David Winch

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.

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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 »

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 »

You read it here first

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!

You read it here first 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 »

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 »

Is there a doctor in the house?

Family doctors have many demands on their time and often little flexibility. Courtesy StockCake

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

It used to be so simple!

After we moved in the 1960s, my mother found us a new family doctor, as I recall, by looking one up in the phone book. She likely asked: when can you see us?  — “How about next Tuesday?”

It was often that easy to book a GP.

This has all changed in recent decades, as everyone sees. Finding and keeping a family doctor today is a real worry.

Somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent of Canadians have no family doctor. In B.C., roughly one million people have no GP, while a McGill survey concludes two million people in Quebec have none. In Ontario, the figure is officially 2.2 million; the Ontario College of Family Physicians said that by 2026 that shortfall may rise to as high as 4.4 million.

Alarm bells were ringing throughout the early 2000s, as hospital emergency wards became clogged with people seeking basic care.

Now we face a Boomers’ Crunch: boomer-age doctors are retiring in large numbers, just as their cohort seeks more medical care as seniors.

In my Townships village, two doctors retired in the last decade, with no replacements in sight. We joined a cooperative clinic 20 km away for nursing services and referrals, as needed, to an MD. That works, but nobody thinks it is ideal.

Overall, the doctor shortage risks getting worse before it gets better.

Canadian Medical Association data show government recruitment websites advertised full-time positions for 2,571 family doctors in late 2022. But only 1,461 completed the postgraduate training required to become licensed family doctors that year.

How did this crisis come about in a rich, developed country?

Specialization an issue

Many analysts point to budget cuts. In the early 1990s, during a deep recession, Canadian governments agreed to reduce medical admissions.

As the Toronto Globe and Mail reported in 2022, “Much of the decline in the share of younger doctors can be traced to 1992, when provincial health ministers agreed to cut medical school admissions as part of a plan to curtail mounting health care costs. A Canada-wide 10-per-cent reduction in admissions in the 1993 academic year left the country with fewer doctors entering postgraduate training for the first time, beginning with the graduating class of 1997.”

These cuts, concludes the paper, “resulted in Canada losing part of a generation of doctors”.

Another point of view is put forward by Dr. Anthony Sanfilippo, professor of medicine at Queen’s University. He wrote a 2023 op-ed titled, aptly, “This is why you don’t have a family doctor” and he is author of a new book, The Doctors We Need (Sutherland House Experts).

Dr. Sanfilippo stresses that medical education has changed, with more specialist training. This downplays general practice. When Sanfilippo graduated from medical school in the early 1980s, he was fully trained to start a practice after one year of internship. Today’s graduates are not, given the number of specialties that crowd medical training.

“Canadian medical schools graduate approximately 3,000 new doctors each year … but only about 45 per cent are choosing to engage in family medicine as a career, and just 50 per cent of those are opting to provide the continuing and comprehensive care that would address the needs of unattached patients”, he writes.

Sanfilippo spoke with Townships Weekend recently, and noted that, while each institution in the doctor-certification process does its job well, there is “no consolidated oversight”. We are left, for example, with family doctors working at a piecework rate, while a team approach and single fees might serve patients better.

A career full of obstacles

Some medical students avoid a career path that seems full of headaches.

Most family doctors, after all, must run a small business whose expenses —from office rental and computer service to staff —are entirely dependent on them. Patients suffer from multiple, complex issues. Time is short with many demands in doctors’ workdays. Paperwork stifles any extra time with sick people.

Macleans magazinein 2021 published the personal account of a youngish doctor, a female with four children, whose life in small-town B.C. might resemble the rural Townships.

In “A doctor’s dilemma”, Dr. Kristi Herrling recounted her daily life, starting with 6 a.m. wakeups, managing her children through school prep, then opening her medical office. After a workday often disrupted with emergencies, she helps her husband to make the family supper. She is finally free at 8 p.m. for a further 2-3 hours of paperwork and clinical data.

This includes all manner of tasks: “charting patient visits, checking labs, reviewing imaging, requesting consults, reading specialist reports, filling out forms, researching unusual presentations, advocating for patients, answering pharmacist queries, speaking to home care nurses, and discussing cases that can’t wait with specialists”. Such administration often takes up 25 per cent of a doctor’s time.

As for time off, Dr. Herrling despairs that a “locum”, or replacement doctor, is often elusive to cover her small-town practice.

Before we can graduate more doctors, governments across Canada must act to get the most patient hours from the existing pool of doctors. To this end, several provinces have expanded the responsibilities of nurse practitioners. Pharmacists in Alberta have been granted more initiative in issuing prescriptions.

Quebec has taken welcome steps to reduce paperwork: signing notes to certify student or employee sick leaves have traditionally made doctors “the police arm of human-resource departments”, said observers. Bill 68 has made this optional. Doctors will also be exempted from approving insurance and workers’ compensation claims. Quebec estimates these reforms will cut unnecessary appointments —up to 750,000 annually.

More practical action is needed, and more general-practitioner grads must be graduated for a growing country. Otherwise, regular appointments with the family doctor could become a thing of the past.

Is there a doctor in the house? Read More »

Downtown? What downtown?

Wellington North at Frontenac should be bustling, but downtown often lacks oomph. Photo by David Winch

Sherbrooke struggles to establish an attractive, walkable central city

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

The pop tune “Downtown” was a perky 1965 hit by Brit singer Petula Clark (ask your parents) that captured the allure of nighttime streets:

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city

Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty

How can you lose?

