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Without a strong NFB, Canadians will lose sight of who we are

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
June 29, 2024
1148 words

Bill Mason camera helmetWhen I finally bought myself a lovely, red canoe in 1997, it was because I spent my youth, 30 years earlier, watching the many canoeing films by the National Film Board’s legendary Bill Mason.

I recently rewatched Paddle to the Sea, the Mason classic that virtually every child in Canada saw in the 1960s in elementary school. The 1966 film tells the story of a carved, wooden toy canoe containing an “Indian” paddler. The canoe was set free in a river in Northern Ontario, and eventually was carried down through the Great Lakes and out into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. On its journey, the little canoe was aided by many people – and one dog – who picked it up, rescued it and set it once again on its course to the ocean.

I saw that film during an era when there was no bigger thrill than entering a classroom and seeing a big 16-millimetre film projector and a collapsible white screen. Watching the film again, I noticed some things I hadn’t seen the first time. I was struck by the stereotyped First Nations paddler, but also by the powerful environmental message: The Great Lakes were being polluted by humans, with sewage and industrial waste dumped into the waters. I realized that when I saw the film for the first time, at age 8 or 9, it was the moment I first became an environmentalist, as did a great number of children in my generation.

In an age before the internet, and even cable TV, NFB releases shaped the way generations of Canadian children saw their country, saw the broader world, and saw themselves. Now, it seems as if our country has lost a collective sense of who we are. Sadly, the decline of the NFB has contributed to Canadians losing sight of who we are as a nation and what makes us unique.

As a young person, I learned about the Maritimes through films such as Rising Tide and The Sea Got in Your Blood, saw Saskatchewan grain harvested in Wheat Country, and learned about nickel mining in Sudbury in Miner. Sitting in a classroom in Kelowna, B.C., we experienced dog sleds and igloos in the Northwest Territories (At The Winter Sea Ice Camp), and saw famous singers like Paul Anka and Leonard Cohen – famous Canadian singers in an era when virtually all popular music came from the United States.

Like many of my generation, I allowed NFB films to shape me politically and socially. As I grew older, I explored the experimental and creative reaches of the NFB. The animation of Norman McLaren led me to more political films, such as his 1952 anti-war film Neighbours, and later in my mid-20s, in a church basement in Vancouver, to the controversial and influential anti-porn film Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography. And as late as 1993, Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, led me to a strong understanding of First Nations issues, and especially the standoff in Oka.

This was an era when the NFB still had a global reputation. It was well-funded, had production centres all across Canada, and most importantly, was widely known to Canadians and was a source of national pride. It was the very model of a national media organization, a model that filmmakers in other places envied.

In Britain, every person knows or has visited the British Museum. Paris has the Louvre, and Washington has the Smithsonian. Each of these institutions is a cornerstone of how those nations see themselves. Even in these divided times, Americans will look at the Smithsonian and agree: “This is our history.”

Canada lacks a national institution that teaches us who we are. Part of that reflects our relative youth as a single nation, with Newfoundland only joining Canada in 1949, and Nunavut being created 50 years after that. And part of that reflects a population spread out sparsely across our vast, far-flung country, where you can drive for a day or more between populated centres. Those distances mean that the majority of Canadians have never visited the Museum of Civilization or the National Gallery. Instead, for many decades, the National Film Board was the glue that held us together.

In May, The Walrus wrote about staffing cuts at the NFB. According to the NFB’s union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, 80 out 380 full-time NFB positions were eliminated this year. Regional studios in Edmonton, Halifax and Winnipeg, as well as “interactive studios” in Vancouver and Montreal, have been closed. The union says the recent cuts followed several decades of underfunding. Even though both the NFB brass and the Liberal government claim that the organization is being modernized, or reinvented, the sad truth is that these are insupportable blows and that the film board was already a mere shadow of what it was when I was young. Without production centres in different regions of Canada, and without employees with the time and expertise to create and commission new works, the NFB will cease to be a force that binds our country together.

Despite the boundless reaches of YouTube and TikTok, and despite a Canadian commercial film industry churning out police dramas and Hollywood blockbusters, there is still a desperate need for Canada to have a strong Canadian media production organization that will support the filmmakers and films that Disney or Lionsgate or Netflix won’t touch.

When I was young, the government of Canada was genuinely proud of the National Film Board, and understood that it played a critical role in helping Canadians love and cherish their country. Along with the CBC, the NFB told Canadian stories to Canadians. Even though the CBC is finally seeing some funding to replace the drastic cuts of the 1980s and 90s, the production of popular TV and radio programs is different from the thought-provoking films created at the NFB.

