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Your insurance company wants to know if you’ve ever had jaundice.

Your children want information about a blood disease that runs in your family.

You want to find out if you’ve ever been prescribed a medication that’s now making headlines for long-term side effects.

Unless you have a perfect memory, you likely can’t recall […]

Every audience member seems to take away a different image from a Cirque du Soleil performance. For some, it is the high-tech light show or the fantastical costumes. For others, it is the aerialists moving gracefully on ropes and wires high above the ring. For me, when I went to see Cirque’s Quidam in Vancouver in May 2004, it was the young Chinese acrobats. Now, a year later, I can’t even remember exactly what they […]

Imagine you’re the curator of a huge museum, full of so many precious works that most of them haven’t even been catalogued. Yet even as you’re racing to document and interpret them, vandals are destroying some of them with graffiti and thieves are carting others away. The ones that remain are slowly fading before your eyes—and there’s not a thing you can do to preserve them.

That, in a nutshell, is the conundrum facing the archaeologists […]

In 1916, Canada was a little less than 50 years old, but it was deeply embroiled in one of the most cataclysmic conflicts the world had known to that date: World War I. The federal government […]

A working seaport and a historic downtown core are among Lunenburg’s greatest assets.

For more than two centuries, life in Lunenburg, N.S., revolved […]

The 50-seat Canadair Regional Jet assembly line at Dorval, Quebec.

A willingness to take risks, as any modern business maverick will tell you, is one of the keys to corporate success. And Bombardier Inc., a Canadian corporation that builds everything […]

It seems every generation has at least one massive building project that involves more science and more technology than anything that came before. The desire to build it big and build it anywhere is behind everything from the Great Pyramids […]

Steaming into Halifax aboard the SS Stavangerfjord in January 1946 is an experience Patricia McLean will never forget. The Sudbury, Ont., resident was a 21-year-old war bride and she remembers holding her infant son in her arms while looking at the bright lights ringing the harbour. It was a far cry from blacked-out, war-torn Britain.

Once inside the terminal–at Pier 21–she and her compatriots enjoyed the warm welcome they received from the Canadian Red Cross, and the seemingly endless supply of food. “It […]

One of the great ironies of Glacier National Park is that the reason it exists at all is also the greatest threat to its survival.

“The number 1 challenge to the ecological integrity of the park is the national transportation corridor,” says John G. Woods, a park biologist for Mount Revelstoke and Glacier national parks and author of several books about the area.

Until the 1860s, this stunning region of what is now southeastern British Columbia was almost unmarked by human footsteps, native or European. And no wonder. Craggy mountains foil agriculture and most modes of transportation. Winters are cold. And up […]

For the Canadian wine industry, spring 1999 was a heady time indeed.

First, in late April, the Ontario government passed legislation that would make it easier for the province’s wineries to market their products abroad. Six weeks later, Brock university in St. Catharines, Ont., opened Inniskillin Hall, home to Canada’s first degree-granting programs in winemaking and grape growing. Throughout the spring, Canadian wineries picked up prizes in international competitions.

The latest available figures, from 1997, showed that the 42 wineries tracked by Statistics Canada and Industry Canada employed 1,377 people and had annual sales totalling $480 million. When newer wineries and […]