William Lyon Mackenzie ran for his life. His rebellion had failed. It was a disaster. His rebel army was crushed on Yonge Street. His headquarters at Montgomery’s Tavern were burned to the ground north of Eglinton. Some of his men were already dead. Others would soon be hanged for treason. Just a few years earlier, Mackenzie had been the first Mayor of Toronto. Now, he was the city’s most wanted fugitive. The Lieutenant Governor was offering a £1000 reward for his capture. So Mackenzie was forced to flee the city he loved, smuggled through the countryside by his supporters as gangs of angry Loyalists searched for him. He ran all the way south to Niagara, getting rowed across the river just a few minutes ahead of the men who had come to arrest him. He was lucky to escape Canada with his life. He would spend the next decade living in exile.
But Mackenzie wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet. His failed rebellion in Toronto was just the beginning. Now, he and his supporters would launch a war against the British government in Canada, hoping a series of bloody border raids would spark a full-scale democratic revolution. It would last a year — for pretty much all of 1838. We call it the Patriot War.
And the rebel’s admiral in that war was a man by the name of Pirate Bill Johnston. He was a smuggler, a spy, a veteran of the War of 1812 on both sides and, weirdly, an IRS agent. The rebel mayor was the most wanted man on the western shore of Lake Ontario. But the pirate admiral Bill Johnston would soon be the most wanted man in the east.
He’d been born in Trois Rivières, but he grew up just outside Kingston. And it was there that he would make his name as a young smuggler. By the time he was in his early 20s, Johnston was the captain of his own ship. He sailed his schooner through the labyrinth of islands at the spot where the St. Lawrence River meets Lake Ontario. We call them the Thousand Islands — but there are actually almost two thousand of them. It was the perfect spot to be a smuggler. Johnston would make runs through the confusing warren of islands, bringing contraband goods across the river from the United States. And he wasn’t alone. Some estimates say that as much as 90% of all the tea in Upper Canada had been smuggled into the province to avoid paying taxes — and plenty of the rum, too.
Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford admits he has broken the law by driving in special high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes set up for the Pan American Games while he is driving alone.
The Ward 2 city councillor told reporters Wednesday at city hall he watches out for the police as he moves in and out of the lanes that are reserved for vehicles with at least three people inside.
"Go in and out, obviously," Ford said. "You gotta watch the cops over your shoulder... I have to get to where I have to go."
[. . .]
The temporary lanes will be in operation from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. during the Games, which run in Toronto and surrounding areas from July 10 to 26. The lanes will be restricted to at least two people per vehicle during the Parapan Am Games from Aug. 7 to 15.
As the 1970s approached, Toronto seemed primed to throw off its old cold, unfriendly shackles. The puritanical laws which had cut down on fun, especially regarding alcohol or doing anything on a Sunday, were slowly loosening. The city’s increasingly multicultural mix boosted the number of summer festivals residents enjoyed, opening new worlds to tourists and long-time Torontonians alike. This thawing may have inspired tourism officials to promote our town as “The Friendly City,” even if making that a reality took baby steps.
One huge leap seen in today’s ad was made a decade earlier, one which grabbed attention across North America: erecting signs in Metro Toronto parks urging users to “please walk on the grass.”
The signs were the brainchild of Metro Parks Commissioner Tommy Thompson. Hired as the department’s first employee in July 1955, Thompson spent the next two decades cultivating the region’s natural beauty into over 7,800 acres for the public to enjoy. “We saw our job as wilderness management,” Thompson told Weekend magazine in 1972. “Letting the land express what it was meant to express.” Instead of installing elements like baseball diamonds, Thompson saw the mix of open spaces and flora as places where people could just enjoy themselves.
Russians are living with less Ferragamo and no parmesan cheese as Italy has lost over $1.5 billion due to European Union sanctions aimed at punishing President Vladimir Putin.
"We are worried and we are afraid,'" Italian Industry Minister Federica Guidi, said in an interview in her office on Rome's Via Veneto, the street known for its cafes and elegant shops where Russians can still occasionally be seen stocking up on designer brands before heading home.
For decades, the two countries enjoyed cozy trade relations, buoyed by the friendship between former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Putin. Russia's rich donned high fashion straight out of Milan's catwalks and craved delicacies such as Parma ham. Italy grew to rely on that steady and growing stream of imports.
All that came to a crashing halt last year as the conflict in the Ukraine drove a wedge between Europe and Russia. The U.S. and the EU slapped on sanctions. Putin retaliated by banning a range of foods, from meat to dairy products.
The dance between Canada's energy industry and Alberta's new NDP government is finding a new rhythm during Stampede week in Calgary.
A day after Alberta Premier Rachel Notley wooed a non-partisan crowd of energy folks and international investors with a speech that seemed straight from the Tory playbook, a pair of top energy executives took the stage across town to deliver their own message to a collection of new NDP cabinet ministers.
Top of mind on this day? Environmental policy.
"When we think of policy issues, one role the government does have is setting long-term objectives and I think sometimes where they miss the bar is when they say 'how,'" said Encana chief executive Doug Suttles at a lunch event put on by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. "As governments set these targets, I think they need to let people go out and find the most effective way ... picking winners is difficult, very difficult."
The wants of industry, of course, are ever the same. When it comes to issues such as environmental policy, they'd like governments to lay down a broad agenda and then let market forces decide the particulars.
Whether a hands off ethos — long a given during much of the PC party's 44 years atop Alberta politics — will continue to hold sway under the new NDP government is now an unfamiliar question mark for Canada's oilpatch. Political stereotypes would suggest an NDP government will be more inclined to tell the industry exactly how it needs to go about meeting environmental targets. The prospects of the policymakers taking such a prescriptive approach is something that keeps energy executives up at night.
The head of the Assembly of First Nations is calling for the nearly 60 indigenous languages spoken in Canada to be declared official along with English and French, an expensive proposition but one that he says is becoming more urgent as the mother tongues of aboriginal peoples disappear.
Perry Bellegarde, who was elected National Chief of the AFN last fall, agrees it would not be easy to require translations of all indigenous languages to be printed on the sides of cereal boxes and milk cartons.
“That would be the ultimate goal,” Mr. Bellegarde said in an interview on Wednesday at the three-day annual general meeting of the AFN, Canada’s largest indigenous organization. “But let’s do small steps to get there.”
As a start, he said, the federal government should draft legislation that would set aside the financial resources needed to promote, protect and enhance Canada’s aboriginal languages, some of which are now spoken by only a handful of elders and could be gone in five to seven years.
During a session on aboriginal language preservation at the AFN meeting, chiefs and other delegates debated a resolution calling on the federal government to provide money that would begin the work of revitalization. Without putting a dollar figure on it, they agreed it would be costly.
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