Snow collects on the brim of Mike Ranta’s birch bark hat as he watches a whiteout set in on the Chilcotin Highway in northern British Columbia. Built on a bold dream of past success, Ranta is attempting to cross the North American continent, alone, by canoe, one last time. In 2014 Mike Ranta became the first person in history to canoe…
My father died by suicide when I was 12. It had been a year since I’d last seen him, far longer since he’d been a regular presence in my life. A few years prior, when he started missing his weekly visits, my mother had tried to explain depression. By the time I was 11 and he was an in-patient at…
In a part of the world best known as the home of Sidney Crosby, at a narrow gym in an industrial park, a 31-year-old woman powers through a slew of improbable athletic feats. Lindsay Hilton, from Halifax, N.S. was born without hands or arms or legs. What she has, though, is ambition, a passion for CrossFit and rugby and the…
Patricia Garnett is known in her city as “the doll lady.” I met her for the first time in 2013 and asked her about her story because I was curious. She told me that she had lost her child. Patricia carries around one or two dolls around most times she leaves her house in Saint John, NB. She has not…
Canada has long been described as a country that spans “from coast to coast”, with little acknowledgement of the Arctic, which makes up its longest and northernmost shoreline. As of this week it will be harder for Canadians to ignore the splendour of the country’s North. After four years of work, the country’s first permanent road to the Arctic Ocean…
Since the election of Donald Trump, thousands of refugees have crossed the Canadian border over fears they might be otherwise be arrested and deported as a result of a national crackdown on asylum seekers. Refugees have been flooding in all along the Canada/US border, which is the longest in the world but most of the journeys are being made at the…
Kenya’s recent presidential re-run elections, which were scheduled after the Supreme Court annulled an earlier vote in August due to “irregularities and illegalities”, resulted in a landslide victory for the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenyatta ended up winning 98 per cent of the October 26 vote, leading opposition candidate Raila Odinga, of the National Super Alliance (NASA) political coalition, to call the…
In the late 19th century hundreds of farming families left Nepal to settle in Bhutan, responding to the call of the country, desperately short of manpower. For eight generations these farmers lived in relatively isolated areas where they continued to practice their unique Hindu culture in the Buddhist kingdom While the influx of farmers was mutually beneficial for both sides for…
There is a tradition in southern Alberta that goes back to a time when the Prairies were still relatively unscathed by European settlement. It moved west with the North-West Mounted Police and north from the plains of Texas and the mountain basins of Oregon, ultimately coalescing on the wide-open grasslands in the Rocky Mountain foothills of what would one day…