Inside Canada’s wildfire crisis

I’m travelling to Canmore, Alberta, this summer for a family vacation. My mother-in-law has a vacation property there, and I’ve been out west hiking the mountains almost every August for over a decade. The landscape is stunning. But now, of course, I worry that the sky will be too filled with smoke to explore the trails. Back in 2021, when we last visited, the fires in the region were so intense that on some days we couldn’t open the windows. The fires have arrived alarmingly early this year. Friends in Calgary report that the sky is sometimes just a smoky yellow dome.

Last summer, the writer Jason McBride returned to B.C., where he grew up, to report on what it’s like to live in that region in the age of the wildfire. In his eye-opening Maclean’s cover story he wrote: “What was once incomprehensible today feels inevitable. It’s one thing to understand risk as an occasional and distant possibility. Now your brain has to accept that life, going forward, will be even more frequently marred by displacement, loss and death. You have to recalibrate your ideas of safety and vulnerability.” His brilliant story is a perfect primer on how fires work, why they are happening now and the plan to slow them down.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

Some lawyers thrive in the cutthroat, combative, all-consuming culture of big law firms. For Jason Ward it was crushing, even after he moved from a big Bay Street firm in Toronto to start his own in small-town Lindsay. He started drinking to relieve stress on vacation and quickly turned into someone who knocked back Bacardis and Coke before noon and had 24 bottles of wine delivered secretly to his house each week. In his candid memoir about workaholism and addiction, he describes how he lost control of his life and ultimately his career.

Take a look inside this space-age-looking mid-century stucco bungalow. Hambly House—named for its first owner—was built in 1939, one of four remaining art moderne buildings in the Hamilton area attributed to designer Edward Glass. The current owners—a sociology professor at McMaster and a retired music executive—discovered that the house had been sitting empty for a year in a state of shambolic disrepair. But its whimsical character attracted them, even though they weren’t looking for a new home. “The house just fits our personality,” says owner Tina Fetner. “It’s a little bit sassy, just like us.”

At 21, Preston Pablo has achieved a staggering level of early-career success, unheard of even among Canada’s biggest musical mega-stars. His first single earned 51 million streams and counting, he’s already won a Juno and, this summer, he’s headlining a slew of sold-out gigs. Find out how he rose from bedroom YouTuber to must-see showman, and how he’s defining his own soulful sound in a crowded market. “I’m still trying to understand myself as an artist—and a person.”

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