The NFB can still be the place where films are produced that are about us, and where filmmakers of any age can go to learn their craft and produce uniquely Canadian movies and documentaries. The National Film Board can rediscover its role as a cinematic hothouse; a place where non-commercial and experimental forms can thrive, and where the kind of filmmaking happens that will once again influence filmmakers globally.

Just as it was in the past, this is still a time when Canadians – especially young Canadians – need a place where they can see themselves portrayed as genuine Canadians, not as thinly disguised Americans. For that to happen, the government needs to step away from bottom-line concerns, and embrace the value of film as art and film as an instrument for social change. That will require secure and generous long-term funding commitments, and the restoration of production offices in every corner of Canada. The National Film Board is the soul of our country, and it needs to be preserved.

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Japanese fusion comes to Nova Scotia’s South Shore

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
June 1, 2024
962 words

Partners and co-owners of Main & Mersey Dining Room and Coffee Bar, Shani Beadle, left, and Andreas Arnmar, right, are photographed at their restaurant in Liverpool, Nova Scotia on December 30, 2023.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

Andreas Arnmar and Shani Beadle’s road to restaurant ownership was what you could call uphill, right from the concept stage.

Late last year the husband and wife opened the Dining Room at Main & Mersey, an Japanese-fusion restaurant, in Liverpool on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. With a population of 2,500, the town boasts culinary options that lean toward fish and chips and lobster rolls.

Believing locals would appreciate the dishes they were envisioning, such as Oyster Mushroom Tempura or Agedashi Tofu, was a real leap of faith, they say now. And that was just the first challenge.

The couple’s culinary journey started small: with coffee. After moving to Liverpool from the U.K. in 2017 (Beadle is from B.C., while Arnmar was born and raised in Sweden), they opened home-furnishings store Main & Mersey on the town’s Main Street. Beadle’s background in fabric design positioned her well for the endeavour.

While she ran the shop, Arnmar renovated their new home and raised their young daughter. Two years later, they launched a small coffee shop behind the store because, in the words of Arnmar, “there wasn’t any good coffee that we liked around this area.”

Main & Mersey’s menu offerings include, lobster kani salad, left, and salmon misozuke, right.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

The coffee bar did a lot better than they expected, and so did the bakery they added in 2022, serving up treats such as cinnamon buns, lemon-curd croissants and spinach and feta rolls. Soon, she adds, “I saw how many people we turned away asking for proper food, who didn’t just want fish and chips and chowder. There was a massive gap in the food spectrum, especially when the tourists are in town.”

To fill that gap, Beadle and Arnmar knew they wanted to do something new, namely to go higher end and introduce different flavours to the town’s dining scene. They secured a bigger location just a few feet away from the furniture shop in fall, 2022, and began construction on the space.

A brand-new restaurant kitchen, a welcoming bar and an accessible washroom are all complemented by wood-topped tables, tropical plants and cozy lighting. Much of the painting and tile work was done by Beadle, Arnmar and local volunteers. And they converted the upper floor of the building into apartments, with rent offsetting part of the cost of renovations.

The interior of Main & Mersey Dining Room and Coffee Bar.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

The couple decided to bring along their pastry chef from the bakery, Aimee Corbet, and hired winemaker and mixologist, Alexandra Beaulieu, as well as a Peruvian-Japanese chef. Their Japanese-fusion menu is integral to their vision, of course, but Arnmar stresses that they’re out to do more than just serve food on plates.

“You can get a great cocktail, you can try a really amazing bottle of wine that you may not have had before. You get food that you may not have tried before, good service‚ and you’re in a beautiful space. It’s just kind of ticking the boxes.”

But inevitably, there were delays. Their grand opening was punted forward two months owing to a shortage of tradespeople in the region and because of government paperwork. In the meantime, they were on the hook for mortgage payments, construction costs and staff salaries.

And then, when opening weekend finally arrived last August, their chef made a sudden departure.

Beadle and Arnmar were faced with a new and almost impossible challenge: How do you run a restaurant without a trained chef? Fortunately, he had already trained the rest of the kitchen to prepare his menu. And Beadle stepped up to take on a job she never expected to fill as a member of the kitchen staff, doing prep for the evening, creating new menu items and training her staff. Meanwhile, Arnmar is up front, welcoming customers and greeting regulars by name.

The restaurant’s grand opening was punted forward two months owing to a shortage of tradespeople in the region.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

Opening the restaurant stretched the couple’s financial resources to the limit. The first big lifeline came from the FarmWorks Investment Co-operative, a Nova Scotia for-profit co-op that lends funds to food businesses in the province. The funding comes on the condition that the restaurant will buy from provincial producers, and serve Nova Scotia fish, meat and produce.

