Canada Today: Commemoration, Dining Tips and Marijuana
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Version 0 of 1. Each week, Canada Today mixes The Times’s recent Canada-related coverage with back stories and analysis from our reporters, along with opinions from our readers. The route my father followed across Windsor, Ontario, to visit my grandmother on Sundays took us down Ypres Avenue. We passed near other streets with names that seemed unusual to me as a child, among them: Verdun, Lens, Somme and Arras avenues. Eventually, I learned that they were one of Canada’s many memorials to World War I. Cycling trips to Europe and covering the Tour de France has given me the privilege of seeing those places with the names that once puzzled me. In 2001, while near Verdun, I stayed in a hotel along the Voie Sacrée, the road that in 1916 delivered troops and supplies to the front while under constant bombardment. Uniquely for a regional road in France, it is officially known by its name rather than letters and numbers. The kilometer markers that measure it are topped with reproductions of French World War I helmets. And there are commemorative marches on the road to the site of the front by soldiers and citizens alike. The centennial of World War I has more recently brought the Tour de France back to the sites of some of those famous battles. In 2014, the race traveled along a highway where the grass alongside had been replaced by pale blue cornflowers to evoke the jackets worn by French troops. Graveyards and memorials, many impossibly vast and all impeccably maintained, have been backdrops for the race. So have the forests that have grown out of the ground pockmarked with shells fired long ago. Unexploded ordnance make many of those forests off limits. Last Saturday evening, I went down to the national war memorial in Ottawa to watch an overnight vigil to a battle, which, over the last century, has become particularly important to Canadians: the Battle of Vimy Ridge. It was the first in World War I in which the country’s troops fought solely as Canadians. They overran a German line that had defied attacks by French and British forces. As I write, debate continues over whether Vimy marks a critical moment in Canada’s development as an independent nation. But the deaths of nearly 3,600 Canadians in that battle remain part of the national memory. Events throughout the country last weekend and a gathering of about 25,000 people at the Vimy monument in France attest to that. It is a stark contrast to the United States. Commemorations of the centennial of America’s entry into the war last week were few and received very little notice. But while the United States was a latecomer — Canada joined at the outset, in 1914 — it lost 116,516 soldiers. And while Canada rather discreetly celebrates a victorious battle, Australia and New Zealand commemorate the bloodbath that was Gallipoli. We’d like to know your thoughts about why memories of World War I remain so strong in Canada 100 years later. Email us at canadatoday@nytimes.com. Last Sunday, when I returned to the vigil at 1 a.m., the crowd was long gone except for a photographer with a tripod and the occasional passers-by from the bars nearby. But the nearly 3,600 electric candles placed there were still lit and rotating shifts of army cadets were carrying out the memorial in the chilly night air. Read: 100 Years Later, Battle of Vimy Ridge Remains Key Symbol for Canada Canada Today Dining Special I recently asked readers of this newsletter to nominate restaurants in their communities and in Canada generally that are memorable or distinctive. We received a torrent of replies, all of them interesting and many of them involving little-known dining spots. We cannot publish everything. But we have put together a selection. My favorite is a former snack bar at a tiny airport south of Montreal. And, speaking selfishly, most of your suggestions are in a price range that won’t challenge The Times’s expense policies. Thank you again to everyone who submitted suggestions. Our request for family lore about the Dionne quintuplets also struck a chord. Watch for a compilation of your emails about the so-called miracle babies of the Great Depression to appear soon. Read: Canadian Diners Reveal Their Special Places Tight Control The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has introduced legislation that, if passed, would make Canada only the second country — Uruguay was the first — to have fully legalized the recreational use of marijuana. That was, perhaps, the easy part. Although the bill lays out the broad guidelines of a tightly regulated system and introduces strict new penalties for selling or giving marijuana to minors, much work remains. Among other things, provinces will have to figure out how to distribute it and which shops will sell it, and the police will need to develop tests for apprehending impaired drivers that are reliable enough to avoid court challenges. Officials said repeatedly that their chief objective was to take the trade in marijuana away from organized crime. At the same time, the government also acknowledged widespread concern from much of the medical community about the safety of marijuana, particularly for people younger than 25. Sorting out the details of a system will be a sometimes delicate balancing act, particularly between public health needs and the ambitions of the businesses that hope to prosper as growers. Read: Trudeau Unveils Bill Legalizing Recreational Marijuana in Canada Machine Learning Canada’s universities were among the first to support researchers who were specialists in artificial intelligence — the data systems that allow us to chat with our telephones and that form the basis of cars that drive themselves. But, in what has been an all too common story in Canadian technology, many of those specialists were lured away by big money and big projects in California’s Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Steve Lohr, who covers A.I. for The Times, went to Toronto to look at a series of recent initiatives to make it possible and attractive for those specialists to work, and stay, in Canada. Read: Canada Tries to Turn Its A.I. Ideas Into Dollars Meltdown A freezer went on the fritz at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and melted away tens of thousands of years of climate history. Tatiana Schlossberg, a climate change and environment reporter for The Times, wrote that the failure at the Canadian Ice Core Archive “could hinder scientific research into how changes in the atmosphere have shaped Earth’s climate history, and how they could affect its future.” Read: An Ice Scientist’s Worst Nightmare Here are some other articles from The Times over the last week, not necessarily related to Canada and perhaps overlooked, that I found interesting: — As anyone who has been there in recent years can attest, London has become a global crossroads. Sarah Lyall took a deep look into how Britain’s departure from the European Union, known as “Brexit,” may affect that status. — Unhappy about an ice ax, Mary Anderson and her husband went on to found REI, the cooperative store selling outdoor gear that was something of a prototype for Canada’s MEC, also known as the Mountain Equipment Co-Operative. She died in late March at the age of 107. — Three floors underground and next to The New York Times’s headquarters is our “morgue” which is “a vast and eclectic archive that houses the paper’s historical news clippings and photographic prints, along with its large book and periodicals library, microfilm records and other archival material — federal directories, magazine collections and a variety of indexes.” — Radhika Jones offered an appreciation of Agatha Christie and her “endearing, clever characters.” |