Cheesy Reader Offer

Cheese, courtesy of Steel Wool on Flickr

Based in or near Toronto? Stuck for weekend plans? Like cheese?

As a special (last minute) thank-you to my lovely readers, here’s a discount to Canada’s biggest cheese festival, taking place tomorrow and Sunday in Prince Edward County.

You can get 25 per cent off tickets for The Great Canadian Cheese Festival by entering the promotional code CF13NEW before starting your online ticket order here.

It’s only good for tickets purchased online in advance of the festival on June 1-2.

Let me know if you go and what you make of it!

Second Life for Toronto’s Trash

Crowdsourcing’s one of those promising concepts that’s often put to fairly uninspiring uses, whether it’s adding social media sparkle to lacklustre government policies, or advertising tortilla chips.

But last week I wrote about a crowdsourcing site with a social purpose that seems to be carrying out a genuinely useful function.

The article, for Torontoist, was about Trashswag, a website that maps out the location of unwanted wood, furniture and other salvageable bits and bobs left lying in Toronto’s streets.

Anyone who spies some potentially useful junk can add to the map by taking a picture of it and posting the photo on Instagram or tweeting it, using the hashtag #Trashswag.

Creative types are using the site to find materials they can turn into art, wardrobes, seats and tables. Brilliantly, this also means that less stuff is getting sent to landfill.

I wonder whether this has been done in other cities around the world? I hear the site’s founder, Gavin Cameron, was invited onto the Morning Show after producers read the Torontoist article; perhaps the growing momentum will help him expand his empire.

Have you done any “upcycling” via the site? Is it something you might find useful? If you’re not from Toronto, is there anything similar in your home town?

How Cold Does it Get in Toronto?

“The other day, when it was so cold, a friend of mine went to buy some long underwear. The shopkeeper said to him, “How long do you want it?” And my friend said, “Well, from about September to March.”

That’s a quote from Mary Poppins, for anyone who didn’t watch the film so many times as a child that they can still recite it line-by-line.

Having just emerged from the longest, harshest winter of my life, I wonder whether Uncle Albert’s friend had been planning a trip to Toronto.

How cold?

Warning: This section contains detailed information about the weather. If that’s likely to bore you, please feel free to focus on the pretty pictures below and ignore my meteorological musings:

Friends in the UK started asking how cold it was here as soon as we moved to Toronto last July. “30C!” I replied, gleefully. And there it stayed, more or less, for the next two months.

I relished the predictability of hot summer days and nights, though feared the inevitability of plunging winter temperatures.

The impending seasonal shift intrigued me: How cold does it really get here? Is it dangerous? Will my contact lenses freeze to my eyeballs (Google told me probably not)? Should I overcome my aversion to furs?

The slideshow below tracks how the climate’s changed since we’ve been here.

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As the pictures show, a roasting summer led to a progressively cooler September.

By Thanksgiving weekend in the first week of October, it was bitter, at around -6C with wind chill – and even colder in cottage country.

“Fall” was a cold and short-lived, but stunning, season of fiery hues of yellow and orange warming the bluey greens of lake and sky.

After Christmas, it suddenly bucketed with snow, turning the weather unpleasantly “frigid”, as they like to say on this side of the pond (teehee).

For over a month, -25C wind chill wasn’t out of the ordinary. Industrial slabs of cracked ice paralysed the harbour and jagged frost sprouted like cacti over our windows.

After admitting during an ill-advised walk in a snowstorm that my “warm winter coat” was nothing of the sort, I embraced the ubiquitous Toronto uniform of snow boots and goose down jacket – a small sartorial (and not insignificant financial) decision that truly rocked my world. Venturing outside during the Toronto winter is totally plausible with the right outdoor gear.

There’s also the PATH system, effectively 27km of interlocking shopping malls and food courts, which keeps you warm – and well fed – as you wander from A to B in the city centre.

While it may have been a cold winter, it wasn’t a damp, gloomy affair. There was a ton of sunshine, it hardly ever rained and the snow made for fun weekends spent skiing, tobogganing and ice skating at the free outdoor rinks dotting the city.

March and April have dragged on a bit. There’s been the odd moment of T-shirt weather interspersed with snow, hail and – more recently – lots of rain (boo).

This has been the first week in which temperatures have climbed into the 20s, and the city’s already undergone a tangible transformation.