Beadle is on board. “The idea is we use 50 per cent locally sourced ingredients. That can be wine, that could be produce, that can be meat, that can be mushrooms or whatever. It could be distilled liquor that’s made in the province. Obviously, it’s easier in the summer months than in the winter, but we’re also doing things like pickles and other preserved ingredients. ”

Main & Mersey crowdfunded for the final push before opening day. Beadle posted an appeal on their website and received 85 per cent of the $50,000 they were seeking. “You can’t pull out once you’ve taken people’s money. It’s really impressive, that people in our community will step up like that.”

One of those community members is local Laurie-Anne Brown, who grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s when “it was a thriving paper mill town” with a bustling Main Street full of shops and restaurants.

She hopes new establishments like the Dining Room at Main & Mersey will restore “a thriving Main Street that I once knew.”

Beadle notes that the restaurant had donors from as far away as London and Toronto, but they’re counting on locals, like Brown, and residents of the province from further afield, too. “Build it and hopefully they’ll come. People already get in their car and drive an hour and a bit for our pastries so if the food is good … that’s the plan.”

 

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Bad news

By Barry Rueger
Published: THIS Magazine
January/February, 2024
640 words
Read PDF.

THIS Magazine Jan/Feb 2024

One writer’s desperate howl for a good old-fashioned newspaper

WHEN I WAS 11, WE WENT ON A SCHOOL FIELD TRIP TO THE KELOWNA DAILY COURIER.

I can still remember the linotype machines and drum-shaped metal plates of text and pictures that were loaded into the giant presses to print the paper’s pages.

They gave us a still-hot copy of that day’s paper. I kept it for years, and for decades I‘ve subscribed to the local daily newspaper everywhere I’ve lived. For the past year, that’s been in Liverpool, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. Since arriving, I’ve realized that we’re in a news desert; a place where Facebook is the beginning and end of local news. That situation grew even worse when the Liberal government enacted Bill C-18, the Online News Act.

Since August, two months after Bill C-18 received royal assent, Facebook has refused to allow users to post Canadian news stories. For Facebook’s owner, Meta, leaving entire towns and regions with no local news whatsoever is a better choice than agreeing to pay the news organizations whose work Facebook users have been reporting.

Liverpool is a place where daily newspapers really don’t exist. Outside of one store in Halifax we can’t buy a Globe and Mail out here, there are no local dailies, and the tiny weeklies are hard to find. Nova Scotia’s largest paper, the Halifax Chronicle Herald, recently stopped printing on  Mondays, and has cut back on its home delivery. Still, every now and then one of the big papers or the CBC would run a story about Liverpool, and someone would post a link to it on a local Facebook page. Now, even that isn’t possible, and in the meantime, the prolonged death of newspapers continues.

In September the Hamilton Spectator shut down its newsroom, and its owner Torstar is ceasing to print dozens of small local papers, moving them online instead. Similar shutdowns are happening in small-town British Columbia.  It seems Southern Ontario and parts of B.C. are about to become news deserts just like southern Nova Scotia. Yes, you can still subscribe to many publications online, but there is a tangible difference between holding a printed paper and reading news on a screen. The printed page establishes the trustworthiness of the news outlet. Having trained reporters and editors and a physical printing press requires an investment that almost always leads to serious journalism. The time and money spent on reporters and editors is one reason why the New York Times and the Globe and Mail are still considered reliable. These publications have a long history as trusted news sources, and still feel a duty to maintain those standards. One may not like their editorial slants, but few seriously question the quality of their reporting.

In Liverpool, on the other hand, we just suffered through nearly two months of a boil-water advisory, and unless you followed the Facebook page for Queens County you wouldn’t have known what was—or wasn’t—happening. Because there are no local reporters, there was also no one asking questions about why an entire town had no drinkable water.

Meta’s actions are not new. For decades, the handful of publishers who control almost all of our news outlets have dramatically reduced reporting staff while shrinking newspaper page counts, and at the same time have closed or merged dozens of small local papers that they’d acquired. What Nova Scotia’s South Shore is experiencing, and what southern Ontario and B.C. are about to experience, is the harsh reality of living in a place where media ceases to be the watchdog that holds governments and corporations accountable, and where there’s no trusted source for people to sort fact from fiction.

Sometime before 2000, 30 years after my field trip, I visited the Conrad Black-era Hamilton Spectator with a friend who worked there. My vivid memory is of hundreds of square meters of blue carpet – half of the giant newsroom – sitting empty of furniture.  Governments turned their heads while Black decimated newsrooms, just as they turn their heads today.

