Canada Letter: Thanksgiving, Old Photos and Guns

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/world/canada/canada-letter-thanksgiving-old-photos-and-guns.html

Version 0 of 1.

As most readers of this newsletter know, this weekend belongs to the real Thanksgiving. And one of the Canadians at The Times, Kerri MacDonald, a photo editor from Guelph, Ontario, has a special project to mark the holiday. I’ll let her explain.

In connection with the exhibition, Ryerson, where I studied journalism, has asked me to speak about The Times and reporting from Canada next month. Details will appear in an upcoming Canada Letter.

Read: Lens: Canada and The Times: The Faraway Nearby

Instagram: @nytarchives

After the mass shooting in Las Vegas, The Interpreter’s newsletter (subscribe here) turned its attention to gun-related statistics from around the world. As most Canadians know, guns kill fewer people here than in the United States relative to population. But Canada has a comparatively high rate of gun ownership by world standards

What explains the difference between the two neighbors? Max Fisher and Amanda Taub argue that one key distinction is the comparative rigor of Canadian gun controls and the country’s attitude toward firearms.

“Laws like Canada’s or Switzerland’s are more than just tighter restrictions,” they wrote. “They imply a different way of thinking about guns, which are treated as something that can and should be tightly regulated by the state. Citizens are expected to affirmatively prove their fitness to own a gun.”

By contrast they found that “American law begins, perhaps uniquely, with the opposite assumption: that all Americans have an inherent right to own guns, and that it is the state that must be regulated.”

Read: Three Important Ways America Is Unique When it Comes to Guns

The Times loves food. And it has been home to some of cooking’s most famous writers, including Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey and, more recently, Mark Bittman.

In my house, cookbooks have taken a back seat to an offshoot of nytimes.com known as Cooking. It blends the best of The Times’s vast archive of recipes with the latest offerings from its current stable of cooks, like Julia Moskin, Florence Fabricant and David Tanis.

Many of those recipes also come from Sam Sifton, the editor in charge of all things food, who, among other things, has also been The Times’s restaurant critic.

In Cooking’s newsletter, Sam lays out practical cooking plans for the coming days along with completely unrelated viewing and reading tips.

This week Sam offered his readers in Canada what he called a “gigantic collection of Thanksgiving recipes” as well as a special collection of recipes tailored for the Canadian version of the holiday.

Mr. Sifton’s call to arms for the weekend is “turkeys for all: action de grâce.”

And last year, when this newsletter was in its toddler phase, we asked you what food best represented Thanksgiving in your part of the country. Here’s a link for those of you who missed it.

And Happy Thanksgiving. I hope most of you will join family and friends in celebrating. Our guest list is now up to 13.

Read: Favorite Thanksgiving Recipes From Across Canada

Read: Thanksgiving 2017

Read: Canadian Thanksgiving Ideas

• Indigenous people who were scooped up in a 1960s program as children and adopted by nonnative families have reached an accord with the government.

• Travel takes you to the parts of Vancouver Island that inspired Emily Carr’s paintings.

• A large part of Lake Erie has turned a lurid green.

• Canada has a national political leader who is young, charismatic, stylish and not Justin Trudeau.

• A Somali refugee charged following a terrorist attack in Alberta had an immigration history in the United States

• When the Keystone XL pipeline was shut down by the Obama administration, Energy East was supposed to be the next hope of the oil sands. The Trump administration revived Keystone, but now Energy East is history.