The other day I watched a bare-legged girl absently ripping juicy chunks from a whole mango on the bus. I inhaled BBQ smoke seasoning the downtown air and darted out of the way of puffing joggers patrolling the waterfront in micro shorts. The party boat’s back in its summer mooring and yachts are zipping around the harbour once again.

The trees may still be shorn of their leaves, and yep, it actually snowed yesterday, but something strange and rather wonderful is definitely afoot. If I’m not mistaken, it’s Spring.

The Dragon’s Den Canadian Visa

I’ve written an article for Telegraph.co.uk on Canada’s Start-Up Visa, likened by one lawyer to “the Dragon’s Den of immigration”.

The visa’s aimed at enticing entrepreneurs looking for venture capital, or angel investor, funds. The government believes the promise of investment – and a permanent visa – will encourage foreigners to move here to build their tech start-ups.

I’m not so sure. Take the Conference Board of Canada report, which placed the country 13^th of 16 peer nations for innovation. Canadian firms were “rarely at the leading edge of new technology,” it said. Canada also ranked poorly on barriers to competition, which won’t surprise anyone who’s tried to buy a phone contract, broadband package or bottle of wine here.

The UK, meanwhile, was deemed to have the lowest barriers to competition and received the top score for “ease of entrepreneurship”.

In Canada’s favour is its comparatively strong economy and the UK’s decreasing levels of venture capital investment. This report provides an optimistic view of entrepreneurship in maple leaf land.

Interested in finding out more? The government’s giving away up to 2,750 of the new visas annually for the next five years. Time will tell whether they turn out to be the Reggae Reggae sauce, or the DriveSafe glove of the immigration world.

Walk in the park

Half an hour’s drive from central Toronto is a big space known as Rouge Park. When I say big, it’s 10,000 acres. I’ve never been very good with distances, but that’s 12 times bigger than Central Park and 13 times the size of Hampstead Heath.

As any BBC Radio 4 listeners will be fascinated to know, it also amounts to 1/500th of the size of Wales.

So yeah, big. And also wild, especially for an urban park surrounded by industrial towns and cities. Apparently, deer, coyotes, otters and even wild turkeys roam there. Who knew wild turkeys even existed? They look terrifying.

I drove there last weekend for a “hike”. Or, as us Brits like to call it, a walk.

The walk

Parking at Rouge Park Beach, I watch V-shaped formations of Canada Geese cutting through the cerulean sky before landing in the noisy marshes, which in summer act as a jumping off point for canoeists heading up the Rouge River.

A boardwalk takes me past the wetlands to the wide, sandy beach on Lake Ontario’s shoreline.

There doesn’t seem to be any access to the rest of the park from here, so it’s back in the car and round to Twyn Rivers Drive, from where I join the start of the 2km Orchard trail.

The trail hugs the rushing river, taking me through pine and beech forest, crunchy snow underfoot.

Rouge Park river

“Ah, a Grey Tit,” my husband points out, gesturing at a cute little flapping bird. He’s a bit of an ornithologist, but I suspect he just wanted to say “grey tit” out loud. Needless to say, when a panting woman wearing crampons rushes over to tell us about the Pussy Willow she’s spotted, there’s some quiet guffawing.

Pushing on to the Cedar trail through an open area surrounded by small rolling hills, I stop to watch a never-ending train chuff past on its way to somewhere far, far away.

A long, loooong train chugs through Rouge Park

Slippery wooden steps take me back into the forest, and it’s a short hop to Meadowvale road, where I turn back and do the route in reverse, noticing how the snow’s rapidly ebbing away in the sun. It’s a roughly 8.5 km walk and, other than crampon woman, we only pass about five other people.

National Urban Park

I was interested to read that the federal government’s planning to turn the area into Canada’s only “National Urban Park”. It’s not entirely clear what the designation means, other than an expansion of the park’s boundaries, but the aim’s to encourage more people to take advantage of the country’s wonderful natural landscapes, amid declining visitor levels at national parks.

The people in charge of all this might like to consider how to make the park more accessible to those without cars. Getting there via public transit takes more than two hours from downtown Toronto – ridiculous! Luckily we rented a car that weekend.

Some would also argue that the government’s mission isn’t going to be helped by the $29m spending cut to Parks Canada’s budget. Parks across the country have already been forced to cancel winter services; some trails and car parks in Quebec and Nova Scotia are reportedly no longer being maintained in the off season.

Perhaps it’s right that parks in more populated areas are prioritized over those mainly serving smaller, remote communities. But it’d be a terrible shame if the investment in the admittedly fabulous Rouge Park came at the cost of the beautiful wilderness areas for which Canada’s rightly famed.