-BARRY RUEGER

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Taking care of ourselves without a family doctor has been a challenge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail 
June 24, 2023
1639 words

In need of medical attention
One of the first things that my wife and I did after moving to rural Nova Scotia was to look for  family doctor, but we couldn’t find one accepting patients. Getting care has been a challenge.

My wife Susan and I arrived at our new home in Liverpool, N.S., at the end of 2022. Since then, we’ve discovered one valuable lesson: If you’re trying to learn anything about how things are done here, it will be via word of mouth. This is especially true if you need health care. The Nova Scotia Health Authority and the provincial government have websites, phone lines and pamphlets, but for real answers you need to talk to the people who live here: your neighbours, workmates, people you meet in stores and supermarkets, your librarian, the man who cuts your hair.
Susan and I had both been hammered by a vicious COVID-19 infection the previous September. Over the course of 10 days, we suffered all manner of extreme symptoms, ranging from sweating and coughing to diarrhea and a complete inability to do anything beyond survive. I have never been so sick in my life. Since that time, and continuing after we moved to our new home in Nova Scotia, we’ve suffered endless aches and pains, and continuing fatigue – symptoms that seem to reflect long COVID. We knew that we needed medical attention, and sooner rather than later.
One of the first things we did after unpacking our furniture was to set out to find a family doctor. At store counters and in lineups it didn’t take long to understand that there are only a handful of doctors in Liverpool, and not one of them was accepting new patients. And as far as we could tell driving around or looking online, there is no walk-in clinic here – those “fallback” services seem inexplicably rare in rural Nova Scotia.
Canada’s health care services are in crisis across the nation, but the situation in rural Nova Scotia feels especially severe. Official statistics say that one in 10 people in Nova Scotia have no regular family doctor. The reality is that the government’s “Need a Family Practice Registry” for people without a doctor recently reported that there are more than 142,000 on the waiting list – more like 14 per cent of the population. If you’re in the one big city, Halifax, you may have some choice, but the rest of Nova Scotia is rural, and doctors are scarce.
People in my area on the registry’s list can eventually sign-up with a “real doctor” at the Collaborative Family Practice at Liverpool’s Queens General Hospital. Until then, though, you’ll be encouraged to visit the emergency department during the few hours a day when they’re open. For instance, in a recent week in May there were four days when the emergency department shut down at 1:30 p.m. until the following morning at 8 a.m.
In the meantime, those 142,000-plus people without a family doctor are being directed to Maple, an online medical practice that operates across Canada. The publicly funded side of Maple in Nova Scotia – there is also a for-profit, pay-for-service side available – is also short of physicians, and many patients are directed to nurse practitioners.
Even if you reach a qualified doctor, there is no route available to you to return to the same doctor for a follow-up or to discuss the results of tests – you are given the first doctor or nurse practitioner available. If needed, it’s possible that you’ll be referred for an in-person consultation, but that usually doesn’t happen, and I can’t help wonder what’s being missed when knee problems or internal aches and pains are being diagnosed by a different practitioner every time, and over an online video instead of in person.
And that is the real problem. As willing and knowledgeable as the doctors and nurse practitioners are on Maple, it’s still a video call on your laptop. You can hold your phone or iPad up to the area where you’re hurting, but sometimes you really do need a medical professional to examine you in-person, touching, prodding and assessing where your problem lies.
The shift from in-person to online medical evaluations makes a profound difference. We’re feeling the lack of having a regular doctor who knows us and our medical histories. Instead of the familiar routine of visiting a doctor who already knows you, briefly checks your file as a memory refresher, and then begins a consultation and diagnosis based on that knowledge, we find ourselves sitting in our kitchen with printouts and pill bottles at the ready. Every consultation involves using most of the brief time allotted to update a new physician. The onus is now on the patient, not the doctor, to maintain, organize and communicate a full medical history.
There’s also the very real worry about what would happen if we need emergency medical care. This week, the mayor of Middleton told Nova Scotians about a frightening incident. In a letter to Premier Tim Houston, Sylvester Atkinson described how on the evening of June 15, the local volunteer fire department was called to the Soldiers Memorial Hospital in Middleton. The local fire department was called because there were no doctors in the hospital, and no doctor on-call, and a patient was in cardiac arrest. The firefighters did what they could, but the patient died. A doctor did drive down from Kentville, a half-hour away, and declared the patient dead. For small-town residents like me, the story is absolutely terrifying.
Fortunately, we haven’t needed any emergency treatments since we moved here, although we have found ourselves at the local hospital for other medical services. Even when the hospital’s emergency room isn’t admitting patients, the hospital lab and X-ray departments are still open, and it’s possible to be in and out for X-rays or blood tests in a few minutes. And even if it’s near impossible to see a doctor some days, we appreciate that the rest of the medical workers there will take the time to explain what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and to gossip about local affairs.
That is honestly the one positive side to Nova Scotia’s woeful medical system: The local health care team of nurses and lab technicians are relaxed and friendly, and likely someone you’ll run into at the library or supermarket. After decades of brusque treatment in big cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, it’s nice to deal with real people who seem to genuinely care about your welfare.
Nova Scotia’s current budget claims to be ramping up health care spending, but the two headline areas in the government releases are retention bonuses for nurses (to the tune of $110-million), plus an additional $50-million to address continued surgical backlogs. Still, many people believe that not enough attention is being paid to the challenge faced by many Canadian health care systems: a significant lack of doctors, especially family doctors. As convenient as it is to access nurse practitioners and pharmacists for day-to-day health needs, the most important member of your health care team is still a consistent family doctor.
I was raised at a time when every family had a doctor – someone who cared for parents and children through all life stages, tracking their history from month to month and from year to year. These physicians lived in your community and were a constant in your life. It was understood that medical care was not just about emergencies, it was about keeping patients healthy on a continuing basis. It was about a long-term personal relationship with a physician who you knew and trusted.
Today, in rural Nova Scotia, that sort of relationship is harder to find. The older doctors are retiring, and news reports tell us that new, younger doctors don’t want to take on a small-town family practice.
I can’t help but think that decades of “restraint” budgets, and the losses to health care funding that resulted, have to be responsible for this change. Young doctors look at practices in small-town Nova Scotia and see nothing but overwork and underpay, long backlogs on routine surgeries and referrals, and medical treatments such as physiotherapy or prescriptions that aren’t covered in one of the poorest provinces in Canada. Is it any wonder they shy away from family medicine?
Ultimately this all speaks to priorities. Nova Scotia brags about an increase of 21 per cent in health care spending over two years, but every time I drive from Liverpool to Halifax to see a specialist or a relative in hospital, I can’t help but notice the tremendous amount of highway construction that is happening. To my eye, neither the population of Nova Scotia, nor the traffic volumes, merit the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to upgrade all these roads to four-lane divided highways.
It feels as if Canada’s second-smallest province – only Prince Edward Island is smaller – chooses highways over health care. That, I think, is the core of the problem we face in Nova Scotia: Health care is seen as an expense, while highways are an “investment.” We’re faced with months of waiting for surgeries, and we sometimes get questionable treatment options over video chat – but at least the drive to Peggy’s Cove is wonderful.
After many months reflecting on the sad reality that we can’t have a family doctor, we had come to accept the unfortunate situation. Last week though, with no warning, we received a phone call from Queens General Hospital’s family practice. I don’t know how we reached the top of the list, but we now have a family doctor once again. Ours was trained in Khartoum, and several weeks ago he’d left a position in Birmingham, England, for his new job in Liverpool, N.S. He tells us he likes the small town that is now his home. We don’t yet know what chain of events led us to having our new doctor, but he seems good, and we’re very relieved. I hope the many other thousands of Nova Scotians on the family-practice waiting list also receive good news soon.

