Battle of the Generations returns!
Host Lily Singh previews season 2 of CTV's Battle of the Generations; a show where contestants face-off to see how much they know about different generations.
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Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
A river cruise with our American frenemies – what could go wrong?
Jane Christmas is a Canadian author. We are on the Rhine, sailing down the lazy river, staring at ancient European castles and pine-covered hills. The occasional barge or river boat passes in the opposite direction. We wave. We lean over the rail and watch the currents and eddies. The river flows, the sun beams. It's life in the slow lane, and boy, do we need it. Away from the noise of an angry, divided world. Away from blaring headlines, from the fearmongers urging us to prepare an emergency kit because the Apocalypse is closing in. Away from the stuff that makes our hearts race and our minds plunge into dark thinking. Look who's sorry now: Americans are an apologetic bunch to this Canadian on vacation Our party of four Canadian couples finds itself to be among a distinct minority on this small cruise ship. The American passengers vastly outnumber us: 135 of them, fewer than 30 of us. It's awkward, given the trade tensions between our two nations. Still, we're pretty sure we can roll with it. We're a friendly, easygoing bunch. Two nights in, the cruise director announces a pub quiz. Hey, that sounds fun. Let's do it. The other passengers form their groups, grab their drinks, and off we go. Team Canada hits a near-perfect score, falling at the question, On which side of her face is Mona Lisa's smile? But it doesn't matter, we've won handily. Our reward is two bottles of champagne, one of which we immediately hand to the American group sitting next to us as thanks for marking our answer sheet. They're simpatico. We think. Walking back to our rooms, I clock another large group of Americans. Their lips are tight, their arms crossed. I can imagine they're the type to start yelling 'U.S.A.! U.S.A.!' at a moment's notice. They glare at us. One of them – male, white, obese, scarfing down an entire tube of complimentary peanuts – gives me the stink eye and calls out, in a MAGA tone, the number 51. 'In your dreams, buddy,' I say with a smile, and walk on. But when I reach the door of our room, the smile is gone and my head is filled with less civil replies, ones that might elicit a punch being thrown. One of our friends asks what that guy had said to me. I confirm what she overheard. The faces on the rest of our group fall. Apparently, there's no escape from bullies, even on a seniors' cruise. Keller: We see your joke about the 51st state, and raise you a reference to sacking the White House As the trip goes on, things do not improve. Aside from two Americans who approach us to apologize for their current President, the rest treat us as if we're COVID carriers. They rarely acknowledge us in the hall, don't meet our eyes or say hello or good morning like normal people do when they're on a pleasure boat together. During the off-board excursions, they huddle with their countrymen and either ignore us or shoot us looks of disdain. More Canadian invisibility arrives via the tour guides, who constantly point out Americanisms to their guests – a U.S. embassy here, a bridge named after JFK there, the former home of the guy who designed the Statue of Liberty. Americans are on a constant drip-feed of their own cultural fodder. That's why we won the quiz – as the saying goes, Canadians know about the world; Americans only know about themselves. Here's the thing: It's not enough for Canadians to buy ABA (anything but American), we need to work on self-belief and entrepreneurship. We haven't promoted our country or culture abroad as vociferously or aggressively as we could, believing that polite and passive would win the day. How's that been working out for us? As a Canadian living in Britain, I've witnessed the fallout. We are a ghost nation beyond our borders. I had to remind an otherwise educated English twentysomething where exactly Canada was on a map. It's humbling given the rhetoric that 'Canada matters on the world stage.' What stage? We can't even get verbal support from the Commonwealth or England when it matters. They snickered when our PM was called 'governor,' and our sovereignty was bullied. They thought it was a joke. Look at them scrambling now. Still, why have we assumed that the world knows who we are? Each week I leaf through the British newspapers and see the same dull tourism ads for Niagara Falls and the Rocky Mountaineer that I've seen for the last two decades. Where's the nightlife of Canada's cities? The picturesque Newfoundland villages? The Inuit arts and awesome Northern landscapes? The architectural