This might make you a bit jealous

Of all the smug utterances at the expat-in-Canada’s disposal, “we’re going to Whistler” has to be among the most powerful. It’s the ultimate weapon in your bombastic armoury, the Mario mushroom of envy provoking power ups.

It’s an unnecessarily cruel reminder to pals at home that your winters involve zipping down mountains at world class ski resorts, while theirs involve (probably) damp afternoons eating baked beans in front of The Cube. Well, there has to be an upside to walking around with nostril icicles four months of the year.

There’s no need to mention to said pal that visiting Whistler from Toronto is no cheaper than it would be from London and involves a five hour flight. Or that you still spend way too many winter evenings eating junk in front of mindless TV shows. Or that Canadian TV is, by any standard, 1,000 times shitter than British TV.

Despite the hideous costs and pain-in-the-ass distance associated with travelling to Whistler from Toronto, anyone into skiing or snowboarding will understand why we wanted to go there so badly.

But would it live up to the hype?

The snow

We were pummelled with 1.25m of powder over seven days. That’s on top of the existing 2m base, meaning we were carving fresh tracks every single morning on fluffy, tree-lined pistes.

Fresh tracks at Whistler

There were some fantastically powdery gladed runs although, after face-planting at the bottom of one, I vowed never again to ski through trees without a helmet.

Being used to heaving European resorts, we were also chuffed to find the mountains empty of people; the 4pm home run, normally a terrifying gauntlet of ski school pile-ups and slush, was a long, smooth blue or black trail that took us straight to our condo.

The vibe

Luckily, the mountainside isolation didn’t translate into  a ghost town feeling further down in the villages, where the bars and restaurants were full to the rafters.

Thoughtful touches, like tune-up tools laid out with a “help yourself” sign, piste maps on the chairlifts, and excellent food served with a smile (and, usually, an Aussie twang), all helped to make it a truly friendly, happy place to be.

No fiddling about with cold hands and paper maps

Accommodation

Unfortunately, few Canadian ski resorts offer catered chalets, which are, imho, the best value for money accommodation option at big resorts in the Alps.

At Whistler, you therefore choose between hotels and self catered condos/chalets, which are scattered between the main village and a range of smaller areas such as Creekside, where we stayed.

Creekside, a 10 minute bus ride from Whistler village, worked perfectly for us. Our self-catered condo at Evolution was five minutes’ walk from the normally queue-less main lift up to Whistler mountain and had a full kitchen, balcony, and a shared outdoor pool with hot tubs and a steam room/sauna.

Creekside also has a big supermarket with reasonably-priced food, a rowdy bar/BBQ restaurant (Dusty’s) at the bottom of the home-run that often has live music playing, and a great organic pizza joint, Creekbread.

Any downsides?

It seems a bit churlish to complain about the weather at Whistler when it brought us so much lovely snow. As one skiier put it to us: “The less sun the better.” Maybe I’m a fair weather skiier, but my personal heaven is gliding along a velvety mountain ridge under a big blue sky,  hot and cool air concertinaing as I drift between overhanging shadows and sunlight.

Heaven isn’t getting dizzy and disoriented in a swirling white-out, losing all concept of whether I’m skiing up or down. Or skiing through lashing rain, as on our last day, when the lack of visibility and damp conditions forced us to abandon plans for an epic finale.

Reading the ski blogs, our weather experience seems fairly standard for a week in Whistler, although we were told the clouds often lift in January.

And when the clouds dissipate and the blizzard stops, Whistler lives up to its rep for being the ultimate snow playground, offering an immense expanse of pistes and wild backcountry trails, ranging from double black diamond mogul fields to serene treeline pistes.

Serene treeline skiing

To demonstrate just how MUCH it snows in Whistler, I’ve put together a chart comparing its annual snowfall with that of a few North American and European resorts.

The chart also includes stats on peak mountain height and the number of pistes. This is partly to counter the irksome way in which North American resorts tend to put together similar comparisons for their own websites that downplay the impressiveness of European ski areas by using sneaky methodology.

For instance, when it comes to calculating the number of pistes/trails,  some create separate entries for ski resorts that share integrated lift passes, like La Plagne and Les Arcs, or Tignes and Val D’Isere. Cheeky.