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Nova Scotia’s forest fires make me wonder if our dreams of a green, rural life were misguided

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail 
June 3, 2023
815 words

We’ve made our home at the point of Western Head, near Liverpool, N.S. On Tuesday, I was awakened at 4:30 a.m. when my phone shrieked with a warning from the government of Nova Scotia telling me not to light a campfire. By the time the sun rose around 6:30, there was a curtain of thick grey smoke, and I could taste it on the back of my throat. We already knew about the forest fires burning out of control in our province, so the real question was: Where was the smoke coming from, and how close was the fire?

We live right between the two major blazes. The Tantallon fire is about 30 kilometres from the Halifax Citadel. At the time I write this, on Thursday, we’re told that it has consumed about 837 hectares, and is possibly becoming under control. The other one is the Barrington Lake fire in Shelburne County. It had been the fire nearest to our children and grandchildren, burning more than 17,000 hectares. Then late Wednesday night we heard that another wildfire had broken out perhaps three or four kilometres from their house. Fortunately they had already packed up and left to stay with friends in New Brunswick – the smoke was just too much for them.

After waking on Tuesday, the morning was spent on the internet, and looking at whatever media we could find to try and get an up-to-date picture of these blazes. My frustration grew as I realized that anyone who could be updating me had disappeared. Government, media, even the pundits on Reddit and Facebook had all booked off at 8 o’clock the previous night. If the fire changed direction or speed, or if you just needed to know what was happening now, not 12 hours ago, you would need to wait.

Western Head is part of a point of land just below Liverpool. It’s sparsely populated, and has one road that loops along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean that surrounds it. That morning, while we waited for any information about the fires, the isolation that had been so appealing to us took on a different tone.