and cultural charm of Quebec? Where are the theatres, galleries, literary festivals and vineyards? I'd suggest our tourism ads include shopping as a visitor activity (our dollar being a bargain) but we've shamefully cross-border shopped so much that we've lost our signature department stores, having sold most of them to the highest (often American) bidder. Nice one. Is no one minding our commercial legacy? It's time to step up. We need to be seen as a country on the rise, as well as one that gets involved. Yes to increasing our defence spending, but also to elbowing in to some of the world's ongoing conflicts and helping to mediate their end. Why do we always leave this task to the U.S.? Then there's the lack of overseas trade. Aluminum and steel, sure, but what about wine? There's no end of Australian, New Zealand and American wines on the shelves of British grocery stores, but nothing from Canada. No one in Britain is even aware of Canadian viticulture. Let's get those bottles overseas. It's all very well to wear your 'Never 51' shirt, or to post your Canuck creds on Instagram, or to boycott Netflix and Amazon, but it's time to think bigger, bolder. Time to make a splash. If our efforts are rebuffed south of the border, big deal. There are other countries in this world to woo. Why do we still measure Canadian success against our neighbour's barometer? It's obvious by now that big isn't always best. Back on board our cruise boat, the froideur continues and mystifies my group. Did we belittle their leader on national television, as Donald Trump did ours? Did we threaten their sovereignty? Upend their trade deals? No. They started it. And it sounds like a playground spat until you understand that it's moved into gaslighting territory: We are somehow the enemy. This is the strategy of their leader: Drop the stink bomb and blame the other guy. He's told/signalled/tweeted to his nation that Canadians are lazy, do-nothing freeloaders. Of course it's a lie, but try convincing a boatload of Americans of their country's misguided path, a group who've dined on a century of obsequiousness that the world – including Canada – has fed them. The water might be choppy, but it's time we charted our own course, and make waves that count.
CBC
2 hours ago
- CBC
Fishermen spot pod of killer whales off Cape Breton
Lobster fishermen in northern Cape Breton got an up-close glimpse of a pod of killer whales this week, a sighting that a marine biologist says is on the rise. Bernie Lamey was hauling lobster traps on Monday not far off Cape Smokey, a famous Cabot Trail landmark, when a couple of orcas started circling the boat. Within 10 minutes, the fishermen had spotted about a dozen. The orcas seemed to be in a playful mood. "They came around our boat, bumped into the boat, rolled around, showed their bellies, [came] up and had a little look at us," he told CBC's Information Morning Cape Breton. "They almost looked like they were more interested in us than we were of them. It was pretty spectacular." Lamey said he knew right away they were killer whales by their distinctive black-and-white colouring. "That's a pretty hard whale to miss," he said. "We get to see all kinds of marine life out there.... Looking down in the water and seeing something that's only three feet away from you that's the size of your boat is pretty impressive." At least one whale stayed several hundred metres away, but Lamey said he knew it was an orca, too, because its dorsal fin was nearly two metres tall. "The fact that they were killer whales and the fact that there was 10 or 12 of them there at one time and they decided to stay and play for a few minutes was just an experience that I'll never forget." Elizabeth Zwamborn, a marine biologist and a professor at Trinity Western University in B.C., runs an annual survey of pilot whales off northern Cape Breton. They're black like orcas, but don't have white patches on their cheeks and have smaller dorsal fins. It's possible to mistake juvenile white-beaked dolphins as juvenile orcas because they're both black and white, but Zwamborn said the videos and photos she's seen this week off Cape Breton are definitely killer whales. Zwamborn said only one orca has been seen inshore in the 27 years the study has been running. They're more commonly spotted farther out in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland and Labrador or in the Arctic. Climate change is affecting the ocean's temperature, bringing North Atlantic right whales into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Belugas have also left the Gulf and headed to Cape Breton, but it's not clear why they wandered so far from home. This year, orcas have been seen off Cape Breton near Money Point, Cape Smokey and Flint Island, Zwamborn said. It could be the same pod, or it could be more than one.