You can play about with the chart by clicking the icon below:

Brain Stew

This week I went to one of the culinary events put on as part of Winterlicious, Toronto’s annual attempt to pull people out of hibernation and into its plethora of restaurants, during the big freeze.

 Here’s my write-up for Torontoist.com:

Five things they don’t tell you about Blue Mountain

I spent last Friday night in a pub. Life in Toronto isn’t so different from that in London.

Although, admittedly I’ve never rocked up to a UK drinking hole armed with a pair of skis and poles.

My accoutrements attracted quite a bit of attention from The Oxley’s genteel patrons, some of whom seemed to be under the impression that I’d literally skied to the door. After all, it was -13C and gusts of snow were flurrying  horizontally across the windows.

When I explained that my statement accessories had, in fact, been in a nearby workshop getting primed for an actual downhill ski trip the following day, on an actual mountain, my Canadian drinking buddies looked even more perplexed. “You’re going skiing in Blue Mountain?”

The biggest ski hill in this part of Ontario  – all 1,483 feet of it – sometimes seems to be a source of embarrassment to locals, who jealously eye up the rugged mountain ranges out west and the picturesque, snow-sure villages further north.

The vast ski area at Whistler, by GlobalReset on Flickr

With a maximum vertical of 720 feet, Blue Mountain’s very much the pygmy species of the Canadian ski kingdom. This doesn’t put me off; pygmies are among my favourite types of animal, and - as a Brit – small, cramped environments make me feel right at home.

But, having skied in the Alps, Pyrenees, the Andes and Dubai (in an air conditioned shopping mall – sorry ecowarriers) - not forgetting Milton Keynes – would Blue Mountain be a bit of a disappointment?

Well, here are a few things you don’t always hear about Blue Mountain:

1. There’s a great view of Georgian Bay from the top. On a cold day, when the lake’s totally frozen over, it’s rather pretty.

Ok, so not the best pic (cold hands), but you can see Georgian Bay in the distance

2. Everyone will tell you that the queues for the chairlifts can be numbingly long. BUT they often fail to mention that, despite the crowds, tougher pistes can be totally deserted. Well, that was the case on the day we went, anyway. Head for the black runs for the most solitude.

The only ones on the piste

3. You’re better off avoiding the busy, kiddy, cafe at South Base Lodge, near to where coach trippers are dropped off and ski schools gather. There are better eating and drinking options at Grand Central Lodge, based at the end of a couple of blue runs, which also has more of a cosy “resort” feel to it. The huge pulled pork sandwiches and burritos at Rusty’s will set you up for a thigh-burning afternoon sesh.

4. The conditions are fab after a week of the white stuff. Maybe that goes without saying, but a 1.5m snow depth at base camp ain’t bad for a titchy hill.

5. The International Ski Federation’s Snowboard Cross World Cup is being held at Blue Mountain in 2013 for the second year in a row – one of only two stops scheduled in Canada. You can catch the action there this weekend.

In summary, it’s clearly no Mont Blanc or Banff but, in optimum conditions, city-dwelling snowbunnies will have a fun day trip. Having your own kit, pre-booking lift passes via your ski club and heading away from the busiest slopes will enhance the whole experience by minimising queuing times.

And some things they do tell you (but I’ll repeat here anyway just FYI):

• There are 36 trails, ranging from green to double diamond black runs
• Fifteen lifts carry skiers and snowboarders up and down the mountain
• A day’s lift pass (9am-4.30pm) costs $59, including tax. Night skiing (4.30pm-10pm) costs $45. Or it’s $69 for a day & night pass
• You can rent equipment from the South Base Lodge
• The drive takes around two hours from Toronto

Cross-country skiing: definitely a sport

“On your right! On your left!” Glancing up at the fallen casualties splayed like dilapidated windmills on the nordic trail I’ve just skidded down, I catch my breath and smile nervously at a crowd of polypropylene-clad skiers clustered at the bottom.

“Terrifying!” I pant.

“Yeah, you were,” one of them nods.

This seems an overly harsh assessment of the way in which I skillfully wove through the crowds emitting only the very mildest of swear-words (technically, “shi-euuuurgh” isn’t even a swear-word…or a word). But I let it go; the lycra guy’s brandishing a timer and wearing a ski club vest with numbers written on it – he must be important.

I’m at Highlands Nordic cross country ski centre, 10km south of Collingwood on the Niagara Escarpment – the huge crust of rock stretching from New York State through southern Ontario, forming gorges, waterfalls and cliffs.

