When I was growing up in Vancouver, my parents had a flowering quince shrub in their backyard. It had bright pink coral flowers and thorny stems. I picked off the fruit thinking it was an apple, but it tasted tart, like an unripe plum. That was a core memory for me. Quince trees produce a tart fruit usually made into jams, jellies, and other preserves My parents grew a lot of ornamental flowers, like petunia and daisies, and I always helped out. We even have Camcorder footage of me shovelling soil into a wheelbarrow. But gardening wasn’t something I ever considered professionally until 2016. I ..read more

The buyers Tanushree Holker, a 31-year-old investment adviser, and her husband, Nishant Kalia, a 32-year-old recruiter The budget $500,000 The backstory Nishant and Tanushree loved living close to their family and friends in their hometown of Delhi, India. They did not love the city’s poor air quality, busy pace and high population density, which made everything feel cramped. In 2019, they decided to immigrate to Canada in search of more space, a process that was relatively smooth but that took a year and half to complete. Their destination was Toronto, a large-enough city that would still aff ..read more

In the 1920s, Montreal was one of the world’s most active export centres for wheat. The Old Port was peppered with enormous grain silos and, at its south end, Alexandra Pier shipped out all that precious cargo. By 1967, however, the pier served two purely practical purposes: as a parking area and as a processing terminal for cruise passengers, a brief stop-over before they sought entertainment elsewhere in the city. In 2013, with the Port showing signs of advanced age—some parts were literally crumbling—the port authority launched a design competition to modernize the waterfront. Provencher_Ro ..read more

Dave Bradbury was born in the early 1960s in Ontario and moved to British Columbia in 1968. There he grew up, married, raised three daughters and built a career as a unionized tradesman. In the mid-’90s, his wife died of lung cancer and he became the sole provider for his girls, then seven, nine and 12. He’s proud of the life he made for them, working on remote jobsites across the province. After his kids grew up, he met his second wife, Katherine, in 2012. They settled in Kitimat, on the northwest coast, which was booming due to a planned natural-gas facility, and where Bradbury worked constr ..read more

I became a registered nurse in 2007. I’ve held many jobs since then—in prenatal education, women’s health and in various leadership roles—but I got my start in the postpartum unit. In those early years, I spent much of my time at my patients’ bedsides administering medications, checking wounds, drawing blood and otherwise attending to the needs of moms and babies. By 2016, I was a clinical nurse specialist working on staff education within the Greater Toronto Area, which is where I met Amie Archibald-Varley, another nurse. Our friendship really grew after we started exchanging horror stories ..read more

In 2011, I was studying economics at a university in the Philippines. That year, I joined a musical theatre group on campus, and a friend of mine joked that I was replacing another member in the group: a guy a little older than me who’d graduated with a communications degree and was leaving the country to work abroad. I only met him once before he left—and in that brief meeting, neither of us had any inkling the other was gay, though I definitely felt attracted to him. In 2016, we saw one another on Tinder. We reconnected, and though it sounds clichéd, we entered a kind of whirlwind romance. H ..read more

It used to be hard to find a decent non-alcoholic drink for grown-ups besides soda and juice. I became acutely aware of this during the summer of 2016, while on my fourth date in Montreal with Jeremy, my now-husband. He had been sober for five years, after a decade of drinking and drugs that culminated in an intervention, two months in rehab and well over 1,000 AA meetings. That night, when he asked about booze-free beverage options, our waiter looked shaken. “Sir,” he said, “this is a bar.” Retail options were no better. Once, before visiting my sisters in Toronto, Jeremy and a very-pregnant ..read more

I’ve worked in restaurants for my whole career. After culinary school, I started as an entry-level cook and came up through kitchens in Toronto. Eventually, I worked my way up to head chef at a restaurant on King Street West and, in 2020, I joined Beast Pizza, a 20-seat restaurant in West Queen West, as a partner and owner. I love what I do. I get to cook six-course meals for guests almost every day. We also serve whole-animal dinners: last week, I cooked an entire goat for a large group of people. The next day, I prepared venison six ways. From a culinary perspective, I’m living my dream.&nbs ..read more

When Sarika Ghag and her husband, Happy Ghag, married in 2010, they both wanted a home with a huge backyard, where they could raise kids on a steady diet of sunshine, exercise and fresh air. First, they moved into Happy’s pastoral childhood home in Chilliwack, B.C.—a colossal house where Happy had freewheeling afternoons as a boy playing soccer and driving tractors around the fields behind his home. By 2016, Sarika and Happy had two young children. It was time to build their dream home and move out. The kitchen features cabinetry painted in Benjamin Moore’s Raccoon Fur. Happy, an orthodontist ..read more

When Rick Mercer, Canada’s favourite satirist son, retired from the rant game in 2018 after a blazing 15-season run of the Rick Mercer Report, he could have gone quietly. For a while, he got into amateur potato farming. But, every day in his shed overlooking the Atlantic, he was also writing, a new loquacious hobby that resulted in not one but two back-to-back instant bestsellers. There’s 2021’s Talking to Canadians, which charts Mercer’s course from his school days to getting CBC’s green light, and The Road Years, released last October, which chronicles everything after, including the drum le ..read more