CBC
3 hours ago
- CBC
Sherbrooke, Que., faces growing pains as it looks to expand its cycling network
On her daily rides through Sherbrooke, Que., Laurence Williams often finds herself cruising along a bike path — until it suddenly comes to an end. A self-described "utilitarian cyclist," who uses her bicycle for all her transportation needs, Williams says it's possible to get around the city by bike. But it's not always easy. "Sometimes you have a beginning of a bike path and then it just stops," Williams says, adding that this kind of interruption is common on the cycling network in the city, located 150 kilometres east of Montreal. Aside from being inconvenient to someone who is looking for the fastest route to a given destination, Williams feels that the variability in what kinds of infrastructure exist for cyclists also makes her commutes more dangerous, because it is harder to know what is coming up around the next corner. "When you use your bike on a day-to-day basis, you want your route to be quick, to be safe and predictable," she says. Williams argues that in a city like Sherbrooke where there appears to be political will for bike and environmentally friendly initiatives, she expects it to be easier to make progress. "In a context where ecological transition has been mentioned as a priority for the City of Sherbrooke and a context where more than 50 per cent of our citywide greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to transportation, we really need to go faster." 'A big challenge' for the city In May, Sherbrooke highlighted 16 areas where expansions to the cycling network have been planned. Over the next three years, the hope is to bridge a number of significant gaps in the existing system. According to Anne-Sophie Demers, a division chief for sustainable and integrated mobility with Sherbrooke's Strategic Territorial Development Service, the goal of these priority areas is to improve the connectivity between different parts of the network. "It is a big challenge for our team because the context and situation is never the same," Demers says. Demers and her team have been charged with trying to determine how best to implement safe and functional bike paths on existing roads without disrupting the needs of existing traffic. It is an urban planning puzzle, she said, because some roads are simply not large enough to accommodate both drivers and cyclists on fully protected bike lanes. Despite those difficulties, Demers says that the city has been in conversation with local cycling groups to try to find the best options available in the hopes that a more secure cycling network will open the door to more cyclists. The city is also trying to improve access to bikes in other ways. Demers notes that there is currently work underway for the installation of Bixi bike-sharing stations similar to the system that has been in place in Montreal for more than a decade "We think it has the potential to transform mobility in Sherbrooke." The initial Bixi system in Sherbrooke is expected to have 250 bicycles at 25 stations, with 80 per cent of the fleet being e-bikes. Although no official start date has yet been announced, Demers says the system should be operational by July. A city with a lot of potential "The arrival of e-bikes has literally changed the landscape of who's able to cycle," says Magali Bebronne, director of programs at Vélo Québec. The cycling advocacy group is one of the parties Demers's team has turned to for support and data in its planning process. Vélo Québec conducts regular research into the state of bicycle adoption in several different Quebec cities, including Sherbrooke. For a city as hilly as Sherbrooke, Bebronne says bikes equipped with an electric motor are a game changer for cycling accessibility. That, combined with the known benefits of public-access bicycle programs like Bixi, creates an interesting opportunity for increased adoption of cycling as a way of getting around in the city. Vélo Québec also publishes a portrait of cycling in the province every five years and, although the 2020 report was carried out in unusual circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic, research showed that just over half of all Quebecers were using a bicycle and 2.1 million people were using one as a regular mode of transportation. Bebronne says the group is currently in the process of preparing the 2025 edition. Bebronne also challenges the idea that using bikes in this way is uniquely a "big city" phenomenon. "In smaller cities, people actually live closer to where they work," Bebronne explains, noting that Vélo Québec's last study of Sherbrooke showed that about 44 per cent of the population live within five kilometres of their work.