Ever since moving here people have told us that the summers have become hotter, and the weather dryer. Now I look at the forest and bush that surrounds us and find myself thinking about how fast it could all go up in flames.

And I’m thinking that if the fires are this bad in late May, what on Earth will arrive in July and August?

At one point on Twitter – apparently the best source for up-to-the-minute fire news – I read that Halifax Fire deputy chief David Meldrum had said: “Without a doubt … climate change is contributing to volatility.”

That statement is, in many ways, the one that frightens me most. Right now there are thousands of households evacuated, and multiple fires out of control. If you live anywhere in Nova Scotia you’re wondering if your town or county will be next. The one thing that’s agreed on is that this is not normal for Nova Scotia.

We moved here, bought our home here, to escape the pressures of the big city. A very large part of that decision was a chance to be more self-sufficient: to grow our own food, care for our own land, and rely less on governments and corporations for day to day needs. And yes, doing all of this in an environmentally friendly way is important to us.

Now I’m wondering if our dreams of a rural, green life were misguided – if we were fooling ourselves into thinking that we could remove ourselves from the fast-paced, plastic-wrapped scurry of city life.

The challenge for us now is to try and understand if the changes coming at us because of climate change will overwhelm whatever efforts we can muster to adapt to them. Yes, we can adapt our home, and the ways that we eat and grow our food. We can remove the old oil-burning furnace, and add solar panels. But is that enough to counter global warming, rising sea waters and forest fires?

So far, the fires have stayed away from us, and have even changed direction, but Nova Scotia is heading into a summer of hot and dry weather. Instead of relaxing in our yard, building a compost bin and cutting grass, I’m spending my day on the internet and watching press conferences to try and guess whether we should be loading up the car and heading somewhere else to be safe.

And, of course, I’m asking about the future of our grandchildren.

That, more than anything, terrifies me. So far they’ve survived this year’s fires OK, but what about the next ones, and the ones in the years that follow? Will it become normal for them to wake up to a hazy sky, the taste of smoke lingering on their tongues?

 

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I’m not a morning person. But I’ve embraced rising early

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
December 30, 2022
935 words

This morning, I awoke at 6 a.m. The sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean was barely starting to show itself. It was dark and cold, and I stumbled downstairs to make coffee. And to wonder why, suddenly, I was waking up so darned early, day after day, week after week.

All my life I’ve been a night person, a late sleeper, someone who honestly despises mornings. Over years of working in events, in restaurants, or in radio, I have always been able to arrange my life to avoid rising early. This has been less of a choice than my natural state of being. My body and mind just weren’t designed to switch on before noon.

Now, in Nova Scotia, everything has changed. By 6:30 a.m. most days, my wife Susan and I are both awake, drinking coffee and eating toast in bed, our cat Beatrice between us. We’ll already be working on our laptops, and sharing ideas and plans for the day.

We’re both left asking the same question: What happened? The only change in our lives has been leaving France for a house at the edge of the ocean in Western Head, N.S.

Ours is the last home on the road to the Western Head Lighthouse. The house was built in the late 1800s, then added to several times, and has found the balance between modern living and 19th-century charm. We have many windows, and can see the breakers rolling in from three sides of the house. We hear the wind and the pelting rain, and we’re now awaiting with excitement the first real hurricane-force winds. We can’t help but feel a primal attachment to the weather and a respect for the changes that happen from one hour to the next. You can’t ignore the outdoors in such a place.

Nova Scotia weather is immediate and intense, and despite the cloud, rain and wind, it’s somehow joyful. We can wake up to intense blue skies on one day, or great overwhelming columns of white clouds on the next. We’ve become remarkably conscious of the patterns of light and dark. In a few hours we can go from bright sunshine to pitch-black skies punctuated with thousands of bright shiny stars.

But these mornings! Why so early? It’s not just the weather, the Atlantic, or the dramatic difference between the dark of night and the light of day. It’s not about exchanging urban life for rural. I’ve spent years living in the country, and never before have my nocturnal habits been disturbed.

Part of it is about finding the time to just stop, look, listen and enjoy what each day has to offer us. People here don’t rush, but they are not slow either. Things get done, and get done in about the time you would expect.

Yet every person that we know here will stop what they’re doing, look you in the eye and just settle into a conversation. They’ll ask where you’re from, whether you’re “just visiting” (and that’s the big question in a place where families can trace their history back for centuries) and where, exactly, your house is. The first time that they say, “Oh yeah, I know that house,” it surprises you. The third or fourth time, you accept that this is just how things are.