The lights are much brighter there

You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

So go downtown, things’ll be great when you’re

Downtown, no finer place for sure …

Clark evokes the fun of “movie shows” and “little places to go to” to forget all your troubles.

Sadly, that kind of city sparkle is missing in Sherbrooke — and has been for decades. Sure, there is some downtown life on Wellington St. North and King West, a good cineplex here or a nice Thai restaurant there, but overall, the area comes off as shabby and undistinguished. Red-brick industrial buildings and 1920s-vintage banks sit listlessly waiting for some purpose — anything.

“It’s just ugly”, said one dinner companion bluntly, speaking of central Sherbrooke.

To be fair to Wellington North, the main downtown street, walking around there on a sunny Saturday recently I noted the many restaurants, Asian-fusion, Lebanese, Iranian and Italian, the clothing boutiques, the excellent book and magazine outlets, and the Granada concert hall with its full slate of concerts. But somehow, this didn’t make for a bustling street scene. There was barely any bustle.

Longtime Townships residents recall nostalgically being drawn to the big Woolworth store on Wellington or to nearby Tony’s Pizzeria. But retailing has mostly moved to suburban outlets. The food court at the Carrefour de l’Estrie mall today matches the fast-food variety available in downtown Sherbrooke.

City of Sherbrooke’s revitalization plan for downtown focuses on six ‘quartiers’. Courtesy Ville de Sherbrooke

Plans to revitalize

As in cities throughout North America, Sherbrooke became progressively more suburbanized from the 1970s onward, with malls and autoroute-accessible restaurants, cinemas and shops dominating the retail trade.

Across Canada, a range of mid-sized cities resembling Sherbrooke – from Thunder Bay and Sudbury to Moncton and, in Quebec, Trois Rivières – also suffered the impact of declining industries: pulp and paper, forestry, mining, railroads and shipping and, in the Townships, the textile industry. This affected these cities’ dynamism.

A year ago, I wrote about my pleasant experience in Vermont’s capital (“Sherbrooke and Burlington: Twin cities?”, June 3, 2023). I enjoyed Burlington’s picturesque and walkable urban setting. A broad pedestrian mall straddles the downtown, the result of a push by key town councillors to follow examples in Europe, notably the Stroget in Copenhagen.

Can downtown Sherbrooke ever compete with that? Planners are aware of the stagnation issue. The “Mon Centro” revitalization plan posted on the city’s website “is the result of an initiative that began approximately 10 years ago, and culminated in 2015, with the adoption of the Downtown Sherbrooke Sustainable Development Master Plan (also known as Centre-ville 2020)”.

Its goal is ambitious: “The master plan aims to double the population living in the city’s downtown within the next 20 years, while greatly increasing availability of retail and office space” (for English summary, see www.sherbrooke.ca/en/major-projects/mon-centro ).

Pursuant to this plan, downtown Sherbrooke is now seeing “many large-scale projects materialize at the same time: construction of the Espace Centro project, redevelopment of a section of Galt Street West, moving the Grandes-Fourches Bridge … And that’s only the beginning!”

Sherbrooke planning chief Yves Tremblay is a believer; he lives downtown by the river on King. He says he can walk to everything, from the local Maxi to his work at city hall. He agrees there is “no magic formula” for downtown revitalization, especially when Internet is changing shopping habits so fast.

The rugged topography of Sherbrooke also affects its downtown. “Its geography is not linear; there are about six different ‘plateaux’,” which affect neighbourhood character. “Some streets such as rue Alexandre, stand out for their distinct local feel”, notes Tremblay.

Upgrades coming

Other experts in urban planning, however, stress that mid-sized cities don’t often have the downtown population or the geography to maintain a lively scene. The success of Burlington is a special case.

Planning specialist Pierre Filion of the University of Waterloo, for one, has studied dozens of mid-sized cities, ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 residents. He concludes they have to be “very lucky” to bring together all the plusses needed to revive a downtown. Filion also chronicled the “Eaton’s effect” that killed other Canadian downtowns – one department-store closing greatly reduces pedestrian traffic.

Among the successful mid-sized cities that Filion cites — standouts include Madison, Wisconsin, and Kingston, Ontario — there is often a built-in downtown population around a university campus, a major public employer such as a state or provincial capital, and geography that discourages sprawl. Madison’s centre, for example, is built on an isthmus squeezed between two lakes.

Sherbrooke has none of these advantages. And it never even had a downtown Eaton’s.

Today, you can see upgrades on Wellington St. South (until recently a headache for drivers): the broken pavement was replaced with brick and concrete squares, sidewalks have been widened, with planters installed for small trees, and parking made more convenient. Two new office towers of 6 and 10 stories anchor a young working population. Software developer Ubisoft and the school of digital arts (NAD) of the Université du Québec have already moved in. Trendy coffee outlets have followed.

In coming months, the city will adopt “intervention plans” for five more neighbourhoods, denoted as Galt; Alexandre; Marquette, Dufferin and, crucially for downtown life, Well Nord.

But, will these earnest revitalization efforts work?

Filion cautions: “All the elements have to be present for a downtown to be revitalized; above all, there have to be people living and working in the area”.

A tall order, for sure. But well worth it if locals can, some evening soon, like Petula, cheerfully head downtown.

Downtown? What downtown? Read More »

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