There are 25km of trails at Highlands Nordic, winding through hardwood forest and – in some cases  – overlooking Georgian Bay.

A green (supposedly easy) trail at Highlands Nordic

On the day of my visit we’re being pelted with powdery snow, it’s a bone-chilling -13C or, with the windchill, -23C. Mad dogs and Canadians, eh?

It’s the first time I’ve tried cross country skiing. I’m hoping that my downhill experience will come into play, but just in case, I’m taking a morning lesson, which is included in the trip organised by my ski club.

“If you’ve done alpine skiing, you’ll be used to the weight shift and some of the fundamentals we’ll be running through this morning, like the snowplough,” says Greta, our instructor. I nod, feeling encouraged. Snowplough? Pah, I passed that stage years ago.

But snowploughing on flimsy nordic skis is akin to trying to snowboard down a mountain on a tea tray (yep, done it). There’s no “edge” to cut, and the skis are less responsive as your ankles aren’t fixed to them with bindings. Needless to say, on my first attempt at the weediest of “hills” – really just a mound of snow – I lose all control and crash into a heap at the bottom.

Things aren’t a whole lot easier on the flats, but I start to get the hang of stepping and gliding.

It’s easier on the flats

Going uphill is another struggle. The “herringbone” move eludes me so I resort to running, which is stupidly exhausting.  Now I get how you can burn more than 1,000 calories an hour and double your cardivascular fitness doing this.

“Give it more oomph” shouts Greta. I give it more oomph, and fall over again. At least the exercise is keeping me warm, and the snow-covered pine trees make a serene backdrop to my group’s giggly screeching.

I’m feeling brave enough after lunch to venture onto the trail again with just my other half for company. As we whoosh through the forest in the afternoon sun, slicing through glittering snow flurries with increasingly fluidity, it’s easy to understand what draws people to the sport.

And, to any naysayers, it IS a sport. That’s what my thighs and calves were telling me three days later, anyway. Look at these guys if you’re unconvinced.

Cross-country skiing: Potentially useful, factual stuff:

How long does it take to get to, from Toronto? Highlands Nordic takes around 2.5 hours from Toronto by coach

How much does it cost? Equipment rental plus a trail pass costs $35 for the day, though we only paid $15 each with the ski club

What to wear? On a normal winter’s day, you’ll probably be too hot in downhill ski clothes. I wore waterproof hiking trousers over thermals, and – as it was so cold – a long-sleeved base layer, hoodie and ski jacket.  On a  warmer day, you could probably get away with winter cycling/running gear

Anything else I might like to know? The shoes are COMFY. This is a major bonus to anyone used to toe-crunching downhill ski boots

Court report: Latest on the immigration backlog cull

The Canadian government was taken to court last week over its decision to scrap thousands of immigration applications from people who’d been waiting for up to eight years to hear whether they could move here.

I covered the case, heard at Toronto’s federal court from Monday to Wednesday, for Canadian Immigrant magazine:

The lawyers representing the would-be immigrants, all of whom had submitted their applications before 28 February 2008, argued that the government acted unconstitutionally.

They told of families that had put their lives on hold in order to pursue their dreams of moving to Canada, passing up jobs and delaying buying properties as processing times for immigration files got progressively longer. I spoke to a British applicant with a similar tale for a story published last year on telegraph.co.uk.

The government, for its part, hit back that parliamentary sovereignty gave it the power to make decisions that were in Canada’s best economic interests.

Terminating the old files would help to speed up the immigration process for newcomers who applied under updated criteria and more closely matched the country’s labour needs.

But the authorities were also accused of discriminating unlawfully against applicants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, in favour of countries that were “more like Canada”.

This was based on figures that Mario Bellissimo of Bellissimo Law Group said had been obtained from officials, showing the proportion of files that different visa offices around the world managed to process between 27 February 2008 and the June 2012 cut-off point. Those that weren’t processed by that date have been cancelled.

I’ve visualised this below (click on image for the interactive version, works best with Internet Explorer):

More than half – 57 per cent - of all backlogged files were processed between February 2008 and June 2012, leaving 97,715 applicants (or 278,391, including dependants) out in the cold. But, as the map shows, applicants’ chances varied significantly depending on which visa office they applied to. No data was available for the Middle East.

The judge presiding over the case, Justice Donald Rennie, is mulling over all the evidence and is expected to make a ruling in around a month’s time on whether the cancellation was lawful.

Have you been affected by the backlog cull? Let me know your thoughts below.