Maclean's February 2022

AT THE HEIGHT of our recent federal election campaign, someone threw gravel at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he was campaigning in London, Ont. Police later charged the president of a nearby People’s Party of Canada riding association. In March, a Manitoba man was sentenced to six years in prison for crashing his truck through the fence around Rideau Hall in Ottawa. He was looking for Trudeau and believed that Bill Gates is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. A Laval, Que., QAnon believer was recently arrested for posting a threatening message about his daughter’s school after a Canadian QAnon influencer urged supporters to “shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject children under the age of 19 years old with coronavirus19 vaccines.” Anti-vaccine protesters are increasingly causing serious risks to public safety—protesting at…

SONGS OF SOLACE I would like to express my appreciation for Katie Underwood’s article on Céline Dion (“Coming back to us now,” Torch Song, December 2021). It was beautifully written, funny and touching. Underwood mounts a compelling defence of Dion, and of the role singers play in sustaining our emotional lives. Musicians, poets and performers have always been the ones to get us through a crisis. Remember poet Anna Akhmatova and the siege of Stalingrad! While artists are often treated as trivial in our society, they are, in fact, vital to our survival. Gillian McCann, North Bay, Ont. Your contributor writes that Canada has never needed Céline Dion more. I’m reasonably sure I need less Céline and more Stompin’ Tom—unless, of course, she knows all the words to Sudbury Saturday Night. Mel Simoneau, Gatineau,…

OPENINGS Feb. 18-27. Festival du Voyageur. White, green, red and yellow for the Franco-Manitoban flag. Red, white and blue to represent L’Assomption, Que., the provenance of French-Canadian voyageurs to Canada’s west. Black and red for the Festival du Voyageur. Those are the traditional colours woven into the sash that Gab-Riel Turenne—named after Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel, prominent historical leaders of Turenne’s own Métis nation—is draping around long-time mascot Léo La Tuque on this snowy day at Winnipeg’s Fort Gibraltar. Turenne, his wife, Julie, and their kids, Annika, 18, Martin, 15, and Natasha, 13, are official ambassadors for the annual festival that draws some 95,000 people and celebrates francophone culture in Manitoba with outdoor activities, live music (including a band that will roam festival grounds in a mobile trailer), maple taffy,…

CHERYL MALONEY’S EYES glossed over with tears as she stood near the bank of the Stewiacke River in the middle of Nova Scotia. The news was finally sinking in. Behind her, about 100 people filled plates with spaghetti and fried chicken; the crowd included her 11-year-old grandson, Drake Nevin, one of many children who’d spent most of their childhoods fighting alongside Elders to protect this river system. She saw the drift netters—white fishers who catch shad in these waters—reminiscing, and amber leaves floating on the water like confetti. Two weeks earlier, Alton Gas, a subsidiary of Calgary-based AltaGas, had abandoned a project that would have pumped 10,000 cubic metres of brine into the mouth of this river each day for as long as a decade, leaving behind subterranean caverns where the…

5,366 km 1 DENALI NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA The eagle was first seen in the preserve that encompasses much of Alaska’s interior wilderness in August 2020. Although the species is known to fly along the west coast of Alaska, it’s rarely seen inland. 3,548 km 2 GOLIAD COUNTY, TEXAS After making its way southward, unseen by humans for months, birders caught a glimpse of the eagle in the southern U.S. state in March 2021. 3 YORK RIVER, GASPÉ, QUE. The raptor cruised north to Quebec in July. “No one would have put this on a list of potential birds in Texas, let alone Quebec,” says The Birdist blog’s Nick Lund, who’s been tracking the eagle. 192 km 4 RESTIGOUCHE RIVER, N.B. Next stop: the Atlantic provinces. It was first seen in New Brunswick, then along the Avon River in Nova Scotia…

There was talk about moving cows from my friend’s farm next door onto dry land, on Highway 1. We tried running the cows at first, to see if they would go on their own. That didn’t work. So we jumped to Plan B. I’ve had a Sea-Doo for two years. I live two minutes from work, so I just hooked up to it and took off. It’s obviously really hard to pull cows through water, but it was a great team effort. I pulled a cow to the freeway, where they had cattle trailers loading them right away. By the time I got back to the barns, they had another one ready for us. When we had to call it quits, many people had been standing in waist-high water for five hours. I didn’t…