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In remote communities like Grise Fiord or Kugluktuk, the supply-chain woes are nothing new — but climate change is making them harder

Right now the rest of Canada is moaning about out-of-stock Christmas gifts, shipping delays and higher pricetags. Yet there’s a part of the country where these problems are a frustrating fact of life — and they’re hoping climate change doesn’t make things even worse. Northern communities have learned to live with the high costs and low access of remote living, but climate change threatens to make both worse as warmer winters jeopardize the primary transport routes for people, goods, and wildlife.

Opinion | Ditching the time change leaves Canada in the dark

On Sunday, most Canadians will set their clocks back one hour. The sun will rise at 7 a.m. in Toronto; 7:51 in Thunder Bay; 9:16 in Igloolik, Nunavut, and 10 a.m. in Pond Inlet. In Grise Fiord, Canada’s most northerly community, the sun won’t rise until 12:12 p.m. — on Feb. 10. In Canada, where a single time zone might stretch across nearly 30 degrees of longitude and over 40 degrees of latitude, people at the western and northern reaches of their time zones are sentenced to a kind of eternal jet lag, their circadian rhythms perpetually at odds with the alarm clocks they set for work and school.

Unpredictable winters are threatening Toronto’s outdoor rinks

The morning after Toronto was buried under 50 centimetres of snow, my phone pinged: “We’re looking for all hands-on deck at noon today for rink shovelling.” By midday, the natural ice rink at Leslie Grove Park in the city’s east end looked like a 16th-century Bruegel painting: dozens of parents and tweens pushing shovels across the ice surface, kids jumping in the resulting snowbanks and a half dozen neighbourhood dogs zipping back and forth across the newly revealed ice.

Rogers’ reno is nice but it’s missing the Blue Jays’ soul

As Geddy Lee reflects on how to “make a house a home,” a montage plays some of the team’s most “treasured moments” including Edwin Encarnación’s walk off homer to clinch the 2016 wild card game and beloved pitcher Roy Halladay sealing the franchise record with his 22nd win in 2003.The renovation, which will purportedly “turn the stadium into a ballpark,” however leaves this team history and context behind.

Freeze Frame | Block Magazine | Allied REIT

When Sum Artist (Toronto muralist Paul Glyn-Williams) was contacted about a new project that had “something to do with the Blue Jays,” he knew right away what it would be: José Bautista’s historic 2015 bat flip when, after crushing a three-run homer that would eventually win the intense playoff game, Bautista, in an unplanned release of charged emotion, tossed his bat so high in the air, it seemed it might never come down. In a way it didn’t.

Life changes, baseball does not

“Baseball has seen us through a lot of ups and downs,” my grandmother observed one evening about 20 years ago as we watched the Blue Jays game from the overstuffed pink chairs in her upstairs TV room. “It’s always just … there.” She was reflecting on the game’s steady and predictable presence throughout her more than 50-year marriage to my grandfather, including his deployment and return from the Second World War, raising three daughters and at that time in their mid-80s, saying goodbye to so many beloved friends.

Canada’s next top model: Little Canada. How a businessman spent a decade and $24 million building a giant 3D love letter to his adopted nation

From Tom Thomson’s iconic Canadian landscapes to the evocative aerial photographs of Edward Burtynsky, many have attempted to capture the essence of this vast and diverse country in a static image. In Little Canada, Jean Louis Brenninkmeijer has tried the impossible — representing the entire country in miniature in a 45,000 square-foot former GoodLife Fitness at Yonge and Dundas.

Indigenous tourism experiences have an unexpected benefit – helping members of those communities reconnect to their cultures

Thirty years ago, tourists weren’t able to take a Haida-led tour through the mossy remains of an ancient island village or prepare bannock with a Mi’kmaq community on Prince Edward Island. But the growing demand for authentic Indigenous-owned and -operated cultural experiences has given communities across the country economically sustainable means to not only share their languages and cultures, but to learn and practice them – for some a first opportunity to do so.

A Love (Park) Letter to Claude Cormier

Claude Cormier, the Montreal based landscape architect who designed Love Park died Sept 15 at age 63. He leaves behind the gift of a 30-year career’s worth of seriously fun public spaces and an endless supply of smiles like the ones I saw on my first visit to Love Park earlier this summer. Marc Hallé, a partner at CCxA calls the rush of surprise and happiness people feel when they first encounter a CCxA park “the dopamine moment.” I think of it more as the Cormier Effect. An immediate feeling of joy that deepens and evolves over time.

People are destroying Toronto’s parks. Meet the ones restoring them

On a clear morning in late April, circling drones, news helicopters and billowing grey smoke hovered over Toronto’s High Park, announcing that the park’s rare black oak savannah was once again in flames — a necessary and dramatic disturbance to maintain the savannah habitat and regenerate the endangered prairie grasses below. “We typically do these in rural areas,” burn boss Jason Sickel told the crowd, among them a handful of High Park stewards in neon green vests with “Volunteer” across the back.

Wedding dresses never worn, pets surrendered: Kijiji sales show people's pandemic losses | News

A year later, Kijiji is once again swamped with pandemic-related ads. But this time, prices are low, and the listings reveal a portrait not of greed, but of shattered dreams, loneliness and financial despair. Beloved Canon photography equipment: "COVID killed my business." Limited-edition Epiphone Les Paul Nightfall guitar: "never gigged, thanks COVID." Ikea table and 3 chairs: "because no one's dining with me."

