Canada Today: A Fire’s Lingering Effects, Novelty Socks and a Secretive Tax Program

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/canada/fort-mcmurray-fire.html

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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.

It was extraordinary that no one died during the initial evacuation of Fort McMurray, Alberta, when a raging forest fire swept into the city a year ago, incinerating neighborhoods in its path. But the effects of the fire and the material losses were still devastating for thousands of people in the capital of Alberta’s oil sands.

So when I returned to Fort McMurray this week, it proved to be an emotional, and often delicate, assignment. Whether or not I asked, nearly everyone I interviewed insisted on retelling the stories of their escapes. And at some point, almost everyone choked up.

The last time I saw the city’s mayor, Melissa Blake, was in Edmonton while the flames and smoke were still menacing Fort McMurray. She had just been evacuated by air and taken straight to a news conference. After the meeting with reporters, which was at Alberta’s emergency management headquarters in a distant industrial park, Ms. Blake was stranded, so I gave her a lift across town to a relative’s home.

While the rebuilding that Ms. Blake predicted is gradually happening, she had another concern this week: Fort McMurray’s emotional recovery. In the year since the fire, she told me that 29,000 people in the city had sought help with mental health issues. The figure for the preceding year was just 1,000.

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Fort McMurray is in the midst of a collective breakdown. Person after person told me that the past year has brought them closer to neighbors. And the city’s rebuilding seems to have given new vigor to a longstanding campaign by many residents for laws requiring that oil sands workers move to Fort McMurray, rather than fly to their high-paying jobs there from other parts of Canada.

Read: Worry in Scorched Fort McMurray: How Many Will Walk Away?

Incentives One of Dan Levin’s stories attracted considerable attention in Canada this week. I asked him about how it came to be as well as the effect it has had. He wrote:

When a journalist hits a wall of government secrecy, he starts wondering what is hiding on the other side. That’s what happened back in February when I emailed British Columbia’s ministry of finance, asking about an obscure provincial tax incentive program and its mysterious members, which have received over U.S. $100 million in tax refunds since 2008.

Almost no information is publicly available about the province’s International Business Activity program, which provides tax incentives to attract corporations to the province. Who are they? What has the province received in return? The ministry refused to say.

So began a monthslong hunt for answers that involved scouring government records and exploring a private organization, which the program’s participants are legally required to join, run by a former finance minister from the province. Among the group’s members were a slew of Canadian property developers, Chinese state-owned corporations, an investment firm that solely manages the family fortune of a Wall Street billionaire and a trio of companies the U.S. government sanctioned last year for money laundering.

Few people outside of the provincial government seemed to know about the program or the organization. But since the article was published this week, the program has been “thrust into B.C.’s election spotlight,” according to the Vancouver Sun, which along with other Canadian media outlets has kept a spotlight on the tax breaks and their mysterious recipients.

Read: British Columbia’s Business Temptation: An Opaque Array of Tax Breaks

Eye Catching Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the former Liberal prime minister and father of the current Liberal prime minister, stood out among Canada’s leaders for his style. Many Canadians still associate him with a buckskin jacket or an extravagant cape. This week, Justin Trudeau had a fashion moment of his own. Vanessa Friedman examined his sartorial choice and looked into the politics of clothing.

Read: Justin Trudeau and the Case of the ‘Star Wars’ Socks

Ice Time Along with legal texts and case material, Madam Justice Mara Greene lugs something unusual to her work at the courthouse in Toronto’s Old City Hall: a hockey bag and stick. Curtis Rush met up with the 47-year-old provincial court judge. To say that the native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, is hockey-obsessed might be an understatement. One defense lawyer told Mr. Rush, “I wouldn’t be surprised if she conceals a hockey jersey under her robes on some days.”

Read: Meet Toronto’s Gavel-Wielding, Puck-Shooting Madam Justice

Questioning Resentment from travelers, including many Canadians, over less-than welcoming treatment at the United States’ border seems to be growing under the Trump administration.

Read: ‘They Treated Us Like Criminals’: U.S. Border Crossers Report Severe Reception

Resting While she was in Old Massett, on Graham Island in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia, Catherine Porter was taken to a wooden shed behind a former school. Once a nail serving as a latch was removed and the door was pulled back, she saw a 197-year-old totem pole.

Read: Where Totem Poles Are a Living Art (and Relics Rest in Peace)

High Test The Canadian authorities have recalled a batch of Bombay Sapphire gin for containing far more alcohol than what’s advertised on the label. They warned that drinking it may produce “temporary adverse health consequences,” which sounds like a very bureaucratic description of a hangover.

Read: Canadian Drinkers, Listen: Too-Potent Batch of Gin Is Recalled

Streaming The May edition of Watching’s guide to Canadian Netflix offerings is now available. Among its recommendations is “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” which Scott Tobias describes as “Sacha Gervasi’s serio-comic documentary about a long-in-the-tooth Canadian heavy-metal outfit” and says it has been dubbed “a real-life ‘This Is Spinal Tap’.”

Read: The Best Movies and TV Shows New on Netflix Canada in May

Survivor Bernard Labadie, from Quebec City, is perhaps best known in Canada as the founder of Les Violons du Roy, a chamber orchestra. As he prepares to take over as the principal conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York, Mr. Labadie sat down with Michael Cooper to talk about music as well as his harrowing, but successful, battle against Stage 4 lymphoma, which included spending a month in a medically induced coma.

Read: How a Brush With Death Changed the Next Conductor of St. Luke’s

Here are some other articles from The Times over the last week, not necessarily related to Canada and perhaps overlooked, that I found interesting:

—The decline in Arctic ice may turn the region, including part of Canada, into a major shipping route by 2030.

—Dan Levin made his way to the bit of France just off Canada’s coast to take the political temperature ahead of Sunday’s French election runoff.

—Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious drug Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, isn’t having much luck with his efforts to improve American jails.

—Hubert L. Dreyfus, the philosopher who began considering the consequences and limits of computers and artificial intelligence in the 1950s, has died at 87.