TORONTO —
Lexi McKenna’s work day now includes breaks to help her mother-in-law plant vegetables, which wasn’t possible when she was running her wedding business at breakneck speed out of her Toronto studio.
McKenna and husband Jeff Richards had been intrigued for years by a slower-paced life outside of the city. But it wasn’t until COVID-19 brought their respective businesses — Richards is a chef — to a halt that the two moved from Toronto to the town of Grand Valley to live with his parents.
They might never come back.
“We’ve kind of fallen in love with this small-town vibe,” McKenna said. “It’s a really lovely community. There’s a nice sense of security, and then honestly, the pace of life — I’m still getting work done here, but I just don’t have this sense of urgency in everything I do that I do when I’m in Toronto.”
Since the global pandemic first forced Canadians into their homes in late-March, our houses have become our offices, our schools and our recreation centres. And we suddenly see our homes’ shortcomings, and crave more beautiful scenery and space to roam.
That allure, along with the high cost of city living, and the new knowledge that many Canadians can work from home, has more people shopping for homes outside the city.
“In the last 10 days, we have seen an overwhelming migration of people up here,” Chris Keleher, a Royal LePage realtor who specializes in Collingwood and The Blue Mountains, said on Friday.
“The increase in buyer activity has been massive, and 95 per cent of the buyers my team is working with are families where the pandemic has finally been the straw that broke the camel’s back, and they are moving out of the city.”
Keleher’s clients Renee and Francis Tanaka are shopping in Collingwood, a virtual playground on the southern part of Georgian Bay with beaches, forests and Blue Mountain ski resort. Renee, who is a maternal support practitioner and Francis, a technical sales representative, want to be closer to family, plus provide more space for their two sons, aged three and six, to play.
“It’s funny, because when we were up (in the Collingwood area) in the summer, our thought was always like: could we actually live up here?” Francis said.
“And the lifestyle outside of the city is much more appealing to us,” Renee added. “We have two active boys who are continuously wanting to play in nature. We are an active family, so by moving somewhere up north like Collingwood, we can ski, we can bike, we can hike, we have all of these things at our fingertips. We also can get more green space for our dollar.”
Royal LePage CEO Phil Soper said online viewership of Ontario listings outside of Toronto — in “exurban” regions — are on the rise.
Royal LePage numbers show Vaughan, just north of Toronto, saw an 83 per cent jump in May over the same time last year. Peterborough and Lindsay were up 56 per cent, and Kitchener and Cambridge saw an increase of 53 per cent.
Soper said the real estate market was already trending in this direction, driven both by the 5,000 baby boomers that retire each week, and millennials’ desire for better housing bang for their buck.
“Forever people have thought ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in the country with all its accoutrements, with the rush of the city behind us?”‘ Soper said. “So fast forward to now, I think what we’re seeing is an acceleration of a trend that had already began.”
In some cases, such as McKenna and Richards who could no longer afford their $2,300-a-month Parkdale apartment, moving was a financial necessity.
“Once COVID happened, it became a very fast, downward sort of spiral in terms of Jeff was the chef of a great restaurant in Toronto and they were laying everyone off so he was out of work. . . And then I work in weddings, and the wedding season for 2020 is essentially becoming non-existent,” said McKenna, who co-owns Paper & Poste, which specializes in wedding stationery.
“Just two really unlucky industries to be a part of as a couple.”
McKenna said Richards had been “over Toronto for awhile” because of big-city inconveniences such as lack of parking.
She was more worried they would miss the perks of downtown living.
“But then as soon as it became something we had to do just to survive financially, first of all, I was kind of happy that the choice was taken away from me.
“I was like, this is just what we have to do now. I’ve really loved it since we’ve been up here.”
McKenna said they might eventually move closer to Toronto again, and that Hamilton is an option. But the longer they’re in Grand Valley, she said, “the better we feel.”
“Sometimes people just need the right reason or the right motivation to do something they’ve always wanted to do,” Keleher said. “Now they have it.”
Home Group Realty’s John Gaida moved to Erin, Ont., from the GTA with his wife in 2011. They live on a permaculture farm with a food forest, pigs and chickens on three acres of land.
Gaida, who’s helped people from the GTA find homes in the Guelph area for years, said he’s seen a bump in business since March.
“I’m swamped,” Gaida said.
Buyers’ search criteria has changed dramatically.
“Where I’ve noticed it the most is the desirability of certain areas — houses that typically would have been deemed really desirable because let’s say they were close to the highway for commuters to jump on and off. Now people are like, ‘Our offices have said we are not coming back, so if we’re going to be working from home, I want a property that I can actually enjoy versus just settling on this one because it’s in a good location.”‘
Gaida, who knew nothing about running a permaculture farm before he and his wife moved to Erin, added that the internet alleviates some of the fear of moving out of the city.
