flare of ejection of CMEs from the Sun gives an early warning of geomagnetic storms.

Astronauts that are on a mission to the Moon or Mars are in serious danger from the energetic particles of flares. However, astronauts that stay relatively close to the Earth are not in immediate danger as they do not have to worry about the cumulative radiation exposure. A major problem with geomagnetic storms is the temporary loss of electrical power over a large area. The most well-known case of this occurred in 1989 in Quebec. The high flux in the magnetosphere causes elevated electric currents in power lines, exploding the transformers. This can occur more frequently at higher latitudes, where the induced electricity is greatest, and in areas that have longer power lines and where the ground’s conductivity is weaker.

The consequences of geomagnetic storms are more disruptive now than in the past due to our increased dependence on electronics and satellites that can be impacted by electric currents and energy particles up top in the Earth’s magnetosphere. In addition, the cost associated with repairing satellites and large-scale power grids can be very expensive and time consuming.

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