The Canadian Stories That Moved Us in 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/world/canada/the-canadian-stories-that-moved-us-in-2018.html

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Before the Canada Letter takes a year-end break, the three of us who cover Canada for The Times wanted to look back on the stories that most affected us this year. The newsletter will be back on Jan. 5. Until then, best wishes for the holidays.

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I spent a lot of time driving around Saskatchewan this year, including a trip that retraced the route of the ill-fated bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos.

Even in winter or late spring, the vastness of the prairies offers an exotic sort of beauty. Part of that is an overwhelming sense of isolation. Farming is large scale in Saskatchewan. Traffic is scarce.

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Countering that isolation, however, is the powerful sense of community the world saw in Humboldt following the crash. We all learned that the Broncos are one of the ties that bind the town. The arena’s capacity of 1,854 people means that there’s a seat for every 2.6 of the town’s residents. But Humboldt isn’t just hockey. Its churches and community halls are just as vibrant and were, even at a time of immense tragedy, as warm and welcoming to those in grief, and to strangers like me.

Many players among the 16 killed in the bus crash came from throughout Canada, mostly the West. In the towns the Broncos’ bus passed through, there were few doors without a hockey stick beside them as a memorial. Every restaurant and shop I visited solicited donations. At the crash site, drivers stopped to say silent prayers, leave something on the impromptu memorial or simply try to understand what went wrong.

We still don’t know exactly what happened, although the upcoming trial of a truck driver may shed some light. Eight months later, one Bronco remains in hospital. But in September, the team again moved to billets in Humboldt, and took to the ice for the first time since the tragic events of the spring.

—Ian Austen

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There are several moments that stand out for me in 2018: Olympian Ross Rebagliati rolling his fourth joint a few hours into my smoke-filled interview with him.

Filmmaker Xavier Dolan talking to me for nearly eight hours straight about his life and childhood and inviting me to his house to watch a cut of his new film.

Rushing to Toronto in April to cover a van attack that killed 10 people and, chillingly, appeared to be motivated by hostility toward women.

But the story that perhaps stands out the most was covering the sentencing hearing of Alexandre Bissonnette, the 28-year-old political science student who killed six people at a mosque in Quebec City in a January 2017 rampage.

I had barely arrived back in Canada after 28 years abroad when I was sent to Quebec City to cover the hearing. Sitting in a hulking court house, and seeing Mr. Bissonnette, a waiflike figure, handcuffed behind a glass enclosure in a crowded courtroom, was hard to get out of my mind. As was seeing his father, a lawyer, looking heartbroken and averting my gaze in the hallway during a break.

These things aren’t supposed to happen in liberal Canada. Or so I had thought. It emerged during the hearing that Mr. Bissonnette decided to act after learning of a well-publicized tweet by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, inviting refugees to Canada. He had also developed an obsession with Donald Trump, the far right, mass killers and Muslims.

The story was a stark reminder to me that even Canada has a dark underbelly — that the forces of populism can percolate here, sometimes with lethal consequences.

—Dan Bilefsky

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I will never forget the afternoon and evening I spent with Jihan earlier this year.

She is a Yazidi woman from Kocho, a town in northern Iraq that ISIS militants attacked in August 2014. She was separated from her family and fiancé and sold — so many times, she can’t remember — as a sex slave.

While being held in an underground prison, she tattooed the names of her loved ones across her chest, arms and hands, using a sewing needle, soot and the breast milk of a fellow captive. They are the first things you notice about her — both forlorn love letters and fiery acts of resistance.

Jihan is among the few victims of ISIS taken in by Canada. She arrived in June 2017 with her sister Munifa, and was settled by the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society into a residence along a street in southwest Calgary.

Together with her Yazidi neighbors, she invited me to dinner. We ate rice, chicken and fresh tomatoes sitting on a colorful cloth laid out on the floor. That meal seemed such a profound act of kindness and generosity, given the brutality they’d endured.

The next afternoon, Jihan posed for photos in an empty classroom. As we were leaving, I heard a thud behind me. She had dropped to the floor. At first, I thought she was having a seizure. But as it soon became clear, she was reliving an attack. Psychiatrists diagnosed her with conversion disorder, a rare diagnosis that is relatively common among Yazidi survivors of ISIS.

I was shaken to see Jihan in that state. I also marveled at her resilience — how she came to school each day to learn English and try to start a new life in this strange country, rather than give in to sorrow and hatred.

You might pass Jihan on a downtown street in Calgary, and not guess what she’s lived through. She is a warrior.

—Catherine Porter

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This week’s Trans Canada and Around the Times highlights were compiled by Lindsey Wiebe, the Canada audience growth editor.

—Canadian shoppers are an important source of business for American towns along the northern border. But this year, more Canadians are taking a pass.

—Robert Lepage’s new play explores issues facing Indigenous people in Canada. But it does so “through the defensive gaze of a white artist who can’t resist telling us that he, too, has been victimized,” writes Laura Cappelle in her review.

—Liam Kirk is the first player born and trained in England to be picked in the N.H.L. draft. He’s now adjusting to life far from home, playing in a junior league in Peterborough, Ontario.

—Plan your 2019 binge-watching with an overview of what’s worth seeing among Netflix’s new January offerings in Canada.

—“I never even heard of a hippie.” The Canadian composer behind the hit musical “Hair” was the unlikely driver of a cultural phenomenon.

—This list of our most-read stories this year is a snapshot of a tumultuous 2018. (For those seeking a reprieve, there’s also a “no politics” option.)

—Katherine Rosman’s investigation into the origins of a blockbuster bikini is the suspenseful bathing suit saga you didn’t know you needed.

—Cannabis legalization in California led to numerous debates. One thing lawmakers didn’t anticipate: How bad thousands of flowering marijuana plants can smell.