“Man, YouTube is amazing. Everything I’ve learned out on the rural property is like, ‘screw it, I’ll watch a YouTube video and I’ll figure out how to kill a chicken,’ or whatever it is. It’s really interesting how having the available resources to have the knowledge there takes away the fear factor of actually potentially making a move. The mentality, has really shifted, people have a much higher threshold for new things and new adventures.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 13, 2020.
CALGARY – MEG Energy says it earned $167 million in its third quarter, down from $249 million during the same quarter last year.
The company says revenues for the quarter were $1.27 billion, down from $1.44 billion during the third quarter of 2023.
Diluted earnings per share were 62 cents, down from 86 cents a year earlier.
MEG Energy says it successfully completed its debt reduction strategy, reducing its net debt to US$478 million by the end of September, down from US$634 million during the prior quarter.
President and CEO Darlene Gates said moving forward all the company’s free cash flow will be returned to shareholders through expanded share buybacks and a quarterly base dividend.
The company says its capital expenditures for the quarter increased to $141 million from $83 million a year earlier, mainly due to higher planned field development activity, as well as moderate capacity growth projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
Premier David Eby is proposing an all-party committee investigate mistakes made during the British Columbia election vote tally, including an uncounted ballot box and unreported votes in three-quarters of the province’s 93 ridings.
The proposal comes after B.C.’s chief electoral officer blamed extreme weather, long working hours and a new voting system for human errors behind the mistakes in last month’s count, though none were large enough to change the initial results.
Anton Boegman says the agency is already investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change.
He says the uncounted ballot box containing about 861 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie was never lost, and was always securely in the custody of election officials.
Boegman says a failure in five districts to properly report a small number of out-of-district votes, meanwhile, rippled through to the counts in 69 ridings.
Eby says the NDP will propose that a committee examine the systems used and steps taken by Elections BC, then recommend improvements in future elections.
“I look forward to working with all MLAs to uphold our shared commitment to free and fair elections, the foundation of our democracy,” he said in a statement Tuesday, after a news conference by Boegman.
Boegman said if an independent review does occur, “Elections BC will, of course, fully participate in that process.”
He said the mistakes came to light when a “discrepancy” of 14 votes was noticed in the riding of Surrey-Guildford, spurring a review that increased the number of unreported votes there to 28.
Surrey-Guildford was the closest race in the election and the NDP victory there gave Eby a one-seat majority. The discovery reduced the NDP’s victory margin from 27 to 21, pending the outcome of a judicial review that was previously triggered because the race was so close.
The mistakes in Surrey-Guildford resulted in a provincewide audit that found the other errors, Boegman said.
“These mistakes were a result of human error. Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province,” he said.
“Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.
“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes,” he said.
B.C.’s “vote anywhere” model also played a role in the errors, said Boegman, who said he had issued an order to correct the results in the affected ridings.
Boegman said the uncounted Prince George-Mackenzie ballot box was used on the first day of advance voting. Election officials later discovered a vote hadn’t been tabulated, so they retabulated the ballots but mistakenly omitted the box of first-day votes, only including ballots from the second day.
Boegman said the issues discovered in the provincewide audit will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
He said he was confident election officials found all “anomalies.”
B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had said on Monday that the errors were “an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
Rustad said he was not disputing the outcomes as judicial recounts continue, but said “it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process.”
Rustad called for an “independent review” to make sure the errors never happen again.
Boegman, who said the election required fewer than half the number of workers under the old paper-based system, said results for the election would be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday.
Full judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna-Centre, while a partial recount of the uncounted box will take place in Prince George-Mackenzie.
Boegman said out-of-district voting had been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters utilized the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A public memorial honouring former judge, senator and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, Murray Sinclair, is set to take place in Winnipeg on Sunday.
The event, which is being organized by the federal and Manitoba governments, will be at Canada Life Centre, home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
Sinclair died Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73.
A teepee and a sacred fire were set up outside the Manitoba legislature for people to pay their respects hours after news of his death became public. The province has said it will remain open to the public until Sinclair’s funeral.
Sinclair’s family continues to invite people to visit the sacred fire and offer tobacco.
The family thanked the public for sharing words of love and support as tributes poured in this week.
“The significance of Mazina Giizhik’s (the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky) impact and reach cannot be overstated,” the family said in a statement on Tuesday, noting Sinclair’s traditional Anishinaabe name.
“He touched many lives and impacted thousands of people.”
They encourage the public to celebrate his life and journey home.
A visitation for extended family, friends and community is also scheduled to take place Wednesday morning.
Leaders from across Canada shared their memories of Sinclair.
Premier Wab Kinew called Sinclair one of the key architects of the era of reconciliation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sinclair was a teacher, a guide and a friend who helped the country navigate tough realities.
Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada.
He served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba to examine whether the justice system was failing Indigenous people after the murder of Helen Betty Osborne and the police shooting death of First Nations leader J.J. Harper.
In leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada and heard testimony from thousands of residential school survivors.
The commissioners released their widely influential final report in 2015, which described what took place at the institutions as cultural genocide and included 94 calls to action.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