Celebrating Christmas outdoors? Inspiration may lie in centuries-old traditions

In a year when the fear of spreading COVID-19 has put large indoor gatherings on ice, there is still a way to look forward to the holiday season — by looking back and going out. Many contemporary Christmas traditions were adapted from ancient solstice celebrations that infused the darkest moment of the year with light and hope. Celebrations were linked to seasonal cycles, and many rituals began outdoors or incorporated outdoor elements as signs of life and light.

Toronto architects share their design solutions to working and learning at home

With offices closed during the pandemic and many kids kept out of the classroom, families have scrambled to carve out functional remote-learning spaces in homes that weren’t designed for the job. Faced with space constraints, acoustic challenges, and shortages of office furniture, even architects — experts in conceptualizing interior spaces with time and budget constraints — are struggling to keep up with the demands that school closures are putting on their small, open-concept homes.

Profiles


The Mayor Of Cache Lake

If you needed help cutting down a tree, retrieving rental car keys from the bottom of the lake, or building a dock, Tom Pigeon was the guy to call. He could build anything, fix anything, and figure out the answer to any problem the Algonquin bush threw at him. No wonder, he was practically born there. When Tom was just two and a half weeks old, his mother, who was born and raised in Algonquin Park herself, snow-shoed him across Cache Lake to their pine clad, A-frame home with no indoor plumbing and a foundation filled with sawdust to hold the heat of the wood burning stove.

Scarborough-born activist and educator Curtis Carmichael wants to help kids thrive, not just survive

“It’s tricky,” says Curtis Carmichael as he explains the difference between how the police treated him and his friends in their housing project in Scarborough and the way they operate in other parts of the city. Carmichael, 28, seems to use these two words when he’s holding something back, perhaps softening the edges around the complex realities of living as a young Black man in Canada for someone like me — a privileged white journalist who grew up in the same city, but in the world outside the four streets of the self-contained neighbourhood where Carmichael spent all his time.

When Torontonians needed face masks, the folks at King & Bay gave them the impeccably tailored shirts off their backs

“We can make anything,” says King & Bay master clothier Aashif Jamani, opening the front of a Prince Harry-inspired floral-motif jacquard tailcoat to reveal a custom-printed Toronto Raptors lining. “These were for the team when they won the championship.” When the pandemic forced businesses to close last March and life-saving PPE was in short supply, the King & Bay team immediately shifted their “make anything” operation to Jamani’s Don Mills garage, where instead of tailoring $200 luxury cotton dress shirts, they cut them into five-by-seven-inch panels to create face masks.

Lip service: When the pandemic hit and Lyss Billingsley quit her job to look after her son, she used the time to create her own lip gloss line

Lyss Billingsley wears a number of labels: queer Black femme, Gemini, gloss boss. But the two words that best reconcile this outspoken entrepreneurs’ confidence with the years of childhood trauma and mental health issues and confusion about her identity, are inked in ornate script across her chest: Perfectly Imperfect. Growing up with an Irish mother and Jamaican father in 1990s Meadowvale, Billingsley struggled with her identity. “I was told by the full Black girls that I wasn’t Black enough,”

Plant Girl to the rescue: Toronto consultant and influencer has advice for anxious plant parents

Julia Rago arrives at my door armed with an N-95 mask, a beefy yellow heirloom tomato from her North York garden, and a large blue plastic tub containing everything she needs to assess and revive my houseplants: A light meter to test if the philodendrons are getting enough light in my narrow Toronto semi (they aren’t); her custom homemade natural pest control mixture in case of an infestation (ugh, spider mites and thrips); a freshly mixed batch of her signature chunky soil mix plus a trowel, st

A young water advocate paddles to protect the future of the Great Lakes

“Everybody always asks where I am,” says Waasekom, a water advocate from the Saugeen and Kettle and Stony Point First Nations, as he breathlessly hustles to his next commitment. “They know I’m never in one place.” Much of his time away from his Hamilton home is spent on the water, fulfilling his personal responsibility as one of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples and original caretakers of the Great Lakes.

Book and Magazine Excerpts

Filters & Sorting

Harvard Design Magazine: Core Sample

When asked to be the guest editor for this issue of Harvard Design Magazine, I was intrigued by the title “Landscape Architecture’s Core?” as it opened up a question—an invitation to enter an exploration into the “core” of the discipline as it continues to evolve, deepen, and diversify. Here, the core sample offered a relevant framework: A process where a study area is identified, an auger is driven into the ground, and a sample of material is removed to be analyzed for its physical makeup, i

Dome Life

They have been modifying the planet since they arrived. At first, their trace was nearly imperceptible, but as their population expanded, so did their imprint. Slowly, over thousands of years, they have reformed Earth to meet their demands. They have cleared its forests, dug up its resources, drained its lakes and rivers, paved its surfaces, and loaded its atmosphere with destructive gases. They have permanently altered the course of the Earth’s system, marking the dawn of a new epoch. How will they protect themselves along this path toward total extinction?

Experimenting Landscapes Excerpt

More than 90 years after Elsie Reford defied convention to grow exotic perennials as far north as the 49th parallel, the designers at the International Garden Festival at Métis continue to test the limits of the garden. Advancing Elsie’s legacy of experimentation and what she called ‘adventuring’ with different soils, plant materials, and hybrid species, the contemporary gardens at the Métis International Garden Festival continue to evolve as a living laboratory for exploration, innovation, and experimentation.

Recycling Spaces Excerpt

Cities are constantly changing. With the inevitable cycles of prosperity and decline, political succession, ideological shifts, the rise and fall of industry, war, resources, and immigration, urban areas continue to evolve—growing, shrinking, diversifying, sprawling, and densifying in response to forces of change that act upon them. Parks and open spaces do not only adapt to forces of change, but also have the power to guide, shape, and curate the evolution of cities as the most effective catalysts for urban transformation.