Since moving here, I’ve learned that if deciding on a plumber or a roofer takes me a month, or six months, that’s okay. I feel like I can slow down, take one step at a time and consider every decision for as long as it takes.

That space, time and freedom means that I can rise early. I can allow myself to just sit and enjoy the sunrise, to think and plan my day, and perhaps allow myself a third cup of coffee just because I have the time.

These early mornings are becoming a ritual. For the first time, I find I have the space to order my thoughts, file some away for later and deal with some right now. And when my brain feels like it’s close to capacity, it gives me permission to stop, look out my windows at the sea, the sky and the sun, and let the true world in front of me clear my head.

Which is wonderful. But why am I waking up so early? I don’t have a fixed schedule. I’m not heading down to the boats. I don’t have a desk job to be at by 9 a.m.

Ultimately it feels as if I’m doing this because it’s what you do if you live here in Western Head, on the coast of the Atlantic, in Nova Scotia. Just as watching the sunrise is now a normal part of each day, aligning my body rhythms with the cycles of the sun and sky is simply the best and healthiest thing to do.

After decades of fighting the morning, I’ve found that it’s something that unexpectedly and definitely works for me. After fitting my life into schedules that perhaps made waking difficult or impossible, I find that I can trust my body and my soul to choose when to rise – and when to sleep.

Now, when I look at the people around me in Western Head, and in Nova Scotia, I understand that we all share the same attachment to the sky, to the sea and to the weather. We’ve learned that our best happiness comes from recognizing the power of our natural world, and from integrating our lives into those rhythms – allowing us to be scheduled by the natural world around us, not by our alarm clocks.

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Save lives, money and reduce pollution: Why roundabouts are a solution for every city

Published: Globe and Mail
May 7, 2022
920 words

Round-aboutCOVID-19 restrictions are disappearing and France is expecting another one million Canadians to visit the country this year. Many will arrive after a lengthy flight, collect their luggage and clear customs at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, then climb into a rental car. Minutes later, they’ll suddenly find themselves immersed in a stream of French drivers circling around a traffic circle or rond-point. And once they’ve escaped that first traffic circle, they’ll immediately find themselves in a second, and a third, and in all likelihood, yet another.

Welcome to France, and the first of more than 30,000 traffic circles, the multilane roundabouts that challenge visiting drivers to learn new rules, new signs, a new language. They also provide no chance whatsoever to just stop and figure out where you’re going.

It is an item of faith in France that the roundabout was invented in Paris in 1907. The goal of its creator, the architect and urban planner Eugène Hénard, was to better manage the horse-and-carriage traffic throughout Paris. His first roundabout was at Place de l’Étoile in Paris, (since renamed Place Charles-de-Gaulle) where multiple lanes of circulating cars, motorbikes, vans and buses still circle around the Arc de Triomphe.

More specifically, these drivers battle for supremacy over 12 unmarked traffic lanes where cars entering the circle from the right have priority over everyone else. The result is legendary chaos and massive traffic jams.

Regardless of where traffic circles were invented, it was in Britain, not France, where they first became popular, with an explosion of construction in the 1950s and 60s, and a rethinking of how they functioned. It was the British who decided that incoming traffic should yield to those already on the circle. It was the success of this improvement that led to the adoption of the new British design in France.

The first French version of the “English roundabout” was opened in 1976 in Quimper, near Brittany’s Atlantic coastline. The rond-point’s official entry into the French Highway Code happened in 1983, the same year that decentralization moved much of town planning to local governments.

These town and village governments embraced the roundabout with enthusiasm. Since gaining popularity in the 1980s and 90s in France, roundabouts have been adopted in every corner of the country. And civic pride has led to another French tradition: the sculptures placed in the middle of the traffic circles. From the beautiful to the bizarre, these emblems of local pride have not only become important landmarks for lost tourists, but have led to websites, documentaries and Pinterest groups celebrating – or mocking – these roadside artworks.

The modern rules for French roundabouts are simple: Entering traffic must yield to the vehicles already circling. Once you’ve entered, keep to the inside, left-hand lane, with your left-hand-turn signal activated. Once you approach your exit, switch your signal to the right and move to the outside, right-hand lane, then exit. For drivers used to traffic lights and street corners, it can be nerve-racking to figure out which of the three, four, or even five exits you want, before you can change lanes and escape.

All of this happens while you’re watching both rear view mirrors and trying to spot a directional sign that almost never matches what your GPS is telling you. Having a spouse to act as navigator is a big help. (My wife Susan says that depends on which spouse is providing the navigation.)

Roundabouts aren’t just another French oddity – they’re actually a solution to a few problems that are faced by every town and city.

