In a country whose diverse landscapes and extreme climates both define and threaten the existence of its people, the words we use also connect us to where we are (and who and what was here before us). Anyone who has paid a hydro bill or felt the warm relief of a chinook wind implicitly knows how connected daily life is to the natural environment in Canada.

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.

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.

As restrictions lift and summer begins to look normal(ish), Ontarians are once again hitting the road to head, as they would say, “up north.” But what exactly does “up north” mean in a country that spans more than 40 degrees of latitude – nearly equal to the difference between Cairo, Egypt, and Cape Nordkinn, Norway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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. .

Edward Burtynsky sees the world differently—not just as an artist but because he spends up to three months of the year looking at it from hundreds of feet in the air. Using a helicopter, airplane or drone, he flies over restricted industrial sites and resource-extraction landscapes shooting photographs that, as he puts it, “pull the veil” off how these processes affect the earth.

Close since growing up in Rosedale, Elsbeth, 75, and Katy, 74, have been through it all together. Emily Waugh joins their daily stroll

In the market for a square of Edwardian lace, a real glass eye, or a City of Toronto elevator license from 1922? Victoria Dinnick at Gadabout Vintage probably has it. And she knows exactly where it is, too. “If you’re looking for something, ask us, because otherwise you’ll be here for 48 hours,” Dinnick says with a laugh. “It really is ‘Where’s Waldo?’ in a 3D experience.”

“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.

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

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,”

“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.