They completely eliminate stop-and-go traffic. Instead of dozens of cars sitting with their engines pumping out exhaust fumes at every red light, traffic moves constantly into and out of intersections. And because they do away with the need for stop lights or advanced left-turn signals, infrastructure maintenance costs are dramatically reduced. For small towns and villages, this saving is a valuable advantage.

Most importantly, though, roundabouts turn out to offer significant advantages in traffic safety. Every car entering a traffic circle has to slow down, so cars, trucks and buses move more slowly than usual. There are no red lights, so there are no drivers who accelerate through the intersection on a yellow. Deadly 90-degree collisions are a rarity in France. And because everyone moves in a counter-clockwise direction, and exits to the right, there’s little chance of cars appearing out of nowhere from your blind spot.

The result, according to a 2018 report by the European Commission, which examined 44 studies where junctions where converted to roundabouts, is a 41-per-cent reduction in traffic accident injuries and a 65 per cent reduction in fatal accidents.

In addition, a World Economic Forum report from December found the United States is saving lives and energy costs by replacing lights with roundabouts. It also notes that France has by far the most roundabouts per capita, about double the number per capita of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“Here’s a controversial idea that turns conventional thinking about road safety on its head: traffic lights cause accidents, increase pollution and we’d be better of without them,” starts the report.

Still, when your jet-lagged self is suddenly dealing with multiple roundabouts, you’ll appreciate the two big secrets to manoeuvring around them. First, it’s okay to circle two or even three times until you know where you’re going. Second, in the event you take the wrong exit, in all likelihood there’s another roundabout just ahead, so it’s easy to double back to where you got it wrong.

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Get to Know the Global Scheme that Promotes Green Building

Published: Asparagus Magazine
November 4, 2020
1000 words

The Vancouver Convention Centre is LEED-certified platinum.
The Vancouver Convention Centre is LEED-certified platinum. (Photo by Faruk Ateş via Flickr / CC BY 2.0)

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), is a comprehensive and complex certification program for green building. Developed in the 1990s by the non-profit US Green Building Council (USGBC), it now guides sustainable construction in more than 160 countries. LEED looks at every component of a building — from site selection and construction techniques to appliances and furnishings — with the goal of making buildings safe, environmentally friendly, and energy efficient.

Sustainability Begins at Home

Although LEED is often associated with prestige buildings like Vancouver’s grass-roofed convention centre or Facebook’s water-efficient headquarters in California, LEED also certifies apartment, condo, and single family home construction. Projects earn points for meeting requirements like careful construction-waste disposal and optional features like rainwater management. The number of points earned determines the level of certification awarded: certified, silver, gold, or platinum.

Read the full article.

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How long can we support the weight of COVID-19?

Published: The Globe and Mail (PDF)
September 25, 2020
818 words

In August, I received a frantic text message from my sister. She has been our  mother’s primary caregiver for many years, but Mom is 92, settling into dementia, and now had gout. The time had come to finally help her to move out of the family home and into care.
Even though I hardly ever make the drive from Vancouver, where I live, to my home town Kelowna, obviously there was no choice. I cancelled a day’s work and was set to go.
But I didn’t. I still don’t feel entirely safe visiting my mother. I’m pretty sure that I don’t have COVID-19, but that isn’t 100 per cent certain. I’m even less sure that my brother and sister aren’t carriers.

(Read the full column)

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North Vancouver’s Mountain Bikers Strive to Shred Sustainably

Published: Asparagus (PDF)
Summer/Fall 2019
July 8, 2019
1040 words

On a Saturday in early March — when sunny weather drew hundreds of people to the mountains in suburban North Vancouver — I made a contribution to the trails I hike every week. I joined seven volunteers from the North Shore Mountain Bike Association (NSMBA) to spend a day rebuilding a forest trail on Mount Seymour. We shouldered shovels, pickaxes, and plastic buckets as we hiked to the snowline partway up Bridle Path, a popular local trail.

Our leader, Penny Deck, wore sturdy work pants and steel-toed boots. Once we’d unloaded our tools, she knelt down and knocked aside hard-packed snow to uncover a cedar ladder bridge. The bridge once kept riders out of rain and stream water flowing around the trail, but years of erosion had left it nearly buried under black mud. Now, hikers and riders splashed through muck in wet weather.
By the day’s end, the bridge was gone. We replaced it with an elevated trail, stone retaining walls, and drainage ditches to carry water away from the path. The day’s work represented a small section of the 226 kilometres of trails in North Vancouver, most of which are maintained by hikers, runners, and mountain bikers who volunteer with NSMBA. Their handiwork has produced some of the world’s highest-ranked mountain bike trails, all while emphasizing social responsibility and environmental sustainability.

(Read the entire article here)